This question is the best illustration of why it makes me so angry that the institutions have been so untrustworthy. Without the institutions, you end up in the land of can't trust anyone/anything and choose-your-own-reality. It's not going to end well if we can't make serious reform and right the ship. The worst part is there doesn't seem to be any appetite for doing that, just denial and self-interest.
In Asia, you kinda just assume as a tourist someone is going to take advantage of you or try. You can't be naive about reality, once you accept that you can then figure out what you want to do about it.
Eventually new groups will forms as the old ones dies probably violently as they fight to protect themselves.
I think 100% the institutional corruption has destroyed public trust in them, and the public is right to believe they are untrustworthy.
The unity debacle recently shows how easy it is to loose trust, and how difficult it is to get it back.
Why should institutions be trusted in the first place? Isn't it up to the institution to maintain their reputation/quality, perpetually? Since when did the public have to bear that weight? For what reason?
Isn't the appetite to tear down the castles and towers arguably due to years of frustration following failures to change/reform them? Average people can definitely be annoyed by institutions like the court or congress or the who, but they have very little agency to effect any change there, much less "rebuild" anything. Arguably it takes a certain idealistic naivety to hang hopes on things like "change it from the inside!" and "something something grassroots". If you're not perfectly satisfied with the status quo then tearing down or sowing chaos to change something somehow does start to look rational.
Trust no one and nothing. Assume every narrative you're being given of the outside world has been corrupted and distorted to manipulate you towards unknown ends, and that every authority a liar and a fraud. Stop engaging with the media, pop culture and modern communications technology as much as possible.
Live your life and accept that there's nothing you can do about any of it. You're being lied to by everyone and everything and you'll never be capable of knowing the truth beyond what your senses immediately tell you (and even they can be fooled) - and it doesn't really matter. We live in a "post truth" era so just pick the lie that suits you the most.
Nowadays the only way to get some legit information is to cross-check multiple conflicting sources. And then apply some gut feeling based on historical track record. Which also needs to be formed by cross-checking multiple sources.
If you “trust nobody” and you aren’t immediately and cripplingly paralyzed by the task of rigorously verifying every piece of information you rely on to live, then you’re not being serious.
How do you trust that your car, electrical wiring, water pipes, food, medicine, and consumer products are safe? Foreign reporting is true? Politicians aren't secretly selling votes?
Your have to trust other people. If you “trust nobody” you’re just obscuring who you actually trust, and that makes it harder to think about whether you should actually trust them or not.
How do I trust my car? I see plenty of cars of the same model being driven around. I assume my car will act the same.
Electrical wiring and water pipes? When my house was being built, I visited the site almost daily, took tons of pictures and read a ton how the things should be done properly.
Medicine? Read multiple sources upfront and possibly visit multiple specialists. I and my relatives were burned multiple times by not doing this and trusting first specialist they bumped into.
Regarding foreign reports and politicians, as I said, triage multiple reports. And I’m pretty sure vast majority of politicians have biases, either paid-for or ideological.
I don't need the level of psychological assurance you do in life. I use judgement. I know my car works because my mechanic seems like he has his shit together and knows what he is doing. I don't get that impression from virtually anyone in the social sciences.
And you make that assessment based on what? I would wager taht there is significantly more fraud amongst car mechanics than social science researchers. Let's not even talk about the massive fraud that car companies have been engaged in (VWs Diesel scandal, Teslas autopilot...), but somehow you find them more trustworthy than social science professors?
That’s why there are lots of word-of-mouth in some industries. Or at least review websites. Nobody says „trust the mechanics“. More like there few good ones in the sea of average and flat-out fraud.
Meanwhile „trust the X field“ crowd lacks this component. Any field will have frauds and word-of-mouth does not replicate easily.
Sure, “trust nobody” is a literal impossibility even if you’re way off the grid like Ted K. But I don’t see many people pushing that sort of extreme ideal as a response to the replication crisis or the fraud coming out of highest levels of soft sciences.
You just end up having to treat sci-news the same way most of us likely already treat regular news media: with heavy suspicion by default for any unfamiliar topic. Reverse Gell-Mann Amnesia, I suppose.
It’s not particularly good for one’s mental well-being, but it’s a rare person who can go back to being blissfully ignorant of something this widespread.
Mini-rant: I just now realized that the Andrew Tates of the world have made it nigh impossible to casually drop a pop-culture reference to the Matrix in these sorts of convos.
