The Trust Deficit - Part I

I’m trying to keep these entries accessible. Most people these days, me included, don’t have the time or patience to read 3,000 words in one sitting. So I’m breaking this piece up into several parts which cover what I believe is the most important issue facing us today and truly sits at the heart of everything that’s wrong with our democracy. The trust deficit.

The Trust Deficit – Part One

If you didn’t see Jon Stewart skewer Glenn Beck like a Kalua pig Thursday night, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It was a bonafide dipshit luau and it was all I could do to not throw on my grass skirt and fire dance around my living room like a bone-in-nose Tongan warrior. Stewart brought his A game and it was perhaps fifteen of the greatest minutes of political satire the world has ever seen.

And it’s a nice segue for me because I’m gonna take the Glenn Beck route on this one, common sense being so en vogue these days and all. Not to mention, there’s a galactic deficit of trust in this country, which means that in the current climate any article that attempts to use data to substantiate its claims is ironically less trustworthy than one that just makes good intuitive sense to people. For example, I just saw Stephen Moore – a giant lactating milk-toast Randian Reaganite – argue against CBO backed data that states that the current healthcare bill will save $1.3 trillion by 2029 by saying that it can’t because the bill covers more people. See? Fuck everything else in the bill geared towards cutting costs and fuck the CBO estimates. If it covers more people it has to cost more, facts be damned! Of course if he’d had the facts or the CBO on his side he’d have argued both at the top of his lungs. But he doesn’t, so we get the Beck treatment.

Sadly, plenty of Americans are far more amicable to such a style, and it’s not entirely unclever, if wholly bereft of legitimate content. When I heard Moore make his moronic, fact absent, data obstinate argument I cringed, envisioning millions of Americans staring vacantly at the boob tube and nodding in unison. And I get it. It sounds right, even if it isn’t. And in this day and age, where data is no longer trusted, people go with what sounds right.

This deficit of trust in the information we’re provided is, I think, the single greatest threat facing our democracy today and here’s why. We live in a world drowning in rhetoric. Fact is the one thing we can rely on to help us sort truth from bullshit. If we throw fact out the window, we’re left with persuasion and coercion as the driving forces behind our actions. And that begs the following question. In this day and age, of the people and institutions we have regular access to that provide us our information, who’s best positioned to persuade and coerce us? In other words, in a world full of rhetoric, where fact is irrelevant, who do we trust to guide us?

Certainly not the politicians, who relentlessly let us down and are plagued and mired in scandal after scandal. They’re beholden to campaign contributions in order to keep their jobs and so beholden to those who control access to media channels and campaign funding. And certainly not representatives from big business who have demonstrated without exception that they’ll screw anyone at anytime for anything so long as there’s a buck in it for them. And if you listen to the Right, you can’t trust science or the CBO or anything you learn in our liberally eschewed collegiate system. And if you listen to either party, you can’t trust anything that comes out of a think tank because they’re all partisan propaganda machines staffed by ideologues and zealots. Even organizations that were founded to be a solution to this very problem, as unbiased non-partisan hubs for information, aren’t trusted. The right will tell you that factcheck.org is a liberal outlet.

For every credible study, report, poll, piece of data, chart or graph that’s accessible, there is either another contradicting it or a trusted figure, be it pundit or politician, telling you that it can’t be trusted. It’s too much for anyone to handle. Most people who try to mine information on their own give up because there is no definitive trusted source anymore. Everything has to be vetted. This is all relatively new to us and we simply don’t have the proper equipment or training to trudge through this blizzard of bullshit on our own. In the Age of Information, with the vastness of the internet at our disposal as a resource, it’s truly more difficult than ever to find credible information.

Add to that, that Americans – those who still have jobs anyhow – work more hours per year than anyone else in the industrialized world, and that our average work hours per week has gone up consistently over the last half century. So even if we knew how to sift through all the nonsense, we don’t have the time to.

It really is the perfect storm.

We can’t trust facts and we can’t trust our leaders. So who do we turn to? The pundits! And why? Because they act and sound like they understand all the shit that we can’t. They sound like they’ve done the legwork and reached rigid conclusions based on hard data. The more convinced they sound, the more popular they are. It’s why Glenn Beck is popular.

And here’s the proof. In the drum up to the Iraq War in 2002, Fox News carpet bombed the airwaves with talk of links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. It was so effective that even in the wake of the 9/11 Commission’s report, which was released almost two years later in the spring of 2004 and stated flatly and outright that there was no link whatsoever between them, fifty percent of Americans still insisted that the link existed. You just can’t battle spin with facts when people have been corralled into trusting the former over the latter.

Illustrations like this – and there is no shortage of them – make one thing pretty clear. When media has such a dramatic impact on public opinion, and that media acts irresponsibly and only in their own interest, and facts are considered by the populous to be malleable and untrustworthy, your democracy is begging for a serious beat-down. Right now, we’re that guy in the bar whose had nine too many and keeps hitting on the lady friend of the no-neck beef stack checking ID at the door.

Part II of The Trust Deficit will be posted within the next few days.