Do you trust a person who exudes an image of perfection? What about a business that projects infallibility? As our cultural values continue their rapid shift, I no longer think that perfect works anymore. The carefully worded press release? Phony! Politicians have affairs (gay ones!), athletes use drugs (and have affairs), newspapers lie and plagiarize.
So who can you trust?
I would be a complete schmuck if I told you who you can trust. But explaining who you cannot trust is a far easier task. Time was, we trusted brands and individuals who, as I said above, exuded an image of perfection.
There was comfort in big, comfort in impersonal. That is no longer the case. Our culture has begun the process of hollowing out our notions of who and how to trust.
I, too, once was guilty of trusting in big. Big must be good. Big must be doing something right, right? Because you can’t get big any other way.
It’s clear now that was never really the case. Bank of America, General Motors, Tiger Woods, Alex Rodriguez, Social Security, The New York Times, Newsweek.
These are all cases of “Big” that in retrospect, don’t seem so big. Some of these entities have failed, some of them have exhibited the lack of sustainability inherent in their business models. Some have lied to our faces, some have lied to our backs.
But they all benefited from being big and from exuding something that in retrospect we now know doesn’t exist. There is no perfect.
Trust in Imperfection
We’re in the early stages of a transition to valuing the very things we were suspicious of before. I think the culture is starting to realize that honesty and authenticity lie in imperfection. When we acknowledge our imperfections, we are no longer playing that old game of duplicity and preying on the weakness of people to delude themselves. We are instead letting people into a sophisticated sense that we are like them, we are imperfect, there are things about ourselves that are imperfect.
