Trust me, I’m a Director
In the spirit of interactivity, as well as your Director’s enduring love of language and ting, today’s Column kicks off with a question. I wonder, dear reader, whether you can discern what the following list of words have in common..?
gaslighting, authentic, polarisation, goblin mode, rizz, brain rot, permacrisis, AI, brat, vibe-coding, hallucinate, demure, manifest, parasocial.
The straightforward connection, of course, is that each of these terms has elbowed its way into our dictionaries within the past three years. A colourful, half-slang, half-sociology bunch they are too, so very evocative of a Year 9 drama improvisation, complete with questionable accents. But peer through the cultural mist and they begin to look less like linguistic novelties and more like weather-vanes of the age. And what they seem to point toward, at least from where your Director is uncomfortably perched, is a developing turbulence in the territory we’re visiting in today’s Column: trust.
For some time now, we seem to have been living in a world where reality itself has acquired a slight wobble. Freud once remarked that civilisation depends on a large number of people not taking offence at the small things. We might wonder what he would say of an age in which people take offence at imagined things, real or AI-fabricated, or algorithmically hallucinated by a model with all the serene confidence of a politician. Our dictionaries, ever vigilant stenographers of the culture, have begun to record precisely these anxieties.
Little did your Director know that his admiration of Fanny by Gaslight would accrue a whole new meaning in the modern world. Gaslighting now covers everything from geopolitical misinformation to the way students attempt to convince their teachers that ‘today is not a homework day’. Permacrisis coolly announces that what was once the exception has quietly become the rule. Polarisation has escaped from the laboratory and now thrives on Tuesday evenings across social platforms. And hallucinate, as applied to AI, gives a name to that deeply modern phenomenon in which machines fabricate untruths with absolute composure. The very fact that the word was needed should give us pause.
Thread these together and one detects a kind of epistemic shakiness; a sense that we can no longer rely on any of the old anchors. Seeing is no longer believing. Hearing is only marginally more convincing. A generation raised on photographic evidence has discovered that photographs are no longer evidence. We now require forensic verification before trusting a video of the Pope wearing a puffer jacket.
Of course, this epistemic drift has deep literary roots. George Eliot understood that trust in perception is delicate: Middlemarch is practically a 900-page meditation on how impossible it is to fully know another person’s inner life. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina shows how imagined suspicions can metastasise into catastrophic misreadings. Shakespeare, as is his wont, goes even further: Othello is a tragedy not merely of jealousy but of compromised trust; particularly the trust one places in one’s own judgement. Iago’s genius lies in eroding Othello’s inner confidence. Kafka then takes this erosion and turns it existential. In The Trial, Joseph K. inhabits a world in which trust isn’t simply broken but structurally impossible. Systems are opaque; motives unknowable; the very notion of a shared reality dissolves into bureaucratic mist. In Kafka’s world, the crisis of trust is no longer interpersonal, it is ontological.
Our new dictionary entries are, in their own way, little Iagos and miniature Kafkas, whispering incessantly: Are you sure? Can you trust that? Isn’t that your handkerchief? Is that your arrest warrant?
Yet this erosion is not merely cognitive. Many of our new words hint at a deeper unease about sincerity.
Consider the idea of authentic. A noble virtue once associated with Augustine and Socrates, now slapped on skincare routines and artisan rye. It has become an aesthetic rather than an ethical category. Paradoxically, the more we talk about authenticity, the more we suspect each other of counterfeiting it.
This suspicion drives the next cluster of terms, which name the management of sincerity itself. Rizz, which is a beautiful, silly reduction of charisma to something one might bottle and sell suggests that personal magnetism is now a commodity. Vibe-coding is the charming habit of broadcasting curated signals (‘I’m effortlessly cool,’ or ‘I’m performing nonchalance with great effort’) through clothes, manner, or social media presence. Even goblin mode, that theatrical surrender to unfiltered humanity, is, ironically, self-aware performance.
There is something faintly Beckettian about the whole enterprise. In Waiting for Godot, everyone performs roles they scarcely understand, clinging to scripts whose meaning they distrust. Much of contemporary social life feels chipped from the same block. We could well be a civilisation of unreliable narrators. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita offers a darker version: in a society where truth has been so routinely distorted, the devil can stroll into Moscow unnoticed. When the unbelievable becomes commonplace, disbelief becomes the rational posture. Behind every performance; comic, tragic, or theatrical, lurks the quieter question: Can I trust what I’m being shown?
Then there are words pointing toward our relational disquiet: parasocial, brat, demure. They map out a landscape in which relationships are increasingly asymmetrical, virtual, or curated. A parasocial relationship: one person investing devotion in someone who doesn’t know they exist, is not new (ask any Victorian swooning over Tennyson) ( they did) (honestly!). But the sheer scale of contemporary versions has earned it a dictionary entry.
Technology intensifies all this. When AI appears in dictionaries not merely as a concept but as a social actor. In such instances as “it hallucinated,” “it gaslighted me,” “it rizzed me up” we have crossed a conceptual threshold. We have granted machines a place in our moral and linguistic ecosystem.
And what then of trust? Harry Frankfurt famously distinguished between the liar who knows the truth and hides it, and the exaggerator (he used a slightly more rustic word not fit for a family Column) who doesn’t care whether what he says is true. AI models have introduced a third category: the confidently incorrect entity. The unembarrassed fabricator.
The stakes stretch far beyond technology. Camus’s The Plague reminds us that societies do not survive crises because they possess unshakeable certainty, but because they cultivate a fragile trust that binds them into solidarity. When trust falters, the epidemic, literal or metaphorical, gains ground. A society that cannot trust cannot cohere.
Philosophers continue this thread in different registers. Ricoeur suggests that identity is fundamentally narrative, namely that we trust ourselves and each other in proportion to the reliability of the stories we inhabit and exchange. Midgley argues that our imaginative capacity is what allows moral life to exist at all; trust grows because we can imagine others as agents like ourselves. In other words, trust depends not simply on verifying data but on participating in shared meaning.
At school, these themes play out in gentler and more humorous ways. A student assures me that they ‘definitely sent the homework but the Wi-Fi must have eaten it’ for example. In younger years, I treated such declarations with forensic scepticism. Now, much older and much less wiser, I take a more McGilchristian approach: assume sincerity unless given reason otherwise. Trust, I have found, is usually the more accurate, and certainly the more humane, default.
But the personal is entangled with the cultural. The broader climate, the permacrisis, the polarisation, the relentless hum of unease, might make trust feel like an endangered species.
Here Rowan Williams offers a luminous insight. Faith (or trust), hope, and love are not virtues we acquire by raw effort, like perfecting scales or improving one’s 5k time. You cannot practise being more trusting in quite the same way you practise being more punctual. These qualities, Williams argues, have the character of a gift, in other words, something poured into us from beyond our own reservoirs of competence.
Trust, in this light, is not a technique but a posture: an opening of the clenched fist, a willingness to risk that the world might be more hospitable than our fears suggest. It is rooted not in our capacity to guarantee outcomes but in a conviction that reality might just hold.
This is, in its way, profoundly countercultural. Our age trains us to grip tightly, verify endlessly, assume the worst. Trust says ‘open your hand’.
So how do we begin? The good news is that trust is not a finite resource. It replenishes itself not through certainty but through generosity. It grows when extended. It widens when practised. Ursula Le Guin writes in The Dispossessed that true community rests on ‘unpossessive love’ which is a phrase that, to my ear, describes trust as much as love. Trust is a kind of unpossessive confidence: believing the world is better approached with openness than with barricades.
If our new vocabulary signals a crisis of trust, it also signals its necessity. For trust is not the opposite of vigilance. It is the opposite of fear. Fear narrows, trust enlarges. Fear isolates, trust connects. Fear assumes the worst, trust hopes for better.
And your Director sees signs of that hope every day: in the student who hands in work with the slightly breathless declaration, ‘I tried harder this time, sir,’ and means it; in colleagues who risk collaboration; in parents who choose goodwill over suspicion.
Perhaps the final lesson is this: if our dictionary must expand, let it expand not only to capture our anxieties but also to recover what anchors us. Words like sincerity, fidelity, grace, integrity. They may not trend on TikTok, but they remain the deep grammar of any society worth living in.
In a permacrisis, trust is not a luxury. It is the essential humane default, the means by which we navigate uncertainty.
And so this week, as we all attempt to make sense of classes, deadlines, world events, the occasional outbreak of goblin mode, or the sporadic AI hallucination, perhaps our task is simple: to choose generosity before suspicion. To believe that most people are doing their best in a bewildering time.
If our language reveals the crisis, trust may yet reveal the cure.
Until next time, Happy Reading/Trusting.
This week’s fun answer to last week’s fun question:
This week’s fun question to answer:
My friend Miss Bathpole loves salmon but hates pilchards. She ‘simply adores’ octopus but ‘cannot abide’ plaice. She likes trout but not pike. She can’t get enough of kippers but detests herring.
Will Miss Bathpole like halibut?