By Stuart A. Sutton, PhD
Secretary, Renaissance Petaluma
November 4, 2026
The 2026 election is behind us, but its shadow remains. Here in Petaluma, it has been a bruising campaign, marked by suspicion, accusation, and personal hostility, much of it amplified through social media, particularly Nextdoor. Long after the votes have been counted, we will still be neighbors, sharing the same streets, institutions, and challenges. Yet I wonder what damage has been done to our ability to work together.
That question has been on my mind since hearing historian Yuval Noah Harari make a remarkable assertion in a recent interview for The Economist: “The most important asset in the world is trust.”
Harari's claim is sweeping, but difficult to dispute. Trust lies at the root of human cooperation. Long before cities, governments, or currencies, people survived by depending upon one another. As societies grew, that cooperation extended beyond family and tribe to encompass millions of strangers. Money works because we trust others to accept it. Cities function because we trust people we will never meet to maintain our water systems, build safe bridges, educate our children, and perform countless other tasks upon which our lives depend.
A city is an immense web of cooperative relationships, most of them invisible. Trust makes possible what none of us could accomplish alone.
But Harari's observation raises a question that has occupied much of my intellectual life: How do we decide whom to trust, particularly when it comes to what we believe we know?
Patrick Wilson, whose 1983 book, Second-Hand Knowledge: An Inquiry into Cognitive Authority, profoundly shaped my thinking about knowledge, information, and belief systems. Wilson served on my doctoral committee, and his ideas have remained with me for over fifty years.
Wilson recognized that almost everything we believe we know comes to us secondhand. We cannot personally verify most scientific findings, historical accounts, or events beyond our immediate experience. We depend upon what he called cognitive authorities: people, institutions, and sources whose knowledge we regard as worthy of influencing our beliefs.
But cognitive authority is not the same as political authority, nor is it universal. Someone I regard as knowledgeable may have no authority for my neighbor. And expertise in one field does not necessarily confer authority in another.
There was a time when Walter Cronkite (for those with long memories) represented a relatively shared understanding of journalistic authority. That era had its biases and blind spots, but much of the public encountered news through institutions with recognizable professional standards and accountability.
Social media has shattered that common ground. Today, almost anyone can become a "Walter Cronkite" to an audience predisposed to believe them. Expertise, evidence, and reliability can become secondary to something much simpler: telling people what they already believe.
We have not abandoned cognitive authority. We have increasingly confused cognitive authority with cognitive agreement.
We surround ourselves with sources that confirm our convictions. Agreement becomes evidence of credibility; disagreement becomes grounds for suspicion. Two neighbors can confront the same issue, consult entirely different sources, and emerge not merely with different opinions but with incompatible understandings of reality. More facts accomplish little when the disagreement is over whose “facts” deserve to be believed.
Harari offers another insight that makes this especially troubling: the importance of self-correcting mechanisms. Institutions deserve our trust not because they are infallible, but because they possess ways to discover and correct their mistakes.
Science is an extraordinary example. Its authority rests upon testing, scrutiny, and revision when evidence demands it. Democracy embodies a similar principle. Elections, independent courts, a free press, and institutional checks and balances provide opportunities to recognize failures and change course.
Social media operates differently. Despite fact-checking and community notes, there is no consistently effective mechanism ensuring that falsehoods are corrected or that corrections reach those who believed them. Worse, the incentives often run in the opposite direction. A confident falsehood spreads faster than a careful correction. Acknowledging error can be treated as betrayal, while repeating it becomes a demonstration of loyalty.
If we recognize someone as a cognitive authority principally because that person agrees with us, what incentive remains to reconsider what we believe? Agreement, by itself, provides no mechanism for correcting error.
This is not simply an information problem. It is a problem of cooperation. We cannot cooperate effectively without trust, and we cannot cooperate intelligently without some shared means of determining what is true.
Here in Petaluma, our community faces consequential choices about housing, development, downtown vitality, infrastructure, and fiscal responsibility. Reasonable people can disagree about these matters. But disagreement over public policy is one thing. An atmosphere in which nearly everyone's motives and credibility are suspect is something quite different.
When a developer presents a financial analysis, a planner explains a zoning provision, or a civic organization publishes research, the debate may no longer concern the evidence. It may concern whether the source deserves to be believed at all.
When trust disappears, the merits of a proposal become secondary to suspicions about who supports it and what hidden interests might be served. The question is no longer whether something would benefit Petaluma, but whether anyone advocating it can be believed.
This is a miserable environment in which to govern a city. More public meetings, longer comment periods, and additional opportunities to speak do not necessarily produce understanding. People can be heard repeatedly without anyone in the community listening.
Nor can trust be restored by demanding agreement or suppressing criticism. Distrust is sometimes justified. Institutions make mistakes, experts can be wrong, and conflicts of interest exist. The distinction is between skepticism that seeks better knowledge and suspicion that rejects the possibility of trustworthy knowledge altogether.
What, then, might rebuilding trust look like?
It cannot simply mean asking people to be nicer to one another. Trust grows when people discover that others can act in good faith despite disagreement, that evidence can be examined without surrendering one's values, and that changing one's mind need not be experienced as defeat.
This is why I believe civic mediation deserves far greater attention.
Between government and individual citizens lies a civic sphere of neighborhood associations, community organizations, professional groups, and independent forums for dialogue. These can bring people with different perspectives together outside the familiar roles of political allies and opponents. Their independence matters: mediation should not become a government exercise in manufacturing consensus.
Nor does mediation require unanimity. The more useful objective may be rough consensus: sufficient shared understanding to move forward after serious concerns have been heard and addressed, even when disagreements remain.
But Harari and Wilson suggest something more fundamental. Civic mediation can help people recover the habits through which knowledge becomes shared rather than merely asserted. A mediator does not decide what everyone must believe. Instead, mediation creates opportunities to question assumptions, examine evidence, recognize mistakes, and revise positions without humiliation.
In that sense, civic mediation can become a social mechanism of self-correction. The capacity to say “I may have been wrong” is among the most valuable capacities a community can cultivate.
Elections determine who exercises public authority for a time. They do not repair damaged relationships or restore the shared understanding upon which productive disagreement depends. Those who supported different candidates will still encounter one another in shops, restaurants, neighborhoods, and public meetings. We will still depend upon the same infrastructure, contribute to the same local economy, and confront the same challenges.
Petaluma's future cannot be constructed by one portion of its population acting as though the other has no legitimate place in shaping it.
Harari reminds us that civilization rests upon trust. Wilson reminds us that trustworthy knowledge is essential to navigating a world we cannot personally verify. Together, they reveal how deeply cooperation depends upon both.
If trust really is the most important asset in the world, rebuilding it may be among the most important tasks facing Petaluma. Not because we should expect to agree about everything, but because we must recover the ability to disagree without destroying the relationships upon which our common future depends.
A healthy civic culture is not one in which everyone agrees. It is one in which people retain the capacity to discover, together, when they have been wrong.
The election is over. The work of living together is not.
References
Wilson, Patrick. Second-Hand Knowledge: An Inquiry into Cognitive Authority. Contributions in Librarianship and Information Science, no. 44. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983.
Harari, Yuval Noah. “An Interview with Yuval Noah Harari.” Interview by Zanny Minton Beddoes. The Intelligence, The Economist, August 20, 2026. Interview information and audio.
