Blogtrek

Trust: interesting article

In this blog before I mentioned that frequently when a politician or other important figure makes a statement, it is false. In fact, I even developed a logic out of it in which the hypothesis are assumed to be false and the conclusion is then to be proven true. An example would be Richard Nixon saying "I am not a crook." I said this means he is a crook.

Today an Leonard Pitts entitled "A matter of trust and the truth" says that this is taking skepticism as a default position. It is assuming that a statement is a lie until proven otherwise. He cites many examples of it including the enduring belief that astronauts really didn't land on the Moon. He says that the Internet makes things worse by letting any blowhard say that anything in the world is false or is a Communist or government plot or CIA plot or something. He even mentions the belief that blue is not blue but is instead a US Government ploy.

If things get this far, trust and communication break down. Each of us has to depend on ourselves, for we can't depend on each other. Mr. Pitts says we need to come back again to a common language and common ground that allows us to disagree and still come together to achieve things collectively.

I say it is more than that. It seems that there have been so many injuries to our sense of trust, including Watergate, statements about weapons of mass destruction, statements about what happened with that intern in the White House office, and so forth that societal trust has broken down. According to The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe, a major societal crisis is needed to build a new world order and bring trust back. Perhaps this is what is needed. In the meantime, we will have to do our best to determining what in the media and other high places is true and what is not.