Institutions and the Reallocation of Trust
Trust in institutions is in free fall, but that trust isn’t vanishing into thin air — it’s migrating to other places.
I have a new piece out in Queer Majority: “Brazil Is Wrong to Imprison Homophobes.”
We are living through a crisis of trust. Between political polarization, conspiracism, and the rise of populism, Trumpism, and anti-vax, collapsing trust is a phenomenon we’ve all experienced, either firsthand or as observers. It’s become an oft-covered subject among scholars, journalists, and writers, myself included. From organized religion, to the military, to courts, banks, schools, universities, the press, law enforcement, doctors, corporations, government, or politicians, institutional trust is indeed in free fall. But trust itself is just as thriving as ever — it’s simply being reallocated. We are the same species of naïve, trusting, delusional dupes we’ve always been. We no longer trust institutions, true, but our trust in gurus, renegades, wishful thinking, self-flattery, and the exaggerated abilities of our own brains has never been higher.
Of course, this didn’t happen in a vacuum. Our institutions and experts are flawed. They make mistakes. They sometimes spin or misrepresent the facts, or lie by omission. They have political or ideological biases. And they are surrounded by bad incentives and unhelpful social pressures, where professional integrity and a commitment to the truth can misalign with one’s career prospects or standing within their field.
Flawed or not, however, our institutions still serve various functions, and unless you’re going to disconnect from civilization and live alone in the wilderness, those functions will have to be replicated by something. Even the most apathetic and oblivious among us requires information from time to time, and if the official avenues cannot be trusted, they will not simply go without; they will turn elsewhere. They will listen to alternative media instead of the mainstream media. They will listen to gurus and internet personalities instead of experts. And they will “do their own research” instead of accepting the official story. The question then becomes, are these replacements better?
To answer this question, we must first ask: where are these alternative avenues of information getting their information from? The vast majority of alternative media outlets and independent journalists lack the wherewithal to do actual reporting. Outliers like Bari Weiss or Matt Taibbi, whose Free Press and Racket have respectively grown into indie outlets capable of regularly uncovering new information, are few and far between. For every one of them, there are hundreds of Tim Pools and Ben Shapiros and Cenk Uygurs who depend entirely on the reporting of mainstream press organs which they then selectively repackage, spin-doctor, and feed back to their audiences with added commentary.
Even the heavy hitters like Weiss and Taibbi rely heavily on mainstream news coverage. It could not possibly be otherwise unless the Free Press and Racket grew large enough to rival the Associated Press and Reuters. The irony, of course, is that any media organization which grew to that size — managing a workforce of thousands and maintaining the myriad political and business relationships necessary for access and high-volume reporting — would become a mainstream outlet too. There’s no getting around this. Journalism requires sources. Sources require relationships and connections. Make enough of those, and you become, by dint of your proximity to the various power centers, part of “the establishment.” To be outside of the establishment is to be someone with no access who can only look on from afar and commentate — and that’s what over 99 percent of alt-media is. We’re all consuming the information published by mainstream institutions. The only difference is whether we’re getting it directly or secondhand alongside an extra dollop of bias.
This dynamic is only put on steroids when it comes to dismissing official stories in favor of “doing your own research.” Where does that information come from? A stroll through the internet or a trip to the library turns up information that either traces back to mainstream sources or is fabricated. Research is wonderful. Endeavoring to be a more informed and educated citizen is laudable, and I wish more people did it. But if our own individual googling is supposed to supplant the function of our institutions — forgetting for a moment that large tech companies like Google, and many of the results they generate, are a part of our institutional apparatus — how are we to evaluate the information we encounter? How confident must we be in our own abilities to research, fact-check, and resist our own biases to think that we can go it alone and bootstrap knowledge out of nothingness? In the end, everyone ends up coming around to experts after all — but only the experts who buck the trends of their fields or offer confirmation for our preexisting beliefs.
The dissenting counter-experts we turn to instead of the experts who represent consensus positions are just as reliant on the same dreaded institutions. They were educated in the same universities and rely on the same research as their mainstream brethren. They simply derive alternate conclusions that non-experts are in no position to verify and must take on faith. The reallocation of trust shifts our faith not merely from one group of people to another, but from institutions to ourselves. This might at first seem like a triumph of individualism, initiative, and self-esteem. But thinking you know better than everyone and that your own judgment on a wide range of subjects is superior to specialists who have dedicated their lives to studying them isn’t independence or self-esteem. It’s arrogance — arrogance that is endlessly exploited by people with a different story to sell.
We are all drawn to believing what we want to be true. We want to see our bad habits exonerated. We want to see our tribes and biases vindicated. We want to see the other side slapped down and proven wrong. We want to feel good. And for a certain kind of person, nothing flatters the ego like feeling themselves to be part of a select group in the know; people who have pierced the vale of lies where the great masses of sheeple have not. This is the path away from any rigorous method of evaluating what’s true and toward what I have called “gastro-epistemology.” Under the transparently fraudulent auspices of freethinking and skepticism, people devolve into postmodern hedonists who eschew objective truth and just believe whatever feels good. Far out, man. But while breathtaking in its magnitude, the human capacity for self-deception has its limits. For all but the most hopelessly mad, reality finds its way through the cracks in bullshit.
Consider the double standard we apply to institutions and their alternatives. The New York Times, for example, has often been wrong and is unquestionably biased, but they have an editorial process. There are many stages, protocols, and hands a Times article has to pass through as it makes its journey from concept to finished product. What do you imagine that process is like for YouTubers, live streamers, social media personalities, bloggers, and podcasters? If time-tested mechanisms to weed out error and bias still fail more than occasionally in our largest institutions, by what rationale should we expect any better from a lone man with a microphone? Well, our attitudes suggest that we don’t.
If the Washington Post or the World Health Organization are caught fudging the facts one time in 20, that’s it, their credibility is toast. But if Bret Weinstein, Maajid Nawaz, or Joe Rogan are right one time in 20, they are hailed by their followers as modern-day Nostradamuses. We count only the misses of the institutions, and only the hits of the alt-media gurus. This double standard is a tacit and unconscious acknowledgement, even by those who think they have no institutional trust, that they still, in fact, recognize that institutions are better equipped to provide reliable information than some dude with a webcam in his basement.
What the reallocation of trust exemplifies most of all is that we are, ironically, losing our capacity for skepticism, despite people’s self-conception as skeptics being at an all-time high. Skepticism is absolutely essential for living an examined, reasoned, and sane life. We must question the information we encounter, the stories we hear, and the authorities who disseminate them. But if the searchlight of critical inquiry is only ever directed externally; if we only ever question the powers that be but never our own perceptions, competence, biases, prejudices, and blindspots, then we aren’t engaging in skepticism, but in self-delusion. Credulously accepting everything we’re told is the mark of a simpleton. But absolute and unquestioned confidence in ourselves and in people who tell us what we want to hear is a form of insanity — and one that leaves us just as vulnerable to manipulation and tyranny as any other form of blind faith.
None of this, it’s worth reiterating, is to say that there are no problems with our institutions, nor that they haven’t earned their distrust. But a small-c conservative theme I often harp on is that just because there are problems with the status quo doesn’t make any alternative automatically better. It is completely untenable, in a modern society, for every individual citizen to individually replicate for themselves the essential functions that our many institutions exist to perform, however flawed they are. Trust is the foundation of civilization. If we withdraw it from one area, it will flow into another. The inevitable consequence of the reallocation of trust is a massive influx of flattering but nonetheless undeserved confidence in our own abilities. Ultimately, the only way out of this spiral is to reform our institutions and rebuild the trust they have lost. I have shared some of my ideas for improvement, and will continue to. I realize this is a tall order, but every daunting project begins with a little self-confidence, and wouldn’t you know it, we suddenly have more than we know what to do with.
See also: “Journalism Should Be More Than a Rich Kids’ Hobby”
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I feel like this is kind of a one-sided essay - I think a balanced analysis of this situation has to include consideration of what these institutions may have done to lose people's trust. Institutions & the experts & others who populate them are not the same places or people that they used to be, and they don't act in entirely the same ways as they used to act.
Some of this is due to internet-induced changes in the media landscape - the primacy of speed and the possibility of minute-to-minute updating rather than daily (as with a newspaper) or hourly (with cable news) means that every incentive is to minimize fact-checking and editing in favor of getting a story out first. This means more minor & major mistakes and more little embarrassments that add up over time.
Many mainstream news sources have also branched out into "lighter" news written by not-quite-journalistic staff - that's fine when it's fluff pieces about shakshuka or a funny cat, but then the "activist fluff" started flowing fast & heavy. Even when there's no specific stance taken, there's this vague, "XYZ is the feminist/conservative hero we need right now" type of article that's short, fluffy, smarmy, and annoying to basically everyone but the kind of people who write things like that.
However I also do think there has been a change in the composition and nature of the class of people termed "experts." I don't think today's "experts" do nearly as good a job of arguing for & justifying their positions & their work as "experts" used to. There is a lot more specialization and there's a lot more separation of researchers from publicizers. There are also a lot more "fluffy experts" because what people study at universities has shifted toward ever-more-esoteric and narrowly-defined "fields of study" that are self-contained, to the point where "experts" in these fields are neither interested in nor capable of justifying their work or proving their purported expertise to laypeople.
As a basic example, let's consider an expert on history with a focus on art - the older kind of expert - compared to an expert on "art history", the newer kind of expert. The art-focused historian could tell you all sorts of historical details about art, artists, artworks, and art theory, but not only that, they can place these things into a historical context and show with specific examples why art is important to history, how art has affected history, and why understanding art is crucial to understanding humans & human history.
The narrow modern expert on "art history", meanwhile, may be able to tell you the same historical details & theories on art, but they don't have the broader expertise or worldliness required to explain cogently to laypeople why any of it matters - and more importantly, they don't see any need to do so. They study art because they already know art is important - and to them, everyone worth knowing knows that already, and anyone not already interested in art is a rube not worth engaging with.
It's a general issue with the "experts" of today. Being in their own corners of the internet, as most people are these days, they've forgotten that most other people are not "experts" - and consequently they've forgotten that it's necessary for experts to demonstrate & prove the value of their expertise regularly, publicly, and plainly in order to retain the regard of the general public. This has also allowed a lot of unqualified "false experts" to fit in seamlessly with credentialed experts - especially in fields ruled by numen like Psychology, anthropology, sociology, and various "cultural studies" morasses. These people really *shouldn't* be trusted, but it's very hard for a layperson to differentiate a false expert from a present-day credentialed expert, since what they say & do appears very similar if not identical for certain varieties of expert.
One cannot expect to be trusted forever on title & status alone - people start to suspect that the tiger is paper, and they can hardly be blamed since a lot of today's purported tigers really are paper. Experts need to do more to demonstrate their worth. Purported expert journalists need to be seen walking the street and putting the screws to people in real life, not writing essays from their home offices - anyone can do that. Purported experts on policy need to be seen debating & defending their assertions publicly, intelligently, cogently, coherently & accessibly. Likewise with every other purported expert - they will retain credibility & respect only in accordance with the extent to which they demonstrate genuine expertise in a way that the public can understand.