Firstly, I’m going to colour my perspective. Through the last several years I have worked, in both Ottawa and Toronto, in film (advertising, webseries, indie projects, and music videos), in academia (IT at a major university), manual labour (roofing, siding, painting, arboriculture), in the arts (as a gallery artist, a gallery director, and an organizer), and as a designer (graphic, visual, and illustration). I have met no small collection of people from different walks of life.
Now here are links to the two posts Gardner has published today:
Don’t Trust the Trust Decline
Negativity Bias
And so we proceed. Anecdotally, what I can tell is that, at least here in Canada, trust for government is at an all time low. I even know people in government who distrust government - though also don’t, they’re more so just frustrated by budget reviews and such.
So, in academia and in public view, the failures of the Trudeau government to ensure everyone has potable water have been seen as reflections of a racist history. The police are also counted in this (just go read Rinaldo Walcott’s On Property for a written example). While in IT, roofing, siding, and painting, I have encountered no small number of people who identify as “communists” and “marxists”. These are not perspectives that appeal to me as I think they’re a little more than nonstarters so don’t consider them reflections of my own ideals, what’s important is that distrust of government is the underlying concern for these people. The idea is “the system has failed us”. Some are as conspiratorial as Guy Debord, others memorize facts about Leninism and figures about discriminatory crimes.
In both Ontario and Quebec many people experience atrocious wait times and find it hard to access medicine, many of these people wind up going the other way, they believe that privatization will help ease the concerns of the average person - again a perspective I will never support. That being said, from what I’ve seen in the news, the issue is rather common across Canada, with smaller communities having trouble finding and retaining health care professionals, and difficulty finding family doctors almost everywhere.
I am very much under the impression that the media is right when it comes to such a perspective in Canada. Everyone I speak with seems to think something is wrong. You even see complaints that psychedelics are still illegal getting lumped in with the concerns of many average people, something that makes less and less sense as our research into the therapeutic capabilities of both psilocybin and LSD becomes harder and harder to ignore. These critiques often think that we’re controlling things that people should have a right to in the way they consume alcohol and cannabis - both legal in Canada in case any foreign readers might wonder.
The list goes on, the public further distrusts the media as the right wing media tends to make hyperbolic, inflammatory, and oftentimes entirely misleading statements, and the left have adopted the neoliberal discourse of hyperindividuality. This issue is compounded by a sense of insecurity as we find that so many work for poverty wages - look up minimum wage in your area, then living wage, these two numbers are consistently out of line, or consider just the first numbers along the statcan “Market income, government transfers, total income, income tax and after-tax income by economic family type” chart, “median market income” for “Economic families and persons not in an economic family” goes from 58,200 (CAD) to 61,700 from 2017 through 2021, adjusted for inflation using the Bank of Canada inflation calculator, this group has suffered a loss of roughly 2373.39 in real dollars. Add to this issue the concepts of shrinkflation and greedflation, and voila, the two major social perspectives think we either need more regulation or less because what is happening isn’t working for anyone except maybe the Weston family and friends - who luckily we all mostly agree are self-interested and perhaps even evil people.
A note, if you’ve read some of my other Substack posts, you’ll probably know that I definitely believe in more regulation.
Now, though I do agree with Gardner about us all not living in the United States of America, there is a lot that we share aside from a border, our culture is probably that which is most influenced by our neighbours to the South. They are, after all, our largest trade partner. And so, here I invoke a little quote from Astra Taylor’s New York Times opinion article today, Why Does Everyone Feel So Insecure All the Time?, that I think is highly relevant:
If inequality can be captured in statistics, insecurity requires talking about feelings: It is, to borrow a phrase from feminism, personal as well as political. Economic issues, I’ve come to realize, are also emotional ones: the spike of shame when a bill collector calls, the adrenaline when the rent or mortgage is due, the foreboding when you think about retirement.
And unlike inequality, insecurity is more than a binary of haves and have-nots. Its universality reveals the degree to which unnecessary suffering is widespread — even among those who appear to be doing well. We are all, to varying degrees, overwhelmed and apprehensive, fearful of what the future might have in store. We are on guard, anxious, incomplete and exposed to risk. To cope, we scramble and strive, shoring ourselves up against potential threats. We work hard, shop hard, hustle, get credentialed, scrimp and save, invest, diet, self-medicate, meditate, exercise, exfoliate.
And yet security, for the most part, eludes us. That’s because the main mechanisms by which we are told to gain security for ourselves — making money, buying property, earning degrees, saving for retirement — often involve being invested in systems that rarely provide the stability we crave.
This present insecurity is seen as manufactured insecurity, and as noted by Taylor, has certainly already been written about extensively.
It is this insecurity that I dislike most because for all of us, it seems to be at the centre of our limitations. Many work in conditions that amount to modern forms of serfdom - unable to travel or move, only having enough to survive, and even those that don’t see their financial capacity dwindling with the years.
I need to add another massive quote, this article is simply too good for me to butcher with wordy attempts at summary:
As the British political theorist Mark Neocleous has noted, the modern word “insecurity” entered the English lexicon in the 17th century, just as our market-driven society was coming into being. Capitalism thrives on bad feelings. Discontented people buy more stuff — an insight the old American trade magazine “Printers’ Ink”stated bluntly in 1930: “Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones.” It’s hard to imagine any advertising or marketing department telling us that we’re actually OK, and that it is the world, not us, that needs changing. All the while, manufactured insecurity encourages us to amass money and objects as surrogates for the kinds of security that cannot actually be commodified — connection, meaning, purpose, contentment, safety, self-esteem, dignity and respect — but which can only truly be found in community with others.
Part of the insidious and overwhelming power of insecurity is that, unlike inequality, it is subjective. Sentiments, or how real people actually feel, rarely map rationally onto statistics; you do not have to be at rock bottom to feel insecure, because insecurity results as much from expectation as from deprivation. Unlike inequality, which offers a snapshot of the distribution of wealth at a certain moment in time, insecurity spans the present and future, anticipating what may come next.
After this we return to another topic I often dwell on, the negative effects of a competitive environment with rising inequality and depreciating resources, is the umwelt which Gabor Maté has noted as causing so much illness (it amuses me that in this article, the only book of his I’ve read in whole is quoted right at the end). We are becoming increasing unwell, we are less and less healthy. Here, at this point in her article, Taylor focuses on the concept of fractal inequality - essentially how we all feel insecure in looking up the rungs of financial capacity.
One final Taylor quote and note on this topic:
This manufactured insecurity reflects a cynical theory of human motivation, one that says people will work only under the threat of duress, not from an intrinsic desire to create, collaborate and care for one another. What the economist John Kenneth Galbraith called “the nerve-racking problem of insecurity” is, he argued, a feature inherent to our competitive economic system, one that takes the form of “episodic unemployment for the worker” on the one side, and “occasional insolvency for the farmer or businessman” on the other. “Along with the carrot of pecuniary reward,” he wrote, “must go the stick of personal economic disaster.”
This is the source of mass distrust, this is why so many are voting in strong man politicians, we want someone to make us feel safe.
There’s one bit of irony, in that, for me, I believe most of these issues stem from neoliberal developments in the last century that basically destroyed the liberal project, and that is that one of the best solutions we’ve tested in Ontario and British Colombia, actually was originally a neoliberal concept: negative taxation. Or, as we more commonly hear of it today, minimum income. It works, it helps, and it grants everyone what they need without stigmatizing their financial situation. Of course there are a lot of other political hard pills to swallow for our governing parties, we seriously need to change housing regulation, everyone definitely deserves basic healthcare and access to medicine, and we need to better regulate how the cost of necessary food items change, however, I feel it that these can all be tackled simultaneously with enough public and political support. We just need to regain that trust, and in order to do that, we need that little thing Obama originally campaigned on, change. Politicians need to be willing to take hits in the polls to rebuild trust, unless the average person sees that things are being done about the insecurity felt in their lived experience, there will not be any new trust found.
*Oh, one last little thing, I meant to point out at some point that the one concerning statistic in Gardner’s article was the one that expresses why trust is in decline, it is the severe decline in peace and security.