All the Institutions I Was Taught to Trust Are Crumbling All at Once

A Eulogy for the Modern World Order

As a Canadian raised in the 1980s, I grew up believing in the fundamental good of democratic governments and the morality of the liberal world order. In the Jewish elementary and high schools I attended, I was taught the principle of “Never Again” and the existential need for the State of Israel. I was drawn to study science in part because I understood that its methodology and culture produced singularly trustworthy claims. Convinced of America’s exceptionalism, I moved to New York City and came to believe in both the impartiality of American jurisprudence, with its steadfast reliance on precedent, and in the essentially unbiased nature of the Fourth Estate. I went to Davos to help “improve the state of the world.” And I founded tech startups because I held that capitalism was necessary to do big, important things in the world.

In the past months, weeks, and days, all of these institutions and tenets that I was taught to trust, upon which I built the scaffolding of my life, have crumbled before my eyes. All together, all at once.

Thousands of children are being killed in Gaza and the West Bank by Israel with the support of the United States, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, and other allies. The UN is blocked there from doing what it was founded to do — maintain international peace and security — by a U.S. veto. By a country where the frontrunner of one of two political parties has been charged with criminal activity concerning the last election. And where the highest court in the land recently overturned a nearly half century precedent, ending the constitutional right to abortion.

Bias in the media is now almost taken for granted. A recent quantitative analysis of the coverage of the first six weeks of the Gaza war in major newspapers, for example, shows that reporting has been skewed toward Israeli narratives. Science, too, is broken. More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023, a new record, with notable recent cases rocking some of the world’s foremost universities and top journals.

Meanwhile, the irresponsibly rapid rollout of generative AI by big tech is eroding the epistemological foundations of society — that is, the ways in which we construct knowledge, arrive at truth, and make decisions. As Douglas Hofstadter recently forewarned, it could “undermine the very nature of truth on which our society — and I mean all of human society — is based.”

The world, to me, feels rudderless. And I know I’m not alone.

Public trust in the federal government in the U.S. is currently among the lowest measures in nearly seven decades of polling, according to the latest data from Pew. For just the second time in Gallup’s survey of trust in the Supreme Court dating back to 1972, less than half of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust and confidence in it.

More generally, nearly three-quarters of Americans 18–39 years of age no longer consistently support fundamental democratic tenets — and this trend holds globally. According to Freedom House, “Democratic backsliding has become a global trend. Amid this environment comes a rash of statistics suggesting that the world’s young people are increasingly disengaged from political life… telling researchers that their country’s leaders aren’t working in their interests.” And on the heels of a pandemic and in the midst of a global climate crisis, the false tidiness of a bordered nation state feels fictional and anachronistic.

This disillusionment extends to other arenas as well. Roughly a quarter of Americans now say they have not too much or no confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests, up from 12% in April 2020. Only 36% of voters surveyed in November by the Wall Street Journal said the American dream — the ultimate expression of capitalism — still holds true, substantially fewer than the 53% who said so in 2012. And finally, faith in our bedrock social institution is breaking down, with a recent survey showing that 2 in 5 Americans 18–42 years of age currently view marriage as “an outdated tradition.”

That I had so much trust in so many institutions for so long is very much a reflection of my privilege. I’ve never been racially profiled by my government, I’ve never been unable to pay for healthcare or education, my demographic has never been excluded from clinical trials, I’ve never been banned from traveling or lived under occupation, I’ve never experienced hatred or fear because of my religion, I’ve never felt unseen or misrepresented by the media I consume, I was never prevented from marrying who I love. I’ve benefited from these institutions because I look like the men who built them.

What I now feel about these institutions — immoral, corrupt, hollow, anachronistic — has long been the cruel reality for millions who are systematically colonized, oppressed, subjugated, and excluded by them. But their voices are growing louder, echoed by millions of us.

And the cracks in the walls are deepening.