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Comment by mbg721 | Hacker News Reader

As I think you've gathered, I'm coming from the "the trust is already gone" side.

I wasn't inclined to reflexively trust gov, even before this debacle. That's neither here nor there. I try to keep my bias out of it. Otherwise, someone from the opposing spectrum will take it as an invite for a useless argument.

What steps can practically be taken to restore trust for the average person, who might not be as cynical as myself?

It's not going to happen anytime soon in the US, but the thing that will win people over is a genuine common philosophy of some kind. We've spent the last 50 years doing a weird washed-out half- Christianity, and now half of us want the old Christianity-based system back, and the other half wants a tech-humanism that is anathema to the first half.

If either side is genuine about their beliefs, a first step is probably enforcing single-issue bills in Congress.

> It’s not going to happen anytime soon in the US, but the thing that will win people over is a genuine common philosophy of some kind. We’ve spent the last 50 years doing a weird washed-out half- Christianity, and now half of us want the old Christianity back

“Christianity” isn’t a unifying philosophy; even more recently than 50 years ago, the most dedicated evangelical/fundamentalist Protestant Christians were campaigning against the single largest Christian denomination in the country (Catholicism) as vigorously as against non-Christians, and many of our key religious freedom rulings were a result of Christian or Christian-adjacent groups (Jehovah’s Witnesses figure particularly prominently here) resisting impositions by more dominant Christian groups. Kennedy got much the same kind of attacks for being an (actual) Catholic as were directed at Obama for being (supposedly) a Muslim.

And if the short history in America were not enough, look at the troubled history of Christian-Christian relations in Europe and the Near East.

That's fair, I'm just struggling to define what the prior American mythos actually was, and I think Jesus factors in there somewhere, in name. As a Catholic myself, I know well that actual religious belief isn't the main driver. Maybe I'm wrong and there never was an American mythos, but there's a palpable sense of change that isn't just outright racism.

> That’s fair, I’m just struggling to define what the prior American mythos actually was

The problem I think is that you are starting from the assumption that America had a uniting mythos that only recently fell apart, rather than America having had deep, vicious internal divides throughout its entire history that were sometimes temporary subordinated to even stronger shared opposition to external forces.

It wasn't always this vicious, or this pervasive in its viciousness, in my lifetime.

>> The problem I think is that you are starting from the assumption that America had a uniting mythos that only recently fell apart, rather than America having had deep, vicious internal divides throughout its entire history that were sometimes temporary subordinated to even stronger shared opposition to external forces.

> It wasn't always this vicious, or this pervasive in its viciousness, in my lifetime.

In our & our parents lifetimes, we had the "even stronger shared opposition to external forces" of Cold War opposition to the Soviet Union to keep these divisions in check.

America's divides have been terribly vicious in the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Kansas, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War), and some of the current things that divide us even have their roots in that era.

> we had the "even stronger shared opposition to external forces" of Cold War opposition to the Soviet Union to keep these divisions in check.

And even then, the Civil Rights and Anti-War and other internal conflicts of the 1950s-1970s weren't insignificant.

Nothing at this point.

Nixon killed any real trust in the 70s generation that raised the 90s kids, and Bush v. Gore, the war in Iraq, and Obama era drone strikes on US citizens without trial have killed any real trust in the 90s kids who raised the current generation. The current adult generation is having that killed by what is going on right now.

There's been three generations of general distrust (if not outright cynical belief that the government is _always_ lying), and that's not going to come back any time soon. I'm not sure there is anything that you can do beyond radical transparency and time.

The government is made of people. It's inherently fallible and manages a lot of power. It's a recipe for disaster.

We're at this intermediate stage because the previous solution was to just give all the power to a bunch of people, likely the ones that killed more people.

Using elections instead of military power is an improvement over middle age, but you still have a bunch of people with a lot of power.

There's absolutely zero trust possible.

Maybe after western social democracies wreck the economy for the umpteenth time, people will try to remove power from governments until they disappear.

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