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Building a Culture of Trust in Politics
Without trust, there can be no hope of real and lasting positive change in the world. Our challenges are too big to solve on our own. We must be able to work together and collaborate on an unprecedented scale to build a stable economy, restore health to our communities, and manage the tremendous global changes unfolding around us.
And yet we live in a world filled with manipulative messages, the very presence of which threatens the foundation of democracy. From a very early age, our hidden motivations (in the form of emotional tendencies and networks of associated knowledge embedded in our unconscious minds) have been exploited to trick us into thinking we need things that we don't.
And now this pervasiveness of sophisticated commercial marketing has corroded the fabric of political engagement. We no longer trust most of the information we receive. Our skepticism is a cultural pathology - a deeply rooted belief that those in power are trying to trick us. Unfortunately, this distrust is grounded in the truth that we have indeed been tricked many times in the past.
The existence of skepticism is a matter of significance that needs to be addressed in our politics. Lip service is often paid to the need for greater voter turnout, but no solutions are offered that address the malaise of distrust that has stood in the way of progress for decades.
I believe that a culture of trust is desperately needed if we are to address the looming challenges of the modern world. People need to be able to identify deceptive practices and stop them in their tracks, while also having the skills necessary to communicate their real concerns authentically so that others can trust in them.
A starting point in the cultivation of trust is to name the strategy that undermines it. One that has been around for years, but is not in common use, is the acronym "FUD" which stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt - the standard tactics for deceiving and manipulating people. FUD can be found every time that an insecurity is used to push a product ("Use our acne medication or you won't be attractive"). It is present in misinformation campaigns that undermine legitimate authorities ("Climate has changed in the past, so you can't trust those who claim it is changing now due to human causes."). And it is the basic premise of public relations and marketing firms that fill our world with mixed messages throughout the mass media every day.
Where do FUD practitioners learn their trade? Is there a FUD University that teaches the tactics of deception and redirection? Perhaps not. But these skills are widely deployed and are threatening the public confidence that forms the basis of modern democracy.
What we need is an antidote to FUD - a collection of skills and practices that nullify deception and transcend it. As we move into the 21st Century, we must create new tools for countering deception that instill trust in our capacity as a people to govern ourselves. We need to be able to deconstrust spin in the media so that hidden messages are made explicit. This will require us to think differently about truth and perception. We'll have to understand the psychology of meaning and the nature of our hidden motivations. We need the opposite of FUD, an Open University that teaches the tactics of honesty and authenticity.
The only viable response to FUD is openness and transparency. Our hidden tendencies can only be exploited if they remain hidden. It is vital that we democratize the production of political communications, starting at the most basic level of knowing our own minds. We need a cognitive toolbox - tools for understanding what's going on inside our heads - to be able to see how communication works within us. Only then can we truly open up the production process and invite the public to participate.
This goes much deeper than merely changing the content of our messages in political communications. Rampant distrust in a culture keeps a populace from being able to discern truth for themselves, regardless of how accurate a message might be. Instead, we have to restructure the methods of communication themselves. For example, most people are well aware that digital media can be modified to make things that are fake seem real. We've all experienced this at the movies many times in our lives. So there is a need to make the creation of digital media more transparent - as websites like YouTube do when users typically know what is real because they are making it themselves. This transparency makes it possible for the process of media production to be scrutinized.
The same can be said for other political processes. Currently most legislation is created behind closed doors and under the veil of technocratic language. The obscurity of this process - combined with the fact that bills have been used in the past for purposes different from what we were told (think "Patriot Act" or "No Child Left Behind") - and you get a recipe for widespread skepticism about the legislative process. No wonder so many people disengage!
It is time to start the difficult work of building a better kind of politics, one that works in the 21st Century. We have to open up the political system and make it more participatory. People have to feel like they can take ownership and engage the political world with a mandate for openness and transparency.
The age of elite democracy is behind us. It doesn't serve us any longer. In the days ahead, we'll need a populist politics that recognizes the value of active participation, one that promotes inclusiveness for everyone. Such an open political machine will only work if its "operating system" is visible. We can only trust in the system if we are able to see how it works and make modifications to it when it doesn't. This is analogous to what software developers call "open source" where the source code of a piece of software is open for others to see. When the source code is hidden, it is impossible to truly know what is going on inside the black box of the machine.
The same is true for our politics. Democracy is only real when the political source code is open for everyone to see. Building a culture of trust will require that we get to the heart of this problem, and make visible the methods of production for all the world to see.
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25 Comments so far
Show Allon the one hand, how could you possibly disagree w/the general thrust of this article? the goal should be more trusting, open, participatory democracy. well, duh.
on the other hand, most people aren't nearly sceptical enough. after all the terrible, terrible things the obama admin has done, the "best branded product in america" still sells quite well.
finally, and perhaps most importantly, joe brewer *never* addresses concrete actions for people to take to address the disparity of POWER in this country. does anybody really think that people who are today committing the most horrible crime possible, lying a country into war (today-the obama admin re: pakistan, yesterday, the bush admin in afghanistan/iraq), what are these people NOT capable of?
they are not going down w/o a bloody fight, and the joe brewers of the world have almost nothing to say on that subject.
I agree that openness is great. However, it is worthless if people do not THINK. Being able to look at the source code isn't all that useful if no one actually looks at the source code and thinks about what the code is doing.
The viable response to FUD is to not believe the FUD. The viable response is to have a proper understanding of risk, of cost and benefit. The viable response to FUD is to THINK.
And I disagree that the problem is a lack of trust. I would contend that the problem is that there is too little distrust and scepticism, too many people want to blindly trust the "experts", the authority figures, instead of thinking. If people are so distrustful of those in power, if people believe those in power are out to trick them, why then do they repeatedly fall for that trickery, whenever FUD type arguments, whenever "oh noes, won't someone please please think of the children" type arguments are used?
In a way I strongly agree with Joe Brewer that trust is the basis of any viable relationship, including the relationship between a people and their political leaders. But THINKING, as you say, is always essential, since we don't (or shouldn't) give our trust to those who are not trustworthy, and factual evidence of that trustworthiness must be determined by our intellect.
Maybe there's a little presumption that we should trust our parents, lovers, employers or Presidents, but to maintain that trust in the face of contrary evidence is just plain wrong and counter to our best interests. When, for example, Obama asks for our trust as being an agent of change, his behavior must pass muster in justifying that trust. During the presidential campaign, he criticized "beltway politics" and implicitly the presidency of Bill Clinton (by way of Hillary), then, as President, proceeded to cram into his administration many of the warhorses of Clinton adminstration policy, both foreign and domestic. The popular saying "screw me once, shame on you; screw me twice, shame on me" comes to mind. As the explicit or implicit promises that Obama has made have been violated in so many ways, our thinking capacity should lead us to a "never again" resolve with respect to any of his promises: "I'll believe that when I see it."
You can't build a marriage, friendship or a government on trust alone, but without it, you don't have any of these relationships. Clearly we have to think and think hard about the candidates for political leadership we are offered, and not let ourselves succumb to the wiles of the Madison Avenue marketeers. We need a lot of good, solid consumer education to help us identify manipulation and dissimulation when it occurs, and for this purpose, those of us who engage in critical journalism are promoting that trust without which democracy cannot survive.
Joe,
Great post. One method that I have found to be successful in clearing out FUD, is the scientific method.
If it becomes necessary to determine which one of several mutually contradictory hypothesis are true, one just has to run a test. One caution here though is that some truths change, especially in the social sciences and economics.
Regards,
"Without trust, there can be no hope of real and lasting positive change in the world"
what a non-starter
prez o has given us change we can believe in
everything's cool now
Trust in politics is an oxymoron.
I don't want a culture of trust. I want unremitting skepticism. I want those whom we vest with the awesome power of the state to have to prove, EVERY TIME, the truth of what they say.
I want media who don't take at face value everything they're told, and then parrot it back at us as "news." I want ten thousand clones of Izzy Stone to descend on every public building and to poke around in their trash cans for the scribbled memo, the forgotten spreadsheet, that reveals whether we've been bamboozled or not.
Nobody who seeks power should be trusted. History is the record of why that's true.
I just thought of Reagan's comment on trusting Russia's nuclear disarmament: Trust but verify.
Too bad not more Izzy Stones were poking around in
Ronnie's trash cans to bring out the atrocities that went on as we trusted him because he had such a pleasant smile!
i want eternal vigilance.
. . . but no solutions are offered that address the malaise of distrust that has stood in the way of progress for decades.
Money is supposedly the mother's milk of politics, or so said the late and unlamented crooked California politician Jesse Unruh. The mother's milk of politics is actually distrust. For it is the totally justified distrust of the rigged, crooked American political system that keeps tired, pessimistic citizens from storming the gates, taking out the bastards and stringing them up from the nearest tree branch that will bear the weight of their fat bodies. People are filled with distrust because they don't think anything can be done. That's the way the Republicans and Democrats want it. And for the most part, Americans are right. It's Catch-22.
I disagree that it is distrust which is keeping citizens from taking action; it seems to me that it is a combination of isolation and disempowerment.
I completely agree with Jethro Tullamore's comment here; the last thing we need in politics is a culture of trust. The notion that we should all place more trust in the ruling elite of a sociopathic plutocracy is absolute lunacy. Trust is a substantial part of the problem, NOT the solution.
Your first sentence is perfect. The second is acceptable. But then you lose me. Populism, by definition, is "a political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite." I'm always puzzled (and somewhat irritated) by the advocates of Marxist-Leninist Communism who dismiss any philosophy that isn't explicitly "Communist" as merely a manifestation of bourgeois thought. I often think that if the ML Communists were to stumble upon the Communist Manifesto under another name, they'd read the first page and then dismiss the whole thing as "bourgeois". I think there is a real danger in this dogmatic close-mindedness. I am an advocate of anarcho-syndicalism, but my ideology is dictated by my understanding of history and current events. Conversely, it often seems to me that the Marxist-Leninist's understanding of history and current events is dictated by his ideology.
spoken like a true petit-booooojwah
Haha, oy vey.
sorta like trusting the DOJ
to oversee the
"Logjam of War Contractor Fraud Suits"
by Matt Renner
truthout.com
here ya go:
http://www.google.com/search?q=logjam+of+war+contractor+fraud+suits
Civilization and society is built on that most brittle thing - trust. Our's is shattered.
Brewer is coming from a cognitive science angle and he makes some points. As many comments above allude to, there are many other factors that are at play as well. The Adam Curtis (former Cambridge lecturer, now BBC documentary producer) documentaries aired in the UK and Europe (but not in the "land of the free") outline some of these various factors and draw more of a big-picture, connect the dots sort of outline. "Century of the Self" touches on the roots and the more recent documentary "The Trap" is absolutely brilliant.
Any society that allows power to concentrate is doomed. It doesn't matter how that power accumulates - by manipulation, fraud, or completely moral and legal means. Power corrupts - not just the people who wield it, but the subjuated and/or exploited as well, who become 'conditioned' to accepting that 'that is the way the world is' - which, incidentally, isn't true. It's only been during the last couple thousand years, as humans spread into the territory of others, that power has evolved into its current fatal form. With such short life-spans, it can be difficult for people to judge how 'the world really is' from their own experience - even the written word has a very short history.
If you want 'trust' - justice - then society must constrain the accumulation of power, in whatever form it appears (money, brute strength, armaments, cults, etc). Our Constitution attempted to derail the accumulation of power - one of the means was to restrict the vote to people who were educated and had a vested interest (property, for instance) in the success of the country. Another was banning a standing army - the temptation to use it being too strong to resist. And then there were corporate charters - limited, so they couldn't become the monster that had threatened them - East India.
Modern inventions - mass media, for instance, and applied psychology - made certain industrious people too powerful to confront. The Constitution has plenty of faults - but it wasn't supposed to be the 'end all' - just the beginning of a civilized and prosperous society. We need to start over - and use a scientific model to construct a better basis for social rule. Placing limits on power is the only way there can be any trust - it ends the 'agenda' of accumulating power, which is socially destructive. Eisenhower reminded us of this - and Americans ignored him. Power is a monster - it must be starved, or it will devour all of us. That's what the anti-trust laws were supposed to do. And RICO. And all those investigations into the various forms of accumulating power, to the detriment of society. Now the monster is devouring us - again. The new and fearful 'aristocrcy' (those who wield too much power) has arisen - and our misery won't end until we chop off its head.
Money is power, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Cap wealth to cap power.
or
Incorporate We the People and distribute equal shares of non-transferable stock and dividends from our publicly owned resources to every American adult. We can decide what to do with our money, not the lobbyists, banks, corporations, or their politicians.
"An honest politician is one who when he's bought stays bought."
Building a culture of trust is impossible without real campaign finance reform.
To some degree people can and must distinguish between "doubt" as in "I doubt that X is correct" and "doubt" as in "I doubt that we can accomplish this, so I will save myself the pain of attending to my concerns."
Also, we need to distinguish between "I doubt XYZ is correct," "I doubt that XYZ is sincere," and "I doubt that XYZ has human concerns": 3 distinct evaluations.