Which Institutions Are We Supposed to Trust, Again?
Are you lamenting the public’s loss of trust? You should be lamenting the public’s BETRAYAL.
Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.
--Fleetwood Mac
Let’s play sci-fi for a minute.
Imagine you land on an alien planet only to find, to your dismay, its population suffering under a brutal tyranny overseen by an oppressive, oligarchical ruling class.
After watching the official communications of this ruling class for about ten minutes, you conclude that it is lying. About everything. Every single thing it broadcasts over its global communication network is a fabrication designed to manipulate the planetary populace in some way. As a consequence, that populace lives in confusion, fear, enslavement, disease, perpetual crises, war, and impoverishment.
(Hey, James, I thought you said sci-fi.)
(I know. Sigh.)
Essentially, you observe, the alien populace and their ruling class have the exact relationship of an abuse victim and their abuser. Everything the abuser says is an attempt to weaken, confuse, demoralize, and gaslight the victim.
Would you then conclude: “Well, the real tragedy here is the mistrust”?
That’s like saying the real tragedy of abuse is that the victim doesn’t beg for more of it.
And yet, here on our home planet, I keep running across this exact sentiment.
The theme of Davos 2023 was all about “addressing the eroding trust in institutions”, which Klaus proposed to solve by “reinforcing cooperation between the government and business sectors”. Which means, restoring trust that they destroyed with corporate fascism with even more corporate fascism. Because, as we all know, the only solution to the problem of the boot on your neck is to ask for more boot pressure, please.
There are hand-wringing NGOs measuring eroding trust scores (whose cover photo features some very trustworthy individuals):
A letter to the editor in my local newspaper started off well, talking about restoring trust in journalism by restoring journalistic integrity—sounds good—and even talks about how “trust in institutions breaks down when those in positions of authority manipulate facts and foster propaganda”—sing it, sister!!—but then laments that the loss of trust is all the fault of Tucker Carlson and Fox News, and says you should mistrust them and put your trust where it belongs back with CNN. 🤦♂️😂
I keep seeing it: some version or another of “It’s such a shame that no one trusts government/media/science/public health anymore.”1
Really?
The victim is the flawed party in this scenario?
We should just trust our lying, profiteering, power-mad, ideologically insane abusers? Would that make everything just fine?
This is victim blaming gone hyperbolic.
Why, I wonder, would the public have lost trust in those institutions?
Let’s see:
They lied about virus origins.
They lied about the lethality.
They lied about pre-existing immunity.
They lied about ventilators.
They lied about age stratification.
They lied about asymptomatic transmission.
They lied about the tests.
They lied about school closures.
They lied about masks.
They lied about repurposed drugs.
They lied about fraudulent trials.
They lied about safe.
They lied about effective.
They lied about the necessity of mandates.
They lied about preventing hospitalizations.
They lied about the contents staying at the injection site.
They lied about a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”.
They lied about boosters.
They lied about “directed evolution”.
They lied about censorship.
They lied about violating the First Amendment.
And it’s not just pandemicism. They lie about everything. Ukraine, laptop, Ohio train derailment, “violent insurrection”… The list goes infinitely backwards, once you start digging. 9/11, HIV, JFK...
More often than not we don’t know what the actual truth is. But we know a bullshit cover-up when we see one.
The Mendacity Industrial Complex has its fingers in education, public health, intelligence agencies, military, scientific research, academic journals, justice department, media, banking, medicine, corporations, NGOs…
Is there an institution that hasn’t misled or betrayed the public in some way over the past few decades?
Which ones are we supposed to give our trust to again?
Because I’m drawing a big f***ing blank.
Actually, scratch that. I have one.
Sick as it makes me to write, the only organization seemingly cursed with the affliction of honesty is the WEF. They, at least, have been brutally open about “penetrating world governments” and implementing their transhuman, dystopian agenda for the benefit of “stakeholders”.
We can definitely trust that they mean it.
Otherwise, lies abound.
But they’re being unveiled, one by one. 2023, thus far, has been a disaster for the ruling class narrative. And we’re only a quarter way in.
If there’s something positive to be taken away from the pandemia years, it’s the utter eradication of the myth that these institutions are beneficently working on your behalf. We’ve undergone a great unveiling of all the ugly inner workings of a machine gone berserk with its own power-lust and ideology and psychosis.
That doesn’t sound like a positive, I guess. But we’re in a far better position knowing than not.
So, who to trust?
Personally, I’ve Loctited my skepticism at the 110% setting.
I no longer believe a single word coming out of the mouths of GovMediaCorp. It’s all a perverted fantasy designed to induce shame. Everything, as Sage Hana seems fond of saying these days, is a rich man’s trick.
But skepticism is not the same thing as cynicism.
I have a great deal of trust, faith, and yes, even optimism in people—you and I—figuring out alternatives to the madness and enslavement proposed by the ruling class. Alternative food systems, alternative medical systems, alternative education, alternative banking, alternative media, etc.
Discussing this with someone the other day, they expressed horror as I described the collapse of the old systems, and that I was advocating “burning it all down”, and that there is still much good to be preserved and fought for.
True, I said, and I’m not advocating burning anything down.
There is much that still works. We’re not in Walking Dead land… yet.
The lights are still on, the roads still work, I can still go see live music, or chat with a friend at our favorite used bookstore, or buy heavy whipping cream for my imported coffee, or go on a hike in the woods without being murdered by bandits.
For now.
But we nearly lost all these things. And now we know we could lose them again in a heartbeat, largely because they’re functioning on the backs of corrupt and broken systems. Thankfully there are still good people working in those systems. There are still good teachers working in an increasingly deranged public school system. Good nurses working in an unfortunately corrupt medical system (that tried to get rid of them, but did not totally succeed). Same thing for military and law enforcement. And we know (because many of us read their Substacks) there are still good doctors, and researchers, and professors.
I’m not advocating burning those institutions down. What I’m advocating is no longer granting those institutions our BLIND TRUST.
The world is learning, and resisting, this hard lesson.
You cannot just trust that a credentialed class of “experts” are in possession of superior knowing and therefore should tell the rest of us what to do. Experts, in their wisdom, crotch-kicked the civilized world, put it in a rear choke hold, and are now holding conferences and symposiums on why it can’t breathe.
You cannot just “trust your doctor” anymore. You have to be your own health advocate, do your own research, and decide whether your doctor is a good ally, or has been corrupted or mind-wiped by the pharmasick system.
You cannot just send your kid off to public school and trust they’re getting anything resembling an education (or not being indoctrinated). You must get involved with school boards to figure out what they’re being taught, or you must withdraw your kids from the system and figure out alternatives.
You cannot just trust the food production system. People are starting to rediscover that they must grow their own food or trade with local farmers they trust.
You cannot just trust that “your money is safe in the bank”. People are finding alternative stores of value for their wealth: physical goods, land, alternate currencies, etc.
Trusting that electing someone to public office will fix everything is almost beneath comment.
And obviously, we’re here on Substack because we no longer trust in traditional media.
Really, when you break it all down, this is the difference between you and your narrative-believing relatives that think you’re the crazy one: they still trust the heads on the telescreen are telling them the truth, and that they’re being looked after by well-meaning institutions.
But more and more people are realizing the folly in that way of thinking. They’re learning not to blindly trust.
This is a good thing.
If you live in a rural area as I do, you are likely surrounded with people who reject the GovMediaCorp narrative wholesale. No-nonsense, hard-working, grounded, reality-oriented people who do not believe one word of the lies coming out of the faces of the cast of villains on their telescreen (assuming they even have the thing turned on).
Also, we’ve seen working people gathering in the thousands, protesting, standing up. We’ve seen Canadian truckers stand up to their tyrannical Prime Minister. We’ve seen Dutch farmers win a majority in their government.
We’ve even seen something I thought I never would see: people protesting in totalitarian China.
People have a breaking point. We blew through it, I believe, sometime around the middle of last year and are now well into the Active Resistance territory. Which is why the elites are gaslighting us about “restoring public trust”.
The people of the world have lost their capacity to trust in the institutions that have betrayed them.
This is a GOOD thing.
This is JUST.
The adjective in English which describes someone deserving of trust has the suffix “WORTHY”.
You want the public’s trust?
Try working on the worthy part.
In “How We Exit the Cave” we talked about how things don’t end so well for the awakened philosopher. The prisoners in the cave trust the shadows projected on the wall for them to consume. They like the lies. They think the philosopher is the madman. So they pull him to pieces rather than question what they’re being told to see by their shadowy masters.
Of course, that is a story written by an authoritarian elitist (Plato) who believed the ruled to be too stupid to figure out the lies the rulers, in their wisdom, wisely imposed upon them.
We can easily imagine a retelling in which the masters are so inept at spinning the fiction, the story they’re telling so moronic, the lies they’re spinning so blatant, that the puppeteers themselves cause the prisoners to blink and look around and realize they’re watching nothing but shadow puppets on the wall.
And we can imagine what the prisoners do when they discover the existence of the puppeteers.
We’ve been talking quite a bit about red pills over the last couple of years. We’ve debated about the merits of this red pill vs. that red pill, as though now, finally, surely, we have the one, incontrovertible piece of evidence that will awaken the brainwashed from their slumber!
And we’ve lamented when, for some strange reason, it didn’t work.
Here’s why: the awakening has to come from within.
No matter what I write, it seems to come back to this one basic truth: people must learn to think for themselves.
Not everybody. That will never happen. But a critical mass of freethinkers is all it takes, I believe.
The best we can do to help the brainwashed, I believe, is a simple question: “Do you believe it?”
Do you believe the nonsense the telescreen is having you swallow?
Do you believe it portrays beneficent actors with nothing but your interests at heart?
Do you believe they have no financial interest in lying to you?
Do you believe that they really are only concerned for your “safety”?
Do you understand that any threat to your safety, real or manufactured, is a leverage point they can use against you?
Do you believe that people in power are really motivated by improving your life, or are they motivated by improving their lives?
Do you believe they are not enjoying the powerlust that comes with wielding greater and greater control over your life?
Do you believe they are motivated by something called “rule of law” or “respect for natural rights” which will stop them from going too far?
Do you believe they want you to live a long, happy life in freedom and peace and prosperity?
Do you believe they have nothing to gain by your complicity?
Do you believe their ideas about what is moral have anything to do with ethics?
Do you believe their ideas about what is true have anything to do with reality?
Do you believe they have any concept of, or fidelity to, “truth” whatsoever?
Do you believe it?
Planting that skeptical seed in the mind of the narrative believer, and the possibility that they do not have to mindlessly trust, I believe, is about the best you can hope for. The rest is up to them.
The old institutions will not go gently into the night. They’ll try to regulate, restrict, and eliminate the alternatives that you and I come up with.
They’ll try to say, “if you would only trust us!”
These lamentations over the loss of public trust (much like last year’s calls for “pandemic amnesty”) are one more instance of pleading.
They know they’ve lost the people. The public’s trust is not really what they’re after.
They want the public’s BLINDNESS.
Public blindness is the only currency now which will allow them to continue to exist.
Do not grant it to them. Remove the blindfold. If you can, remove the blindfold from your friends, family, and neighbors. Start the seed which will get them questioning the nonsense and the lies.
Get them to realize that every major societal institution has betrayed them. Every one.
And the time of reckoning is here.
Spot on. I believe nothing. Unless I see it with my own eyes. The absolute final solution of their end game is horrific, and believing that in and of itself is like believing in the science...fiction. If it were not for the fact that people I actually know are having heart attacks, strokes and debilitating after effects of "something", I could go on about my business as usual, like everybody else does. Skeptical but silent. But, I have never been a go-along-gal. I am genetically skeptical and I thank my dad for that! He would be told by our vet to take his dog to UC Davis, for further treatment and dad (in the late 60's early 70's) said NO WAY. "They would just experiment on my dog there!" And, his mom believed the moon landing was a hoax. Dad wasn't just skeptical, he would call people out, no problem. I agree with Gabriel too, the fact that trust in "institutions" keeps America going? Wrong on so may levels. And...shout out to the State of Jefferson. If only. We should call all this "sigh-fy". ~sigh~
The idea that "trust in institutions" is what keep society working is such a terrible way of thinking about it. No institution should be trusted, instead they should have procedures in place that allows them to not only be transparent, but demonstrate their effectiveness.
The problem with the public's blindness is that it's been partially imposed, partially sought after. Undoing that damage while it's still ongoing is a significant challenge.