It’s the opposite. Trust nothing, and we end up with pure chaos and the tragedy of the commons. Trust institutions (arguably had been the right choice), and society can move in lockstep forward together.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
> 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.