Last week I wrote about how Americans have lost considerable belief in their elected leaders. Recent studies show a similar collapse in faith in non-government agencies too, indicating a spiraling mistrust of all leaders across all sectors.
Yes, this is another summary installment of the Intelligence Unit’s report “Revenge of the Deplorables” published earlier this year. You can get your own copy here. In my opinion, anyone pursuing fundamental change needs to read this report. It lays our our theater of operation in delightful detail.
While American faith in political leadership is in the toilet, churches and labor unions – bulwark organizations of the working class – are suffering a similar losses of confidence according to the report. This is great news as popular sentiments and a search for something to believe then shifts from our political leaders to these more community oriented institutions. And yet, as that shift occurs, as the general public searches desperately for something to believe in, they are finding more and more that believing in themselves is preferable to these more traditional places they once placed their trust.
Not only have churches and labor for unions suffered so have Banks, big business the media and other commercial institutions. Not surprisingly, popular sentiment has also lost confidence in its own ability to forward an effective political agenda. The intelligence unit makes this abundantly clear:
The percentage of people who have a good or great deal of confidence in the political wisdom of the American people dropped from 77 percent in 1964 to 64 percent in 1997, to 57 percent in 2007 and to 35 percent in 2015. Nevertheless, more than half of those surveyed by Pew think that ordinary Americans would do a better of of solving problems than elected officials.
What is delightfully remarkable about this quote is that last sentence. Even though Americans have lost confidence in their own ability to solve political problems or problems overall, they still believe that ordinary people can solve these problems. This leads to tremendous opportunity for those ordinary citizens who are working stridently towards fundamental change. For if we can offer salient and realistic transition processes leading to a better conceptual or theoretical future, now can be an excellent time for having those transition processes is adopted by mainstream popular sentiment.
What’s really remarkable about this trust erosion political leaders and institutions is, how long this erosion has been going on. Many people are of the opinion that the 1960s era fundamental change movement characterized by “Flower children”, “hippies”, LSD and standoffs like Kent State was an abject failure. These people disdainfully believe change agents of that time turned into the very people they once despised. And yet, according to the Intelligence Report the seeds of change planted in the 1960s seemingly is resulting in the flowering of institutional mistrust we see today:
The slump in levels of popular trust in government has continued for an unprecedentedly long period of time. Fewer than three in ten Americans have expressed trust in the federal government in every national poll conducted since July 2007, the longest period of low trust in government for more than 50 years. According to Pew, the erosion of public trust in government began in the 1960s after peaking at an all-time high of 77 in 1964. Within ten years a period that included the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy, civil unrest and the Watergate scandal—trust in government had fallen by more than half, to 6 , after which it oscillated around this relatively low level. Since the early 2000s confidence in government has fallen further, in the wake of disastrous wars in the Middle East, a deep recession after the 00 -09 financial crash, and gridlock and dysfunction on Capitol Hill.
It’s really exciting to see the macro trend evidenced in these statistics. It’s even more remarkable to think that people like Buckminster Fuller and Jacque Fresco had their heydays in the early parts of the fundamental change era. Today, a new era of individuals and innovations are gripping public consciousness beginning with the early adopters. And now we see the funding necessary to implement these innovations emerging from within the elite class. There is no doubt in my mind, that all of this is result result of a conscious plan instigated by collective consciousness as part of a grand scheme of social evolution towards greater diversity and greater freedom, evidenced by the gentle retirement of capitalist foundations and debt-based financial instruments.
In other words, we are at an unprecedented time of harvest. A point in the era where are those who’ve gone before us expected to see. How inspiring it is to be living in these times, being part of the implementation of something that has been in the works for several decades.
I’ll be sharing more about this macro trend and its implications for Copiosis in future posts. Stay tuned.
Somehow the momentum swings back our direction. Although this momentum takes ages or a generation to resurface. I truly believe we must lead ourselves in a direct democratic way otherwise we will be here in another generation. Very insightful article, thank you!
Yep. The more I think about fundamental change, the more I think it can’t be achieved apart from the system. The “system” is us. Therefore, the change might need to come from multiple fronts.
Great article!!! I feel that’s what I took away from the Sixties. At the same time, the system seems to keep going.