I recently realized that many of the problems I have with our current society can be explained by a single issue: trust. We have all seen during Covid how little people seem to trust experts and politicians, but you might not have realized that the issue runs much deeper than that. There is a profound unhappiness I can observe in almost anyone I talk to and, probably more often than not, this unhappiness can be traced back to being at the mercy of someone they don't fully trust. Sometimes this lack of trust is justified and sometimes it isn't but it's almost impossible to tell these two situations apart and that is basically the whole point.
Did you ever realize how difficult it has become to trust people? It's not only the fact that our society seems to transform into a neoliberal dystopia where becoming rich by scamming others out of their money is seen increasingly as "clever", rather than immoral. It's not only the fact that capitalism incentivizes everyone to do as little as possible for as much money as possible, so you really need to consider the fine-print with every transaction. It's not only those "free" services that turn you into the product, the ever progressing enshitification that turns everything into a subscription service so we don't own anything anymore, or the powerful algorithmic propaganda tools that billionaires use for astroturfing. All those factors play into it, but the main culprit for me is the rapidly spreading epidemic of incompetence.
Is it just me or does it feel like everyone is an idiot these days who thinks that they are the only source of truth and everyone else is an idiot. And no, the irony of that is not lost on me but note that I'm not making any efforts to exclude myself from that observation. It's tragic, because our society was built on collaboration. Every day we benefit from technologies that no individual human could have developed on their own as their complexity exceeds what one individual can learn in their lifetime. If we now stop trusting anyone and need to check everything ourselves, how are we going to get anything done?
It's also a self-reinforcing effect, because if you have less accurate information to work with, the information you produce as a result will also be less accurate. Garbage in, garbage out. This is independent of how much you try to be accurate and how much you care personally. Only if everyone (or at least most people) started caring about the accuracy of data again could we stop this vicious cycle. But that seems to be the opposite of what's happening. People care more about what feels right and what they want to be right than what actually is right.
Or at least that's what they think they care about. When they have to face the consequences of relying on inaccurate information they are not only surprised, they feel betrayed. They have too little understanding of what is going on to reliable explain the circumstances but they know that they've been lied to and that erodes trust. It erodes trust in any external information so they feel encouraged to make up their own facts. And so the cycle continues.
I have tried to analyze so many problems with society, with democracy, with economics, with education, or with culture just to arrive at the conclusion that the core problem is just that people are too stupid. But the people might not actually be stupid at all. Maybe they just have trust issues. Maybe they're just alone and scared and unloved. Maybe they're just aching to be rescued by someone, anyone, who they can believe in. Someone who will always do what's best for them and who would never betray them.
So what can we give those people? Religion? Fascism? Is that really the best we can do? Why do we need anybody to be the one people can trust, why can't it just be *everybody*. Why can't we just declare war on anything that erodes trust in our society? Why can't we shun anything that's deceptive, misleading or even confusing. Why do we value "cleverness" higher than "clarity". As a society, we value accessibility. We install ramps for wheelchairs, we put braille on elevator buttons and we have special days at carnivals where the lights are flickering less and the music gets turned down so the experience becomes more enjoyable for people with autism. So why are we still allowing people to enrich themselves by taking advantage of the fact that their customers don't understand their terms. Why are we shrugging at people spewing false information just because they can't be bothered to fact check. I'm not saying we should necessarily shame people for being wrong, honest mistakes happen. But we should demand from our fellow humans that they do the best they can to be accurate. And if they don't do that, maybe a bit of public shaming would be in order.
