OUTSIDE THE SYSTEM - OUR DISINTEGRATION OF TRUST

Let me start with a story, one that is, in one form or another, familiar to you. Late in the evening, I was making my way from the magnificent building that houses our University to the train station, with its imposing soviet-style lifelessness. In this hour, with fewer people around and with the rush of the working day winding down, I paid more attention to the streets and tunnels that I move through daily, particularly examining the writings on the walls. They have always fascinated me, with all the filth and wisdom. But tonight the open book of the streets showed me neither. Instead of the usual graffiti swastika or sad poetry, I saw a flyer describing the horrors of the Pfizer vaccine. You know where this goes. Apparently, the vaccine had not just killed tens of thousands of people but was also manufactured from human embryos, collected from abortion clinics. I must say, I was impressed. It’s one thing to repost something you barely read on Facebook, but quite another to spend time sticking such memos all over town. I suppose that, if you’d genuinely believed something like this, you’d want other people to know it as well (and now you do). By the time I got to the train, a 5-minute Google search had debunked every revelation provided by the strange little flyer. So why couldn’t our industrious anti-vaxxer do the same? It certainly was not laziness that held him back. And what led this person, along with millions across the world, to imagine that every government, media outlet and pretty much the entire medical establishment is engaged in the greatest conspiracy that anyone has ever pulled off? Another question occurred to me then. How come these people, so sceptical of the “official narrative” of Covid were so credulous to the obvious snake-oil peddlers on social media? Why is it that they so firmly trust one source and distrust another?

Answering these questions is important. We are starting another wave of cases, with a new lockdown looming that would be destructive in its own right. Hospitals are getting full again. The horrible sights of people coughing up their lungs are once again on display. None of the people there are vaccinated. Some of them will pay dearly for it, as will their families. Their deaths are perfectly preventable. All of them had the opportunity to protect themselves (and others). But they felt that avoiding the shot was protecting themselves. Now, it’s easy to simply dismiss this as stupidity. Or rather (if you want to be more gentle), that this is just the result of scientific illiteracy, coupled with the overabundance of misinformation. But I think there is a lot more to it than that. And if that is true, perhaps their deaths are preventable in another sense. That we, as a society, could have done something to prevent this tragedy, the pointless loss of life that seems inevitable. And perhaps, the fact that so many choose to believe lunatics over those who spent a good part of their lives studying human health also says something about the world we live in, and not just the people sticking flyers over the streets along my way home.

The phrase that I’ve heard again and again (as I’m sure you have heard it too) from those who won’t take the vaccine is: “There is something else going on here”. There are many variations to this. One that sticks out to me came from a relative, who did take the vaccine later on. Answering as to why she didn’t want to, she said “I’m still a soviet citizen”. What she meant is that her default position was always to doubt the state, to always assume a hidden agenda, to read between the lines. The state is guilty until proven innocent, and almost any proof to that innocence can simply be construed as yet more lies, more disinformation, more deception. This was, in fact, the modus operandi of the USSR. Deceit at every conceivable level. And that leaves a legacy, one that is very difficult to wash out. This is, of course, far more pronounced in other post-soviet states, but even here, as European and democratic as we try to be, this malignant influence is still present, in all institutions, in government corruption, in the very people running the show (born and raised in the Soviet Union),

in their attitude towards its citizenry, who are often treated like morons who don’t know what’s best for them. To what extent can we really blame those who lived in such conditions for not being able to switch off this defense mechanism, meant to keep their lives and their sanity in a society where nothing was real?

You don’t know how the vaccine works and neither do I. Some of us might have inquired about it, out of curiosity or some sense of due diligence. But at the end of the day, unless you really are an expert in medicine or biology, you are deceiving yourself if you think you understand. At some point, we have to trust the people who are knowledgeable and take their word for it. In other words, the real difference between us and those who believe in such nonsense is trust, or the lack of it. We trust that academia and the scientific community knows what they are doing and that they are not lying to us, even if there are good reasons to suspect that pharmaceutical firms, public health institutions and academic organizations can at times be corrupt (with disastrous consequences). The level of distrust in institutions and the system is what separates people, and increasingly polarizes our world.

Trust has long been noted as a key component of a well-functioning society, dating back to Confucius. Many since then have noted the importance of trust in governance, and in a broader sense, in the everyday relations of people, sometimes also people from different groups or backgrounds. Trust in the government, in the legal system, in institutions like the police are vital to a civilization that wants to run smoothly and steadily. Every transaction in society is based on trust. I trust someone to conduct my train, to cook my food in a restaurant and for my boss to pay my wages on time and per contract. The same goes for business deals. The economist Kenneth Arrow pointed out that every commercial transaction is based on trust, at least to some degree. Many economists have also pointed out that high levels of trust significantly lower transaction costs. If you trust someone, you will spend less time on due diligence, will charge a lesser interest rate when lending money, charge smaller premiums and so on. Finally, trust in government institutions to uphold their basic duties is also crucial. Any society functions better when we trust the government to spend our taxes wisely, to create laws that are just and useful, and to serve in the interests of those who elected them. Trust, in short, is the glue of our societal fabric.

It is concerning then to witness the decline in trust over the past decades and not just government but also for other important institutions. A healthy amount of distrust might be beneficial- it shows that people won’t simply take the government promises for granted, that they will treat claims with a reasonable degree of scepticism. But after a certain point, distrust becomes extremely corroding to that very same fabric. Both trust and distrust are selfenforcing. Obviously, if someone proves themselves to be trustworthy, your faith in them to carry out their promises and obligations in the future will increase. But the same applies to distrust as well. This holds true on a personal level as well as on a collective level. A government that lies to its people and is rife with corruption will cause people to not take it seriously. They won’t pay their taxes, they won’t observe laws and follow the direction given by the ruling establishment, be that direction right or wrong. Distrust works in both ways here as well. If the population distrusts the state and acts accordingly, the state will increasingly treat its people with suspicion and will attempt to increase its control. The public, in turn, may well see that as a power grab, more evidence that the establishment is only interested in increasing its power. And on and on it goes. Both trust and distrust are based on feedback loops, ones that are not always easy to reverse.

The trend of increasing distrust in government is now reflected in various surveys conducted across Western countries. It’s most pronounced in the United States, but the same pattern can generally be observed in most OECD states, where distrust is now the majority position. Another area where mistrust has increased is the media. In the States, only 29% say that they generally trust the media, according to Reuters. Whilst the percentage is higher in Europe, and particularly in Scandinavia, it still rarely surpasses even 50%. In France, the number is only 36% and in the UK it is only 30%. To mirror points made before, trust in media is crucial to all of us, especially during something like a pandemic, where accurate information can be the difference between life and death. The old adage is that journalists and the news are supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The news is supposed to serve in our interest, to question the powers that are and expose their lies and misdeeds. In principle, it should serve as a check to the rich and the powerful, in addition to providing the general public with truthful information. But if the public does not trust the media, it won’t believe them even when the information is truthful.

It should be noted in fairness that distrust is not universal in the Western world, nor is it uniformly spread across different scales or institutions. The same studies note that trust is generally higher for local governments and local news. Nevertheless, even if increasing distrust is somewhat limited to a few countries and is mostly contained in the national as opposed to the local level, the trend is still concerning, especially given that some of the aforementioned states wield tremendous influence in the world. There is also something to be said about the fact that the most distrusting also tend to be less educated and on the lower scale brackets with respect to income. In other words, those who benefit the least from the system and are most likely to be screwed over by it. This has nothing to do with intelligence. Rather, these people know best how untrustworthy institutions can be. If distrust is more easily explained in postsoviet countries that experienced constant lies and bullshit from their government for 50+ years, what is causing it in prosperous states, who’ve had stable democracies? It may have a lot to do with some of the trends and events that have defined this century. Firstly, the effects of globalization have not benefited everyone equally. Free trade has made things more efficient and is generally good for GDP growth but at the expense of the working class. It has allowed many jobs, particularly in manufacturing, to be shipped overseas and taken away the bargaining power of labour. And while the establishment has boosted growth, that growth is felt almost exclusively by the upper strata of our world. The data of stagnating median incomes, even while GDP has grown, is well known to all of us. And when people hear those in charge praising this system, while they experience none of the benefits promised, they are right to feel deceived. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz has written extensively on this topic, particularly in his seminal work “Globalization and its Discontents”. As the former chief economist of the World Bank, he saw firsthand the effects of globalization on the developing world and later on how the rules of free trade written by the West came back to haunt it. Like many others, he links the rise of strongman politics in Europe and America directly to the effects of globalization.

Two further events, in my opinion, have led to the present level of distrust. First, the deception by the Bush administration that led the Western world into the war in Iraq and the famous claims about weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be false. The media largely repeated the claims made by the US government and intelligence agencies without any scrutiny. In fact, the two worked together. In a few instances, for example, the CIA leaked its own “intelligence” to the media and then cited that reporting as more evidence for the invasion. Despite that, millions of

people opposed the war and expressed their outrage, only to be ignored and eventually proven right. Not only did it show that the establishment was lying, but that trying to affect the system was seemingly hopeless.

Second, and more recently, the fallout of the Great Recession and the Euro debt crisis, which was devastating to the common person. I admit that I lack the competency to say with certainty that I know whether it was right or wrong to bail out the banks. But one does not need to be educated in economics to see that no one from those who caused the crisis were really punished - they happily flew away in their golden parachutes or were even permitted to stay in their positions. Nor was there any large change in the system. Instead, the public sector paid the gambling debt, and governments all across our modern world, and in the Eurozone in particular, took on severe austerity measures, ones that hurt the middle and lower classes the most and arguably made the recovery slower than it otherwise would have been. It’s almost cliche to add that these events have also led to the rise of Trump and others like him, both in the States and in Europe.

I now turn briefly to the other question I raised in my opening- why do people who are so distrustful of the state are often so willing to believe claims by those who spread false information online? I think it has to do with the fact that all humans require some coherent story about our world. A reality that does not make sense is difficult to deal with for anyone. We require a narrative about what our world is, where it’s headed and who’s in charge. A complete loss of trust and faith in the system can indeed be devastating, especially if it comes with the loss of work, degraded living conditions, stagnating wages and so on, even while billionaires are shooting themselves in space. By contrast, a story that is simple but powerful, that explains the hardships and, more importantly, has someone to blame, can be very attractive. This is exactly what happened in Germany before the Third Reich. A people completely dissociated from the system, and a party willing to provide the causes for their troubles and people to blame for them.

There are some positive outliers to the vaccine story. Chile, for example, has very low trust in the government (17.1%) but a very high rate of vaccination (76.4%). A large part of this has to do with the country’s long history of successful vaccine rollouts, dating back to the 1950s and an established, effective vaccine distribution system. Here, the trust feedback loop takes effect. People know that vaccines work since they have a long history of successful campaigns against diseases like polio and smallpox. The situation in the UK is somewhat similar. In that case, while government trust is below 35%, its citizens have a much higher trust in their National Health Service (NHS). The silver lining is that distrust in government does not always translate into distrust in the healthcare system. An effective healthcare system, it seems, is crucial for trust in a state’s health policies.

The distrust that is now so pervasive throughout the Western world is likely here to stay, even after the pandemic is more or less dealt with. Its underlying causes have not been solved, and are often not even admitted by those in charge. Its effects are felt by all of us, not just by lower rates of vaccination that prolong this nightmare, but also by growing political radicalization. When the populace does not believe in the system, it gravitates towards any alternative. Worst of all, there are good reasons to be distrustful. The lack of trust is well earned by those who rule. They have themselves to blame for all of this. My hope is that people can learn to apply trust on a case by case basis. That just because the establishment lies does not mean that everyone does. And that they can be skeptical of everyone, not just those in charge. Then I can read the scribblings on my city’s walls without being reminded of the hidden insanity of my world.