Image in the original: Professor Bob Sutton from bobsutton.net/
America gives individuals the right to bear arms.
To use or not to use — that decision is left to each person, not to the government.
In a sense, this is a declaration of trust in human beings. That’s one way to read it.
Japan is different. Guns don’t exist in the first place. The option itself has been erased.
Which society is more mature? I’ve wondered about this for a long time.
Then one day, it hit me.
This is exactly the same question that lies at the heart of leadership.
I teach leadership for a living.
I study management philosophy and have spent years thinking about how people function within organizations. I’ve been inside organizations my entire life — from childhood to now.
And yet, I sometimes feel a friction with organizational structures that I can’t quite name. I find depth in human connection genuinely difficult.
I know this is a contradiction. I’m aware of it.
But this question won’t leave me alone:
What does it truly mean to trust a human being?
There’s a body of research by Bob Sutton, an organizational psychologist at Stanford University — many of you may have encountered it through Guy Kawasaki’s Substack. In his book The Friction Project, Sutton argues something that stopped me cold.
The real problem in organizations isn’t leadership quality. It’s friction. The kind of friction present in a workplace determines how well it functions, far more than whether the leader is talented or not.
But Sutton is careful about something important: not all friction is bad.
He draws a clear distinction between bad friction and good friction. Bad friction: pointless bureaucracy, unnecessary approval chains, conflicts that drain people without producing anything. This should be eliminated. Good friction: the dialogue that promotes growth, dissent, constructive tension. This should be preserved — intentionally.
I nodded at this deeply.
I’ve had the experience of offering honest feedback to someone, grounded in genuine care for their development, only to have it met with rigid resistance. The door closes. They’re not interested in growing.
That, I’ve come to believe, is the face of bad friction.
A relationship with someone who has no willingness to receive good friction — the kind of tension that leads to growth — only exhausts both parties. So I’ve stopped investing deeply in people with low coachability. I do this naturally now. It’s not a conscious decision I make; I simply find myself moving that way.
But here I have to turn the question on myself.
Isn’t that a form of distrust?
The moment I decide “this person won’t change,” have I given up on their potential?
Marcus Aurelius reminds himself again and again in Meditations: human beings exist for one another. The person who frustrates you, the person you cannot understand — they are still human.
This was a man who ruled the Roman Empire. And still he struggled. Still he couldn’t find the answer.
I don’t expect to find it either.
But I can at least recognize the question. And I think that’s where we have to start.
Perhaps “trusting human beings” is something different from evaluating the specific person in front of you.
When I look at a particular person, I see their flaws. I remember our past exchanges. Old wounds resurface — the time they said something that stung, and I haven’t entirely forgotten it.
And yet. This person, flaws and all, hurts and all — is still a human being.
So if I’m in the business of working with humans, maybe I need to love them a little more.
That’s the orientation I’m trying to cultivate.
In management, I always tell people: don’t see the group, see the individual. Know each person one by one.
But trusting human beings operates at a different layer. It lives beyond individual assessment. It means refusing to let go of the potential inherent in human beings as such.
Back to guns.
A society that arms all its citizens looks like it trusts human beings. But in reality, some people will always be overcome by temptation. Nations possess nuclear weapons and feel the pull to use them. Having the option makes the temptation real.
Eliminating the option from the start — is that an infringement of freedom? Or is it a realistic acknowledgment of human weakness?
There is no clean answer.
If the philosopher-emperor of Rome couldn’t find one, I certainly won’t.
But I can recognize the question.
And that, for now, is where I begin. ■
First published on Substack on Jul 22, 2026 (JST). Archived here as part of the Fabio Caipirinha permanent archive (published on this site: Oct 15, 2026). Original: https://fabiocaipirinha.substack.com/p/what-does-it-mean-to-trust-a-human