Inspired by a few other posts and memes flying about. When I was young movies and tbh real life you would come across old people telling you that can’t trust the gov. To keep your cash at home etc. tell em nothing.
I am feeling it. I always assumed maybe about 60 it will happen to me. I kinda linked it to idle minds or a cognitive decline but lack of trust for me has arrived a lot earlier and I think I can rationalise to myself it’s more based on the gov actions rather than my circumstances.
So wha do you think in the magic age number that trust in the gov erodes? I’ll start. 42.
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Not every generation is the same. Many old people where I live and today still seem to trust it a lot, while the ones from when you were a kid probably saw WWII and the Great Depression.
What I’m saying is, it’s less an age, and more what you’ve lived through.
Exceptionally young, around 8 years old. Same goes for religious people lying to me.
I trust some parts of government to be useful. Like food assistance or healthcare are useful and should be expanded. I don’t trust that politicians will keep the useful parts useful though. Also gotta keep this in mind.
I don’t honestly believe such a number exists, but also, I think the age aspect of it is almost or entirely irrelevant.
I didn’t start caring about politics until the late 2000s. When I learned about how bad George W Bush was, it gave me a hint. Politics to me growing up, was just simply background noise, something I could ignore. It was until within Obama’s second term that I started to really see what was happening, so this was about 26 for me. Then 2016 since, I would say that my trust in the government has all but been broken and that was even before Trump had his first term.
When I was about 20 in college I learned that saying shit like ‘the government’ is stupid. Because there is no ‘the government’.
There are agencies, institutions, and individuals in the government. All with varying levels of competence and corruption and incentives. Some of them are amazing, others are really shitty. Just like people or companies or anything.
And I learned to avoid interacting with people who think in massive generalized terms about anything, because they tend to be very emotional and very irrational.
18 when I was able to vote and started paying attention to what politicians said and did.
So that would make it voting age. After that you can trust individuals who run the government, but even trustworthy people in power can be held up by institutional inertia like police unions.
what age do you stop trusting the alternative to government, which is corporations?
let me just remind you that at least the government is voted in, wheras corporations are just any assholes with enough money to buy things and pay wages.
They’re not mutually exclusive?
You can and should not trust either
yes, go live in the nonexistent commune; it’s a solution for 8 billion people.
You can not trust something and still live under it.
It’s about being aware that you should be prepared for if things get worse.
I have never trusted them, I stupidly fell into the might be ok as someone will step up and regulate but I’ve been making steps to stop and protect more of my privacy.
I think it depends on the trustworthiness of your government. Even then, it’s a scale that slides depending on the situation. I’m in my 70s and feel my government is going through a very solid stage right now. My trust level is at one of the highest level.
Trust would have had to be earned in the first place to have stopped. My understanding of the US government was shaped by being raised on a military base in the UK, 9/11 happened but was never exaggerated or propagandized to the degree that it apparently was in the US.
I was never raised to trust the government in the first place.
I probably stopped trusting the government around age 10.
After going through and reading others’ answers, I’m curious if you still think it’s “an old man thing”.
I probably stopped trusting it when I was a 16 year old libertarian.
Sometime between the age of 8 and 12 I remember I started to question authority, not government of countries specifically, but just the concept of authority.
I always felt like teachers were against me for some reason… frequently I got marked for “bad behavior” and weren’t allowed to go on trips…
Then I learned about Tiananmen… for context my family were all born in China… my older brother who actually went through like 7th grade in China was so shocked learned about it in the US and I remember him telling me to look it up online…
Then I remember my mom started telling me about the One Child Policy and how I was the one born against policy…
So yeah… you can see how I’m starting to get very skeptical of things
Then I learn about all the bribery stuff in US Congress, SuperPACs… etc…
US Cops shooting people and getting away with it…
The infamous Gun Trace Task Force of Baltimore
The Great Firewall of China and the censorship…
Then my “arc” completed when I was 17 and got arrested on false accusations of “agravated assault” when I was acting in self-defence against a racist bully in school… even the school admin sided against me and tried to expell me…
So by age 18, I distrust governments… and authorities in general…
Especially the PRC Government and the US Government
I mean distrusting authorities is a very American thing to do…
(Distrust PRC significantly more intensely because of the fact that they tried to end my existence)
I was raised to trust neither the government nor law enforcement.
Good.
