My friend Roger has written an essay that describes the fall in measures of trust in New Zealand society, and rightly identifies these indicators as pointing to important declines in the way that society is working.  He goes on to urge us to replace interactions based on zero-sum grievance with mutual identification of what's not working and the will to fix it.

In the US, people often ask me about the differences between NZ and US society, and I've always identified trust as fundamental: in institutions, in the government, in personal interactions with each other, as the biggest difference I've seen.  And for years, in this blog, I've lamented the losing of trust as underlying many of the woes we see besetting us: the acceptance of falsehood as truth, the abandonment of institutions as too flawed to be usable, even though they were built for good reason and have served well over decades or centuries, the prevailing attitudes that all politicians are the same, they're all corrupt, all media is biased and promotes their own agendas, all big business is against us, the justice system is only for those with money, the cops want to hurt us, you're on your own in this world.  All these trust systems ideally create an environment within which everyone, regardless of luck or initial circumstance, can flourish.  If they're broken, they need fixing, not demolishing.

I often attributed the strong levels of trust between people in NZ to the small size of the population and the way the education system worked.  It's easier to gain consensus on the fundamentals when everyone is born and raised in the same systems, from the hospitals they're born in through the college they graduate from.  As many noted when I lived there, this perhaps leads to a tendency to conformity.  The US was long viewed by me as a society within which non-conformity is not only tolerated but celebrated.

Until the first Trump administration I thought that the society I was living in had a huge variety of ideas about the right way to live, but they were all grounded in tolerance of others and some fundamental common ideas about human rights, the rule of law, institutions that were designed to further those premises.  We had a shared understanding of where we wanted to get to, and lots of different conflicting ideas about how to get there.  The biggest shock to me in that election was discovering how many people didn't share either those fundamentals or the underlying facts on the ground that told us how the world was.