Sunday morning’s front page contained a bit of unintended irony.
A story about the Affordable Care Act website sat atop a story about how each generation of Americans is less trusting than the one before.
The site’s disastrous beginning has certainly damaged faith in our government’s competency; in effect, it has chipped away at our faith in government.
We were told by a president that buying health care insurance would be as easy as shopping at Amazon. We were told the website enabling people to do that would be available on Oct. 1. We were told people would not lose their existing insurance policies.
And in each case, our trust proved misplaced.
Unfortunately, we have become inured to such breaches in faith by repeated government scandals.
The U.S. Navy is investigating admirals and ship captains who steered battleships to ports of call controlled by Glenn Defense Marine Asia.
The company controlled the servicing and resupplying of warships in those ports, and charged roughly twice as much as other companies in other port cities. The officers got everything from prostitutes to Lady Gaga tickets in return.
Again, our trust is taking a beating.
Those revelations come on the heels of a $13 billion fine — the largest ever against a U.S. company — recently agreed to by J.P Morgan for misleading investors in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.
Morgan and two other companies it purchased during the crisis knowingly planted high-risk mortgages in bundles of loans it told investors were of higher quality.
So, it is no wonder that our trust in the institutions we respect has been buffeted by scandal after scandal.
But the Associated Press story Sunday reported something else just as disturbing.
For the past 40 years, our trust in one another has been on the decline, as reported by the General Social Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.
These days, only one-third of Americans say most people can be trusted. Half felt that way in 1972, the survey found.
This means we are more suspicious in our everyday encounters with one another.
Nobody knows for sure why trust is disintegrating, but there are theories.
While we are more fearful of crime, that fear does not seem to be based in reality. Crime rates have fallen for the past 20 years.
In his well-known book, “Bowling Alone,” Robert Putnam concluded that we have abandoned social groups, like bowling leagues and fraternal lodges, in favor of staying home and watching TV by ourselves or with our families.
Increased face-to-face contact with people over time may have led past generations to more trusting relationships with more people, Putnam argued.
Urbanization has probably had an impact on trust. More and more Americans have gathered in big cities and suburbs where bad personal behavior seems to more quickly disappear into the crowd of anonymous faces.
In a small town, where you meet and work with the same people every day, there may be more benefit in taking the time to build solid, trusting relationships.
A University of Maryland professor, Eric Uslaner, blames economic inequality for the growing gap in trust.
As more middle-income Americans become locked out of upward mobility, they tend to trust less.
“If you believe it’s dark and driven by outside forces you can’t control, you will be a mistruster.”
Others might argue that the disintegration of the nuclear family is to blame. Having a parent walk away from a family may be a breach of trust a child never forgets.
Some experts hope that technology can be harnessed to build more person-to-person trust. But, as we all know, technology can just as easily be used to misuse trust.
Everyone from sexual predators to the Russian mob have quickly embraced technology in order to prey upon their trusting victims.
Ultimately, trust is in all of our hands. Day by day, encounter by encounter, we all have the power to create or destroy trust.
To a good person, building trust is a happy occupation. Trust given, rewarded and reciprocated just feels good.
But it still leaves trustworthy people trying to navigate a world full of people eager to misuse a person’s trust.
But this really isn’t a new problem, as the Christian Bible warned thousands of years ago.
“I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves.”
That remains good advice today.
rrhoades@sunjournal.com
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