The System of Trust
Trust isn’t a feeling. It’s operational necessity, and your group won’t survive without it.
Most activist groups collapse from the inside.
Not because a government agent stormed the gates—or snuck in. Not even because the media trashed them publicly and aired their dirty laundry (by the way, the logical question is “why was there dirty laundry to air?).
Groups collapse because the system of trust — the thing that makes the group cohesive, resilient, and impenetrable — was assumed instead of built.
In resistance and activism, we tend to think infiltration by a government agent or informant is the biggest threat—and that’s kind of amusing, because a lot of groups either don’t prepare for that correctly, or they don’t prepare at all. But as I talked about recently, infiltrators don’t need to create problems. They’re simply using the material that already exists in the group members and culture to exacerbate, speed up, and maximize the effects.
The real threat—the one that will absolutely ruin your efforts—is an emotionally needy member with no boundaries, a leader chasing validation instead of vetting, or a member for whom the cause or group is their identity. In activism and underground work, trust is a system. And without the system, you’re headed for inevitable disaster.
Trust is Critical Infrastructure, and It’s Built.
Trust is like the immune system of your group. It’s a dynamic, invisible defense, and like the immune system that’s (hopefully) fighting off the various infections and germs your body might come into contact with, it works under the surface. It filters what belongs in your body, isolates what doesn’t, and attempts to neutralize the threats that it identifies.
Your body’s immune system gets better at its job by being exposed to things, a little at a time. You’re building immunity to various threats, and later when your body sees it again, it recognizes it and has a plan for how to deal with it.
When I was teaching EMT students, I encouraged them to listen to as many healthy lungs as they could possibly find. “Ask your kids, your spouse, your friends, if you can listen to their lungs,” I’d tell them. Why? Because the better acquainted they were with what healthy sounds like, the faster they could identify what UNhealthy sounds like.
This distills down to three precepts:
Know what healthy looks, feels, and acts like.
Be comfortable recognizing and naming unhealthy.
Have a plan to handle it that you spend time and effort training on.
This is why I talk so much about understanding your own needs, your weaknesses, and your leverage points. This is why I harp on the need to understand human behavior if you’re going to be involved in activism or any form of underground resistance—because of the need to recognize healthy vs. unhealthy culture, protocols, and practices. Trust does not like unhealthy environments, and since it’s the foundation of your entire effort, you need to make sure that it has everything it needs to thrive.
What happens when your body’s immune system is compromised? Exponential multiplication of bad things. It’s the same in political activities.
The 3 Failure Points of Trust in Activist Movements
You might be thinking that this is all well and good, but maybe you believe that trust breaks down because of an infiltrator getting into the group and starting their games.
That’s half true—but only half.
Group implosions aren’t due to outsiders that come in and ruin everything. They’re due to members not understanding how to filter, contain, and course-correct. And THAT comes from a lack of trust system—or one that is assumed to exist instead of being intentionally, painstakingly constructed and maintained.
Here are the three most common failure points:
1. Emotional Overload with No Containment
Activist circles attract wounded people; that’s a reality. People who’ve been hurt by systems tend to fight those systems—and that passion can be a huge asset. But when emotional processing and unresolved hurt become the dominant group dynamic, you’re not building trust infrastructure anymore, and your group’s immune system is officially compromised.
Group dynamics become characterized by positions that link the group’s cause to personal emotion:
“You’re not showing up for the cause.”
“I thought we were a family.”
“You’re causing division.”
Trust decays because the group can’t carry the emotional weight of fulfilling each member’s individual needs. Meanwhile, the people best suited for leadership either burn out or get edged out because they won’t enable the chaos—and healthy people naturally withdraw from it.
2. Cultural Misalignment Advertised as Unity
You can chant the same slogans, hold the same signs, and show up to the same events, and still be on completely different missions.
One person thinks the group is about self-sufficiency. Another thinks it’s about building a faith-based community. Another wants to use it as a launchpad for personal brand-building. And yet another is sitting in the shadows wishing the group would get a lot more aggressive.
This is where infiltration thrives: in ambiguity and lack of clarity.
If no one’s ever defined what the group isn’t, an infiltrator doesn’t need to fake anything. They just blend in, mirror the strongest voices, and bide their time waiting for the opportunity to expand the fractures that are already coming.
Combine that with the ever-too-present need to grow numbers (because for many groups, numbers = credibility), they’ll be even more willing to allow members in who aren’t on board with the group’s actual goal. Since the group can’t even verbalize what that goal is, the chaos train keeps on rolling.
3. Infiltration by Invitation
The most dangerous people in your group don’t sneak in. They don’t have to.
They show up eager, ready to work, and saying all the right things. They love-bomb the leaders, offer to help (especially in the menial jobs that others don’t really want to do), and seem to mirror all of the values that the group holds.
They don’t have to bypass any defenses, partly because your group doesn’t really have any, and partly because they position themselves as being exactly what your group is looking for.
You invite them in — because you’re looking for momentum and more bodies.
By the time someone feels comfortable enough to question what’s happening, your new member has already:
Gained trust,
Accessed info,
And weaponized emotional leverage to silence critics.
By then, calling them out looks divisive and paranoid. Guess what? You’ve just become the ‘problem child,’ and an unhealthy group will make sure that you either get in line or get out.
All three of these failure points have something in common: the system of trust was not intentionally designed and cultivated; it was implicitly assumed to exist.
Cultural Antibodies: How Healthy Groups Self-Correct
Every strong group starts with a defense system that can neutralize internal threats. That’s true whether you’re talking about a marriage, a friendship, an underground resistance group, or a business. Oddly enough, the internal threats in each of these are the same:
Unmet emotional needs that compel us to act in a way that restores our emotional balance, even for just a few hours or days.
Mistrust borne from past trauma, other failed human relational situations, etc.
Cultural antibodies aren’t shared slogans or even beliefs. They’re embedded cues and reflexes that tell us that something is wrong.
This behavior doesn’t belong here.
This person feels off.
That story isn’t adding up.
That dynamic isn’t aligned.
Strong groups look for those signals, encourage discussion on them, and have a plan to deal with them in a way that seeks to still further the mission. Weak groups seek to ignore those reflexes and silence or ostracize the people who bring them forward.
A single unchallenged pattern can become a protocol or standard procedure over time. If no one checks the pattern, it becomes the norm. Tolerance of anything less than clarity, transparency, and intentional building of the trust system is the group’s enemy.
Antibodies look like this:
A culture of real, authentic feedback—not just being nice, or playing at unity.
Clear boundaries, not just unspoken or assumed expectations.
Goal-and-role clarity. What are we doing? Who’s doing what part of that? What does it look like if done well? How will we know if it’s not being done correctly, and if we pick up on it, how do we correct it?
That takes intentionality, it takes vigilance and maintenance. Trust systems don’t happen by accident, they cannot be assumed, and they cannot be left to chance. If you’re building something that is important to you, whether that’s a marriage, a business, or a resistance group, the most important foundational aspect of it is the system of trust that you cultivate within yourself and the people with whom you associate.
It might feel like it’s opposed to creating spaces that make us feel safe. In reality, a properly built trust system is one of the safest, healthiest, and most growth-prone environments you’ll ever be in.
Anything less than that is a countdown to guaranteed eventual failure.
⚔️ This essay is one side of a mirrored map. The Red Pill Files explores A System of Trust through the solo lens of entrepreneurship — how trust becomes a powerful force multiplier when scale is no longer the goal. You can read his side of the resonance here!
Tomorrow i’ll be posting a worksheet that allows you to evaluate the trust systems that are important to you.
Thx for sharing this Kit, it gives much to think about.
This hits hard. Trust isn’t soft—it’s structural. You either build it, or you pay for not having it.