Our widening crisis of trust comes at one of the worst moments in history, as war, division, poverty and apocalyptic weather threaten the fabric of life
In 1961, the Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram made a notable contribution to our understanding of the human mind, proving that, under appropriate circumstances, otherwise upstanding and compassionate humans would execute orders to torture other humans.
As for Dr. Milgram himself, well, generations of psychology students, smooth keynote speakers and ordinary people are now forced to realize that their notions of “deference to authority” are far too crude. It’s as if a master decoder ring for human psychology, parsing respect for authority and trust, has somehow transformed into something else.
What is trust? It is easier to say what it is not. Trust cannot be bought or sold. It resists transaction, enforcement and commodification – though it can be tainted by these if we are not careful. Metaphors for its elusiveness and fragility abound: It is like glass, like chocolate, like the wind. It can be earned, but not with wages or fear. It can be broken, always and often, but its bond is stronger than a contract.
But it is not inaccurate to see that the more bureaucratic and enforcement-minded elements of this sweep of ideas have come to the fore, and in the process have eroded some of the authority that the original institutions and methods commanded. There is no indoctrination program that I have ever witnessed, still less so-called “woke mind virus,” still vilified as if it were an actual infectious disease.
Speaking of pandemics, we cannot fail to see how a global challenge to public health generated a new level of doxaholic distrust with science that makes any quibbles about Dr. Milgram’s finding seem like a nursery rhyme. The outsized power of scientism, so correctly challenged by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour, was here manifested as a strenuous, even violent refusal to heed the claims of basic data and truth-claim.
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