If you want to be productive in life and cooperate with people you need at least some level of trust. For example if you are meeting up with someone, do you distrust that they will not show up and not go at all or do you demand they send their GPS location every minute of their way to know that you are not wasting an hour of your time going to the meeting?

This is just one minor example. There's several other things that you have to trust that work. In any exchange or trade you are providing some level of trust. If you didn't trust at all you wouldn't do the trade. You trust that whoever you are meeting up with won't kill you.

So you can't really say that you "distrust everything". That's a meaningless statement. Even you who says that they distrust everything has some level of trust in some items.

If you are in a relationship do you go there with complete distrust, once again demanding to see their messages and location at all times because otherwise you distrust them not to cheat on you?

If you are living in a house you trust that whoever built the house built it well enough for it to not collapse on you randomly.

I'm happy to co-operate. I don't have to trust them for that. I extend my hand to others first. I can trade. I go in with the possibility that I can be ripped off - I'm happy to do so.

I don't think most people are nefarious. Most are incredibly ignorant though. Despite apparent intellectual abilities, most people are unable to think for themselves - they have been programmed. They have received their values and behaviours, etc and believe them to be their own, even though they have never considered them deeply for themselves. They believe its perfectly normal to spend their whole lives working at screens for money. Unbelievable! This is 'normal'. Wearing masks is now normal too, and no travel, ever greater government management of one's life is also normal. Etc.

So yes, there is the day-to-day trust - but what I'm thinking is that trust requires that 2 agents have freewill and a similar reasoned understanding. But we don't. I live in different universes to most, I think.

When I'm talking about trust, there is a relation to truth. Most people accept the truth they are provided without question. There is no debate - the TV doesn't lie, the government has your best interests, corporations aim to make profit but in a 'ethical' way, the law is independent, etc, etc. In dealing with people who accept all that uncritically, we cannot have trust. We do not have individuals interacting according to a common understanding. We have a herd that acts in a predetermined way. It looks like its made up of individuals, but its not. In fact the only thinking that's occurring is small, and relates to personal preferences (I prefer the taste of chocolate, I like watching sport, I will work hard for money to get the house, etc). The behaviour is hardwired, there is no element of free will there. No more trust to be had there, that you could have with a door or wall.

Your cynicism is so dysfunctional that it prevents you from acknowledging basic scientific facts. Why should any person adopt a worldview which demonstrably allows its adherents to renounce something as basic as 1800s germ theory? Because they think they’re smarter and more independent than everyone else? No, your cynicism borders on mental illness.

Mental illness - absolutely.

This is exactly what independent thinkers will be diagnosed with. If you don't go along with what consensus calls true, you are mentally ill - its obvious! That person doesn't believe x or y - despite being taught it at school. He or she wants to know and understand for themselves! My, my - that's definitely a crime.

Mental illness is when one ignores basic facts which have been independently validated by scientists around the world, all for the sake of his own narcissism. I have no time or respect for people too intellectually lazy to do basic reading while praising themselves for their own ignorance. The very people who rationalize their ignorance with self-indulgence inevitably end up revealing themselves to be the greatest slaves to their own cognitive dissonance. Their minds are simply too weak and their egos too frail to admit flaws in their worldview.

The thing is, you believe your basic facts. Believe, not know. But you call it 'knowing'.

Knowing is when you verify facts for yourself. By not checking information, but just accepting whatever is handed to you, you are applying no filter to your reality. You filter only what has been deemed acceptable for you to filter - did Trump say that, did google do that, etc. The basic 'facts' are accepted without contention. Or any verified evidence. All that's needed is for someone to make a claim or show it on TV and that's basically right, right?

Have you ever looked at the replication crisis - where 70% of science studies cannot be reproduced? Or the nature of science funding - its corporations, the government and the military. If we are living in a fascist dictatorship, as I believe is evident, then that is a closed loop. Only what is deemed valuable to those stakeholders is investigated and presented as true.

>By not checking information but just accepting whatever is handed to you...

>The basic 'facts' are accepted without contention. Or any verified evidence.

>All that's needed is for someone to make a claim or show it on TV and that's basically right, right?

Who exactly are you speaking about here? What gives you the right to presume -- without any evidence -- that others don't verify and critically examine what they read and hear? Do you actually believe that you're the only person who does this?

Your attitude is blatantly condescending and supercilious.

Where exactly do you get the conclusion that it alloes for renouncing germ theory? What are the facts not acknowledged?

Exact proof of something simple as 2+2 is laborious and hilariously disproportionate but one can work with approximations well enough and handle the vast majority of cases in the same way friction and time dillation are often omitted from equations.

feralimal implies that people wearing masks aren't thinking for themselves, when the reality is that masks are in everyone's collective self-interest and the vast majority of people understand this. Widespread mask-wearing is highly correlated with reduced spread of airborne contagion, coronavirus included.

Ah I missed that bit in the paragraphs. Of all of the dumb herd behaviors brought out by the pandemic mask wearing the opposite.