you're missing the underlying crux of the problem, which is scale. at small scale, authority can be roughly verified amongst a group. someone is good at buildin

you're missing the underlying crux of the problem, which is scale. at small scale, authority can be roughly verified amongst a group. someone is good at building houses, another person is good at teaching, one is trustworthy, another is not, etc. you can sense these things directly. but (mis-)information scales geometrically/logistically with population, and we have to increasingly rely on imperfect proxies, like certifications, titles, hearsay, etc. to verify and trust each other. that in turn leads to a comfortable insularity for authorities, which allows them to abuse popular trust with fewer and fewer direct consequences. that is, authorities become more disconnected from the consequences of their actions. as soon as corruption (of any sort) happens frequently enough, the populace has no choice but to move to distrusting all authority because nearly none of it can be verified personally. and then we have this whole dynamic of everyone trying to claim authority over all sorts of stuff, most of which we have no deep knowledge/experience about. that's the real crisis of modernity, trust at scale. and what we're rediscovering is that most of what we say is bullshit and should be disregarded en massé. we even have terms like 'serious' that point to the timelessness of this general problem.