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>> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.

> No, that's wrong model.

> Authorities have always misled us. There was no time in the past when authorities would be truthful.

> What changed is us, our access to information and our ability to shout out whatever you want and reach another person on the other side of the world.

I think actually both are true. Authorities have always misled, and people have a deteriorating trust in (especially political) authorities. The reason is because the frequency of lying to the public increases with an authority's access to the public. Before 24-hour news and the internet, there simply wasn't as much motive for leaders to lie with any real frequency. Now they do so constantly because they are in constant dialogue with the public, and are susceptible to frenzy.

What's changed is our ability to detect authorities are lying to us. It's higher than it's ever been. That erodes trust, because over and over we see authorities lying to us.

Then, add in disinformation and propaganda that makes incomplete truths look like total lies, and truths look like at best half-truths. That makes us perceive lying more perhaps more often than authorities actually lie.

I think so too.

With a camera in every hand and an independent (or at least controlled-by-competing-power) news outlet just a click away, all the dirt can no longer be hidden from public view.

Our levels of trust are approaching the level that actually matches the dishonesty of the political and managerial class.

> Our levels of trust are approaching the level that actually matches the dishonesty of the political and managerial class.

Ouch. That may be the most depressing thing I've read in a while. (Not saying you're wrong, though...)

How naive. Why would any lowly person have ever trusted what their lords told them?

To a great extent you have to and with some regularity. Anyone who spends or accepts currency as payment is exercising some trust in the government and the authorities who manage the financial system. When Kennedy told the country about the Cuban missile crisis, the country had to believe he was largely telling the truth about the situation, etc.

Society is built on trust.

Trust isn't necessary at all when faced with a behemoth that can and will crush you without noticing or caring. "Going along to get along" has nothing to do with trust and everything to do with survival.

Some of it I think is an overemphasis on credentials. I think this is a problem in many domains of society, but credentials are vastly inflated in importance. The result of this is that uncertainty is underacknowledged and valid uncredentialed perspectives are under weighted.

Information access might be related in that credentials probably mean less in reality if the information is more widely distributed.

Scribes were more critical in ancient societies where literacy wasn't common.

>Some of it I think is an overemphasis on credentials. I think this is a problem in many domains of society, but credentials are vastly inflated in importance. The result of this is that uncertainty is underacknowledged and valid uncredentialed perspectives are under weighted.

Absolutely. My plumber watched a bunch of youtube videos about coronary bypass surgery. And since I know him, I trust him to do my quadruple bypass surgery[0] much more than someone with useless credentials like a an MD or board certification[1].

Those "doctors" think that just because they went to school and trained for a decade, that they somehow know more than folks who haven't. That's just elitist claptrap. Anyone who wants to watch some youtube videos and read some WebMD articles about brain surgery should be allowed to perform such procedures without all this regulation about "training" and "licensure." /s

[0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/coronary-bypass-...

[1] https://www.abms.org/board-certification/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

N.B.: It pains me that I had to add a '/s' at the end of my comment, but given the current environment, it's important to remember that Poe's Law[2] applies, even about something like this. More's the pity.

It almost goes without saying, but in some cases, there's a fine line between sarcasm and strawmen.

>It almost goes without saying, but in some cases, there's a fine line between sarcasm and strawmen.

Are you claiming that I set up and knocked down a strawman? Please do elucidate. This should be interesting.

Sure. I don't actually know a plumber who wants to perform coronary bypass surgery on me. In fact, I don't require such surgery, at least not at the moment.

My comment was more "reductio ad absurdum"[0] to make the point rather than a strawman.

And that point being that "expertise is not an illusion" in many cases.

While it's true that there are folks who claim to know some things better than other folks, there are many areas (like medicine and a variety of other fields) where credentialed expertise is not only valid, but essential.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

My concern is that western leaders agree with your assessment, have studied the strict information controls that governments like the Chinese CCP have implemented over the past 20 years, and concluded that model is the only strategy for western governments to move forward as well.

Western leaders didn't need the Chinese to teach them about propaganda and the control of information. The fact that we immediately associate the Chinese with this is a result of their work.

The only thing special that the Chinese have done in the past 20 years is not to accept the US imported internet as an unpoliced forum, knowing that it was going to be used as a weapon against them. The US didn't want to leave the internet unpoliced either, but they also didn't want to spend a bunch of money on it. Eventually a private tech censorship industry arose that they could just piggyback on.

I’m talking about the government banning unapproved narratives and criminalizing political dissent. These controls exist currently in China but not in the United States.

What's the evidence that the Clinton/Bush administrations wanted to censor internet content, but decided it was too expensive?

> The only thing special that the Chinese have done

I really don't think this is fair. The Chinese have had an incredible economic boom, modernization, and lifted a ton of people out of poverty, while maintaining totalitarian control of the nation. That's what's unique about China relative to accepted wisdom. It was widely predicted that economic prosperity would inevitably lead to liberation of the people, politically. While the jury may still be out on this long-term, I think the opinion is now pretty pessimistic about the democratization of China. What China has done is shown that economic success can come in a locked down nation. The strife and policy failings of the Western world post-Cold War have also given the Chinese government a narrative about the strife and uncertainty that come with politically heterogenous liberal societies. If you're on the right side of the government, which most Chinese citizens are, the thread of chaos can help keep you in line. Hell, our own government uses this trick to manufacture consent, albeit to a lesser degree.

This challenges a lot of notions in the Western world that liberal democracies are required for prosperity. The Western nations weren't always convinced of this. One need only go back so far to find successful European autocracies. What's "dangerous" to liberty-loving people about China, IMO, is that it may resurrect old ghosts of the Western empires. The social contract people have with their governments gets devalued when said governments think they can press on the people more, or in fact need to, in order to stay competitive or dominant on the world stage. The calls that "we need to be more like China" are more frequent in the press than I'm comfortable with. As Adam Michnik said, "the crucial distinction between systems…was no longer ideological. The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property of the state."