Commentary
This week I want to take a poll on what you think your neighbours think about taking polls about polling. And if you indignantly refuse to waste time on such foolishness, would you trust a poll about whether your neighbours trust those they don’t trust to restore trust? Because we just got one of those.
It’s from Angus Reid plus Cardus, and the good news is that only a third of Canadians think “Canada is so divided that nothing is going to bring it back together.” Whereas very slightly over half of Americans believe it of the United States. So what’s the bad news?
Well, it rather depends on what you think causes distrust. For instance, Canadians apparently trust scientists more than Americans, though both are credulous (77 percent here and 67 percent there express “a great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence). Canadians also trust police more, slightly, and public education (54 versus 44 in the United States). Here, 44 percent even trust the federal government, a statistic possibly distorted by people unable to answer because they are on hold with the Canada Revenue Agency.
Surprisingly, fewer Canadians than Americans trust “Organized Labour/Unions.” But slightly under half in both countries. And more of us trust the courts and justice system, though still only half. I could go on and on, though it might erode my editors’ trust in my providing original copy instead of padding my columns with cut-and-paste. Which curiously brings me to the key point.
Polling on trust in, say, religion, big business, or social media isn’t like polling on whether the sky is blue, the Laffer curve is real, or they found bodies at the former Kamloops Residential School. We can’t change facts by a triumph of the will. But trust is a living thing, or a dying one, a relationship between people individually and in groups. And while some irrational hatreds like anti-Semitism have lives of their own, generally speaking, whether someone or some outfit is trusted is driven, in the long run, primarily by whether they’re trustworthy.
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Fewer and fewer things are. Which I say not from naivete regarding the past but horror at the present. Humans have always been fallible, and governments doubly so. But I increasingly X out “Where are the adults?” at the latest act of self-defeating irresponsibility and get a childish reply or none.
To take an obvious example Angus Reid highlighted early, when asked whether their partisan opponents are a “threat to their country,” 87 percent of Canadian Conservatives say it of our Liberals, 84 percent of whom say it right back. And in the United States the numbers are similar, but only 80 percent of Republicans say it of Democrats while 89 percent of the latter say it of the GOP. Nasty, huh?
Scary, too. But ask yourself this, or have some pollster ask it: How confident are you that your own representative would object if their Leader said something they knew to be untrue, unfair, or both?
Oh my. No hands at all? Or worse, many from their supporters and none from their foes? Because politicians have acquired a reputation for spineless deviousness the old-fashioned way: they earned it, with increasingly frantic greasiness. Likewise, when I see clips online of officers hassling people for exercising free speech rights, I wonder whether they really went into policing to exacerbate this gross breach of trust.
Then there’s COVID, which Angus Reid got to right after Donald Trump and before inflation, noting with commendable balanced restraint, “The pandemic created a sharp dividing line between the vaccinated and those who rejected vaccine mandates.” And here I’ll go out on a limb (specifically the right arm, where I got three shots under duress then stopped) and say the problem is too many defenders of this ineffective, untested mRNA vaccine were aggressively intolerant while too many opponents retreated into conspiracy theories.
Yup. Neither was trustworthy. And I’m a bit baffled at the high levels of confidence in scientists given the huge secondary problem of state-inspired, social-media-abetted quashing of the hypothesis, now being vindicated, that COVID was a communist Chinese lab experiment that escaped. So if the authorities want to restore trust, as in theory they do, they need a full inquiry into this vital question, including why it wasn’t investigated in real time.
As for social media platforms, which apparently only 24 percent of Americans trust a great deal or fair bit, and only 17 percent of Canadians, do they deserve trust? Yes if you’re reading this online, obviously. But more generally?
It is famously easier, and more fun, to pluck motes from others’ eyes than haul beams from your own. But as so often, the question they don’t ask is the one you should. As a private and public individual, as a journalist, politician, scientist, policeperson, or whatever it may be, am I someone people should trust?
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
