Opinion/Editorial
BROKEN TRUST
Many centuries ago, the concept of money was born. Money in those early days was a way of transferring trust. Barter existed wherein goods of certain quantities and value could be traded for certain other goods of varying amounts depending upon value. The problems of transferring trust for certain other things, without the use of paper and the certification process it brings, were problematic until the idea of using wood arose. A contract was sealed by breaking a piece of wood in half and a value or agreement was carved into the side of the wood on both pieces. One piece of wood was stored in a special vault for such things in castles across the land of England. The other piece of wood was the active piece demonstrating value, whether that is of property or a certain amount of anything else. The wood could then be passed around and hold value while its validity could be checked by returning to the castle vault and determining if the piece holding the value fit into the other half held in the vault. Back in those days it was impossible to counterfeit anything as complex as the structure of dried wood. The wooden ‘proofs’ were surrendered to advancing technology where coins and bills became much more difficult to counterfeit.
In later years, as cars were invented and oil refined to fuel them, great glass bulbs were blown and suspended in the air in places called filling stations. The graduated glass bulbs were required to prove that the correct amount of gasoline paid for was actually being pumped into a car owner’s tank. Just as the wooden ‘currency’ of old had been invented to physically prove trust so the gravity feed gasoline bulbs demonstrated or proved trust at all the stations of the world. The glass bulbs of proof gave way to advancing technology wherein bonded experts with meters could be brought in to check the pumps continually and continuously.
Slowly, as technology advanced, trust procedures became less physical and more distantly dependent upon the words of other people through more physically remote video and photographic means. The process of this transfer seemed ever more immutably accurate, hugely timesaving, and so much easier than the physical ‘right in your face’ proofs of earlier eras. Humans of our modern highly civilized and high technology era are being conditioned to accept ever more ephemeral proofs for the existence, value, and truth of nearly everything and these ‘proofs’ being provided are inaccurate through ignorance, deliberation, or both. This essay makes no attempt to evaluate every area that is experiencing this loss of trust, as there are simply too many. Herein I am attempting to point out the general result of accepting falsity as truth, worthlessness as value, script as real conversation. The effect of such acceptance is a deep and darkening loss across America and across most developed parts of the world. This loss has been exponentially increased because of the purchase of media outlets by wealthy individuals and large powerful corporations. These people and entities are perpetrating disinformation and outright lies to further their survival strategies without any real understanding or care that their eventual success cannot stand if the cultures supporting them fail.
America did not back down from space exploration because of a lack of funding capability or there would have been no money for Iraq and Afghanistan. Kennedy was not killed by a lone assassin (either one) and there remain no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (and there never were). Many of these outright lies are still perpetrated as the truth, even though data proving the contrary is everywhere. Tesla invented the radio, radar, radio control and the electricity we use today, not Edison, Westinghouse, or Marconi. By not being able to know or understand the truth today’s cultures remain mired in social and technological doldrums controlled by political creatures that have no care about the future of anyone other than themselves. We exist as nations of the present, occupying a mythical world lost in deliberately displaced trust, unable to move forward because our only visible knowable future is today.
Social trust, just as the foundations of science, must be based upon hard-edged, tough, and even painful reality or the current ‘spinning to march in place’ will continue until the past slowly and inexorably becomes the future in every conceivable way.
