Building Trust in an Age of Distrust

This article is part of our special section on the DealBook Summit that included business and policy leaders from around the world.

Toward the end of my more than hourlong interview last week with Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and space entrepreneur, there was a comment that struck me — that’s been rattling around in my brain for days.

“I gave up on being well understood a long time ago,” Mr. Bezos said. “To be understood is too difficult.” He added: “It’s hard enough, by the way, to be well understood by your loved ones, by your kids and your closest friends. It takes a lot of energy. If you think you understand any public figure, you probably don’t.”

It was a profound thought because so much of what the public does on any given day is try to take the measure of our world’s public figures — and the institutions they run. We judge them. We are constantly assessing them — online and off. We try to determine whether we like them, whether we trust them and whether they deserve our hard-earned dollars.

This is particularly true of elected officials, but it is increasingly true of the leaders of our nation who are unelected — who run the companies that touch our lives in various ways. We read about the rankings of the Forbes and Fortune magazine lists, and we look at their philanthropic efforts as a sign of both their success and, perhaps, their humanity.

All of this is being processed through human sensibilities that are both imperfect and increasingly polarized by politics and a bubble of social media feeds.