Trusting a Stranger: Why It Used to Be the Norm, and Today Feels Like the Exception

Trusting a stranger, argued Danish philosopher Knud Løgstrup, is the natural default of human behavior; distrust is the exception that needs explaining. Zygmunt Bauman, in ‘Liquid Love’ (2003), picks up that idea to ask how much of it survives two decades of reality shows, apps, and increasingly revocable bonds. The answer he builds is more nuanced than it first appears.

“It is a characteristic of human life that we normally encounter one another with natural trust,” Knud Løgstrup wrote in The Ethical Demand (1956). “Only because of some special circumstance do we ever distrust a stranger beforehand… under normal circumstances we accept the word of a stranger, and we do not distrust him until we have some particular reason to do so. We never suspect a person of falseness until we have caught him in a lie.” Bauman cites this passage in Liquid Love as a starting point for exploring an uncomfortable question: is it still true?

A rural pastor who became a philosopher of the resistance

Løgstrup conceived much of this thinking during the eight years he spent as a pastor in a small parish on the Danish island of Funen, before moving to Aarhus to teach theology and ethics at the university. Bauman notes, not without a certain irony, that he doubted these same ideas could have taken shape once Løgstrup had settled in the city and had to confront, as an active member of the Danish resistance during the Nazi occupation, the realities of a world at war. Løgstrup’s own biographical arc already contains a tension his work never fully resolved: trust as a natural impulse, tested by extraordinary circumstances.

The television show that inverted his verdict

Bauman sets Løgstrup’s thesis against a very specific cultural phenomenon: the massive success of shows like Big Brother, Survivor, or The Weakest Link. The subtitle of Survivor, he notes, says it all: “Trust no one.” Bauman suggests that followers of that kind of reality TV would invert Løgstrup’s original verdict almost entirely: it is a characteristic of human life that people meet each other with natural suspicion.

Why trust doesn’t survive inside the game

The reason, according to Bauman’s analysis, isn’t incidental. Within the logic of a televised survival game, trust, compassion, and mercy become a strategic disadvantage. The reasoning follows step by step:

1. The game rewards calculation, not trust. Every decision gets judged by its effect on your own survival within the game, not by its moral worth.
2. Trusting another player exposes you to a rewarded betrayal. If one player trusts and the other doesn’t, the one who trusted loses; the incentive system systematically favors whoever betrays first.
3. The result is a self-reinforcing spiral of distrust. The more players adopt the strategy of not trusting, the more rational it becomes, for everyone else, to do the same.

Whoever isn’t tougher and more calculating than the rest risks getting voted out, with or without any second thoughts from those making that call. The show reproduces, in entertainment form, a Darwinian logic where whoever is best at not trusting survives.

How this plays out in everyday life

Consider a familiar situation, not a real case but an illustration of the pattern: someone starts a new job and, in their first week, a coworker offers help without asking for anything in return. Many people’s instinctive reaction today isn’t to simply accept it, the way Løgstrup described as “normal,” but to wonder what that person is after, what hidden motive might be behind the gesture. That suspicion doesn’t come from any specific bad experience with that coworker: it comes from a general mental habit, trained by years of vague warnings about not trusting anyone. Løgstrup would say that default suspicion is the real anomaly, not the initial trust.

A nuance Bauman won’t let slide

Even so, Bauman doesn’t treat Løgstrup’s thesis as fully invalidated. He makes a key point: Løgstrup never claimed that moral impulses arose from reflection or risk calculation. On the contrary, his argument was that morality’s hope lay precisely in its pre-reflective spontaneity, in the fact that trust, when genuine, doesn’t stop to ask “what do I get out of this?” before showing up. Under that logic, the fact that there are now fewer and fewer guarantees that trust will be reciprocated doesn’t prove the spontaneous impulse has disappeared: at most, it proves it’s finding less and less fertile ground to take root in.

Two kinds of distrust worth telling apart

Bauman’s reading of Løgstrup offers a useful distinction for thinking about your own experience, boiled down to two quite different categories:

• Specific, justified distrust, directed at a particular person for a particular reason: someone lied before, broke a promise, gave real signs of being unreliable.
• Generalized suspicion, held in advance toward any stranger, with no particular evidence backing it up in that specific case.

Løgstrup placed the first as a normal part of social life; the second, as the anomaly that would actually require explaining, though Bauman himself acknowledges that the contemporary world seems, more and more often, to flip that hierarchy.

Trust as a “sovereign expression of life”

Løgstrup described trust, alongside compassion and mercy, as manifestations of what he called the “sovereign expression of life”: acts that don’t answer to a calculation of personal gain or an obligation imposed from outside, but that arise, in his framing, with no need for any further motive. Bauman connects this idea to philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of “responsibility for the other”: both agree that depending on someone, or letting someone depend on you, isn’t a weakness to be eliminated, but the very foundation on which any genuine moral bond gets built. Read this way, the world Bauman describes throughout the rest of Liquid Love, bent on reducing every form of dependence to a risk best avoided, wouldn’t simply be updating Løgstrup’s thesis: in many ways, it would be working against it.

Trust and close relationships

This tension between spontaneous trust and learned suspicion isn’t limited to strangers: it also runs through our closest bonds. Attachment research describes how early experience with available, consistent caregivers is linked to greater ease trusting others in adult life, a pattern that shows up in more detail in the secure attachment profile.

Conclusion: the anomaly changed places

What Løgstrup described as the norm, spontaneous trust toward a stranger, now functions in much of contemporary culture as the exception that needs justifying, while default suspicion has become, for many, the reasonable starting point. Bauman doesn’t rule on which stance is correct. Instead, he offers a tool for noticing the shift: asking, the next time an automatic suspicion arises toward someone new, whether it responds to a real, specific reason, or whether it’s simply the habit of an era that learned to expect the worst before having any proof of it.