The US was close to that back in the days. Maybe it was just nostalgia speaking but I felt a few decades ago, people were so much more "refined" and had respect for each others and themselves.
Then some people took advantage of that. And it devolved. Now we have a country where the presidential candidates insult each other live on TV with straight up lies and deception. And the people cheer on.
So yes, indeed we are having a breakdown of trust and a new paradigm is shifting in. Just that I don't think it is a good one.
(1992) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jWo88Lr0rzw&t=102s
They've objectively gotten meaner and dumber with each cycle.
I think a large contribution to this behavior is the limited number of representatives. A terrible law and a huge disservice to the American people.
The US needs a constitutional amendment that just picks one of the mathematically-based methods for evaluating voting districts and makes it mandatory.
Even times like this occurring in a world that has the power to self-destruct isn't unique.
What is unique is the speed at which information travels.
The first two I'd like to avoid something analogous for a new order based on trust, but maybe the last one we can bring back if our leaders start to have a larger vision beyond focus on GDP, Stock Market returns, inflation, and unemployment rates.
But I'm not convinced the result is a disaster.
Evolution moves in a spiral, every round brings new insights.
Women's employment and/or compensation in the United States peaked approximately two decades ago, and has since declined. Xi Jingping wasn't China's dictator yet, so China was a bit more free. Crimea hadn't been annexed yet, and Russians had much more access to the internet. The alt-right was still in its infancy. Brexit hadn't happened yet.
Hence, when a British think tank claims freedom is falling across the world, I'm inclined to believe it. And levels of authoritarianism are inversely correlated with trust.
On the flipside, a whole generation of people across many of the poorest parts of the world have experienced increases of standards of living due to globalization.
Those words are the problem. Why even have a democratic system if everything is done in “lockstep”? Moreover, “forward” is a highly opinionated term.
Perhaps we can all, in lockstep, take a Great Leap Forward.
Otherwise, all the “forward” and “shared purpose” euphemisms do not change the fact that you have a tyrannical system, nor do the “intellectually lazy” ad hominems.
Facts and physical primary reality matter more than ones opinion, but we paint the sun on the sky and order the tides to recede to please the king anyway.
An informed populace can make informed decisions.
Lying fake news not so much... Aka $50million for condoms in Gaza is a lie.
Alternative facts will bite us all when the pedal hits the metal.
To an extent. We can never have 100% agreement. For example, we would still have Polio if the anti-science squad hadn't been forced to go along with the plan.
At the risk of sounding "elitist", fifty-four percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level. We should not let their inability to function in the modern world keep our entire society functioning at or below the sixth grade level.
> It's the opposite. Trust nothing, and we end up with pure chaos and the tragedy of the commons.
Trust is a necessary part of a society. Trust, but verify. But you still need trust. Without trust, the burdens are far too great. The world is too complex for one man to know everything. We have so much information and there is so much to know, one man is unlikely to even truly know one thing. Look at those with PhDs for an example. How narrow the research is. How narrow their expertise is. Do one yourself and you'll see that there are deep rabbitholes even in what appears to be a very simple topic.
Well I can talk to my parents who grew up in the Jim Crow south where they weren’t trusted to drink from the same water fountain go to the same school or get in the same pool.
Or today you can look at any neighborhood’s NextDoor forum when they see a black person “suspiciously” walking in the neighborhood and entering a home with their key.
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/ving-rhames-officers-pulled-gu...
Not to mention we just elected a President who ran on Haitians are eating pets and fear mongering of “other”.
Prompted by unverified claims going viral on TikTok.
Ceding mindshare to organizations whose only allegiance is to profit (and therefore eyeball time) is a loss, even compared to a world of less-than-perfect professional journalism.
Journalism as a well-funded, independent, competitive market for news is the cornerstone of any democracy.
Because without it, a populace can't be educated enough to vote in even their own best interests. (Exhibit A: Trump being elected on a manufactured illegal border crossing crisis)
The population doesn’t want to be “educated”. They knew exactly what they were getting. How do you “educate” people who in their heart believes that for instance saving Israel will bring on the second coming of Jesus during the rapture and if they condone the “gay lifestyle” they are going to burn for eternity and the nation will be set on fire?
The US no longer has a market of well-funded, professional sources of journalism. (Of the kind and scale that existed before ~2010)
It has for-profit partisan outlets and social media, and those are insufficient substitutes to power a democracy.
There were plenty of alternatives to TikTok to get information that was more credible than a Chinese own media company.
Look at NYT revenue [0], and it's the largest and most solvent of the big papers left. Newsrooms of everything after it (WSJ, WP, LAT) are even more gutted.
24/7 news channel "journalism" isn't a substitute, even when you can find it between the filler shows.
And it takes money to fund high quality journalism. Facebook and Google hijacked those funding streams, but then didn't use those profits to fund an actual replacement.
Instead, their platforms (and the ones that came after them) reward attention algorithm hacking and race-to-the-bottom in content quality.
And now, they've decided that even funding a fact checking function is inconvenient to their bottom line, so ditched that responsibility as soon as the political winds allowed them to.
[0] https://m.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NYT/new-york-times/r...
People want to consume what agrees with their beliefs. As long as Americans continue to believe they are a magical place with magical people that you can't compare to anywhere else for advice, that the Civil war was fought over "state's rights", that we disliked the Nazis in the 1930s, that certain TYPES of people are intrinsically better than others, that we are a "christian" nation, we will never get better.
Hell, even media made for people who don't actively hate LGBTQ types STILL treats the civil war like just some small kerfuffle and it's fine that two brothers on opposite sides of the war just needed to reconcile and love each other and that's totally fine even though one of them signed up to fight and die for a regime who's entire purpose was the continued enslavement of millions of black people for the crime of being born black.
A significant portion of our country is outright TAUGHT IN SCHOOL that the civil war was a war of "Northern" (read: those goddamned coastal elites) aggression.
The south fired the first shot for fucks sake.
Why do you think those people would EVER choose to consume news that tells them: "Sorry, you've kind of been lied to for a long time and actually your ancestors were kind of bad people doing kind of bad stuff and also uh we genocided the indians and also the Nazis were pretty popular here and holy shit you should see the horrible stuff we did under the guise of 'science' when we discovered Eugenics let us claim black people were inherently inferior. Because their skull was the wrong shape. No I'm serious"
How do you get someone to believe something they absolutely do not want to believe in and they don't even respect the primacy of material fact like "The southern states literally said they were fighting to maintain slavery IN THEIR SUCCESSION DOCUMENTS"? You can't force another human to respect and understand reality when they spend their entire existence and have built their entire worldview around "No, the people telling me my country did bad things in the past are actually the enemy"?
Then for instance like minded states could form alliances. A true Federalist country.
And yes I am well aware of my own hypocrisy only living in GA and FL my entire life and I know that the south would even be worse for people of my skin color if it weren’t for the civil rights legislation of the 60s, the official abolishing of segregation, etc
Murdoch aside, it generally happened because of profit chasing.
It was easy and profitable to capture conservative audiences with centrally-programmed partisan content (read: Rush Limbaugh). Progressive-partisan political shows didn't do as well (read: Air America).
Furthermore, stations couldn't mix partisanship without pissing off their listeners.
So you ended up with stations choosing conservative programming because it was more profitable, and then becoming conservative-programming stations because that because their audience.
With the net result of a huge disparity between the availability of conservative and progressive radio programming.
... compound that over a couple decades, and here we are.
Sure, profit chasing plays a part in it. A big reason why Youtube and Facebook push you down right-wing hate rabbitholes at the slightest hint that you might bite is simply that hate, oversimplification, and bullshit lies just drive engagement better than a 30 minute video essay on just how complicated this one tiny subsection of homelessness is and how much human labor and time it takes to work on it.
Humans like easy answer. Humans "engage" more (in ad-company parlance) with hate and things that cause anger. In a free meme market, the most shallow, most hateful content will always rise to the top.
But letting those incentives play out that way is a choice. Letting everything consolidate, an activity that is known to be detrimental to a free market, as long as they lower prices for a couple years before taking advantage of their monopoly is a very dumb choice. Reagan made plenty of dumb choices, but there were enough smart people in his cabinet to tell him exactly how this would play out. You don't live through the cold war and not know that owning the largest media narrative is power. And oh boy is it.
A cornerstone. Another cornerstone is popular memes like this, our culture is composed of thousands of them, and they control how we think.
When's the last time you saw a meme that taught you something or made you think about something more deeply?
The vast majority are cotton candy facts.
Now, can you transfer some of that impressive courage toward the task of answering the question I posed to you?
I used a very unpopular meme though, so unpopular you may not be able to see it.
Any more that for-profit healthcare or housing is.
Tellingly, Reagan’s America is where I really notice cultural growth dying out and trust vanishing.
And more controversially, I'd trace that to the same arguments as the Civil War and going back before the Revolution.
We seem to have had periods of calm prosperity (post Civil War, post WW II) against a base of xenophobia and internal dissension that goes beyond just ordinary differences of opinion. The late 60s were the end of one of those periods, and it has been an exponential curve ever since. It's all inflection points for over half a century.
Put another way, you aren't scouting ahead if no one is following you. You're homesteading. Which is a fine thing to do, but it won't get any significant bridges built. You, alone, won't be able to span the Mississippi with resources you find on your homestead.
I think we have entered a post trust era.
All that said, democracy is a team sport, so zero trust seems to be the population level consensus. So it's what should happen. Maybe it ends well? More likely it ends poorly. But either way, others will be able to learn from it and other human societies will benefit from the knowledge.
In the course of their duties, a scout may need to travel across rougher terrain than the main group, as scouting often involves seeking higher ground to surveil the planned path from a different angle. The scout will have to retrace their steps many times to find paths suitable for the entire group, with or without equipment, or for the weakest members. The group may need to split up to outflank a threat, or to accomodate the mission parameters. It is the scout's duty to identify hazards and report them back to the group.
To have a “group”, you need some trust somewhere. “How to function, and what happens when there is no trust anywhere?”, is the question most of us are pondering.
"This is getting out of hand, now there are two of them!" –Nute Gunray
More than one group may be necessary to accomplish the mission, which may need to split into many missions, possibly even contradicting each other.
Trust is earned, not demanded. Currently people are finding other trustworthy groups, and aligning to otther mission profiles to accomplish the greater mission. All you can do is try to re-earn their trust by giving accurate reports.
I really hope it doesn't leak the US more than it allready has. I prefer lifestyle subcultures centred around music taste.
Class is going to dominate culture until the politics improves. I don’t really see any way around this.
"Well, yes, Alex Jones also says PFASs are bad. Cooking in ... no I don't watch his show ... what? No, I have no prescriptions" etc. (I don't know if he said Telfon pots were bad before it was generally known to be true but lets pretend he did).
The mask thing was a great messup. Going from "it does nothing" to "you must wear them" is not very pedagogical.
Except it wasn't, that was a brand new thing that came out of nowhere in 2020.
Lockstep is never a good thing. And institutions are absolutely not trustworthy.
More important than mistrusting institutions is how you mistrust them. Understand their incentives, their patterns of behavior, their past actions, and hold them up against the theoretical ideals they set for themselves.
Far too often I see people mistrusting institutions on lazy, poorly thought out grounds - "government bad, regulations bad, taxes bad, press bad" etc and so forth.
The perfect being the enemy of the good (and the path to inaction) is the curse of youth.
Imperfect institutions can absolutely be better than alternatives. (Often: no thing)
It's a hard lesson to learn, but a corollary to it being harder to build something than to tear it down.
Yet some things need destroying or reshaping. The best square to the circle I've figured out is 'Don't break things you aren't willing to put ideas, time, and effort into rebuilding.'
> It’s the opposite. Trust nothing, and we end up with pure chaos and the tragedy of the commons.
The parent comment you are responding to is appropriately qualified, and you are throwing away that qualification. Trusting institutions that taking advantage of you to look out for your interests is worse than not trusting institutions at all (example: the institution of slavery, justified by racist pseudoscience, when you are not a protected class). Yes, the existence of institutions that can be trusted to look out for your interests (example: food safety regulators wrt. hygiene) is important, if that is what you are trying to say.
I agree, you should trust untrustwordy entities and trust trustwordy ones. It feels like a truism, but a lot of people revert to the behavior that misplaced trust is too costly and let's not trust at all because of this. Lack of trust comes with a hefty price itself. I personally feel that this leads to the unraveling of society.
In context I think it is fairly clear what OP meant - big tech and the traditional media sources like newspapers, corporate news and radio.
Although if you hear "untrustworthy institutions" and the groups that sprig to mind are the CDC and FEMA, maybe someone should work on making them more trustworthy too.
You get what I'm hinting at, someone having some sort of belief does not ground that belief in reality.
Instead, people are outsourcing their thinking to people like Joe Rogan and political YouTubers who exploit that cynicism for sponsorships, ad revenue and their own product lines.
Say what you will about corporate media, and I'm also a big critic of it and even PBS, but at least something like PBS isn't pure brain rot and can be informative. I highly doubt Mr. Rogers or the News Hour radicalized anyone.
These days terrorists are literally putting internet memes in their manifestos, along with shout-outs to their favorite YouTubers and internet pundits.
> In many ways this is the real transformation change that the internet posited
The "real change" was the Arab Spring era and powers all over the world quickly learned to not let that happen in their own backyards.
We are currently experiencing a duality between domestic powers doing their best to stifle or direct change for their benefit, and external powers doing their best to generate unrest elsewhere to their benefit. The internet as it exists enables both to extents the world has never seen before.
> Manufactured consensuses aren't holding so easily and people are being forced to acknowledge the sausage factory behind them.
Manufactured consent has modernized, it's happening right now all over the internet. Tech has become the modern Skinner box for owners to manipulate users, and social media has absolutely warped the minds of at least one generation in favor of their owners, too.
I wish I had your optimism, and I did like ~20 years ago, but man, the internet is pure poison for the unprepared mind. And I think we're all varying levels of unprepared for the highly optimized digital manipulation on the internet.
But what might be even worse is headline reading. Like you don't read articles like you use to. People read the headlines which are rage bait and click bait. Realtime rage on "developing stories" than nothing when the boring conclusion is known weeks later. People are going insane.
The death of the boring news paper is about as a big problem as Instagram. Modern newspapers just plainly sucks and are mostly rehashes of agency news anyways.
I think we need to figuratively pull the plug on the internet. Like make it some sort of loser thing to be hooked on social media and light minded news.
> stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered
--William F. Buckley Jr to Gore Vidal in 1968 on ABC television
Buckley also hosted a show on PBS at the time.
Joe Rogan didn't lie us into a disastrous $6 trillion war that destabilized the middle east, created all sorts of knock-on consequences such as mass immigration into Europe from the Middle East that we're still living with two decades later. Joe Rogan didn't spend decades cheerleading immigration, outsourcing, and globalization policies most Americans never wanted (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...).
Joe Rogan is popular because people can tell that his gut instincts and general world view are consistent with their own, which makes them trust his takes. If your alternative to that is people who believe in their hearts that the U.S. should bring democracy and human rights to the world, or take on millions of immigrants, you'll never get peoples' trust, just as you probably wouldn't trust someone who thinks the rapture is coming soon.
Most Americans do want their cheap toys and gas, and if you try to take them away, you’re not going to get voted out.
Don’t listen to what people say, listen to what they do.
If Americans didn’t want outsourcing and immigrants, they would have kept buying made in America goods and wouldn’t bitch about higher grocery / restaurant prices.
However, Americans (like any other group) never wanted to move down the relative socioeconomic rankings, especially relative to other Americans. So when they do, they start wanting to blame others for their lack of competitiveness with the other few billion people in the world.
By analogy, I prioritize my right over who enters my home over other considerations. I would like to let contractors and cleaners in, but only on my terms.
For example, one can be completely in favor of x amount of immigration, and be completely opposed to illegal immigration.
In the context of rayiner's post, the historic political cry of "immigrants bad" was not usually about illegal immigrants, it was about legal immigrants willing to work for less than people who grew up in America. There are plenty of records of anti Irish and anti Italian immigrant sentiment (or any other wave of ethnic migration that causes competition for the existing working class).
I would go so far as to say that current Republicans did skillfully weave the two political causes together in modern times to gain support of both those seeking law and order and those who dislike immigrants.
I think maybe that local level Democrats tarnished the national branding of Democrats by glorifying acceptance of illegal immigration, which might be popular in a select few cities or states, but not on the national stage (referring to sanctuary city policies).
>For example, one can be completely in favor of x amount of immigration, and be completely opposed to illegal immigration.
This proves nothing, illegal immigration can still be a subset. I like food but dont like apples. This doesnt prove an apple isnt food.
Illegal immigration has been the focus of the immigration debate in the US for at least the last 50 years. Politicians dont debate the optimal number of green cards and H1B visas on podium.
This is not an analogous situation or context. It would be logically consistent to support a policy of importing food, except for apples, if you think apples are causing a problem that other foods are not.
We were not discussing the existence of immigrants themselves, which yes, by definition, illegal immigrants are a subset of immigrants since they are immigrants. But that is not interesting nor useful to converse about.
We were discussing the acceptance of immigrants (legal) versus the acceptance of illegal immigrants.
Thats your take, not mine. I think the national conversation and rayiner's point is primarily about illegal immigration.
If you want to talk about why a big part of the US public feels betrayed, I think illegal immigration is both relevant and useful.
Clearly they don't - where are the federal criminal indictments for companies which employ thousands of illegal immigrants? How many employers went to prison for that in 2024? 2020? In Apr 2018 - Mar 2019 (2nd/3rd year of Trump-1), only 11 were even indicted [0].
Immigration is not a law and order issue for anyone other than low-information voters esp. in coming up to an election, when one party scapegoats the statistically small subset of (illegal) immigrants, the vast majority of whom don't commit serious crimes. Sanctuary should not apply to serious criminals. (There are certainly plenty of economic reasons to oppose illegal immigration, and to call on (both sides of) Congress to regularize their situation by adding new types of visa, because everyone acknowledges the US only functions on illegal labor; also they stabilize Social Security and never withdraw from it. Anthony Bourdain and the Texas construction industry both said as much.)
[0]: "How Many Employers Have Been Prosecuted for Employing Illegals?" https://hrexecutive.com/how-many-employers-have-been-prosecu...
So, because he lies in a way that makes them feel good, more angry at people they want to be angry.
I have no idea what his true thinking is. Or even what hes like away from the public eye.
Like Rayiner says, Rogan is not that smart, which combines with the confidence that comes from social and financial success and with the pressure to always be producing new content to cause him to make mistakes.
I think that says it all
It's anarchism if things go well, though I do believe whoever is in power has preplanned for erosion of "trust." Youth culture is heavily shaped by forces from the dark that are not directly "big tech" despite using "big tech." I think Kropotkin said something like anarchism learns on its own outside socialist/communist commentary that applies, but this memory I wouldn't rely on!
Stem is trendy & sexy in US in sort of leftist way, to use the world in the way Kaczynski meant. I think there's real interest, but it feels superficial, though getting regulators like "stem" when they probably couldn't separate physics from chemistry overall is great, for funding. I say this because STEM <=> Privacy cultural flow.
Anyway, the cultural shift is to stem. It's also a shift to Hobbesian world. That makes sense. In a place with millions of people you cannot have humane humane truth that all share. You need to converge. So the suffering comes from the dead fish, that wouldn't find their groups that are not all natural worldview nihilism Hobbes.
Why that's the end? Remark: Most humans cannot complete the Niestchean process of own value-choosing. You either do it when you are 1-20 or probably will never do it.
On other hand, it's very scarying that we may actually see coercive, dogmatic Crowlian (or at least leaders don't believe in it) "religious" or "aesthetic" or "cultural" movements which then are all about power, because these do break the chance to have sort of system that learns by itself & may need force to break. That's the opposite of the now-known Japanese lock-up. Western governments probably should be focused on regulating groups so that everyone can do whatever they want as long as they don't influence others. Robotics makes this urgent, as they are great tool to violate & penetrate other humans fast.
Economically it's the question of who is capable neurobiologically of being the most emotionless & greedy, and most useful transhumanist upgrades in next it-would-not-be-prudent-to-give-date will probably target that. This could be great if subsided, since if everyone is Lykken I Hobbesian, or most and the rest dies / suffers from lowel financial gains, then groups will not form as strongly.m around few humans, everyone going after their own good. This is actually good scenario, not grim.
Tribalization & party systems aren't necessarily compatible though 2 parties doesn't cause necessarily party to mean "group" beause in large numbers there's going to be mixed up people, but does it make sense to group biggest groups into two meta-groups and have them rule?
Dunbar & law of small numbers contradict, but the optimal system is sortition with entropy derived from formally-verifiable-on-your-own blockchain, such that if you are eligble and never before chosen, you may get a chance to be elected if you want, and perhaps anyone can submit their own bits to that system, and elected then get some training in logical reasoning, economics, finance, etc., and lobbying is banned with threat of pension loss after the term, meaning you'd have say 150 or some large number of random samples. This solves pretty much all problems of representative democracy, but cannot solve the fact representative democracy will probably NEVER switch to sortition.
The elephant that's yet invisible in 2025 is what happens when big groups of non-objevtive truth like "person X should rule the world cults" collade with AI+qualia+neurobio research. Free will doesn't exist, but free agency does, and it's decreasingly less possible because someone can manipulate you via technology to work for their deterministically-evolved own interests. What happens when spirituality is just science, and science is just power, and power is just spirituality (uniqueness)? The world gets monotonous and boring, and societally we may not recover from the biggest manipulator-cults. Zuboff's book in 2/3 section goes along these lines less explicitly and with different thesis / goal or argumentation.
To close the loop though, we are fortunate that Los Alamos & CIA & NSA exists, since they probably can produce this manipulative tech in advance, predict it's future economic role, and apply it for themselves. This isn't guaranteed, but one would hope for it, since US values & ideology are – indeed – not bad at all, for a dominant filler of the power vacuum.
"About 1 in 3 (32%) think that illegal immigrants are more likely than other Americans to commit violent crimes like rape or murder. This marks an increase in this view from prior polls (21% in 2019 and 17% in 2015)."
I suspect "close enough" is adequate here though :)
It is a difficult problem.
It's going to take people interested in more than just money, and the number of people willing to work for more than just money has seemingly never been smaller.
(a) immediately throw out the bathwater without checking for a baby: discredit all the output of the institution
(b) select an alternative source and then become completely credulous about it: discarding mainstream news for places like Infowars or Tiktok
(c) everyone is now in their own differently wrong bubble happily consuming all sorts of propaganda and grifter nonsense
The result is not an improvement, it's a low-trust society where you get things like an anti-vaxxer being appointed in charge of health.
As long as the average person is beholden to a corporation to earn enough to provide for basic existential needs, nothing will change. The corporation retain full control and capital dominance, and they are still able to leverage that capital dominion for political gain via horrid mechanisms like lobbying.
It doesn't really matter how much the people recognize the BS in the media when those holding the cards can still force policy makers to do their biding.
This was the point behind theoretical marxism that people (thanks to those lying media outlets) tend to miss. You are not free until you control the production mechanism and the generators of value. Until that happens, you will always need to bow to those that actually hold and hoard value at the expense of everyone else and at the expense of establishing a truly free society.
Have no idea what it will look like, but I think it'll be the 9/11 of another era.
Its not their fault, but the next generations simultaneously doesnt trust anyone and is also too gullible.
Its as if we, as a world, are losing our grip on reality because of the internet. Flooded with constant streams of information, our brains cant make sense of it, so we default to going be how things feel. But we all know what feels right is usually wrong
In many ways this is the real transformation change that the internet posited. Manufactured consensuses aren't holding so easily and people are being forced to acknowledge the sausage factory behind them.