Trust is gradually disappearing
I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge on one of those sparkly mornings that make your eyes hurt. I could see the Transamerica Building and San Francisco’s downtown jumble of white cubes that look like some kid’s gorgeous sand castle.
You’d think such a scene would be enough to get you feeling pretty good about things. But it wasn’t.
That’s how it’s been. It’s getting tougher to make yourself trust anything, even your own eyes. I thought, “Is it me, or is everybody feeling that all our social institutions, in near unison, have pulled on their clown shoes and commenced to stumble drunkenly across the front pages of America’s newspapers?”
Sports, business, academia, government, religion, medicine, media. Separately, each has had its dark days through history. But has there been a time in memory when they have so dishonored themselves all at once? Has there been a time when our faith in everything and everybody has plummeted so far so fast?
The Olympic figure skating scandal, for example, was even sleazier than we thought. Now a Russian mobster has been implicated. How long before we trust Olympic judging again? And in other sports, you look at the stars and, instead of marveling at their spectacular feats, you wonder who’s juiced and who isn’t.
Each day the business world offers up corporate misdeeds, executives in handcuffs, restatements of profits as losses, accountants admitting outrageous errors. In academia, a well-respected nuclear researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory makes an amazing discovery of the heaviest element ever created. Then we find out he fabricated his data.
We’re convinced our doctors are in cahoots with the pharmaceutical companies, so we’re skeptical when they hand us yet another prescription. We believe the media have an agenda and therefore cannot deliver anything remotely resembling the truth. Our religious leaders are either conning television audiences into sending them their pension checks or they’re abusing young boys in the rectory restroom.
Distrusting government is nothing new, of course. After a big uptick in trust after Sept. 11 — poll numbers were at their highest since 1970 — we have settled back to our normal cynicism. In February, 35 percent of those polled by Roper ASW said the country was on the wrong track. By July, that number had climbed a whopping 20 percent to 55 percent.
“How much trust is enough? What is the right amount?” said UC Berkeley professor Jack Citrin when I called him. “You can’t function if there is no trust, but can you also trust too much?”
He meant that skepticism is an essential component to a modern democracy. There has to be a questioning of authority, critical thinking, a refusal simply to take things on faith. In other words, a certain level of distrust is a healthy fact of modern life.
Then I talked to Kathy Sheehan, a senior account executive with Roper ASW, the polling company. Yes, people are definitely pessimistic about the direction of the country and the economy. But the research showed something else, too, she said.
People are optimistic about their personal lives. They feel good about their kids and their spouses, about the friends who call to see how it went at the radiologist, about the teacher who stayed late to explain (again) the mysteries of long division.
I want to think there are leaders out there who can make you believe, if not in greatness, then at least that things can get better. In the meantime, if I’m looking for someone or something to believe in, I can stretch out my hand. It’s probably close enough to touch.
(Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Send comments to her in care of this newspaper or send her e-mail at [email protected].)