From the beginning, the word “trust” could be found in our literature here and there, pretty much casually—not with any great emphasis on it, certainly not with a whole essay about it. It was a kind of underlying characterization—there’s a lot of trust in the school, kids trust each other, they trust the school, parents have to trust their kids if they send their kids to the school. It was considered self-evident to all of us as we articulated what the school is about over and over again in many different ways: in a school like this, trust obviously plays a role, so we don’t really have to talk about it that much, because we all know. That was the way I thought about it until recently, when it occurred to me that it might actually be worth taking a closer look at the whole concept of trust. What does it really mean? How does it manifest itself? What is its origin? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that trust is a much broader subject, not just with respect to the school (or to any particular institution). In fact, it seems to be a subject that has gotten very little serious study as to its deeper meaning, and its manifestation in society at large. I came to realize that this was a serious omission, because trust plays an intriguing role in defining the human species and, as we’ll see, in defining the nature of societies at large and of the institutions created by them.1
In order to explain how I reached that conclusion, I’m going to have to take a bit of a journey, and that begins with the evolution of the human species.
Consider an infant who has just entered the world, and is suddenly subjected to a myriad of inputs to its sensory system. Those inputs somehow get transferred to the mind, and the mind begins processing them. One of the things that evolution has done is provide humans with self-awareness—the knowledge, or awareness, that they’re aware of their surroundings. All animals are aware of their surroundings. As far as we can tell, the human species is the only species that is aware that it’s aware. Let’s look more closely at the emerging infant. We can see how it gradually comes to recognize that it exists, that its body possesses various parts that it can observe. Slowly infants figure out what those parts are and how to use them. You see that vividly in the first months of an infant’s life, when they’re literally “exploring” their body. Watch the infant’s transition from being just another member of the animal kingdom—a being that is aware of its surroundings—to a being that is aware that it’s aware of its surroundings and is figuring out what that implies.
The difference in behavior exhibited by humans relative to other species is stark. Consider a newborn colt. Within minutes of its birth, it is usually up on its feet, hobbling around. The whole process is built in, it’s all there from the outset; they don’t have to think about it. The newborn colt doesn’t have to think: I have four feet, how do I manage them, and what are they anyway—and what do they have to do with being upright? The infant human, on the other hand, has to go through that period of becoming self-aware, figuring out how to manipulate its body, and then starting to use it in a way that meets its self-aware goal of mobility. That takes a considerable stretch of time; look how long it takes an infant to crawl effectively, let alone to walk. A lot of parents would be very happy if their newborn child popped up on its feet a few hours after birth and started walking around.
In that contrast between newborn animals of any species and the newborn human, you see this tremendous difference between living things that are aware of their surroundings and living things that are aware that they’re aware and therefore are able to develop a knowledge of the surroundings and a way to manipulate it—a way to construct models of reality in their minds relative to which they can organize their lives and influence their surroundings2. What’s going on is that the child is building frameworks within which they can carry on their lives with confidence.
The whole point of functioning within a framework is to be confident in your ability to develop the outcomes that you want. That’s how you learn how to walk, and that’s how you eventually learn to talk. The end result is that at some age, whatever it is—one and a half, two, two and a half—they don’t have to wonder about it anymore, they trust their model and their ability to manipulate whatever they have to manipulate to get the result they want. This is where trust plays a key role in the evolution of the human species. It’s the key to the result that self-awareness produces in human life; it enables us to create models of reality so that we can function in a way that we can trust, that we can be confident of. Trust is the key. The aim is to reach a point where you can be confident that what you have figured out, when you put it into action, will actually produce the same result that you always want. And if it doesn’t, then you have to address why it doesn’t.
Trust is a key component of evolution. It is the component that enables the process of building a model of reality during childhood and later on in life, a model that can be relied on, that doesn’t have to be revisited every waking moment. That’s what our models of reality are about—they’re not just about creating things that we can imagine or write about, they’re about creating the ability to function in a way that we can rely on, that we can trust to be useful. The point is to eliminate uncertainty, so that we don’t have to guess each time we do something: is it going to work? Imagine what our life would be like if every single time we took out our toothbrush in the morning and put toothpaste on it and wanted to brush our teeth, we wondered whether that process will go through to its completion! Our life is a drama of trust from beginning to end; we want to have confidence in its smooth unfolding.
Trust, confidence, are the keys to human behavior throughout the life of an individual. When I say that every individual constructs their own models of reality and their own understanding of reality, I’m also saying that they construct their own methods of dealing with that reality with confidence and trust. That is the nature of human existence, a gift of evolution.
There’s another evolutionary gift to the human species, in addition to the element of trust. That gift has to do with the evolutionary behavior of individuals when they’re placed in groups. When I conduct History seminars, usually at the very beginning, I explain that human beings as a species have one favorite activity: killing each other. I’m not joking, though perhaps exaggerating a bit. But what evolution has done clearly when individuals are together as a group is make them compete. In fact, competition is the basic feature of human social interaction. One way or another people are constantly jockeying for control or manipulation of other people. As far as we know, from the dawn of history societies have been organized according to different principles of competition, and of trying to resolve problems arising from competition.
Given this universal and rather challenging feature of groups, one might ask: why bother with groups at all? We don’t have to look far for the answer. We form groups because if you have more than one person doing things, you can do more things, and you can do bigger things.
But competitive groups are never stable. The hierarchy is constantly under pressure from all sides, so nobody can be confident that any particular activity will continue to be the way it is. Evolution has, it seems, played a dirty trick on the human species. It’s provided individuals with the drive to create models that will lead to trust and confidence in their actions, but when they come together in groups, it creates the opposite result. Members of a group can never be sure of what’s going to happen tomorrow, because they are always at the mercy of pressure from all sides.
I think it’s pretty interesting that evolution managed to deal such a complex hand to the human species, and such a contradictory one; that the behavior as individuals and the behavior as a group are really totally incompatible. In one situation trust is the deciding factor of behavior, and in the other trust is basically totally absent. Nobody in a group can fully trust anybody else, ever! A group can never be stable. That’s the one thing historians will tell you: whole civilizations rise and fall; Rome fell, even though Romans thought it would live forever. Nothing is stable in communities—not cities, not towns, not villages, not tribes, nothing. All because evolution has dealt groups a bad hand, the hand of competition.
Having understood this all clearly for the first time, I was confronted with a puzzling question: where on earth did the Founding Fathers come up with their entirely original concept of social organization? Until now I have thought that this was a pure bolt from the blue. I couldn’t connect it to anything. There it was, appearing suddenly at a moment in history. The original colonies were just like other social organization of that day, and there’s no reason why they couldn’t have remained thirteen competing independent states. If they had to, they could band together just like they did during the Revolutionary War and defend themselves, but in the meantime they could be vying with each other over a variety of matters.
Furthermore, why did this appear here, and not some place else? And why has it never been duplicated anywhere else? The answer materialized when I considered more closely the nature of the society the Founding Fathers were dealing with. There is a unique feature to the populating and settling of the North American continent, a feature with no historical parallel. The entire Western hemisphere became a destination point for people from what’s called the “Old World”. Central and South America were one big gold rush, whereas the Latin America gold rush lasted for a couple of centuries. And as you would expect, the people who went to take advantage of that gold rush were people who were well-outfitted and could take advantage of it. By contrast, there was no gold in North America that they knew of—none. (Of course, eventually people would know differently.) There was no obvious reason to go there. The people who came to North America were not people after riches, not people who were well off; why would well off people leave their place to go to a place that offered no clear advantage, and many anticipated disadvantages?
Instead, they were people who, for one reason or another, wanted to leave their homes, to abandon the social structure that they grew up with—in short, to abandon their roots. These were decisions that were made by individuals, by families and by small groups. They had decided to embark on a new life journey, in uncharted territory. Not many people were willing to do that. A self-selected few were ready to brave any hardship and go to a place where they could create a new life for themselves. That was the essence of the North American settlement in the 17th and 18th centuries.
All these people were—had to be—rugged individualists, and they were aware of it, and proud of it. They created a culture of: go out, fend for yourself, work hard, do your thing—there is an open horizon. Even much later, when the United States had already taken shape, the essence remained, memorialized in the advice given to so many aspiring young men: “go West, young man, go West”, keep alive the American tradition of rugged individualism where you can be your own master. Go West, where nobody has yet settled, just like the people did who came here originally from the Old World. That was the “manifest destiny” of America talked about in the 18th century—just keep going, you’ll always find new pastures where you can fully embody this tradition of individual realization, where you can live your life out and be confident of your path in life, because you have charted it for yourself.
That origin, that way American culture came into being, distinguishes America from any other society. The Founding Fathers had the insight and originality to say to themselves: we don’t want to lose this element of individual trust. We want to create a social order appropriate for a group of individuals who trust themselves and their own ability to negotiate the world; we don’t want to lose this precious gift. The challenge was to construct a society in which that trust is kept alive.
Their genius was to come up with their “self-evident” solution, as they called it, which was totally original and very simple. The solution was to start with preserving individual liberty, the freedom for each individual to carry out their life goals. Their starting point was each person’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And furthermore, they insisted that any ruling entity that will decide what actions are permissible to such a group of individuals must do so with the sole purpose of preserving their rights, and have the consent of the groups for all their decisions. It took them a lot of time and effort to figure out how to do that, how to create a structure in the Constitution that could make it happen, but the conceptual framework was there from the beginning, in the founding document.3
This was the driving force that led the Founding Fathers to create an anti-evolutionary society, based on the evolutionary traits of the individual, with the aim of maintaining the ability of every individual to have confidence in their own destiny. The maintenance of trust is the key. And the only reason it could work here at all is because of that very peculiar character of the people who were over here at the time, who were ready to accept it. To be sure, there were—and are—disagreements about the details. There was even a war about it when it was finally realized that excluding a whole segment of the population from the benefits of individual liberty was completely against the core principles of the nation. But basically, the daring idea of creating an anti-evolutionary culture in America—one not based on brutal competition—worked because it suited the character of the people who came over here.
That of course answers the question that had puzzled me: why has no other country ever copied the American constitution or the American way of life? The answer is clear: because it’s anti-evolutionary, it runs against the way the human species is set up. All other societies, developing in a wide variety of locations, were created as products of evolution. So their structure should come as no surprise. The surprise is that this bizarre happenstance of Christopher Columbus landing on a new continent, and the top half of it not having riches, and a bunch of people saying: I want to get out of my old country because I want to start a new life in which I can be myself. And then you understand something else. You understand why the whole world from the beginning has looked at the American experiment as strange and somehow inappropriate. When people talk about American exceptionalism, they do so because America is exceptional. No other historical case is like it. You can’t run away from that, it’s a historical reality. But the rest of the world looks at this and says: nothing about it is right; those Americans don’t know how to organize a proper society which protects their group identity.
Where does Sudbury Valley fit in? For Sudbury Valley, too, individual trust is front and center. We’ve sometimes called ourselves “an American immersion school”, because, by design and intent, we’re a microcosm of what the culture around us is about. And just as the world looks at American culture and says: you’ve got to transform yourselves into a culture of elites and expertise and people who know truth, and give up your precious individualism, so too people object to the school on the same grounds.
So coming back to the title of this essay: The “Invisible Hand” of Trust: What Sudbury Valley School Is Really About, I call it the “Invisible Hand” of Trust because trust as a concept usually isn’t at the center of conversation when talking about America. In America trust is invisible because it’s so ingrained, it is the evolutionary key to everything else, and it is so self-evident that nobody talks about it. And because nobody talks about it, nobody fastens on the fact that trust is an evolutionary heritage of every individual human being but is counter to the evolutionary heritage of human groups. The problem, however, is that in this country up until now trust has been too invisible, with the result that we haven’t focused on protecting it enough.
That’s what Sudbury Valley is about as well. The key here too is trust, throughout the entire culture of the school. We owe it to ourselves to give it its full due if our school’s culture is to survive.
ENDNOTES
1. Dictionaries are spare in their definitions of the word. Most equate it to confidence in, or relying on, something—being sure of something so you don’t have to wonder about it or question it.
2. Greenberg, Daniel, The Meaning of Education, (Sudbury Valley School Press; Framingham, MA 2018), in particular pp. 35-37 and 50-52, and 56-58.
3. I have pointed out in America At Risk, Sudbury Valley School Press, Framingham, MA, (2018) that the only areas in which they granted authority to the governing body to lay down laws were national defense against enemies and the protection of individual freedom to create paths to prosperity.