In Mistrust We Trust: How Skepticism Can Fuel Social Change

Ethan Zuckerman shares 5 key insights from Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them.

Happy Thanksgiving, readers. If you’re like a lot of families, in the interest of peace you’ll try to avoid political topics at dinner tonight. And I get it. Things are pretty fraught right now, with an incoming administration poised to make major changes to a wide range of American institutions. In fact, it seems like our countrymen’s deep skepticism about these institutions has greatly contributed to Donald Trump’s continuing political strength. So is this a crisis, or an opportunity? It could be both, according to the 2021 book Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them by Ethan Zuckerman. Ethan teaches public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is the founder of the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure. Here’s Ethan to share 5 of his key insights:

The 5 Key Insights:

1. Politics today is about mistrust.

2. Don't let mistrust paralyze you. 

3. Expand your toolkit.

4. Social media can give us superpowers. 

5. It’s hard to overthrow institutions.

1. Politics today is about mistrust.

In the 1960s, four out of five Americans surveyed told pollsters that they trusted the government to do the right thing all or most of the time. But in the last decade, fewer than one in five Americans said they trusted the government. And it’s not just Washington—Americans have lost trust in large institutions of all sorts, from banks and churches to the media and the healthcare system. We’ve seen the results everywhere, from people resisted the coronavirus vaccine, to supporters of Donald Trump who believe that a “deep state” manipulated the 2020 election. Mistrust toward institutions is now our default stance, and it’s transforming how politics and civics work in the U.S. and around the world.

2. Don’t let mistrust paralyze you.

The danger of mistrusting institutions is that you can lose your ability to influence them. If you assume the government is corrupt, you either give up on it entirely, or you become vulnerable to demagogues who promise that they, personally, can change things. Both of these are traps that will make you helpless. Instead, the key is to learn how to make effective social change, even when you don’t trust the institutions that are supposed to govern society. The Black Panther Party, for example, built their own schools and public health programs instead of relying on programs that weren’t serving black populations. In this way, deciding that you don’t trust an institution can be a first step toward building new systems that work better.

“In the last decade, fewer than one in five Americans said they trusted the government.”

3. Expand your toolkit.

Activists often take inspiration from the civil rights movement, when protests led to new legislation that recognized the rights of Americans who had been subjugated. As a result, many of the people who work to change society today are lawyers, and they consider changing laws to be the most effective way of changing society.

But law is only one tool in a much broader toolkit; you can make social change through markets, for example, creating new products like electric cars or home solar panels that reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. You can make change through social norms, as the Black Lives Matter movement has done, forcing institutions to confront their embedded biases. You can even make change with technology—a remarkable programmer named Moxie Marlinspike created an encrypted messaging system that the NSA can’t eavesdrop on. He then integrated it into WhatsApp, giving hundreds of millions of people a way to protect their communications from the government.

“Deciding that you don’t trust an institution can be a first step toward building new systems that work better.”

4. Social media can give us superpowers.

Trying to make change via social media is often dismissed as a waste of time, but where social media can be very powerful is in shaping social norms. Consider the Me Too movement, which started online and involved thousands of women telling their stories about sexual abuse. Combating sexual harassment didn’t require a change in law—it’s been illegal for years. What it required was a change in norms to become something that institutions were forced to address instead of sweeping it under the rug. Social media allowed ordinary individuals to change the narrative about abuse, leading to real change in workplaces around the world.

5. It’s hard to overthrow institutions.

Institutionalists try to steer institutions in the right direction, while insurrectionists believe that some institutions need to be overthrown and replaced. It’s certainly sexier to think of yourself as a revolutionary, but recent U.S. politics have shown how important it is to have resilient institutions, so that a president can’t simply appoint Supreme Court justices who overturn an election he loses. So one powerful strategy for change is trying to bring institutions back to their founding values. For example, we could turn the House of Representatives back into the “people’s house” by electing 10,000 new representatives, thereby returning to George Washington’s idea that people should have a personal relationship with someone who advances their interests in the nation’s capital.