Trust but verify
A traditional Russian saying urges us to “trust but verify.”
I learned the value of this during my first year of college in my sociology seminar. One day, I made some sort of comment about how divorce figures were going up, and the professor gently interrupted me to ask how I knew that. Truth be told, I hadn’t looked up recent marriage and divorce figures, it just seemed like something everyone knew. And of course, the actual statistics showed a slightly more complicated story, which the professor also pointed out.
Being a kid who prided myself on getting things “right,” my memory of that interaction comes with an embodied sense of shame, even now, 30 years later. For many years, as a human rights researcher, the “trust but verify” approach came more and more into focus. Folks with post-traumatic stress disorder or in activated trauma response (that is, folks who have suffered human rights abuses) rarely give straight stories. As researchers we learned to trust their testimonies but verify whatever we could and only publish that which we found to be “true.”
Recently, I have come up against the limits of “trust but verify” as an organizing principle, both in philanthropy and in community organizing. If we feel the need to verify, how much trust is there? And if we don't verify, is there any accountability at all?
Spoiler-alert: I have no clear answers.
I have long known that I have no way of knowing if something is real or true or right for someone else: my perspective is tainted by my positionality and personal experience, and reality and truth are deeply subjective. At the same time, I hold onto the notion that I can know when some things are wrong: ethically, operationally, sometimes legally.
In short, there is a link between accountability and trust, but it is not verification. I don’t know what exactly it is. Transparency? Authenticity? Clarity of purpose and values? These are the questions I am sitting with today.
Next up: virtual Wednesday vinyasa, May 25 at 16H00 UTC (12noon EDT). See you there?
