On World War I and Trust in Humans

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

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 1:37:

where I pointed to World War I as the moment we lost faith in humans. Many commenters disagreed with WWI as the marker.

This deserves some discussion, no?

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.

Herewith, a series of observations from an amateur historian and student of change.

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. That's a much bigger window: written alphabets seem to have started around 1000 BC with the Phoenicians, and World War II started in 1939.

So I'm on the side of the argument that says there were many causes and many moments that contributed to our loss of faith.

Omigosh, it's hard to tally the many moments that contributed to our loss of faith in humans. You could point to the Witch hunts in the Middle Ages, Colonialism, the Inquisitions and Crusades (so many!), or other tktktk.

But there's something pivotal about World War I that's worth exploring. After it was over, in his 1920 debut novel This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote:

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

I'm definitely not an historian, but the amateur lover of history in me can list these Ways World War I Screwed Up the World.

But, but: 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? I'm interested in your versions. Really.

Convergence of forces

• Emergence of modern mass media
• Speed and reach of communication
• Fear of mobs
• Senselessness of conflicts
• Rigid institutions
• Population growth outrunning our ability to control people

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