Overdrawn at the Bank of Trust

Like lots of other people, I've spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out why so many people are willing to believe the craziest of notions. This isn't just an artifact of the global pandemic---things were well on the way to crazy-town long before everyone started getting used to plague doctor memes. 

Where I used to work---at a university library, no less---I had co-workers who believed in things like chem trails, Masonic conspiracies, Nikola Tesla had invented a time machine that the US government used to control the world (!!!), vaccines are poisonous, etc. Now, of course, we have things like Q-Anon. Where is this coming from? 

I have a tendency to believe that most problems don't have one single cause, but rather several different ones that work together. To that end, I'd like to posit one more potential cause of this plague of idiocy that is afflicting us at the same time as Covid-19: a chronic social deficit in trust.  

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Rene Descartes, a little paranoid?

Trust is an interesting thing. Philosophers have pointed out that if a person is really honest with herself, she really doesn't know an awful lot. Descartes pushed this idea to the point where he said that he didn't even know if there are other human beings in the world---it could be that he was surrounded by robots that perfectly mimic his conception of human behaviour. Indeed, modern thinkers have similarly posited that there is no real way of proving that we aren't all living in a computer simulation that was created by some intelligent race of super beings. 

We have to take a great many things in life simply "on trust". It's true that we have laws governing contracts and thievery, but the fact is that we are at the mercy of the companies that supply goods and services, our neighbours, the government, etc. That's because our court system would be completely overwhelmed if it was expected to police 100% of all human interactions---or even slightly more than it does right now.

This need to trust each other has grown dramatically in recent years as we have become more and more interconnected. I sometimes order parts, tools, or, other things from people running small companies in other countries---some of them with quite sketchy reputations. That has included things like a specialty bolt I needed to fix a chair but which I had to purchase from Hong Kong (because the only North American supplier I could find sold them exclusively in 1,000 piece lots), a box of old-fashioned safety razor blades from Turkey (you can get them here---but they are outrageously expensive), and so on. I've never gotten stiffed and I generally get a good price. If this wasn't people's general experience purchasing goods online, the entire industry would come crashing down---so companies like Ebay and Pay Pal go to great lengths to keep their customers happy. 

Because trust is important to business, there is a polling company that keeps track of how much the global population trusts it and other social institutions. In the words of the Edelman Trust website: 

"We have studied trust for 20 years and believe that it is the ultimate currency in the relationship that all institutions—companies and brands, governments, NGOs and media—build with their stakeholders. Trust defines an organization’s license to operate, lead and succeed. Trust is the foundation that allows an organization to take responsible risk, and, if it make mistakes, to rebound from them.

For a business, especially, lasting trust is the strongest insurance against competitive disruption, the antidote to consumer indifference, and the best path to continued growth. Without trust, credibility is lost and reputation can be threatened."

To this end, Edelman has been polling levels of trust for several years and publishes an annual report. The latest one is worth looking at because it shows a very steady and significant decline in people's trust in several key authorities.

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(Before I get any further, I want to warn readers about the information I'm getting from the Edelman Trust Barometer. 

• This is a private company, which means that by definition, it serves the interests of stockholders, not the public interest. Looking at the report, it appears obvious to me that the people creating it are supporters of the neo-liberal consensus. 
• The "report" consists exclusively of graphs without any attempt to interpret the information or place it into a context.
• Most of the graphs specifically refer to business "brands" and how willing citizens are to believe corporate "spin".   
  
• It gets its information through polling a relatively small number of people: 30,050 for the entire planet. Modern polling is a science, which means there is an attempt to limit different demographics so they aren't over-represented---but just remember that this is a very small percentage of the world population!
• Their data comes from on-line surveys. That means that only people with access to the Web could physically fill it out---and that no one was holding a gun to these people's heads forcing them to answer truthfully. So only relatively well-off people with nothing better to do filled out the form---that's hardly a representative sample of the world population!
• The parent company Edelman has been caught recommending unethical practices in support of things like the Keystone and Energy East pipeline proposals.
  

Having said all of the above, I believe that some of the information we get from these reports is useful---especially insofar as it shows trends from year to year. That's because one can assume that using the same sample year to year will cancel out the self-selection bias.)

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Blue type time again. If you can afford it, why not consider subscribing through Patreon or Pay Pal? It's easy to do, and supporting local media is the "right thing to do".

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Let's look at what the Trust Barometer has to say about what and who the world population does and doesn't trust over the past few years.

It's important to parse out a poll's context if we are going to understand what it means. For example, what does the survey mean by a "search engine"? I suspect that they just mean "Google". But it isn't the only one---I use Duckduckgo, for example. That's because I don't trust Google to not sell my browsing history to nefarious actors. I do trust Duckduckgo on that score. But I do trust both to objectively present links according to a mechanism that uses both popularity and respectability as part of the criteria. Where do I fit on the graph? Do I trust search engines or do I not? 

There's another element to this. It appears that the Republican party in the USA simply does not believe that it is possible that some of their policies are objectively harmful to large sectors of the population or that because of this they are very unpopular. When the search engines reflect this unpopularity, they assume that there is a conspiracy against "conservatives". In this sort of context, what exactly does it mean to say that you lack trust in "search engines". Is it simply because they agree with the lies of a major political party? If so, then perhaps the problem isn't a lack of trust in search engines, but rather too much trust in the Republican leadership?

Even more to the point; Facebook, Netflix, Youtube, etc, all use search engines and artificial intelligence to decide what shows up on my feed. What I expect (but certainly do not want) them to do is quickly create a "filter bubble" based on past choices that will feed me more and more content that is designed to make me upset about the world around me. They do this to encourage me to watch even more content from their social media feed because this will make me a more useful commodity to sell to advertisers. This feeds my "distrust" insofar as I know it will act like Grima Wormtongue (from The Lord of the Rings)---whispering poisonous half-truths and out-and-out falsehoods into my ears in order to poison my mind.

Facebook's employee of the year

So, do I "trust" search engines? Or don't I? 

(I rarely finish filling out a survey because I generally end up raising quibbles like the above. If there is a human being trying to get me to answer their questions, they usually look like deer in the headlights of a car and mumble that I should "just tick something".)

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I suspect that part of the reason why there has been such a decline in trust is because we have had it betrayed so many times. This is especially important with regard to government. Just off the top of my head, I'll list some things that have eroded my trust in politicians.

• the fake "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" that resulted in Congress giving president Lyndon Johnson the authority to get the US military mired in Vietnam
• the fake "Weapons of Mass Destruction" propaganda that George W. Bush and Tony Blair used to justify the invasion of Iraq

These are really "stand out" incidents because a lot of people died as a result of each. 

But there are other, smaller, "drip, drip, drip" scandals that routinely happen and slowly erode any belief that the government can be trusted. These include:

• the "ME to WE" charity that seems to have not been much of a real charity and involved several members of the Trudeau family in a conflict of interest
  
• the "Panama Papers" scandal where a whistle-blower at a large legal firm gave evidence that an entire industry exists that allows hordes of wealthy people to avoid paying taxes
• the "Me Too" scandals that seemed to show that wealthy, powerful men like Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Peter Nygard, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Jian Ghomeshi, etc, can get away for decades with serially abusing women
• the SNC-Lavalin case where an international engineering firm got caught bribing foreign governments to gain contracts---and it looked like the Prime Minister's office was willing to lean on the Minister of Justice in order to let it off the hook 
  

Another problem seems to be that the institutions that are supposed to protect us seem to be not much more than "paper tigers". 

• Elections Canada seemed totally uninterested in punishing the federal Conservative party even though it had clearly involved itself in voter suppression through the "robocall" scandal
• when Liberal leader Stephan Dion wanted to form a coalition government after the 2008 election, Governor General Michaelle Jean allowed Stephen Harper to instead prorogue Parliament
• Revenue Canada seems to have given up chasing tax cheats---if they have enough money to make things difficult
  

Beyond the above, there are other types of "drip, drip, drip" that kills people's trust in government.  

• constituency offices that increasingly seem like the entrance to prisons because of excessive security
• badly-designed and poorly-maintained web-based government application systems that threaten dire consequences if you fill out the forms wrong---but which can be impossible to use
  
• phone messaging systems that force people to wait on line for hours while inane recorded messages spit out the obvious lie that "your call is important to us"  

My "gut feeling" is that every time a politician goes into "mealy-mouth mode" and refuses to express themselves in a forthright manner, a little more basic trust in the democratic process gets eroded. Every time a bureaucrat refuses to speak honestly to a citizen and refuses to admit that there is something wrong with the system they serve, a little more trust in the government chips off. Every time the government gets caught doing something they shouldn't and takes refuge in the statement "no laws were broken", people's faith in government declines. And every time a government oversight body says something to the effect that "they didn't find enough evidence for charges" the respect for regulators declines.

In effect, what I'm saying is that several of the pillars of society---such as government---depend on a certain amount of trust by the citizenry. All the actions I mentioned above are like withdrawals from a bank account. If more comes out than goes in, eventually there's nothing left and a person becomes insolvent. I would posit that many of the old authorities in our society are perilously close to bankruptcy and that's why so many people are willing to seek out alternative authorities to rely upon.

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One of my "bête noires" are people who don't take into account the opportunity cost of their actions. In this case, the trade-off is that every time a person in authority refuses to "fess up" and speak "punk and plain" they seem less trustworthy. The public relations profession has done such a good job of "keeping on the message" and "controlling the spin" that a significant fraction of the public have pretty much lost every scrap of trust they might have once had in our authority figures. The result is that these folks have started casting about for new points of reference. 

Unfortunately, many of these people have fallen into the hands of social media Wormtongue clones who take advantage of this naive cynicism. And that's why we have people falling prey to ridiculous conspiracy theories about reptilian overlords, blood-drinking Hollywood stars, etc. Let's hope this is just a passing fad---. 

Remember to keep your distance, wear a mask, get vaccinated if you can, and, hopefully this idiotic epidemic will be over soon.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!