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I have spent a lifetime attending to what people say, what they do, and the patterns that emerge. People say and do a lot of things, but underneath there are common principles and meta messages. Here’s a basic one. Trust between people is fundamental and resilient, but only to a point. Have you ever tried to repair broken trust in a relationship? You may never get it back. Maybe you two can sit at a table and negotiate some workable compromise, but don’t fool yourself. That is not trust.
Trust is fundamental because we need each other to survive, on an individual and group level. We build relationships, some close like a partnership, but many more that are indirect, as in a community or a nation. We humans are hard wired to operate like this. All of these relationships require the bonds of trust. We tolerate quite a bit of flex in this trusting network because overall, it does the job of supporting us.
We are witnessing the breakdown of trust between people and government on a broad scale.
Specifically, Canadians are boycotting all things American. It is a grassroots, spontaneous, leaderless response to the Trump administration. The boycott is spreading internationally. The Guardian posted an article on March 10, 2025 on the topic. The title is, ‘I feel utter anger’: From Canada to Europe, a movement to boycott US goods is spreading” by Peter Beaumont.
This part is really, really important. This is a grassroots movement. En masse, people around the world are simply doing it themselves.
Ah, trust. When it’s gone, it’s gone. And then what do we see?
Governments fall. Stockmarkets falter. Polls fail. When politicians like Trump come to power and the corruption of government becomes glaringly obvious, the population stops listening to what that government says and simply acts on its own.
But here we are, in Canada, at the end of our trust in the southern neighbour. A knock on effect is looking at other leaders with newly sensitized eyes. Entitlement, vindictiveness, bullying, self aggrandizement are recognized for the dangers that they are.
These behaviours show up in community associations, in workplaces, in families. Perhaps once they could be dismissed, but now the import is so much clearer: I can’t trust you to do your job/tell the truth/behave responsibly. Then family therapists and workplace consultants are brought in to try to put the toxic group dynamic on a better footing. Even on a small scale, such interventions are very hard to get right. But when the trust problem is with a larger institution, such as media, public health authorities or any level of government, the fix so much harder.
That these boycotts are citizen based and spontaneous is the important thing. Ordinary people are taking it upon themselves to formulate their own foreign policy. It is just a boycott of all things American, but like all simple concepts, it takes nothing special in the form of reports and analyses from media and government to make it work. The populations are speaking their own truth to power, a simple message of no.
This essay was sparked by a series of questions. Why do we have leaders? More specifically, what is the point of having leaders if they can not be trusted with the power inherent in a leadership role? What is it that we need and trust them to do so much that we invest them with all this power?
I think the reason for leaders and media is to make sense of the world for us. There is more information about the world than one person can successfully integrate. The task is therefore delegated. It is why we create leaders: to aggregate information, what it means, and what to do. It is not that we the citizens are a bunch of stupid sheep, far from it. We are pretty sophisticated consumers of information. But our lives are so busy and complicated, and the amount of the information from the bigger world so very great, that we need structures we can rely on for the big picture.
It is always about information. Priests, royalty, scholars, national governments: as information grows, their role shifts but it is always one of data collection, narrative building and planning. Citizens invest trust in these institutions to serve these purposes. The job for both government and media is to organize the facts and put them in reasonable context. The job for government is to provide and implement plans. It is the task of media to provide additional facts and lay out alternate stories.
Modern governments and media basically have just one job: organize information. We citizens ask them to do it faithfully and accurately. In return we the populace will support them. But the Canadian boycott says one thing clearly: that the trust between leadership of that nation and the citizens of this nation, strained under the global weight of mismanaged pandemic response and outrage from a campaign of genocide, is now done. We no longer trust the US government to manage their affairs responsibly. Trust is not eroded or strained, it is broken.
A government breaks trust with the public, its own citizens and the wider world at large, by mismanaging information, compromising a free press and controlling the narrative. Controlling the narrative is the way of anyone seeking to dominate a workplace, family, or a nation. Managing information is the tool to capture the immense power of a world full of people. It comes down to making sure which story dominates and minimizing any other versions.
Christina Pagel’s recent substack lays out how the Trump administration is managing scientific and academic information:
We speak of trust as something that is eroded, when suspicion develops slowly. In contrast, the end of trust comes abruptly. A population wide loss of faith has a tipping point quality to it, and, as Malcolm Gladwell laid out so clearly, it is a point of no return. Once that tipping point is reached, distrust spreads. Leaders fall. Governments change.
It is such a simple job, that has been failed so completely and utterly: tell us the truth. Be reliable. We need information and we need it in a reasonable context. We in the western world aren’t getting it and so we act on our own.
Remember that polls said Kamala Harris would win the 2024 presidential election? Why do political and opinion polls fail on such a large scale? Implicitly, citizens say to their leaders: maybe, since you no longer tell me the truth, I will not tell you the truth either. Maybe that is the reason polls fail. Governments and pollsters can no longer know what people think, who they will vote for or what they will consume, until they simply act on their own.
A decline of political trust shows up in a variety of ways. A degree of scepticism in any nation may show up in low voter turnout or conspiracy theories. Perhaps there will be splintering of political power or more frequent elections. But general strikes, marches on the seat of power, even occupations of a capital city, speak to a more final breakdown in the trust of a population for their government. How bad is this breakdown? You may not really know until citizens start to spontaneously act with, for example, a general boycott of goods and services.
Citizen to government, to media: you had fundamentally just one job: collect and organize information, build a context and develop a plan. We citizens are not stupid, we just need institutions to do that part for us, help manage the complexity of this life in this world. But you took that to mean if you could control the narrative you could control people. You could manipulate with misinformation to your own benefit. Under the weight of your early successes you became deluded into thinking you can do anything if you just control the narrative.
Maybe the boycott is implicitly saying they don’t believe you anymore. Maybe the end of trust has already happened.