Who can we trust?

Authority, authoritarianism and shifting the cultural set point

Perhaps the greatest gift that the pandemic gave us was the realisation that we don’t know who or what we can trust.

Amid the ever-changing narratives about how dangerous Covid-19 was, what the best social policy was to contain it, how effective the vaccines were etc. etc., it became clear that no one really knew what was what, especially not our so-called leaders.

Absolutely no fucking clue.

I’m not going to go down that rabbit-hole, suffice to say that on both a national and international level it was clear from the start that there were very different narratives around all of those issues and zero consensus.

The fact that there was a strong political incentive to adopt a particular origin narrative over any other possibility raised red flags for me from the start; the involvement and prioritisation of political interests in the face of a potentially lethal pandemic and therefore over the interests of the populations they are meant to represent was a dismal but fitting start to those dark years.

The self-interest of politicians proved to be the only consistent thing over the course of 2020 and 2021. As usual the politicians were in the pockets of industry, and it turns out that a small number of people can make an awful lot of profit off the back of a pandemic. Who knew?

Who do we trust

Anyway, back to the point.

We used to trust religion. That’s over. Then we trusted the state (anyone still do that?). Then we trusted science (and some treated it as a religion). That, at least for me and many people I know, is over. The corruption that is rampant everywhere is sadly also rampant in the world of science.

I’m not sure who ever trusted politicians but as soon as fear set in at the start of the pandemic people got all evangelical about whatever the hell the idiots in government were saying. This, to my surprise and horror, included people who hitherto would have sworn blind that you couldn’t trust these cretins to tie their own shoelaces, let alone deal with a crisis.

But suddenly they placed their trust in them. Why?

When you have a paradigm in which your own authority is to a greater or lesser extent outsourced to external systems you are going to subjugate yourself to that authority when you get scared.

However if your locus of authority is internal, you do not blindly trust ANY external source - even ones that are rationally trustworthy (which obviously excludes both politicians and the pharmaceutical industry).

If your locus of authority in internal you trust yourself.

That means you trust yourself to make well-informed decisions based on an integration of critical thinking and gut feeling.

Sadly, critical thinking is out of fashion, as the pandemic clearly demonstrated (where groupthink ruled) and most people are severely disconnected from their bodies and couldn’t hear a gut feeling if it slapped them in the face.

Ok that may be a little harsh.

But when fear sets in and you get the old amygdala hijack happening and your usually helpful prefrontal cortex abandons you, it can get heady and hysterical pretty fast.

So maybe not harsh, just accurate :D

A disempowered society

Unfortunately we are raised in a society where literally every system is designed (whether intentionally or not) to disempower you (and in the UK this is exacerbated by the culture). I’ve questioned my cynicism around this a lot but fundamentally it still strikes me as accurate.

So currently we have a disempowered population that outsources its authority, ever increasing numbers of far-right politicians in government across Europe and most people have no existential framework (which means their values are open to manipulation).

It’s not pretty, and I’m realising that I’ve been very naive. I think the pandemic forced me to recognise that “even” in Western Europe we can devolve to authoritarianism in the blink of an eye and that with the rise of populism, unless the trajectory changes, we are headed back to authoritarianism, if not fascism, being the dominant power in Europe.

I did not think that would ever happen again (which now seems very naive).

I’ve recently started reading Hannah Arendt’s “The origins of totalitarianism” and it’s somewhat terrifying to realise that the preconditions for the unimaginable are here again.

Changing course

So what can we do?

The truth is, I have no bloody idea. I live very much in my mind, in the realm of ideas, and do not feel I am in a position to speak with any authority about action. I would say off the bat, that we need to empower people, educate about the past and create alternatives.

We need to bring back critical thinking, bring more overt questioning of the state and the system of government into everyday conversation. Make Animal Farm mandatory reading in schools.

We need to help people feel like their lives matter, that their wellbeing matters, and that they have agency to create the lives they want.

I believe a large degree of the rampant frustration that has people voting for far right politicians is due to a deep frustration with their overall quality of life and the feeling that the people who are meant to represent their interests do not give a shit about them (accurate).

The high degree of uncertainty in which we now exist is also elevating general anxiety and exacerbating the unease in the collective (although side note - is it higher than it was during the cold war? Have we perhaps just been living with ever greater anxiety since WWII with the knowledge that the Anthropocene may end due to our own idiocy?).

I think it’s also clear to most people that our systems are failing us, and nothing is being proposed to take their place.

And the 1% collect their fat millions in overseas tax havens and the average person struggles to pay for school books and food that isn’t poisoned.

Of course people are angry.

And if we could harness that anger, reframe it into an empowered mindset and funnel it towards constructive change, we would topple the world order in weeks.

But that’s just my two cents ;)