>"They're in charge, surely they must know what they're doing! They wouldn't lie to us!

Literally nobody thinks that.

Unfortunately most people don't have the time or energy to fight every emerging attack on freedom.

Everything is going to plan for the billionaire class.

Eventually everything will burn, only time will tell if it will be from global warming or food riots.

>> "They're in charge, surely they must know what they're doing! They wouldn't lie to us!

> Literally nobody thinks that.

I'd have to disagree; I'd say this is the modal perspective.

God, that's worrying.

I must live in a more rational bubble.

Most average people assume competence and good faith from people in charge. Most people don't question, aren't skeptical, and go through life in a fog. That's not most people here, but it's like Gell-Mann amnesia applied to politics. 99% of the time, when politicians put forth a plan to do things in a domain you're competent in, they look like morons. It's exceedingly rare for them to do things well.

People trust elected officials, they trust institutions, they trust "experts", the media, the academics. A vast majority of people don't realize the scale of ineptitude amongst the people who wield power. Most of the "elites" are not overqualified geniuses, but instead average bumbling idiots who stumbled their way into office, or sociopaths, or physically attractive. Most political systems do not reward competence and diligence.

You could swap out all 535 congress people in the US for randomly selected citizens and I guarantee you that outcomes would improve. Things are going so badly because they're intended to go badly, because unethical people wield power for self enrichment and cronyism. The purpose of a system is what it does.

Having lived in lower trust vs higher trust societies, you can see it in how people assume their leaders think. High trust places like Sweden, people have pretty high faith in their leaders to do the right thing. Personally, I much prefer quality of life in a higher trust society. It is exhausting needing to second guess everyone everywhere all the time!

It's a situation of turkeys preferring to live on the farm, except in the lead-up to Thanksgiving. It's quite good until it's suddenly very bad. It's fine if it's used to track down murderers etc, but we are seeing this now with various countries tracking down people who don't like Israel.

In Sweden, something like 40% of the population work directly or indirectly for Wallenberg family owned companies according to one stat. That will exclude the businesses who make money off people employed by them. So who is really in charge of Sweden?

Here is the exact quote from Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallenberg_family

    > In the 1970s, the Wallenberg family businesses employed 40% of Sweden's industrial workforce and represented 40% of the total worth of the Stockholm stock market.

Poll after poll in the US show a distrust in politicians and the governor. Our current president has a 37% approval rating.

Between the electoral college, gerrymandering and 2 Senators per state regardless of population, the minority control who gets elected.

Not to mention that anyone who trusts the police is naive.