Erosion Of Trust

We all want to think that the future will be better, especially in adverse times like we experience right now. We've just kind of closed the chapter of a global pandemic, and now we face another economic downturn that will hurt the middle class and poor and benefit those who already have more money than they know what to do with.

Who do you trust? This is a serious question, one that needs an answer soon. Not just for us as individuals but especially on the larger scale of society. Who can we trust? The answer is, unfortunately, almost nobody. In a world in which the leading ideology is one of making a profit at all costs, which is the world we live in, I can't even trust my doctor. No, really, if he or she prescribes some medicine or treatment, I can't know if he did so with my health, or his own wallet in mind. If Big Pharma just marketed some new drug, and he or she gets a bonus for each pill sold, it would be, in our world, irrational for him or her to not prescribe it to me. Right?

I briefly mentioned the attention economy in yesterday's post, and we all know, I hope, that any free to use website or platform makes money by making our information the product they sell. Everything's for sale. Everything's a commodity and has to be sold for a profit, including you and me. And because of that we're forced into living under leaders who live by the mantra "trust is good, but control is better"; not only in the workplace under our bosses, but society as a whole has become a place where we're under constant and ubiquitous surveillance. In a society where capitalism rules, the capitalists make the rules; it's how we got into this ridiculous situation where a state is ruled like a business, and everything in it has to contribute to the growth of the economy.

That means that everything's privatized. Everything we once held in common and valued as vital for everyone accessible to everyone, like education, public transport, healthcare and the utilities, has now been privatized and locked away behind a pay-wall. We can not trust the media that once was revered as the fourth estate, referring to the press as the watchdog over the three separated branches of power. But the press, in our world, has to make money first, so we can't trust the news. Like political parties, the news media are depending on corporate money and have clear targets for profits. Hence "information" has become "infotainment", with documentaries and news programs being sponsored by big brands. The news is for sale, like everything else in the capitalist paradigm.

We're not citizens anymore. Citizens have responsibilities towards the state and each other. A dense network of unwritten and unspoken rules formed the organisms that were our living societies. "Gentlemen's agreement" used to mean something, just like "the customer is king". That's in the past now. Customers have lost their royal status and have become consumers who are individually responsible if they're being scammed. Did the used-cars salesman tell me everything about the used car I just purchased? Nowadays we automatically assume the answer to that question is "no, of course not". The salesman would be crazy if he did that, wouldn't he? We assume the salesman tells us whatever is necessary to justify the price he wants for the car. From the very first moment, he and I are adversaries who do not trust each other, and we accept that as normal.

The capitalist society, in which each individual is supposed to act as a rational profit-maximizing agent, is based on distrust. Aided with modern technology we can't expect any different outcome than a highly atomized non-society in which we drift further and further away from each other. That's a recipe for disaster all by itself, but it gets worse. The mutual distrust is deliberately exaggerated by the age old strategy of "divide and rule" applied by the tiny percentage of winners in the economy. And they don't trust us, just as much as we don't trust them. We know we're being screwed, and they know they're screwing us all the way to the bank. That's why they stoke hatred among us, that's why they blame the poor, the immigrants, the LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized groups to provide us with someone to kick down on.

In the meantime they control the military (that's also being privatized), the military industrial complex, the surveillance agencies and the surveillance industrial complex. Control is better. If and when our western nations replace their currencies with CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) the total surveillance of the consumers who were once citizens will be nigh complete; programmable money in a capitalist world will become a living nightmare. Our mutual distrust will be encoded in smart contracts, but above and beyond that their distrust towards us will be encoded. Our money could have an expiration-date, for example. It could be programmed so that it's only spendable in certain stores, or on certain products.

The video below is the world we're heading towards, without a doubt, bar some exceptional change in ideology away from capitalism. Don't be fooled; the fact that the report is about China, the biggest so called communist country in the world, shouldn't blind you from the reality that the proposed surveillance state comes from our global CORPORATE masters who also control our governments. China is just one of the first, a good testing ground, but we're to follow soon. Maybe we're already there. Think about all this. Think on how we're eroding trust and how we've been doing so for at least two centuries now. Then think about what we should do about it. One thing's for sure; without trust there's no society. Not a real one anyway...

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