Re: virus: Key Trend: The Decline of Trust

From: David McFadzean (david@lucifer.com)
Date: Sat Dec 13 2003 - 11:20:44 MST

  • Next message: metahuman: "virus: Re:Key Trend: The Decline of Trust"

    metahuman wrote:

    > 1982
    > Janet Cooke is fired from the Washington Post after admitting that
    > her 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning story on drug use included a totally
    > fabricated story.

    Interesting story (and site) here>>
    http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/day/04_17_2001.html

    > We disbelieve our newspapers, our priests and preachers, and our
    > political and business leaders--and one another. Fifty-five percent
    > of Americans in 1960 agreed that "most people can be trusted." By
    > 2000 only 34 percent did.

    What can we conclude from this? Were Americans in 1960s more
    trustworthy or more naive?
     
    > This feeling has evolved from the baby boomers' famous warning,
    > "Never trust anyone over thirty" to the bumper sticker "Question
    > Authority" to the even broader "Who can you trust?"

    Don't forget the next step, the X-files inspired "Trust no one".

    > "A generation is coming of age in America that doesn't take the news
    > straight, that doesn't take the utterances of public figures
    > straight, that doesn't take social games straight. . . . It sees
    > giant con games everywhere." -- Jacob Brackman, The Put-On (1971)

    This would seem to be an improvement (assuming giant cons games
    *are* everywhere).

    > Today, our world looks neither controllable nor predictable; it looks
    > chaotic. Chaos theory fills the shelves of our bookstores and, with
    > the popular book and movie Jurassic Park, enters our mainstream.

    Though JP got the science wrong, chaos theory is is not controversial.
    The world is not entirely controllable or predictable.

    David

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