Trust is the glue that holds civilization together. It’s the cornerstone of social structures like marriage, business, and most of life in these United States. As trust erodes, so too does civilization. We’re seeing the results of that now.
In this post Seth Godin states “Any fully open system of digital communication will corrode over time.” His words were applied to email, which we’ve all seen deteriorate to the point that it is barely useful. It also applies to telephones. Now that we all have a mobile phone for communicating by voice or text, the abuse of spammers has caused us to be bombarded with automated “robo” calls. I no longer answer any call that comes without an ID or number that I recognize. Once in a while I miss a call, but legitimate ones leave voice mail and I can return them.
There was a time when you could trust the food in the grocery store. Produce came from local farms and packaged food was made by well known brands that were focused on quality. Today’s produce may come from the other side of the world, possibly containing residue from pesticides that are illegal here, but sold overseas by US manufacturers. Glyphosate, sold under the trade name RoundUp, may also be present. Its long term effect on health is not good. Packaged goods, especially soft drinks, contain large amounts of high fructose corn syrup. This sweetener is banned in Europe because of the damaging effects it has on health. Then there are the seed oils, used in almost every packaged product. These oils produce toxins that will lead to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and more. Yet they are still present in almost all processed foods and are recommended by the American Heart Association.
It’s not unusual to hear a politician opine that we have the finest health care system in the world. Anyone who has had to navigate the byzantine labyrinth of health insurance knows that is a complete lie. Health care is affordable only if you have good insurance, though if you are in this country illegally it is free. For those with insurance you usually have a Primary Care Physician (PCP) that is the gatekeeper for care. The PCP can do physicals and very minor procedures, but the real goal of the PCP is to refer you to a specialist. The insurance company dictates what the PCP may treat, and what tests need to be performed.
In the early days of the Internet we trusted it as a sort of library in the sky that contained the sum of all human knowledge. But that trust waned pretty quickly as the hordes of Nigerian princes descended on naive users. The amount of information on the Internet now is so large that it requires words like petabyte and exabyte to describe the enormity. For every fact you can extract, there is another fact that is completely opposite. Anyone can post anything, because we have free speech. However we are learning daily that shadowy forces are manipulating the flow of information under the guise of eliminating that which they deem as misinformation or disinformation. We’re expected to blindly trust that what we find there is correct. This is further complicated by social media censoring information to conform to their own profit motives and by government influence.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a devastating blow to trust in our government, the media, and institutions like the CDC, that we’ve depended on. Hardly a day goes by that we don’t get a new revelation of lies that led to destruction of countless businesses, the education of our children, and our health. Those responsible have not been charged, while many of the people who revealed the lies had their careers and lives ruined.
Most parents value the education of their children to be as vital as health. Homes are frequently bought because of the quality of the school district they reside in. Although the US educational system is still considered to be the best in the world, test scores for our students continue to plummet. Teacher unions have worked to prevent parents from even knowing what their children are taught. Math and science have become secondary to radical theories about race and gender.
Our elite institutions of higher learning have been the envy of the world, with students from other countries striving to get in. Now we are learning that these prestigious halls have been accepting massive donations from countries that are hostile to the United States. Many of these donations have illegally been kept secret. In addition to gaining influence through money, faculty have been inserted to influence the students by rewriting history. This has led to protests by students, whose grandparents fought to prevent the genocide of Jews by Nazis, recasting the Jews as the new Nazis.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now being touted as the savior, the answer that will take us into a new glorious age. However the early efforts have revealed that the digital “man behind the curtain” carries all the biases and beliefs of those who created the software. The validity of the material being used to train the AI is also a factor in whether it can be trusted. This created an embarrassing gaffe for Google, when their AI-generated images of historical figures were very wrong because of applying current day biases against the actual facts.
A significant danger of AI is its ability to create deepfakes, still images and video that depict things that did not happen. As the prevalence of this increases, it becomes ever harder to know whether something is real or faked. It also provides an easy escape for miscreants. When an embarrassing video is released in the media, they can simply dismiss it as a deepfake.
All these breaches of trust that I’ve listed could be dismissed as yet another doom scroll. But the list is far from comprehensive, and there are many more. These are all the result of efforts to obscure reality from us. Ignoring reality never ends well. I cope by staying off social media, ignoring most of what little TV news I watch, and subscribing to Substacks that I have found to be trustworthy. I also heed the words of Fox Mulder of X-Files fame.