America’s deadly disease of distrust

Earlier this week,
I wrote about the lack of mercy
in our culture, and last weekend, I wrote about people’s
refusal to trade seats
with a young child who wants to sit next to his mother. These are cultural sicknesses.

This week, three young people were wounded and one killed by the
disease
of social distrust.

THE QUALITY OF MERCY IS NOT POPULAR THESE DAYS

A man in Elgin, Texas,
shot
into a car full of cheerleaders because one of them had earlier mistaken his car for hers.

A man in
Kansas City
shot a boy who rang his doorbell.

A man in upstate New York shot and killed a woman who had mistakenly pulled into his driveway.

There’s a gun conversation and maybe a race conversation to have here, but those are both secondary. The primary problem is that we are becoming a low-trust society, which is a much bigger problem than you might think.

Low-trust societies are not merely meaner societies — they are poorer and less safe. I wrote a book in 2019 whose subtitle was “Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse.” The why was basically social trust. A functioning society — on the familial, local, or national level, or anything in between — is one in which people generally respect others, tell the truth, and don’t try to harm people. When this good behavior is expected, life is easier and happier. But if you think everyone is trying to pull one over on you, that everyone is a threat, your freedom and happiness are greatly limited.

Running a business, for instance, requires immense trust. Being married or raising children requires huge amounts of trust. If you don’t trust your spouse, or you think everyone you’re dealing with will steal from you if given the chance, you can’t get anything done, and you will die young from stress.

Yes, there’s something weird about an unexpected and unrecognized car pulling into your driveway at night. Yes, there’s something weird about someone trying your door handle when you’re waiting in your car. But all three of these shooters jumped instantly to the conclusion that the other person was a lethal threat.

Alternatively, these shooters thought these young people deserved to die because they violated property rights. Unbending insistence on property rights is another part of a low-trust society. Friends and neighborly neighbors respect one another’s property but don’t always exercise their property rights as strictly as possible because it would be antisocial. But that’s typical in low-trust societies, and the visible signs are everyone having walled and gated property.

What are the other symptoms of low social trust? Conspiracy theories are one. The QAnon phenomenon and the
storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021
, were both consequences of our low-trust society. People thought it credible that there was a massive conspiracy to steal an election, and acting on this belief, they took to violence.

What is making America a low-trust society? A lot of things. We could talk about an elite that earned distrust and demagogues who fostered distrust, but the root is the deterioration of community institutions.

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Working, interacting, debating, praying, playing, and eating with others is how humans build social trust. We all belong to fewer things, as Robert Putnam showed 23 years ago and as I elucidated in
Alienated America
.

The central institution of civil society in the United States has long been the church, particularly for the middle and working classes. The secularization of America has meant the deinstitutionalization of America. And it’s creating a low-trust America.