One of the events that got me very worried is the one we all have been giving so much attention to. The Capitol riot was a frightening attempt to overthrow a democratic election. But the other is something that happened to me and my wife personally. That event involved no violence and no politics. But both events are part of a trend that is worrying me about the future.
The other event was a scam call my wife received. The caller told her that he was calling about suspicious charges on her Amazon account. They mentioned several transactions that she said were not done by her. They wanted her to do some things on her computer to help them deal with these suspicious charges. By that time I had overheard some of the call and my wife noticed I was suspicious of the call. So when they wanted her to do something with her computer, she handed the phone over to me, as she does not feel as comfortable with computer tech. The caller wanted me to download a specific computer program to my wife’s laptop. The program was a remote desktop program that would allow a remote user to directly access my wife’s computer. At that point I told the caller that I was not going to download such a program, and hung up.
After I hung up, we logged into my wife’s Amazon account. There was no sign of any suspicious orders or anything other than what she had done herself. No suspicious credit card charges either. It is pretty clear that this was a scam. My wife does not have the knowledge of computer tech that causes alarms to ring in my head if a total stranger making a cold call wants you to download unknown software.
What makes these two events related and makes them worry about the future of the whole nation? They both involve loss of trust between people.
Lately I have wondered why it is that throughout history there are so many bad leaders. What is the history of leadership? So I have been reading books about cultural evolution. Books like Ultrasociety by Peter Turchin, The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter, The Weirdest People in the World by Joseph Henrich. Soon I was enmeshed in clans, chiefdoms, and archaic states. One thing that came up were the concepts of impersonal trust and impersonal prosocialality. These roughly refer to trust for people and cooperation with people that are not known personally or part of the same kinship group. In most of human history, people lived in small clan or tribal groups bound by kinship. Everyone knew personality almost everyone they had dealings with. They did not have to guess if they could be trusted or how they would respond to situations. Now most people live in large societies where most people, including many that they have to deal with, are strangers. In such a situation, it matters a great deal whether the average person can cooperate with other people and can be trusted. History has shown the failure of cooperation and trust has disastrous consequences.
Trust and cooperation in modern America are in trouble. Trump’s followers do not trust anyone except Trump. Republicans are not interested in cooperation with anyone except themselves. Anyone who opposes Trump and his followers have learned that they are not trustworthy. It is impossible to cooperate with Trumpists in what should be common goals, such as fighting the pandemic.
In more personal situations, we appear to be in the golden age of grift. That scam phone call was far from the first. Everyone has to be wary of phone calls from strangers and hackers on their computers. Technology enables new kinds of white collar crime on large scales. The wealthy devise more and more elaborate ways to skim off money from the economy, hide their money, avoid taxation, and generally escape any sort of social rules.
We are being forced to distrust people, to always be suspicious of others. That is the legacy of Trump.
How can our society succeed when a large percentage of people reject any accommodation with the rest of society? How can we do well when an avalanche of lies and scams buries us?