15 Readers on Trust in American Institutions

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week, I asked readers, “Do you trust America’s institutions more than, less than, or as much as you did a decade ago? Why?”

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Judith sees distrust as a sign of cultural maturity:

I believe that the widespread loss of trust in institutions is a combination of two equally strong forces. The first is our culture’s maturing beyond facile acceptance of what we are told by those institutions into a more confident posture of questioning what we are told based on what we know and believe.

The second force is the universal availability of information about every topic of interest in every country and every culture on Earth.

The second force feeds the first, and vice versa, leading to a noisier and more active populace.

The more naive an individual, the more trusting; the more knowledgeable the individual, the less trusting. As our society has matured over time, and as knowledge has spread exponentially, as a culture we have come to understand that institutional malfeasance is nothing new.

The mature within a society will naturally question institutional dominance and more responsibly and openly