The least surprising "surprising answer" in history. Social trust is the foundation of *anything* a society wants to accomplish. The lack of social trust is why so many aspects of US policy are cruel & shitty, and why the US is currently falling apart. washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/…
The fun thing about reading social science on social trust is that the consensus is basically, "yes, this is the secret sauce that enables literally any society to accomplish literally anything. Also we have no idea how it's created or how to restore it or how it works. Whee!"
The last five or six decades have see an organized, billionaire-funded assault on social trust. That's what right-wing media IS; that is its essence. A lower-trust society is a cruel, inequitable, dog-eat-dog environment in which oligarchs can prosper.
This is also, as a million scholars have written, the go-to strategy of every aspiring autocrat. It's why they all go after media first. Destroy social trust -- convince the masses society's institutions are failing, lying, turning against them -- & people will seek a strongman.
This obviously becomes easier when society's institutions ARE faltering. The real puzzle, the thing no one understands, is how to restore social trust once it has begun crumbling. After all, you need social trust to make reforms in the first place! Chicken/egg, etc.
One final point, the relevance of which I hope is obvious: I've really started thinking that the future of this country rides on whether the people behind the 1/6 insurrection are held accountable. If this too gets washed away in a both-sides blur, that's pretty much it for us.
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