Trust is Society’s Memory

On Power, Memory and the Price of Familiarity

Originally published in Swedish in Nya Åland, 4 August 2026. English translation by the author.

This spring, 65 percent of respondents to Åland Gallup said they had personally experienced private relationships influencing public decisions to a large or fairly large extent. In ÅSUB’s 2022 study on trust, more than half believed it was common for relatives, friends and networks to be favoured. Almost as many said personal connections were necessary to get anything done at all.

On Åland, all of this is often summed up in one warm little sentence: “Everybody knows everybody.” Closeness can be a genuine asset: short distances, quick answers, people helping one another before anyone has even managed to find the right form.

But small scale does not make relational power harmless.

It makes it contagious.

In a small society, a relationship rarely stays in one room. It follows you from workplace to public authority, from recruitment process to board meeting, from coffee table to decision. What elsewhere might have remained a single conflict can here colour a person’s entire social and professional future.

The surveys expose the slippage between human closeness and public power moving through the same relationships. The phrase is politically useful precisely because neighbourliness and informal power are allowed to borrow each other’s faces.

Neighbourliness lends power its innocence.

That’s just how things work in a small society

sounds like an explanation but functions as permission. It turns a choice about how power may be exercised into a law of nature, allowing what should trigger stricter conflict-of-interest rules, clearer documentation, independent scrutiny and real consequences to pass instead as a charming local peculiarity.

Everybody knows everybody

should therefore not end the conversation.

It should begin a risk assessment.

Ålanders remember the unanswered email; the recruitment where someone already seemed to have been chosen; the decision whose justification kept changing; the complaint that somehow became evidence of their bitterness; their lived experience recast as mere disappointment; the suggestion that they lacked the bigger picture; and the flexibility that materialised only when somebody else needed it.

What is an ordinary Tuesday inside an institution can become a decade in somebody else’s life.

Perhaps it is not the ordinary person who lacks the bigger picture.

What always strikes me is the ease with which our institutions and leaders assume that trust ought already to be there, waiting obediently for them, particularly after an election. And when the research shows that it is not, suddenly it is THE PEOPLE who require explanation.

Out come the familiar diagnoses: social media, polarisation, young people today, misunderstandings, or disappointment at having been told no.

People understand perfectly well that a public authority sometimes has to say no. They also know the difference between an unwelcome decision and a process that does not deserve their trust.

A change of leadership does not reset trust to zero. A new name on the door does not erase a lifetime of experience. Institutions carry forward habits, hierarchies, protected reputations and consequences that no one has yet reckoned with. Any serious analysis of trust must therefore ask not only who is in charge now, but what remained unchanged, which consequences are still rippling outward, and whose lives are carrying them.

Time is not the only thing our definitions erase.

We imagine corruption as bribes, oligarchs, dictators, suitcases full of cash and explicit exchanges of favours: corruption in its most theatrical forms. Nordic societies like to compare themselves with the cartoon villain, observe that they are not him, and turn relative virtue into presumed innocence.

Corruption does not look the same everywhere.

It takes the form the culture makes possible and power is able to defend.

The logic reminds me very much of the way racism is often discussed in the United States. If nobody is wearing a white hood or attending a Nazi rally, racism is declared absent. Yet racism leaves statistical traces: patterns in outcomes, unequal access, accumulated disadvantage and recurring differences in whose story is considered credible.

Racism does not cease to exist merely because the people reproducing the pattern do not recognise themselves in the word racist.

Here, the system is acquitted if no envelope changes hands and no one admits to favouring a friend, as though corruption between friends were only real when someone confessed to it.

But corruption, too, leaves unmistakable patterns: who is granted access, patience, trust, protection and another chance—and who encounters the rules in their harshest form.

Racism and corruption are not the same thing. But the analytical evasion is the same: define the problem by its most grotesque individual expression, establish that this is not us, and in doing so render the system beneath it invisible.

And no one needs to have designed the whole thing.

That is precisely the elegance of the system.

The cumulative effect is that our relationships begin to carry more weight than our principles, regardless of ideology or political issue.

Åland then becomes a society in which the familiar carries more weight than the right.

A society governed by familiarity eventually begins to mistake the known for the competent, the loyal for the trustworthy, and the new for a threat. Then it wonders why newcomers do not stay, why perspectives fail to widen, why renewal never comes—all while calling out for new expertise and new perspectives.

The status quo, after all, has no party membership card.

It has friends everywhere, because power changes hands but the free passes travel with it.

That is why anonymity in surveys matters so much: the picture that emerges there is often in stark contrast to what people are willing to say openly. In a small society, those who know the most about how power actually works are often the least free to say so in their own names.

To challenge the system is to risk more than disagreement.

It can mean that you and those closest to you are never quite allowed to feel secure.

That is why restoring trust requires more than another campaign. We first have to rearrange the concepts themselves.

Trust is not some latent state of mind in the citizen, waiting to be unlocked through better communication and less doomscrolling. It is a relationship built over time between power and the people who must place their livelihoods, their reputations and their futures in its hands.

Distrust is not always ignorance.

Sometimes it is hard-won wisdom.

Corruption is not only a criminal transaction. It can also lie in the pattern that emerges when access, patience, protection and consequences are distributed differently, again and again.

The burden does not lie with the public to display greater trust.

It lies with power to become more worthy of it.

In the end, trust is society’s memory.

And the question is not how people can be made to trust again.

The question is whether our institutions are prepared to give society something better to remember.