When rights are respected, people trust each other and the twin outcome of peace and prosperity is found. To get ahead materially, people need to be able to count on the rule of law, where criminals pay for their crimes. If any Joe Blow can make a contract with you, and then turn around and violate it and take your money, you don’t succeed.
But if there is an objective, third-party justice system which punishes transgressions, then people grow better off over time. When honest work is rewarded and dishonest skullduggery is punished, people can trust each other and their living standards rise:
At the lower left of the graph there is no reliable rule of law, and people cannot trust one another. This also means that they cannot get ahead in life (their GDP per capita remains below $20,000). Without a rule of law, prosperity cannot arise. But if you first become prosperous, and then hijack your own rule of law, like the USA, trust is lost.
Game Theory research helps you estimate likely responses people have to the changing behavior of others. Just one lie or transgression — especially when there is no apology — can cut trusting behavior by 55% (right bar is baseline trusting behavior; middle bar middle bar is remaining trust after just one lie or transgression):
If one single lie or transgression can cut trust by 55%, then imagine what two of them, back-to-back, could do.
COVID lies set us back
During COVID, there was one lie after another from the government — all without an apology. Before COVID, there was the Patriot Act, where government began large-scale domestic surveillance.
Before the Patriot Act, there was the assassination of JFK and then the set-up of federal offices in every state, supposedly for the purpose of creating what LBJ called a “Great Society” but what we all know to be a Welfare-Warfare State — a type of social system which turns its back on capitalism and the rule of law. Here are the results:
The high-point was in 1964 when 77% of U.S. citizens trusted the U.S. government. That was before wannabee socialists like LBJ turned the USA into a welfare-warfare state — leading to a steep decline in the rule of law, in capitalism, and in trust. It took the Patriot Act of 2001 in order to repeat that kind of a decline in rule of law and trust.
By 2010, the Patriot Act had done the damage that it was intended to do: It had created such information asymmetry (they know all about you; you know nothing about them) that people could be manipulated out of their earned wealth and any political opponents could be subjected to organized harassment and persecution.
Trust in U.S. government had reduced by more than two-thirds (as expected). But this is pretty much guaranteed to cause turmoil further down the road.
The Limits of Lying (and unreliability)
When people need something to rely on, such as in an automated process, then they need for it to be reliable more than 70% of the time that they interact with it (it must work well more than 7 times in 10):
Regarding lying, this means that, if there are 3 or more lies that come out for every 10 times that you open your mouth, then you’ll burn bridges. You will not be able to retain friendships. Regarding agreements like rentals, if a renter is late on rent for one month a year, then that is something that a landlord might be able to live with.
If a renter is late every 3rd month — i.e., paying rent on time for just 67% of the months of the year (being late on 33% of them) — then the relationship with the landlord is going to break down. To regain trust after being late one month, a renter must pay rent on-time for the next 3 months (at least).
When that is true, the rent would be paid in a timely fashion over 70% of the time.
It takes at least 3 times as long to build back lost trust as it took to lose it in the first place. But if the U.S. government has been lying to us for 4 straight years regarding COVID, and if it takes at least 3 times as long to build back lost trust as it took to lose it in the first place, then we are in for 12 years of pain (even if they come clean now).
If transgressions by government remain high, so that trust stays low, then peace and prosperity will steadily grow further and further out of reach. The USA will turn itself into a tin-pot dictatorship. Each new generation will have a less satisfying life than the generation which came before it
The Way Out
The way out of this mess is a renewed commitment to the rule of law. This requires a repeal of the Patriot Act — something which puts that renewed committment out of reach. By definition, you cannot “reform” a secret national police force such as the one created by the Patriot Act. It would be worse than trying to play Whack-a-Mole.
In Whack-a-Mole, when a mole sticks his head up, you can whack it back down. In a secret national police force, the moles — by design — are invisible, and you cannot tell when they are out of place or when they are overstepping their bounds. And even if somehow you could tell, you would have no way to tell that the reform “worked.”
There is no such thing as a Surveillance State that “got better” with time. Our Bill of Rights was created so that we would not have to put up with things like having a Surveillance State, and Article V of our Constitution gives us a legal way to force the hand of the federal government (to force changes on them, whether they like it or not).
We could use Article V to abolish domestic spying programs (either by decree or by removing funding for all of them), in order to attempt to restore trust in the U.S. government. But you cannot simultaneously have both domestic surveillance and trust — because they contradict each other. One of them “has got to go.”
Reference
[trust and prosperity go hand-in-hand] — OWID. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-agreeing-most-people-can-be-trusted-vs-gdp-per-capita
[one single transgression cuts trust by 55%] — Ma F, Wylie BE, Luo X, He Z, Jiang R, Zhang Y, Xu F, Evans AD. Apologies Repair Trust via Perceived Trustworthiness and Negative Emotions. Front Psychol. 2019 Apr 3;10:758. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00758. PMID: 31001183; PMCID: PMC6457316. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6457316/
[just 20% of U.S. citizens trusted U.S. government in 2022] — OWID. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/public-trust-in-government
[being reliable 70% of the time is not good enough to sustain trust] — Rittenberg BSP, Holland CW, Barnhart GE, Gaudreau SM, Neyedli HF. Trust with increasing and decreasing reliability. Hum Factors. 2024 Mar 6:187208241228636. doi: 10.1177/00187208241228636. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 38445652. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00187208241228636?rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed&url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org