Hacker News Reader

> What links these is a strong perception of betrayal by government that has failed in its duty through corruption and preference for private power interests.

What if I told you that all governments are similarly corrupt, and that the USG (arguably, Western governments in general) is one of the least corrupt by reasonably objective measures. Let's not fall for this trite divisive propaganda dating back to old KGB psyops, that has now taken a zombie life of its own (like in the best Hollywood stinker movies).

What is the objective in saying that the USG is the shiniest turd of the bunch? What is you told you that the USG has, over the course of its relatively short history, destabilized and created power vacuums and installed puppet governments in countless countries?

There's no divisiveness to fall for. The public's loss of trust is legitimate and if anything, calling it KGB psyops propaganda is rich.. I suppose you think America doesn't engage in the exact same tactics?

That maybe true, but I deeply believe that currently western governments are generally least corrupt that they have ever been historically. In the 1920s the US army was basically a mercenary force for hire by large banks and corporations. In Latin America whenever the Citi bank wanted to extract unpaid debts or the United Fruit wanted to suppress labor rights movements they just had to call the state department. The largely forgotten occupation of Haiti more resembles the Belgian Congo than the 2003 war in Iraq. Let’s not even get in into wtf was happening in Europe or European colonies.

While the road itself might be quite bumpy, the general situation now is much better than it was in the 1980’s, 50’s, 30’s etc. And I don’t see any reasons to believe this trend will change significantly in the future.

America is not less corrupt than before. It has concentrated its corruption upward, making it more wholesale and less retail, and more inward-facing, and more resistant to correction. The US is today rivalled only by China in its degree and depth of corruption. "Wholesale" means tied into institutions, and not mainly exercised by individuals.

Other countries, like Russia, India, Brazil, or Nigeria, might like to be more corrupt than those, but just can't swing it. There is not enough money in play in their spheres.

Some evidence for either side of this debate will be interesting :-)

The best I have is here https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021 but that does not seem to go far enough back

I think you might underestimating how bad things were in the past. For instance if Amazon warehouse workers in Colombia decided to form an union and strike for better working conditions, could Jeff Bezos call the secretary of state and ask him to threaten Colombia that US will invade if the Colombians don’t sort out their liberal/socialist problem? Hard to imagine right? But the exact same situation happened in 1928 with another famous company. Possible thousands of workers, women and children were murdered. I’ll quote one of the telegrams sent by the US ambassador:

“ I have the honor to report that the Bogotá representative of the United Fruit Company told me yesterday that the total number of strikers killed by the Colombian military exceeded 1000.”

‘ The US is today rivalled only by China in its degree and depth of corruption.’

Really? I mean you really believe that US is more corrupt than Russia where Yeltsin and Putin parceled off most of the resource extraction industry to their oligarch buddies (Putin also added his ex KGB colleagues) in exchange for political support?

See, what you describe is retail corruption. Small potatoes.

As I said, Russia would like to be as corrupt as the US, but is not powerful enough to be. They had to invade two neighboring countries, and more than once, to get paid any attention.

Cynical "both-sideism" is good for nothing.

"Loss of trust" is reductionism. Funny how most people who call about "loss of trust" somehow trust the comedic channel called Fox News. Reasonable people can trust but verify and question channels

Of course this is not one sided politically, we have people like Chomsky that make a sport of saying how the US is "the worse country in the world" while living in probably one of the few countries where such discourse would be tolerated.

While the US has several problems most people don't know how good they have in living in a democracy. A flawed one for sure, but a democracy

The cynicism is fueled by opinions like yours that present a false dichotomy of "western democracy (implied as the gold standard) or anything else (implied as garbage)". This is pure western exceptionalism. The only reason you think your "flawed democracy" bubble is as good as it is is due to the fact that your foreign policy espouses anything BUT democracy, and in its continual aggressions is able to sustain this garden of eden illusion on its citizens. When you see other countries' foreign policies as barbaric and backwards, you get the impression that your country is great. But you do not get to experience your own foreign policy. That is the force of propaganda at work.

Cynics perhaps understand this and think instead outside of the dichotomy. Maybe we can do much better, and the forces in the way of that are powerful --hence the cynicism.

> yours that present a false dichotomy of "western democracy... or anything else"

You won't find that in what I wrote. Especially since there are many different ways of government.

But I won't support sham elections, biased systems (add a special note for gerrymandering and the electoral college here)

> What if I told you that all governments are similarly corrupt, and that the USG (arguably, Western governments in general) is one of the least corrupt by reasonably objective measures.

Then I'd believe you and say, as I kinda tried to in my comment, that it's to the credit of US citizens that they still hold that government to the highest of standards.

Going into WW2 the depression was still affecting a lot of people. Winning that war put the US on top. While the country reaped the post-victory rewards our government changed. The intelligence community was established. They began to see the US as top dog on the world stage. The the foreign interventions began, starting with Korea, then Vietnam, Central America, The Middle East, and so on.

Eisenhower warned of this new complex of US power in his farewell speech. Kennedy was going to do something about it and severely curtail the CIA. Then, IMO, they killed him for it. True US democracy died with Kennedy. Ever since then the American people have been pushed out of the picture more and more by the military-industrial-academic complex. Today we often refer to these people as the "elites". They are the ones that know better, they know who we should get to vote for, who we should send our sons to go fight for vague "national interests". We are the boiled frogs and our democracy is a dystopian nightmare and they are getting away with it because of petty politics.

Pardon my ignorance, what's the evidence for the CIA assassinating JFK? As opposed to a lone, albeit lucky, gunman and secret service incompetence.

It’s circumstantial which is why I caveated it as my own opinion. Oliver Stone’s work talks about this a lot and outlines the problems with the official story and why the CIA could be the culprit. It just makes the most sense to me overall.

The American collective psyche has a history of mistrust long preceding the events you identify.

In the colonial and early republic there was huge mistrust of Catholics, Jews, Masons, Native Americans and African Americans - many thought they were plotting against them. Why? Because at least some of them - say Native Americans - may well have been in order to stop their land being taken away and their families being slaughtered.

In the nineteenth century, "International Bankers" (shorthand for rich Jews), and other rich businessmen - Carnegie, Morgan, Mellon, Rockefeller - all joined the ranks. There is substance in the idea that they literally conspired to create cartels in some circumstances, so this is not unfounded.

And then we get to the 20th century.

If I told you that 10 servicemen who were serving in Roswell in 1947 have come forward and said "yeah, there was a cover up, I didn't want to say anything earlier because I was worried about prosecution and losing my pension", and all their individual testimonies mostly collaborate you might think there was some evidence of a cover up. What if I then told you the actual number was higher? How many ex-USAAF service personnel would need to say "that was not a weather balloon, there was a cover up" would it take for you to re-think whether there was indeed a conspiracy? 50? 100? The actual number is... over 600.

600 people with no reason to lie are basically going around thinking "wow, my government is really keen on lying". Perhaps telling their families that there are dark, secret forces in this World.

Then a couple of decades later, we have the assassination of JFK. For you to accept the official government explanation of what happened on that day in Dallas, you have to believe in magic bullets and a small entry wound to the front of the head and a large exit wound to the rear of the head is caused by a bullet fired from the rear.

All this sits swirling around people's heads and then _actual_ conspiracies are proved completely true: CIA assassination plots, Watergate, and Iran-Contra.

If somebody tells you that the CIA would "never" do something shady, there is ample evidence that they can, do and will.

The reason Americans believe in conspiracies is because at various points in time there has been ample evidence of them and some of them are actually true. Some of them are just racism, or anti-semitism, or shock, but some of them _are actual conspiracies_.

As to your last sentence, and the wonder what it would take to restore trust. Well, quite simply, the true conspiracies need to stop happening, and that means governments need to stop needing reason to form them. In short, nothing less than total revolution, then.

AFAIK European Americans were escaping powerful occupational guilds in Europe which definitely did conspire in secret and not so secret. There was a fear that such guilds would follow them and establish themselves in the US.

> Watergate, and Iran-Contra

For me, an essential litmus test for whether a “conspiracy theory turned out to be true” is the timing between these three events:

1. Person claims something happened.

2. Government denies it.

3. Thing revealed to have actually happened.

The test is really whether #1 turned out to be valid reasoning, with the benefit of hindsight, i.e. were the claimants vindicated? And if the affair plays out over a matter of weeks, was there really a conspiracy movement?

The two examples you listed… I’m not expert in these, but they feel like controversies rather than conspiracies. Or was there an underground movement of suppressed believers telling us the truth and we just weren’t listening?

There was a conspiracy in all cases.

A conspiracy does not need a conspiracy theorist to be a conspiracy.

However, when a conspiracy becomes public knowledge, my point is that it will contribute to that collective cultural thought that conspiracies happen, they're real, and so other conspiracies being claimed with less evidence could also be real.

My point is that real conspiracies - on being unearthed - fuels support for theories that have less evidence, because as the article we're discussing points out, the reason for conspiracy theories existing that have little evidence of existence has little to do with established facts, and more a sense of what "could" be true.

It is a process and you can't get people to trust you unless you're willing to make some fundamental changes. Private prisons, marijuana criminalization, spying, qualified immunity, etc. are just a few of the reasons people don't trust their government.

The things you are mentioning are bad decisions that favor the government and there are likely be ulterior motives, but there is no overt deception. What's driving distrust IMO is overt deception which is becoming increasingly normalized and regular.

One of the most extreme examples was the death of Officer Brian Sicknick [1] during the January 6th riots. The media ran a nonstop narrative (for months) that he had been brutally killed after being attacked by a rioter with a fire extinguisher: a visceral and discomforting image that helped to frame the riots. Politicians, up to and including the president, exploited this by having an honorary ceremony at the Capitol Rotunda historically used to honor the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, and RBG.

The problem is that not only was he not killed by a fire extinguisher, he wasn't killed at all. He died of a completely unrelated and preexisting medical condition (blood clot in the brain leading to stroke) well after the riots had ended. He texted his brother long after the riots stating he was feeling fine and had no problems except getting pepper sprayed twice. The media tried to pivot to claiming that he died of an allergic reaction to the pepper spray, but there was no basis in reality for that whatsoever and it was also completely dismissed by the medical examiner whose report was publicly released only months after its completion.

Events like this emphasize that the argument of scale against conspiracy theories simply doesn't hold. His family knew what happened, the examiner's office knew what happened, many politicians exploiting his death knew what happened, and I expect there's no doubt much of the media also knew. Yet they all ran with the same story because it helped advance the desired narrative. Efforts at countering it were effectively squished by a mixture of censorship and labels (such as conspiracy theory). And of course this event also emphasizes that the political establishment are more than happy to carry out amoral conspiracies even over such absurdly petty things, and that our media is now more of a tool for political manipulation of society than a balance against it.

So after events like this, what reason do I ever have to now believe the media or politicians on pretty much anything? Even science is now starting to go down the exact same myopic path with things like the famous open letter published by the Lancet [2] declaring any consideration that COVID may have come from a lab leak as being an unjustifiable conspiracy theory. Most of the scientists who signed that letter had direct ties to the Wuhan Lab. They declared no competing interests in the letter, and the Lancet editor who chose to publish it clearly didn't see it as a conflict of interest either.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Brian_Sicknick

[2] - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

> such as conspiracy theory

but most of the rioters were there that day because they believed in some conspiracy theory

Or at least that was their esxcuse to wreak havoc and show their disrespect for any kind of common rule that should not be broken.

If you go there saying you're protecting your president from Hillary Clinton's gang who rallied in a pizza restaurant owned by HC herself but it was actually a cover up for a pedo-ring of satanists who also drank blood, well, even if you don't believe it when you say it, don't be surprised if they'll frame you as cop killers.

Psyops go both ways: sometimes you punch, sometimes you get punched in the face.

So no, that's not reason for distrust of the government, that's reason for not taking reports too seriously and read between the lines looking for the actual information, buried in the noise.

The reason for government distrust in USA is fabricated by those powerful people that do not want to make it obvious that they are abusing the rules and use the common people as human shields to protect their shady interests

> The reason for government distrust in USA is fabricated by those powerful people that do not want to make it obvious that they are abusing the rules and use the common people as human shields to protect their shady interests

Many of those powerful people work in the government, so yes the government is the reason of people distrusting the government.

> Many of those powerful people work in the government

don't know about the US, but AFAIU many of the people who want free hands try to put some of their people in the government

being directly the ones who work for the government means having your public and private life constantly under scrutiny and that's a no go for such people

One should ask (IMO) why people vote for them or believe that people like Sanders are commies who want to destroy US lifestyle ...

> That some agencies in the world deliberately fanning the flames of mistrust and division

Plus, since WW1 misinformation and conspiracy theories has been routinely used as a weapon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare

Disseminating (true or false) information is still one of the main tasks of secret services around the world.

> One has to wonder, what event would restore trust in competent and benign government? Is there such a thing as therapy for a whole culture?

The medicine is called healthy democracy. It requires free press, informed citizenship, schools to teach critical thinking...

(Unsurprisingly many conspiracy theories are undemocratic or spread in undemocratic environments)