Sun Tzu: Trust and Deception in Warfare
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War opens with a paradox: “All warfare is based on deception.” Yet throughout the text, he emphasizes that trust between commander and troops is the foundation of military success.
A commander who cannot be trusted will find his orders ignored, his strategies undermined, his army fractured. Sun Tzu wrote: “The general who advances without coveting fame and retreats without fearing disgrace, whose only purpose is to protect the people and serve the sovereign—such a man is the jewel of the kingdom.”
For Sun Tzu, trust operates on two levels. Internally, trust binds the army together—soldiers must believe their commander will not waste their lives needlessly. Externally, deception is deployed against the enemy, not against one’s own people. The skilled commander creates trust within while sowing confusion without.
This distinction illuminates enshittification precisely: platforms have inverted Sun Tzu’s principle. They practice deception not against external adversaries, but against their own users—the very people they should protect. When a platform manipulates feeds, hides algorithms, or changes terms without notice, it treats users as enemies to be deceived rather than allies to be served.
Sun Tzu warned that an army which distrusts its commander has already lost. The same applies to platforms: when users recognize they are being manipulated, trust evaporates—and with it, the platform’s strategic position.
Aristotle: Trust as Virtue and Social Glue
Aristotle understood trust not as a mere feeling, but as a virtue woven into the fabric of human community. For him, trust was inseparable from philia—friendship—and dikaiosyne—justice. Trust enables trade, governance, and the pursuit of the good life.
Aristotle observed that money itself has no intrinsic value—it is a social convention based entirely on trust. Gold and silver are worthless without collective belief in their worth. This insight remains radical: the entire economic system rests on nothing but shared confidence.
His concept of pistis (trust/faith) was foundational to his ethics. Trust enables us to act beyond immediate self-interest, to cooperate, to build institutions that outlast individuals. Without trust, Aristotle warned, the polis cannot function.
Niccolò Machiavelli: Trust as Political Currency
Machiavelli saw trust through the lens of power. In The Prince, he observed that rulers must cultivate trust not through virtue alone, but through calculated consistency. A prince who breaks promises arbitrarily loses the trust of both allies and subjects.
Yet Machiavelli also recognized a deeper truth: trust built solely on fear is fragile. The most stable states are those where citizens trust their institutions—not because they love their rulers, but because the system delivers predictable outcomes. Trust, for Machiavelli, is the currency of effective governance. Spend it wisely, and you maintain power. Squander it, and even the mightiest state collapses.
His insight anticipates modern enshittification: when institutions prioritize short-term extraction over long-term trust, they undermine the very foundation of their authority.
John Locke: Trust as the Social Contract
Locke’s entire political philosophy rests on trust. Government exists, he argued, only because citizens consent to entrust it with power. This trust is conditional—when government violates it, citizens have the right to withdraw consent.
For Locke, trust was not naïve faith but rational expectation based on evidence. We trust institutions that demonstrate reliability, transparency, and accountability. When these qualities erode, trust erodes with them.
Locke’s framework explains why enshittification provokes such visceral anger: it represents a fundamental breach of the social contract. Platforms that once served users now exploit them. The trust that enabled their growth is treated as an expendable resource rather than a sacred covenant.
Immanuel Kant: Trust and Moral Duty
Kant grounded trust in the categorical imperative: we ought to act only according to principles we could will to become universal laws. If everyone broke trust whenever convenient, trust itself would become impossible—a contradiction that proves trust is a moral necessity.
For Kant, trustworthiness is not merely pragmatic—it is a duty. We owe it to others and to ourselves to be trustworthy, regardless of consequences. A merchant who deals honestly even when deception would profit them demonstrates moral worth.
This perspective illuminates why enshittification feels morally repugnant: it treats trust as a tool to be exploited rather than a duty to be honored. When platforms deceive users about data practices or algorithmically manipulate engagement, they violate the Kantian principle that persons must be treated as ends, never merely as means.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Trust as the Key to Living Fully
“Sobald du dir vertraust, sobald weißt du zu leben.” — As soon as you trust, you will know how to live.
Goethe’s insight cuts deeper than mere self-confidence. He suggests that trust—particularly self-trust—is the prerequisite for authentic existence. Without it, we remain paralyzed, unable to act, create, or love genuinely.
For Goethe, trust was not passive belief but active surrender to life’s possibilities. The person who trusts opens themselves to experience, to growth, to transformation. Trust is the gateway to living fully rather than merely existing.
Thomas Jefferson: Trust as the Foundation of Liberty
Jefferson understood that democratic governance rests entirely on trust between citizens and their government. His declaration that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed” is fundamentally a statement about trust.
When that trust is violated—when government serves itself rather than the people—the social contract dissolves. Jefferson’s insistence on transparency, accountability, and the right to revolution were all mechanisms to preserve trust.
He warned that institutional trust, once broken, cannot be restored through words alone. Only through structural reform—real changes in power dynamics—can trust be rebuilt.
Søren Kierkegaard: Trust as Leap of Faith
Kierkegaard explored trust through the lens of existential anxiety. True trust, he argued, requires a “leap”—a commitment beyond what evidence can guarantee. We must trust not because we are certain, but because uncertainty is the condition of authentic existence.
For Kierkegaard, the opposite of trust is not distrust but despair—the refusal to commit, to engage, to risk. The person who cannot trust retreats into irony and detachment, never fully participating in life.
This insight reframes enshittification’s damage: when platforms betray trust, they don’t merely inconvenience users—they create existential anxiety. Can I trust anything? Should I commit to any platform? The result is widespread cynicism and withdrawal, what Kierkegaard would recognize as despair masquerading as sophistication.
Hannah Arendt: Trust and Totalitarianism
Arendt observed that totalitarianism destroys trust between individuals, making collective action impossible. When neighbors cannot trust each other, when every conversation might be reported, when institutions serve power rather than truth—society dissolves into isolated atoms easily manipulated by propaganda.
Arendt’s analysis reveals enshittification as a form of soft totalitarianism. Platforms don’t merely exploit users—they reshape social relations, replacing authentic connection with algorithmic engagement. Trust becomes impossible when you cannot know whether content, recommendations, or even friends are authentic or manufactured.
The antidote, Arendt suggested, is the public sphere—spaces where people can appear to each other as themselves, speak freely, and build trust through genuine interaction. This is precisely what enshittified platforms destroy.
Niklas Luhmann: Trust as Complexity Reduction
Luhmann offered a systems-theory perspective: trust is a mechanism for reducing social complexity. In a world of infinite possibilities, trust allows us to act without verifying everything. We trust the bank will hold our money, the doctor will cure our illness, the platform will deliver our messages.
Without trust, every interaction requires exhaustive verification. Society becomes paralyzed by the cost of information. Trust, Luhmann argued, is what makes modern life possible.
Enshittification exploits this function. Platforms gain trust by reducing complexity—making it easy to connect, share, transact. Then they gradually increase complexity (opaque algorithms, hidden fees, manipulated feeds) while demanding the same trust. The result is a system that requires trust but no longer deserves it.
Francis Fukuyama: Trust and Prosperity
Fukuyama demonstrated that trust is the foundation of economic prosperity. High-trust societies—those with strong social norms, reliable institutions, and low transaction costs—outperform low-trust societies in virtually every metric.
In Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, Fukuyama showed that cultures with high “spontaneous sociability”—the ability to trust strangers—can form large, efficient organizations. Low-trust cultures must rely on family networks, limiting scale and innovation.
This framework explains why enshittification is economically destructive: it converts high-trust platforms into low-trust environments. Users must verify everything, assume worst-case scenarios, and limit their engagement. Transaction costs rise, innovation declines, and prosperity diminishes.
Yuval Noah Harari: Trust as the Engine of Civilization
Harari argues that trust is the ultimate creative force of human civilization. Money, corporations, nations, religions—all are shared fictions sustained by collective trust. The entire global economy—valued at hundreds of trillions—exists because we believe in it.
Harari points out that in 2006, the world’s total financial assets were approximately $473 trillion, but physical coins and banknotes totaled only $47 trillion. The rest—over 90%—exists purely as trust in promises, institutions, and systems.
This insight extends beyond economics. Every human institution—from marriage to government to science—is a trust network. When trust collapses, the institution collapses with it.
The Universal Pattern
Across millennia, these thinkers converge on a single truth: trust is not optional. It is the operating system of human cooperation. Whether expressed as Sun Tzu’s military necessity, Aristotle’s virtue, Machiavelli’s political currency, Locke’s social contract, Kant’s moral duty, Goethe’s gateway to authentic living, Jefferson’s foundation of liberty, Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, Arendt’s bulwark against totalitarianism, Luhmann’s complexity reduction, Fukuyama’s engine of prosperity, or Harari’s creative force—trust remains the invisible architecture that makes everything else possible.
And when trust is betrayed—when institutions serve themselves rather than those they were built to serve—enshittification follows.