1522 Loss of Faith in Institutions

Up until the current generation, Gen-Z, people respected institutions: law, medicine, government, education, entertainment, news. They had reason to because life was continually improving; each successive generation was doing better than the last, and the people in those institutions seemed to have earned their place. Now it seems all institutions are inadequate, incompetent, even counter productive, and people have lost faith in the opinions of "experts." One by one, our institutions have been shown to be corrupted: medicine was dishonored by COVID, the judicial system was disgraced by the lawfare on Trump, education is tainted by usurious student loans & politically-biased faculty, Climate Change put science into disrepute, and business has consolidated into monopoly. Most previously trusted fields, economists for example, fall into the same category as pollsters & hedge fund managers. Then along came affirmative action, followed by DEI; not to mention increasing levels of nepotism. Merit is derided as White Supremacy, which is defined as thinking that conscientiousness, punctuality & integrity are good things. Of course, this is coming from the people who are none of those things, and got their positions of authority through questionable means. Combine that with general social & economic degradation that comes with the fall of empires, and nobody believes in anything anymore. There has been a resurgence of religious fervor, and maybe that can save us and the institutions too, but it seems doubtful.