A world without trust

Have a look at the current ten-pound note. ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds,’ it says. The ‘I’ who is speaking appends her signature. She is someone called Merlyn Lowther. She describes herself as Chief Cashier, and she signs, as the note states, for the Governors and Company of the Bank of England.

This note strikes me as an interesting and important example of how trust works. To the sceptic, after all, there might seem to be nothing to trust at all. What is this ten pounds that Mrs Lowther promises to pay me on demand? The word ‘pound’ was originally a word describing the weight of sterling for which the note stood. But if I walked into the Bank of England today and asked for Mrs Lowther to come to the till and redeem her promise, I expect I would be shown the door. What I am holding, the sceptic could say, is just a piece of paper which prints a lie, no less of a lie because it has a pretty picture of Charles Darwin and a humming-bird on the back, and the Queen on the front. In principle, perhaps, it would be quite hard to argue with this sceptic; the ten-pound note is only a piece of paper, and it makes a promise that it will not literally keep. And yet we all know he is wrong, and he would have to be a very extreme sceptic indeed before he tore up the ten-pound note and threw it angrily into the wastepaper basket.

In other words, we trust this note. We do not worry that we have probably never met Mrs Lowther. Her position, not her personal character, is what matters. We know that we know what we need to know – that this is a piece of paper which signifies a value.