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 was raised to trust neither the government nor law enforcement.
Good.
11y 👀
not exactly govt per se, but police, I was a minor and got my phone & money stolen in public area. Went to a police station to report (I really don’t know what to do in that age and being desperate), but the police can only do something if I’m being represented by my parents (I was going out alone). For many years since, I sometimes wonder what would even they exactly do if they took me seriously.
Nowadays I realize the police never took such report seriously anyway, they just make a report and you get the written copy. Unless if you pay for an investigation. “reporting for a stealing incident” is a very administrative service with little actual function to get the stolen item back.
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 was never raised to trust the government in the first place.
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)
Not necessarily stop trusting it, but realize they’re either corrupt or incompetent… Or worse, both. Also, 35…
This depends a lot on where you live, under what kind of government, your socioeconomic background and the personality of your close friends and family.
I grew up in Argentina and I don’t think anyone believes they can really trust the government. Consensus among high school kids is that everyone is corrupt and exploiting legal loopholes is considered the norm.
Now I can’t say there was much of a privacy concern in my circles, in my experience, and that’s still the case today, decades later, in a totally different country. So yeah it depends a lot on a lot.
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 never truly trusted the government 100% from when i was a teenager. I get that we need a government to ensure “things work” and they need us to “turn the gears”, but that’s as far as it goes. They aint looking out for you
Don’t trust what politicians say, watch what they do. They are remarkably consistent then.
I don’t honestly believe such a number exists, but also, I think the age aspect of it is almost or entirely irrelevant.
I probably stopped trusting it when I was a 16 year old libertarian.
