The Trust Matrix: Weaving Language, Belief, and Interdependence
When a friend told me 'trust is all or nothing,' it stopped me
Yesterday I talked with a good friend of mine. It seemed to me that he was impatient with my worldview on this. He said: “It’s either I trust someone or not. If there is trust, I’d risk my life to save them; if there’s no trust, then the whole thing isn’t worth it.”
Now this friend—I trust him completely. I’d risk my life to help him. Maybe he senses it too. The trust between us (אמון in Hebrew, a word that carries the weight of deep, almost primal reliance) is many things: comfort, safety, assurance. Our shared history is so strong that trust feels binary, like a switch flipped on. Such a relationship is a privilege. With most people, I don’t have this—instead, there are degrees of trust and reliance. Having a different relationship with someone doesn’t mean there’s no trust—just that it’s limited. Is this bad? It’s a feature of social life. Not all bonds enjoy high trust, but I’d still choose them over full enmity.
Treating trust as a non-binary phenomenon helps me build better expectations and stay patient when trust frays. I agree with my friend, though—in many situations, I must stay sharp. Misjudging trust carries a high penalty.
So what’s the alternative to the binary framework? That’s where the trust matrix comes in.
The Trust Matrix: Beyond Binary Trust
At its core, the trust matrix is a way of thinking about trust as a network of interconnected elements:
- Capabilities: The skills, competencies, and capacities that enable trust to be built, maintained, or repaired.
- Truth Values: The alignment between words, actions, and outcomes that fosters reliability and integrity.
- Interactions: The dynamic exchanges and feedback loops that sustain trust over time.
Most explanations of trust revolve around truth values - whether someone will be honest, keep their word, fulfill commitments. But watching trust emerge or crumble in my childhood, in relationships, in AKBAN dojos, showed me something that is not instinctual. My instinct is similar to my friend's; I too feel misalignments as a breach. Looking at trust otherwise necessitates effort. Is this effort worthwhile? I think so.
A typical dojo session shows, embodies, something more intricate. When my students practice dangerous techniques, trust isn't just about intentions, promises or declarations. It's about demonstrated control, clear embodied communication, consistent behavior, and mutual verification. Like a living organism, this trust matrix responds to stress. If any one of these elements fails, the entire matrix weakens. It does not get destroyed, just weakens. The trust matrix is resilient - it must be, or training would be impossible. Only extreme breaches destroy it completely, while a binary view of trust shatters at the smallest violation.
This isn't unique to martial arts. Trust, in its broadest sense, is a matrix of relational interdependence. It emerges through histories of co-evolution and co-adaptation. Co-evolution and co-adaptation mean that trust develops when entities (whether animals, humans, or systems) adjust to each other over time, like how training partners learn to move together, or how mothers and infants sync their responses. The word "histories" emphasizes that this isn't a single event but a long process of mutual change.
The lion cub's family bonds showcase this matrix in action. Its mother's care - feeding, grooming, protection - and the cub's instinctual responses - nursing, following, vocalizing - form a dynamic feedback loop of embodied trust. This mirrors human infant-caregiver attachment but operates without what we think of as “truth.”
The fish dad that keeps his offsprings safe in its mouth, the tiger mother nursing its cub, maybe even the gut bacteria and their host, exist without human volition, they are not dependent on textual truths. When we label these relationships as "trust" (rather than mere reliance) we acknowledge their complexity and reciprocity, human and non-human. It also opens a path toward understanding AI-human trust matrices. Trust can exist without human cognition or verbal truth claims.
Trust, in all its forms, emerges from patterns of interdependence, whether through evolution, embodied instinct, or social pressures.
I can anticipate the resistance, what my friend told me, “It’s either I trust someone or not. If there is trust, I’d risk my life to save them.” there is evolutionary pressure, even survival pressure, the cost of trusting in someone and misjudging can be death. I feel trust as a primal, gut-level force—why we’d risk our lives for those we love, and why betrayal cuts so deep. I also am forced to navigate complexity. In cities of millions, collaborating with strangers, algorithms, and global systems. Binary trust is an essential but not all the picture.
I trust strangers in limited ways—the surgeon who operated on me, the pilot who flew me to a seminar. I don’t need to risk my life for them; I trust their role, their training, their institutional safeguards. Also, Distrust is not the opposite of trust. A coral reef doesn’t “distrust” the algae it depends on; it thrives through reliance. Similarly, working with instructors I only partly trust isn’t naivety—it’s trust matrix, ecosystem thinking. I rely on their competence (a capability), verify their output (a truth value), and adjust through feedback (interactions).
Binary trust is for the few friends drinking tea around campfire; the trust matrix is a city. Both keep me alive, just at different scales.