The Problem of Misinformation in an Era Without Trust Elon Musk thinks a free market of ideas will self-correct. Liberals want to regulate it. Both are missing a deeper predicament.
A more clarifying take on trust is laid out by Chris Hayes in “Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy,” a book that was published in 2012 and turned out to be extraordinarily prescient. In it, Hayes describes how elite malfeasance — the forever wars after 9/11; the 2008 financial crisis — was deeply corrosive, undermining the public’s trust in institutions. This “crisis of authority” is deserved, he says, but it has also left us vulnerable. A big, complex democracy requires institutional trust in order to function. Without it, “we really do risk a kind of Hobbesian chaos, in which truth is overtaken by sheer will-to-power.”