Pay No Attention to the Bloody Corpse in the Bathroom
When institutions behave like this they're not just tarnishing their own image. They're destroying civilization.<p>Got into a debate around here a while back trying to explain why otherwise-rational people are afraid of GMO foods. This is an example of my point. Things like this erode trust not just in the particular institution in question but of <i>all</i> institutions in our society. At some point many people actually start to assume the worst and flip over into seeing official pronouncements as contrarian indicators: "oh, the paid shills say it's safe and it's produced by a big agribusiness corporation so it <i>must</i> be bad for you..."<p>Even worse still, we have junk like this:<p><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=moon-landing-faked-why-people-believe-conspiracy-theories" rel="nofollow">https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=moon-landi...</a><p>I've seen a rash of these articles lately, deconstructing in elaborate detail why people distrust science and officialdom and believe in increasingly outlandish "conspiracy theories." They're all elaborate dances to avoid the obvious issue: trust.<p>It's almost a kind of blame-the-victim mentality: yes you have been lied to, but you should ignore that. If the fact that you've been treated contemptuously causes you to begin harboring suspicions, it's because you are irrational and stupid. Now shut up and believe what you're told.<p>No, it's not the victim's fault. It is the authorities' fault. Trust is <i>earned</i> through consistent transparency and honorable behavior. When the institutions of society behave dishonorably and unethically, trust is systematically weakened across the entire society.<p>Once a person learns that their authorities may well be shills, liars, quacks, fools, or worse, then it becomes increasingly easy to harbor increasingly-damning suspicions about what <i>else</i> "they" might be lying about. Hence 9/11 was an inside job, moon hoax, and other conspiracy theories.<p>Keep in mind that sometimes such suspicions are correct. The executive branch lied the US into war in Iraq, to give one example. With examples of that magnitude, I personally question whether belief in outlandish conspiracy theories is even particularly irrational.<p>And it's very, very dangerous. Trust is one of the key differences between the first world and the third world. Part of why places like sub-Saharan Africa can never develop is that nobody trusts anyone and nobody dares do anything. They "know" (and sometimes with good reason) that anything they do will simply be stolen by their kleptocracies, and that anything their authorities say is probably a lie. (Hence the prevalence of things like HIV/AIDS denialism in those cultures... another symptom of decayed trust.)<p>If our leaders, authorities, and institutions continue to treat the public with dismissive contempt, the third world is where we are headed. The prevalence of conspiracy theories and alt-health fearmongering is a leading indicator of an overall breakdown in the implicit trust relationships and social contract that underlies advanced Western societies.