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.
11y 👀
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Exceptionally young, around 8 years old. Same goes for religious people lying to me.
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. There are also multiple levels of government and so many people are angry at the feds over property taxes which has nothing to do with the feds.
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.
I fully endorse this point, but with an added caveat. The government is made up of people, just like any other organization, but there is often less money to be had in the public sector than the private sector (corruption notwithstanding) so often you wind up with people passionate about their work, but occasionally you have people who aren’t talented enough to hack it in the private sector.
Sadly, most people who understand this seem to just lurk.
Maybe each unhinged commenter scares away a nuanced commenter and a bit, until some kind of equilibrium is reached.
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 was around 12 and to this day I think that was the most corrupt student council we had.
Few months after 9/11 is when I figured it out so I was like 7 or 8
I was 16 on 9/11. I remember watching john Ashcroft the Friday before talking about how the Pentagon couldn’t account for billions of dollars. Then i wake up on Monday morning to the planes hitting the towers.
I stopped trusting the government sometime around there
I don’t honestly believe such a number exists, but also, I think the age aspect of it is almost or entirely irrelevant.
As soon as I knew what a government was. Age 12ish
Took another 18 years for me to actually have articulated reasons why other than "feels*
For me, the second I understood what war really was, it was clear that governments are often evil and shouldn’t be trusted. That was probably around age 12.
For me, it was somewhere around 14. Maybe younger.
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It’s not just age, it’s when you’re living. Someone growing up in the '50s probably had more trust in the government than someone growing up in the '60s, for instance. But it really feels like overall trust has dropped significantly since then and probably won’t recover. Part of the reason is we simply know more about what’s going on. There are still secrets, but not like there were in WWII and the decade after.
