Lying and deceit and evasion of the truth are rampant in our world – especially among those we really, really need to trust
You know, trust is a massive concept. It sort of underpins everything on the planet. Right now, we are seeing the way the world spins when there is an almost complete absence of the concept of trust. And there is good reason for this total and complete lack of trust. It has been caused by the incessant barrage of lying and deceptiveness we have been subjected tofor most of the last 70 years, when almost all of our major institutions, and by definition, the folks who have represented them, have misled and misinformed us at almost every turn. Indeed, it has become very difficult and challenging to separate the so-called wheat from the chafe in our societies…..
There is, of course, an almost total lack of trust in government at all levels. The populace have come to expect politicians to evade answering questions and to break promises pretty well as fast as they make them…..In Canadian politics, you can find numerous glaring examples of where government has acted directly against the wishes of the public, starting as far back as the flag debate in 1965, followed closely by wage and price controls in the early 1970’s and on to the struggles over free trade and the GST in the 1980’s. There are “lots” of examples at all levels of government. So, is it any wonder that ordinary folks don’t “trust” their elected officials? And that’s a really big one.
Everybody knows, of course, that you really can’t trust the media. The media just out-and-out lies almost every time it opens any orifice of its monolithic structure. Everybody just knows that. It’s not actually true, you know. When the media sticks to reporting actual “news”, the stuff that involves some use of actual facts, it does sort of an okay job. The problem we have with the media today is that since the advent of the 24-hour news cycles, they have massive amounts of time and/or space to fill. So that a huge percentage of what is passed off as news these days is actually so-called analysis or speculation. And a big part of the problem is that most ordinary people can’t tell the difference between the “news” and the “opinion”….and that has a lot to do with the way the media packages their stuff. The media portrays everything as news, when clearly most of it is not.
Let’s carry on with large businesses and corporations. Again, the public totally expects these huge entities to lie and deceive it at every turn. Most people understand that the vast majority of advertising and market messaging consists of mostly major untruths. It’s just the way it goes. Most people, I think, realize that our major food processing companies are gradually poisoning us by adding huge numbers of awful and terrible chemicals into most of our food, while at the same time telling us how wonderfully healthy this same food is for us. Major appliance makers tout the wonderfulness of their fancy sophisticated products, but they deliberately build stuff that doesn’t last and is clogging up our landfills. Plastic is literally destroying the planet, but not only are we not stopping using it altogether, there are new plastic products being released into the market every day. It’s just one big, huge pile of bullshit and almost everybody knows.
Anybody watched any police shows on TV lately? I really liked Hill Street Blues when it was on back in the 80’s. Loved what I thought was a look inside actual policing in a big city. And I watched NYPD Blue and a bunch of Law and Order and shows like that. But I really didn’t tune into things right off the bat. I watched as police detectives regularly lied and broke the law themselves to get convictions. Somehow, it seemed okay to do that because they were usually getting bad people off the streets. These days, though, I don’t think it’s okay for police to do “whatever it takes” to arrest bad people. I think police and law enforcement people in general need to be above reproach. They should never use any type of questionable tactics just to get a conviction. Because that approach has killed trust in the police.
No, it’s really no wonder there very little trust left in society. So, it’s not surprising there are all kinds of folks out there during the pandemic who don’t trust scientists or politicians or health care people or anybody else – and don’t want to wear masks or get vaccinated – even though both of these things seem like no-brainers to most reasonable people. I have no idea how we could ever get this trust thing going again in society. Lying and deceit and evasion of the truth are rampant in our world – especially among those we really, really need to trust. And so it goes….