The brazenness - and visibility - of the hypocrisy and callousness of our leaders has eroded public trust. We no longer have any paragons, really. We just have people who we think aren't quite as bad as the alternative. To use the events of today as an example, everyone knows the people running CrowdStrike are going to continue being fabulously rich, and might not even lose their jobs. Even if, by some miracle, CrowdStrike gets sued out of existence, they'll walk away and still be multimillionaries.
And when this seems so universal, so inevitable, in the people running the world (whether that be in business, politics, or whatever else), you start to wonder if it's even possible to do otherwise.
One of the first things I wrote down when I founded my company was, quote, "do not spin, do not mischaracterize, do not omit, do not grey-pattern." I don't know what the chances that that doomed my company on day 1 were, but they certainly are not zero. I am genuinely not sure it's possible to succeed in the world as it is without being a lying, cheating bastard to some degree. And I'm not the only one.
Have you ever tried just going down a grocery-store aisle and counting every snake oil claim within your line of sight [1]? It's astounding. I looked on the coffee table my laptop is sitting on right now, and sure enough I've got a box of what are effectively Twizzlers claiming to be a health food because the sugar came from apple juice instead of being distilled first. Every room in my house is full of lies. It's desensitizing.
"Quiet quitting" provides a workplace example of what this does to a culture. In a sense, intentionally not doing the work you're being paid to do is a crappy, somewhat immoral thing to do. It's certainly not a sign of good character, at least in my book. But people do it because they perceive (correctly) that their employer would screw them given the slightest chance. The local incentives of each side to be adversarial have fallen into a defect-defect equilibrium (see [2]) that is detrimental to both parties. Both sides are so used to being exploited that they defensively and preemptively spend tons of energy defending themselves against it and failing to find common ground in the many areas that aren't zero-sum. Worse, they even feel bad about things that are positive-value to themselves but might be used against them! [3]
And once you're in that kind of a culture, it's so hard to argue for anything constructive. How can you believe in anything when the representatives, the would-be paragons, of every moral value you'd like to promote are flaunting ignoring them, when so many values are used as paper-thin excuses to hurt people day in and day out?
That's true almost whatever you believe! Are you big on the traditional family? You're probably voting for the cheated-on-his-wife-with-a-porn-star guy. Did you favor invasive pandemic measures in California? You're probably voting for the guy who had a party while you were staying home. Like organized labor? You're voting for the guy who shut down a strike on critical infrastructure. Like law and order? You're voting for a felon. Almost everyone knows this, and for some years now, we've gone "ugh, but have you seen the other guy?". (This isn't a criticism - I do this too.)
But the optimistic take, to quote MLK for a second, is that we might be climbing out of one local minimum into another:
> [Protest] seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored...there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal...the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.
> ...How strange it would be to condemn a physician who, through persistent work and the ingenuity of his medical skills, discovered cancer in a patient. Would anyone be so ignorant as to say he caused the cancer?...We did not cause the cancer; we merely exposed it.
(MLK is, of course, talking about a different issue here. But the observation is valid to others.)
It's only in this moment where we're all so disgusted, where we're all in a world so "crisis-packed", that we act. For better or worse, the people of Earth are wildly destabilizing their societies, whether that's the right in the US or the left in Latin America or protestors in Shanghai. We're "mad as hell, and we're not gonna take it anymore," and while that's unpredictable, it does at least offer the opportunity for the establishment of new, more legitimate institutions built on the disgust of those who make them.
In a more game-theoretic sense, my mental model is that the public and the elite are playing an iterated Ultimatum Game [4]. The elite holds the cards and makes the decisions, but the public can always flip the table over and screw everyone if they feel they're getting a short enough end of the stick. And it's at moments like this, when the public begins to pose a credible threat, that the elite begin to listen - or get replaced by a new elite that will, which is essentially my goal in life.
-----
[1] https://xkcd.com/641/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41011173 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40346311 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game