We're Stuck In the Era of Broken Trust
Where are the leaders that work to build trust, rather than erode it?
The 2003 version of Don't Know Much About History by Kenneth C. Davis includes an afterword in which Davis describes his experience of being stuck on a runway at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport the day of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and the observations he made in relation to that.
He concluded the chapter with this observation: "Historians may look back at America in late 2002 as the Era of Broken Trust." He noted not only the loss of trust by Americans in the FBI and CIA (at the time, resulting from their failures in intelligence gathering), but the revelations of predatory priests in churches, and various corporations that went bankrupt, with revelations of corruption within those corporations.
Davis couldn't have been more accurate with his observation, given how much more corruption and loss of trust have happened since he wrote those words. There was the housing bubble and the subsequent bank bailouts, the failed war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the opioid crisis and Purdue Pharma's role in it, and Big Tech monopolies dictating public discourse.
Then there's the death of George Floyd, for which Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted, which tied into more than one instance of broken trust. There's the broken trust in police officers and how they treat the people they arrest, the riots that destroyed neighborhoods and led to broken trust in the media who shrugged their shoulders at them, and the broken trust for certain government leaders who, to that point, were asking people to stay at home because of the COVID-19 pandemic, only for others to declare "now is not the time to stay at home” and those government leaders looking befuddled in how to respond.
More recently, there was the Met Gala, in which much of the attention focused on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wearing a dress with the words "TAX THE RICH" on the back in big, red lettering. However, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out, a bigger issue was that all the servants, photographers and video camera operators were wearing masks, but not a single guest did.
Once again, an example of broken trust, this one from a different set of standards for the VIPs and the hired help -- and let's not pretend only the VIPs were vaccinated for COVID-19.
Filmmaker Leighton Woodhouse wrote about the effects of post-modernity, in which the end result is many no longer see the people with expertise as worthy of trust. He points out that people with expertise often forget that, while they may be right some of the time, they aren't right all of the time.
In other words, experts are human, in that they don't get it right, every single time. However, the experts fall into the trap of thinking that their credentials tell them all they need to do, when in reality they aren't enough by themselves.
Furthermore, nobody likes it when they sense there is a double standard taking place. And when somebody points out the double standard, and is simply blown off by those with the credentials, it only further erodes trust in the credentialed.
If one is actually going to build trust, they need to acknowledge the times in which they get something wrong or when they truly don't know the answer. People may not like to hear "I got it wrong" or "I'm not sure," but in the end, they'd rather hear that, than be told "I know the answer" and, when the answer is wrong, to proclaim "well, it really wasn't because..." Acknowledging you got something wrong does more to build trust than pretending what you got wrong, really wasn’t.
Plenty of the credentialed today put Franklin D. Roosevelt on a pedestal, not realizing that, at the time FDR was president, the elite and credentialed couldn't stand him. It's not because FDR pushed "tax the rich," but because he rejected elitist rhetoric and spoke to the masses in a way that connected with them.
FDR didn't get everything right, and his programs didn't really pull the United States out of the Great Depression. However, what he accomplished was building trust with the American public.
In today's society, we are lacking in leaders who work to build trust with the public. That's not about how many times the public agrees with the leader or how many times the leader puts the right program in place. It's about a leader who doesn't act like certain people are beneath him and doesn't pretend credentials make the leader infallible.
Until such a leader comes along, the Era of Broken Trust will only continue, no matter what the credentialed class continues to push.