Here in the US we’re all still picking our way out of the wreckage of the 2024 elections, and trying to collect enough shoulder blade bones to conduct a proper divination of the results, but Cooper Lund has already written a good piece on the dynamics of trust at play in the electorate, and I think he touched on several vital questions.
For those in the future who may read this, there a lot of theories and arguments on what drove Trump to a second victory (are young men to blame? inflation in the grocery cart? fear of trans athletes?) and I’m sure that many of them will be settled or proven by the time you read this. I don’t think it’s in dispute, however, that there is an increasing divide of trust, as Cooper describes it, and that it stretches across a variety of interrelated political issues and debates.
The media monoculture is dead, and it’s been replaced by a million talking heads that appear on your phone and tell you not to trust things. Not to trust your doctors, not to trust your teachers, not to trust the government. They appear on your phone no matter what you do because an algorithm has decided they’re the most likely thing to keep you watching so you can keep getting the ads. This constant buffeting of the psyche of each and every American by the winds of these forces has eroded them, and it’s taught us to no longer trust institutions, or each other. American minds are increasingly their own individual bedroom communities, paranoid and twisted, looking skeptically at the outside world.
…The Democratic Party is the party of institutions, the party of Good Governance. It’s the party of trusting other Americans to make good choices for you. There is very little that the Democrats can do to appeal to the Low-Trust voter, and you saw what that means for the future of our politics last night. I would go so far as to say that we’re seeing the effects of a realignment of what partisanship is. The GOP is the party of the perpetual outsider and the Low-Trust voter, the people calling for things to be torn down. The Democrats are the insiders, the institutionalists.
I’m a little more optimistic about reaching the Low-Trust people than Cooper is (more below!), but I have a couple scattered thoughts about the concept of “low-trust” people and movements, and a suggestion or two about how to operate in an environment when the consensus reality doesn’t hold the same sway as it may once have. Not that any of us have “bona fides” in this stuff, but I have a lot of experience with “Low Trust” people in a variety of contexts (my family, working in skeptical protest movements and spaces, roommates, etc). Hopefully my thoughts spark some ideas for you as well– this isn’t a “one guy’s solution” type of problem, we’re going to have to build out a sturdy communal practice for this kind of problem– it’s an “all of us” challenge.
- Who I’m talking about: a non-comprehensive list. Low Trust people may doubt the consensus about any number of topics– climate change, nutrition, schooling, history, gender relations and gender roles, organizational management, psychology, family court, entertainment, biology. Many of these will have a charismatic influencer or two who spark interest in the topic, and then a community of people who float around in the FB group with a variety of comments. I think it’s actually kind of a fool’s errand to try find a common thread among the topics that a person departs from the mainline with, the answer is with the person themself (more on that in a bit)
- Problem of technology. I think, as a grounding comment, it’s worth noting just how much of modern life is predicated on trust in the unseen, and how many products, processes, and events we enjoy that are the result of coordinated and unseen work. These are, to be clear, some of the great marvels of modernity, and very few of them are “hiding the ball” on how they are produced, but in their presentation and consumption, much of modernity appears as something to be taken on trust, and trust at a level that nears what some would call “faith.” It is into this kind of space that a lot of Low-Trust options can be presented to someone, and since the target person likely hasn’t much considered the issue, the Low-Trust option appears as a revelatory moment, and the target feels a swell of interest at getting “Behind the Curtain”.
- A galaxy brain take I’ll throw here: wild theories arise around complex technologies and multi-agent processes, and have for awhile. For the longest time, the most complex technology was a state’s currency, which led to thousands of hare-brained ideas about how money “worked.”
- A battle for authorities, rather than a battle for “reality”. While I think Cooper is correct to call this broad cohort of people ‘Low-Trust’, I think it a key point to underline: they actually have quite a bit of trust, it’s just in different places than our institutions– some trust their Scriptures the most, some trust a religious leader (almost always a man or men) the most, some trust “their own gut”, some trust an influencer they have a parasocial relationship with. What’s happened is that, on a subjective level, these people have opted out of putting academia/research/institutions on the throne of meaning, and retreated to another ruler.
- Authority’s Not Here, Man. What I’m about to say may sound as a critique of the mainline liberal mindset, so I want to qualify this on the front end: I am your friend, and I’m on your side, and I’m not with the kooks. But in a world where institutions are losing the authority (for dumb/tech reasons), your claims that are based on said authority are going to suffer. Secular liberalism has a (benignly annoying) tendency to assume itself as being aligned with “reality”, and it assumes itself as self-evident in ways that are no longer going to maintain. Some of this assuming comes from good reasons– liberalism has opened itself up to adaptation and to further evidence as it proceeds through history, unlike orthodoxy. But part of what liberalism adapted to was the dominant institutions — to academia and education, to American empire and welfare capitalism– and each of those institutions’ names don’t ring quite as loudly in the Market/App Discourse Hellzone of the 2020s. So while you and I may be in accord with the findings of the global medical community, the CDC, your favorite academic science or economics poster, or any other traditional institution, those appeals are increasingly insufficient for people who can (and are encouraged to) just throw up a blanket form of doubt and say “nuh uh, I got someone on TikTok/Instagram who says otherwise!” to it. I’m not saying to give up asking “but what about reality?” or demanding evidence, but I’m suggesting that you stop expecting “reality” to hold the power you think it does, especially in audiences that don’t share your own rosy sense of trust in an institution.
- There’s hope, though! I don’t think there’s any quick way to get a Low-Trust person back to an unquestioning acceptance of institutional consensus, but there are methods that some of us can adopt in our interactions with these people. The two parts I’ll suggest are: don’t allow the skeptic in your life to get off cheaply— they used a dime-store amount of skepticism to leave the mainline, demand that they interrogate their new authority (an influencer, a church, etc) too. Secondly: education and good-faith inquiry. I know that this sounds impossibly kumbaya, and naive, but I come to this position through years of experience– I don’t know any method that is more sturdy. Demanding them accept a mainline authority, or a new authority, is a bold ask, and one that won’t work if you don’t show the authority to be competent. If someone doubts vaccines, this might mean going on the journey of teaching a person the details of the science, and the methods used to establish what works. I fully understand how unfair, vexing, and tiring this suggestion can be– I wish it were different. In any case, I think one reason why these kinds of Low Trust communities persist is because many people who trust institutions get exasperated with skepticism and “give up” on the skeptic, and cede the person’s mind to whatever media sources they prefer. We have to be more persistent for these souls than their media influencers are, one way or the other.
- Effective debunking. One of my favorite Alfred North Whitehead quotes is “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true…” I think this angers or frustrates a lot of well-meaning people, but I don’t know that many would dispute its truth (hah!) in this age. This is because our interest in a proposition is the vital tether to the question, more than truthfulness (there’s all kinds of true facts out there that none of us care about). This fact of “interestingness” should guide how we approach bullshit– simply saying “not true!” won’t work as well as we think. The art of debunking comes from de-fanging the interestingness in alternative theories. Whitehead concludes the quote with: “But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one,” and in that, I believe, lies the answer. Yeah, it would be super interesting if the world was actually run by a cabal of lizards, and yeah it would be super interesting if eating an all-meat diet made you look jacked and toned, but….they don’t.
- Don’t Fear the Skeptic. Another one of my favorite quotes comes from George Santanaya: “Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.” I think getting over the sputtering indignation at someone being skeptical of well-proven and established authorities is a good idea. Someone being cheaply skeptical, or selfishly skeptical, or stubbornly skeptical, they aren’t enemies to progress, they are pre-formed members of our group, waiting to be persuaded in. Something that the Low-Trust influencers all practice is a near veneration of their audience’s skepticism to the modern proposition. See also: Joe Rogan’s whole deal. Those of us who trust institutions need to be better at honoring that instinct, rather than scold it. Especially considering that the facts are on our side. We’re not the side that needs to demand unthinking acceptance of bold claims, the Low-Trust people are. We don’t need to fear someone’s skepticism, it’s honestly a cool chance for empirical reality to strut it’s stuff. Someone wondering about chemtrails is a potential future fan of atmospheric science or flight.
- Further reading. I can’t think of a better person in the English-speaking world for debunking than Mick West, and I can’t recommend his work any more highly. Mick has spent decades politely and persistently debunking conspiracies on the Internet, and his techniques/rhetoric are second-to-none. West runs the sites Metabunk and ContrailScience, among his many projects. His Escaping the Rabbit Hole is my bible for interacting with conspiracy theorists.
(Housekeeping: Probably gonna start doing more political-ish blog posts here, free from cannabis policy. Hell, I’m probably going to start using this site more in general as we move through the 2020s. Find me here and on Bluesky, that’s mostly gonna be it, I think.)