14 Dec 2011
Truth and trust were once inseparable. To be trusted you had to be truthful. Anyone discovered to be untruthful was dubbed untrustworthy. Life was simple; then came Bill Clinton. Clinton taught us that things are neither simple nor clear-cut. Truth, for example, is a subjective matter that depends upon what one’s meaning of “is” is. Following Clinton’s radical redefinition of truth, Dan Rather, a Clinton admirer, drew us a brand new portrait of an honest man. When asked if he believed President Clinton was an honest man, Rather responded, “I think he’s an honest man. I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.” There you have it, truth and trust are now severed, liars can be trusted, and truth-telling is no longer the criteria for honesty. Confused? No need to worry, modern-science has come to the rescue.
Scientists at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and Claremont Graduate University in California claim to have discovered that “trust is actually a neurochemical that can be distilled in a nasal spray.” According to the Los Angeles Times, an experiment conducted by these scientists has led them to conclude that the secret to trust among human beings is “a hormone called oxytoxcin, which evolved 100 million years ago to aid mating among fish and breast feeding among mammals.” In the experiment, which was conducted in Zurich and first reported in the scientific journal Nature, volunteers who were given two puffs of an oxytoxcin nasal spray were measurably more likely than others to risk all their money with a stranger. All of this reminds me of an uncle I once had; however, it wasn’t two puffs of nasal spray, but two glasses of cheap wine that transformed him into a trusting soul.
Touting the hormone oxytoxcin as “the keystone of a normal social life,” these Swiss and American researchers hope to have found a cure for the world’s third most common mental health problem; namely, social phobias, which are spawned by people’s inability to trust other people. Furthermore, since trust is the crucial element in love, diplomacy, and finance, these researchers are hopeful that a puff or two of their nasal spray will do wonders for the world’s marital, international, and business relationships.
Can you imagine the ramifications of trust being bottled, marketed, and sold to the public? What if a used car salesman could buy it at the local drug store to spray on everyone visiting his car lot? What if political conventions filled balloons with it? What if the New York Times sprayed it on every newspaper coming off its presses? And what if lawyers came up with a way to circulate it in courtrooms through courthouse ventilation systems? Can you imagine a lawyer concluding his closing argument with a Johnnie Cochran-like quip, “If you sniff, you must acquit”?
Attempting to cure our ills by treating our symptoms rather than our diseases is typical of our time. Our world today is not suffering from a shortage of trustfulness, but from a scarcity of truthfulness. The reason distrust is so prevalent in today’s world is because dishonesty is pandemic. Nevertheless, we would rather do away with our symptoms than deal with our sin. Instead of being honest and telling the truth, we’d rather be gullible and believe anything. Nasal spray anyone?
Don Walton
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