Wednesday Morning Rant [Joe Mannix]

A common theme in much of the news over the past several years is the insincerity, dishonesty and outright fiction masquerading as fact. As is often said about this here, "everything is fake." The phoniness extends to all things and permeates every facet of public life. Virtually everything is, in short, a lie.

When people realize this, it is often traumatic. As Naomi Wolf put it in her column:

But now, when I did the exact same thing for which they had long applauded me, I was cast immediately into social outer darkness.
Why? Because the times had changed.
And because the scale of the revenue generated for them by supporting flat out lies, had changed.

Sometimes it's a grift. Sometimes it's ideological. Sometimes it's just rank, reflexive dishonesty. Causes aside, deceit is now the norm and the high-trust civilization we have built over the past several centuries will not survive this shift from default trust.

We have gone from "trust unless you have reason not to" to "trust but verify" and now, increasingly, "distrust unless verified." Next up is "distrust, period" and then the transition from high trust to moderate trust to low trust to zero trust will be complete. What will that look like? We can look to other extant low-trust societies for examples.

What can we expect as trust continues to die? Self-defense, for one. A man's home is his castle, but in a low-trust society it must also become his literal fortress. Walls and gates, bars on windows and brick rather than wood construction will become more common. Crime is the norm and cops are at best unhelpful, so it's on you to man your own defenses. Vigilantism grows.

Defense against fraud becomes important, too. The price on the shelf isn't the price the computer rings up. You'll have to take notes and protest when the store tries to rob you. The ingredients list on the package won't reflect reality. Defending your money gets harder, too. The bank will steal it or just lock it up. So will the government. Cause? Evidence? Why do those matter? Cash usage will increase and the First Bank of Stearns & Foster will make a comeback.

Black markets will grow and thrive. Although people can be arbitrarily eliminated from the legal markets without cause, they still need to eat and wear clothes and so the black market will fill the void. It will fill that void at great expense and risk, but it will be effective.

And everything slows down under the weight of individual defense, protection and verification. Everything also gets more expensive. Low-trust societies are, in short, poor and inefficient. They have to be. You can't layer complexity - and broad-spectrum wealth - atop a foundation of sand.

There is a reason why honesty is one of the Ten Commandments. "Thou shalt not bear false witness" is there for a reason. As our transition to low-trust continues, we will all get a visceral reminder of why that is.

posted by Open Blogger at 11:00 AM

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