On World War I and Trust in Humans

(draft) The many interesting ways we lost that faith.

My post about the origins of our trust debacle generated many fascinating comments on LinkedIn, some of which commented on Scarcity = Abundance - Trust, as I posted recently.

But the biggie appears to have been this moment in the video at m:ss:

where I pointed to World War I as the moment we lost faith in humans.

What I say in that passage is this:

After trampling and replacing lots of this hard-earned wisdom, we proceeded to lose faith in humans, partly through the senseless, wasteful brutality of World War I, partly through the consumerization of every aspect of our lives, which dumbed us down.

In the process, we broke trust.

This deserves some discussion, no?

Herewith, a series of observations, as sections.

I was generalizing, but also searching for a moment

In my Brain, there's this thought: Somewhere After the Alphabet and Before WWII, We Lost Faith in Humans.

From F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut novel, This Side of Paradise, published in 1920:

Here was a new generation, grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.

Ways World War I Screwed Up the World More of my logic:

• Telegraph and photography both changed journalism forever. Speed and impact of news.
• Scramble for Africa ended with WWI
• The Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916) screwed up the Middle East
• Revolutions were in the air, especially Communism. Took Russia out.
• Infamous Versailles Treaty (and Britain's weird role)
• Eddie Bernays, the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, and his uncle Sigmund
• Ho Chi Minh wrote Woodrow Wilson to ask his assistance in creating a democratic Vietnam
• The meat grinder
• The end of gentlemen soldiers
• Shell shock
• Machine guns, high explosives, poison gas...
• The Spanish Flu started at its end, killed more people. But it also shredded the social fabric. From Laura Spinney's book Pale Rider: "Your best chance of survival was to be utterly selfish... jealously guard your hoard of food and water, and ignore all pleas for help." The Spanish Flu was so awful that nobody wanted to talk about it afterward.

Nobody took issue with my conclusion (yet)

I started with the assertion that we lost faith in humans, then said we built the world's major systems and institutions from a basis of mistrust of the average human.

Seems big, no?

Want to chime in here?

There are so many contributing factors!

Omigosh, it's hard to tally the many moments that contributed to our loss of faith in humans.

I'm interested in your versions. Really.

There are so many other rotten spells of history!

• Witch hunts in the Middle Ages
• Colonialism
• Inquisitions

Convergence of forces

• Speed and reach of communication
• Fear of mobs
• Emergence of media

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