When Trust Collapses, People Meet People Once Again

01Since When Have We Seen People by Their Titles?

In Part 1, we saw that capitalism stands on trust and that much of that trust is deposited in electronic records beyond the screen¹. Here I want to turn to one more fact: we have come to see people themselves through records beyond the screen as well.

Job titles at work, income and assets in the market, follower counts and star ratings online. When we meet someone for the first time, we try to measure them by the titles and numbers attached to them before we listen to their words or watch how they act. That is more efficient when dealing quickly with many people. I see this as human beings having become cogs of capitalism. A cog can be anyone, so long as its shape and size fit.

In the age of AI, however, those very attachments have become the easiest things to fake. In the Hong Kong case discussed in Part 1, the employee transferred the money because the title "chief financial officer," together with familiar faces and voices, appeared on the screen². If titles, faces, and voices can all be fake, attachments no longer guarantee trust.

What, then, remains? The person themselves, with the attachments removed: a relationship in which we take time to confirm what someone says, how they act, and whether they have kept their promises. I believe that the collapse of trust is giving us a chance to meet one another again, as people.

02Where Does Trust Return?

Indeed, as a means of seeing through fakes, many security guides recommend that, for money transfers and important requests, we confirm with the person through a channel separate from the request, such as calling them back ourselves or meeting in person³.

This sounds like a matter of technology, but it is in fact a return to very old wisdom. However elaborate the systems we build, what we can rely on in the end is the relationship between people who know each other and have met face to face. I believe that trust over-entrusted to systems does not disappear; it returns in this way to the space between people.

03How Have the Japanese Cultivated Trust?

Japan has long had financial systems built on trust between people. One of them is tanomoshi. Members contributed fixed sums on set days, decided by lot or bidding who would receive the pooled money, and continued until everyone had received it. It is said to have arisen in the Kamakura period and spread in the Edo period⁴. Its name is explained as coming from the word tanomoshii, meaning reliable⁴. Every system of every age has its light and shadow, but in the fact that people made being able to rely on one another the very name of their finance, I see the prototype of the Japanese view of trust.

In the late Edo period, in 1814, Ninomiya Sontoku created a mutual-aid financial system in the household of the Hattori family, senior retainers of the Odawara domain. It is known as gojoko and counted as one of the origins of cooperative finance in Japan⁵. Gojo refers to the five virtues of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trust, with trust placed last. A system for lending and borrowing money bore the name of virtues.

In the modern era this way of thinking did not die out. Shibusawa Eiichi taught in Rongo to Soroban (The Analects and the Abacus) that morality and economics cannot be separated⁶. I believe we should read these not as fond stories of the past, but as an origin to return to in an age when trust is wavering.

04What Is the Most Certain "Invisible Thing"?

Let us now extend the axis of time even further back, because there is a connection more certain than trust in people we can see.

You have a father and a mother. Each of them also had a father and a mother. Counting simply, the generation 10 generations back alone contains 1,024 people, and the generation 20 generations back contains more than one million people who passed life down to you. In reality, the same person appears many times in a family line, so the number of distinct people is smaller than this, but the fact remains: if any one person on any line were missing, you would not exist as you are now.

What I want to emphasize is that this is not faith but fact. We cannot see our ancestors' faces. For most of them we do not even know their names. Yet that they truly lived and passed on life is proven by your being here now. A family tree, as a record, can be rewritten, but no AI can forge the fact itself that life has been passed down.

The Japanese have long cherished this invisible connection. In Senzo no Hanashi (About Our Ancestors), the folklorist Yanagita Kunio discussed how the Japanese have regarded the spirits of the dead not as beings sent off to a distant world, but as presences that remain near their descendants and watch over them⁷.

05What Does a Future That Renews the Good Things of the Past Look Like?

I do not think the coming age means returning unchanged to the old ways of life. AI and electronic records will enter our lives even more deeply. What matters is to use them not as the foundation of trust but as tools.

On the foundation, we place trust between people with the attachments removed. Further beneath it, we place our connection to our ancestors, invisible yet certain. People who know where they come from are less easily swayed by the numbers in front of them. People who try to live in a way that would not shame those who passed life on to them can discipline themselves even when no one is watching beyond the screen. I believe that an increase in such people is the way to truly rebuild trust.

Just as tanomoshi bore "reliability" in its name and gojoko bore "trust," the economy to come should also be built on ways of living worthy of being trusted as human beings. Neither discarding the good things of the past nor merely longing for them, but renewing them together with new tools: this is where I see the future beyond the age of AI.

Under capitalism, we have lived believing in uncertain invisible things. Now, as that trust wavers, it may be time to notice an invisible yet certain presence, our ancestors, and begin walking that path. Which path will you choose for the future ahead?