Trust

Reading social media on a regular basis eventually attunes you to the reality that most of what people post is repetition of things they heard or read from sources that align with their worldviews. Every so often - and sadly, more and more often - I find themes that are obviously the “current thing.” Messages gone viral, despite their not standing up to rational scrutiny.

The most recent is a growing trust in politicians.

Which should baffle me...

but for the realities that people are woefully ignorant of history, that people reshape history to fit their preferences, and that people are being increasingly infantilized by our system and culture so that they default to a natural trust and reliance on daddy figures.

These people trust politicians who say things they like, promise things they want, and denounce everyone who says “government should not be trusted,” and are willing to hand the keys to the kingdom to such politicians. To grant them the monopoly power government has on violence, and allow themselves only one recourse: vote them out of office next election.

The politicians know full well, of course, that failure will be excused or explained away by such voters, because their tribal loyalty overrides their rational sense, and because voting against them would create cognitive dissonance too powerful for most to abide. Getting that first win, especially in “stronghold” districts or cities or states, is the hurdle. After that, hanging on becomes much easier.

Simultaneously, they distrust the one thing that has been shown to work: market forces.

The most common excuse for this distrust that I see is the assertion that big private sector companies, often shorthanded as “CEOs,” are too powerful to be effectively regulated by market forces.

No one ever seems to ask “why,” though. They don’t take the logical step of trying to figure out the reason for this - or even if it’s actually true - before concluding that the remedy is more government.

As if politicians and CEOs are natural enemies, and that government regulation is the natural counterweight to corporate rapacity.

History (again) shows us they are not. Sure, once in a while some big company gets put in the penalty box for a while, but that’s the dog-and-pony-show exception.

It doesn’t even take that much awareness of history to figure this out. Government is (at least until Trump’s little-noticed deregulation efforts started bearing fruit) bigger than ever, but people still see corporations as having too much power. Given how much government we’ve had these past few decades, shouldn’t we expect CEOs to have been largely neutered by now?

That’s like asking “we’ve spent thirty trillion dollars on the War on Poverty. Shouldn’t poverty be eradicated by now?”

The unfortunate reality is that humans are not particularly rational creatures. Especially in politics, where a variety of elements of human nature override rational assessment and critical thought. Wishful thinking that they’d consider delusional in their personal lives is treated as reasonable in the political sphere.

That wishful thinking these days centers on a benevolent government keeping a tight leash on all the bad guys in the private sector. That the people they put in government are altruistic Good Guys capably fighting the good fight, no matter the mountains of evidence of incompetence, corruption, and worse.

This evidence is amplified by the cognitive dissonance displayed when government gets unmasked.

Hundreds of billions in waste, fraud, inefficiency, corruption, and the like? Blame the whistle-blowers, ignore the harm, wildly exaggerate the ‘babies thrown out with the bathwater’ when someone tries to clean up the mess, and instead demand even more taxes be imposed (but always on someone else).

I’ve gotta hand it to the socialists. They’ve managed to rehabilitate the image of a murderous and destructive ideology by adding “democratic” to the front of it and by peddling class and race envy. The naivete of the gullible would be funny were it not so dangerous.

Our government was designed by people who distrusted government but knew we need some amount of it. Voters today have flipped the script. They are rushing to put all their trust in government, and particularly in people who based on what they are selling should not be trusted one inch.

When this trust proves to be misplaced, don’t expect them to admit their mistake.