> People just don't trust authorities anymore, This is true. > because authorities time and time again have misled them. But is this? Here's a chart of U.S.

> People just don't trust authorities anymore, This is true. > because authorities time and time again have misled them. But is this? Here's a chart of U.S. public trust in government since the late 1950s: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-government-1958-2015/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-g... Was government really more trustworthy in the 1950s than the 1960s and 70s? Did governments back then not mislead people? Surely there was plenty exaggeration or propaganda about the Soviet Union and communism in the 50s? Johnson misled the public about the Gulf of Tonkin, but was it so different than Roosevelt misleading the public about the Greer incident? I suspect the real cause of the decrease in trust is not a change in the way institutions behave, but a broad cultural change towards individualism that began in the 1960s, when institutions became "the man."