Trust Fall

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I thought I’d begin by clearing my virtual throat with some stupid jokes.

Pictured here: A dumbass.

Pictured here: Rigorous peer review. (Yes, that’s what you think it is.)

Pictured here: How it’s made. Now you know.

This post is about a day late because the topic got away from me: I thought I had a nice, tight set of statements and observations, throw in a little pedantry about human psychology, sprinkle in a few dick and fart jokes, and Bob’s your uncle.

But my internal monologue said firmly, “nuh-uh. This story is too simplistic and you know it. In fact, you’re deliberately simplifying it to contain it. Give it the room it deserves.

So, here we are on Saturday instead of Friday.

The original idea was simply entitled “Can We Ever Trust Them Again?” with the subtitle “Maybe We Shouldn’t.” It was meant to be a relatively simple assertion: that the tyranny, abuse, and war crimes we’ve suffered for the past two years have revealed deep, systemic, evil flaws in some of our biggest social institutions- public health, government, etc.- and that a big part of how we arrived where we were on March 2020 when at least a few of the biggest dicks said “we know these things don’t work but we’re going to do them anyway and incrementally make life absolute hell for any of the little shits that don’t go along.”

I was going to proceed into the argument that perhaps part of where we went really wrong was in placing unconditional trust in entities with this kind of power over us and, for the most part, simply doing what they say without skepticism or critical thinking- that modern society has stumbled down a suicidal evolutionary path where we’re on our way to becoming one big Jonestown and eventually drinking the Kool-Aid in the not-metaphorical sense.

(Fun fact, it was actually Flavor-Aid. But the Kool-Aid brand seems to have weathered history just fine.)

I was going to sum up by saying that if modern society is to survive, in the irreversible atmosphere of total information and total connection that exists and will likely only continue and deepen, barring an apocalypse, we will have to give up the idea of unconditional trust in institutions the same way we outgrew ideas like human sacrifice, sorcery, phrenology, and (some of us) astrology.

I still believe about 90% of that. But as I turned the idea over in my head, I realized that, while a nice revolutionary rallying cry, my thesis isn’t really that simple.

If you’ve ever interacted with any kind of animals, ever, you know that trust is a concept shared by a great many living things, including ones much less intellectually complex than us. It’s a big part of the basis by which we call an animal “wild”- it is wary of human encroachment, responding with retreat or aggression, doesn’t allow humans to approach, touch, or feed it, and so on. When a regular stream of tourists feed the mountain goats on the side of the highway in a national park long enough, the goats lose their fear of those tourists and we start saying that they’re “tame”- they’ve changed in some fundamental way and differ from goats that have not been thusly conditioned. We no longer think of them as precisely “wild.”

This isn’t strictly anthropic, or strictly about inter-species relationships. Animals have the same rules among their own kind, and depending on what their social behavior is like, will avoid most or all members of their own kind until certain conditions are met, if at all, to allow the sharing of space or to mate.

The notion of trust as a human experience is bigger and more complex in ways, and we’ll get into that, but it’s fundamentally the same: the reduction or elimination of fear that the Other will hurt you in some way.

The only thing that really differs with humans is the range of things that fall under the concept of trust.

When you go to a self-serve gas station, do you trust that the attendant isn’t filling your tank with water or goat piss? When you pay with your credit card, do you trust that he isn’t somehow giving himself a nice little tip?

When you walk down a crowded street, do you trust that random strangers will not suddenly, unprovoked, draw a deadly weapon and attack you?

These are relatively ridiculous examples for a reason.

Let’s look at some more.

When an infant is consistently fed by its mother when it’s hungry, it trusts that this treatment will continue, and reacts badly if this is suddenly withheld. Along these lines, there are decades of research that babies that are inconsistently cared for in basic ways like feeding early in infancy develop problematic personalities and sets of behavior in childhood that often persist into adulthood. This is to say nothing of children of parents who are even more dramatically erratic, unpredictable, or abusive in their care, like providing consistent nurturing for a few weeks at a time and then vanishing on drug binges or becoming randomly violent or incapacitated.

The sorts of psychological problems that arise from these experiences are problematic because they almost invariably end up being generalized far beyond a bad Mom or Dad; they impact the way that person handles romantic relationships, commitments like work, or even just basic interpersonal interactions.

Is a person who is utterly emotionally crippled in their ability to form essential, normal bonds like friendship or romantic involvement irrational for generalizing what Mom did 30 years ago to every human they come across? Yes. It’s understandable, but it still makes no sense, and this is why lots of people spend a shitload of money on psychotherapy to unlearn this generalization and have healthy relationships with other humans.

Irrational, but entirely predictable and human, because this is what trust is: pattern recognition, and an aspect of this is why I had to rethink my thesis of “we can never trust these pieces of shit again.”

Humans do a LOT of pattern recognition, and a lot of it is completely wrong and fucking stupid, but a much bigger lot of it ISN’T. Evolution isn’t about perfect- it’s about good enough and slightly better than the competition.

In a forthcoming post that’s still germinating in my head, I have a lot to say about how institutions and evil individuals of our age have amassed the power and influence they have precisely by understanding the heuristics that have evolved in human behavior, understanding that they are consistent and reliable, and hacking on them to do great harm. But for now, let’s simply deal with the fact that concepts like trust and its subordinate concepts like conformity, obedience, and faith are deeply evolved aspects of human behavior that aren’t going to go anywhere so long as we remain recognizably human.

Here’s why they, like other flawed instincts based on pattern recognition (which is an amazing and incredibly important evolution of intelligence that even AI isn’t remotely as good at as we are) exist: they’re easier and mostly work. This isn’t to imply at all that having trust in itself is intrinsically “lazy” or “intellectually weak.” It makes existence easier because it has to be or we wouldn’t survive.

Think back to my earlier examples. Are you going to test the gas every time you fill your tank to make sure it’s gas? Are you going to demand to pat down every stranger in the street to make sure they aren’t armed, or walk around in a glass Popemobile box so no one will randomly attack you? Are you going to hire a food taster or chemical analyst to check every meal you eat? Are you going to demand to see the ID of everyone who tells you their name?

If you are unable to assume that the majority of things you encounter in a day are what they appear to be, you will be unable to physically function. Period. You will die somehow, unable to efficiently meet your basic needs because you will be avoiding or double-checking every source of them.

So, you engage in pattern recognition. If the pump is at a gas station, it’s gas. If someone tells you their name, it’s their name. If these things fail to meet your assumptions, you are rightly surprised, because 99% of the time, they don’t.

And this is why my original fist-shaking idea of “we can never trust certain institutions in our lives ever again” breaks down, because we just can’t function that way. We do not all have the time, resources, or intellect to scrutinize every single interaction with a permanent enemy. Many of us, even the more intelligent among us like the people probably reading this and other stacks, are already reaching our carry limit for critical thinking and skepticism. There are only so many hours in a day to fact-check and read competing arguments and run background checks on statements and people.

As George Carlin (RIP) said, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” Try to imagine half of humanity even getting past the abstract of a research paper or parsing a deceptive or dissembling statement from a politician.

The evil that exists within these institutions knows that, and knows that there is an exhaustion point at which individuals and societies throw up their hands and say, even if they (like us) don’t want to, “fine, we can’t challenge every little thing anymore.” They count on it. They count on that same overload and frustration and fatigue that lies behind the response you will eventually get when you argue with someone who is used to uncritically believing and trusting everything they see on legacy TV news: “fine, I give up, they’re all liars- what do you want me to do, not watch the news?”

Fine, I give up, what do you want me to do- never seek healthcare? Have money? Enter into a contract? Buy something from any corporation?

Fortunately, this is not hopeless, and the answer lies within the same universe that the problem does- in the emergent social structures that exist because of consistent human behaviors like trust. The hint is in the subtitle of this post.

Societies run on trust and cannot exist without them. When human communities were smaller, this was a lot easier, because you could probably literally know personally, or at least see, everyone you had to trust. But even then, we learned that not everyone could be trusted all the time: it would be naive to assume that there were no antisocial individuals in bands of early humans that violated the trust of their kin.

Then, as now, the solution was simple: consistent justice as a deterrent to antisocial behavior. Do this, you get punished. If you’re intelligent enough to hold that idea in mind, even if you’re intrinsically antisocial instead of just occasionally an asshole or dumbass, you will avoid the behavior (or at least avoid being caught) to avoid the punishment. As societies got larger and we couldn’t literally keep an eye on everyone, we developed criminal justice codes with people to enforce them, and it wasn’t long before those enforcers became irrevocably wed to the authorities that paid and fed them and developed blind spots for the evil done by the hands that fed them. (Perhaps this resembles some institutions you know of.)

This is clearly where we’re at now. Just ask anyone who’s tried to accomplish anything to protect us in the past two years by talking to the FDA.

So my rallying cry of “trust none of them ever again because the stakes are too high” needs to be amended into something simultaneously more realistic and more effective.

What we need- in EVERY SINGLE ONE of the institutions that have so thoroughly betrayed and violated us- is the equivalent of a civilian review board for police departments WITH REAL POWER TO PASS JUDGMENTS AND PUNISHMENTS composed in such a way that they do not become beholden to those institutions or to the overarching governments that fail in their basic responsibilities to hold those institutions accountable.

And those punishments need to be harsh if they are going to be real deterrents to the sufficiently sociopathic that hold themselves above morality.

I’m talking about something akin to citizens’ vigilance committees for Big Pharma, Big Medicine, Big Intelligence, and Big Tech. People whose responsibilities are not to fact check every aspect of daily life, but one specific corner of it, adding up to all the corners, not drawing a paycheck from those same Bigs or from the legislators that are enslaved to them.

The challenge is that for such civilian ombudsman’s groups to have real authority, they must be permitted to exist and exercise that authority by the power structure that already exists and is, admittedly, corrupted by all the aforementioned forces. The further challenge is that they have to be structured in such a way that they do not contain mandarins and double agents within their ranks- no former Pfizer CEOs on review boards. These things are why similar currently-existing “watchdog” groups often fail, and I don’t have the answer to that here and now.

But it begins by demanding accountability, and demanding that the arbiters of that accountability are no longer composed of praetorian guards.

And this is why this war will not be over when the last mask or vaccine mandate ends. This ends with justice, and while it is rational to throw up one’s hands and say that we cannot fact-check every aspect of existence, we cannot- dare not- throw up our hands and say, “oh, well, in the end none of them will be held accountable, and you’re naive to expect any justice at the end of this” as I have seen in numerous defeatist comments across Substack.

No. Demanding justice, and a hand in its arbitration, is neither unrealistic nor naive. Justice is the safety net for a human civilization rooted in trust, and that civilization literally cannot exist without it. One way or another, it is the most important demand we must make of this era and our very survival demands we carve it out- one way or another.