Emerging Sources of Trust, and the Central Role of IT
In a widely discussed end-of-the-year editorial, New York Times commentator Frank Rich suggested that Tiger Woods should have been deemed Time magazine’s Person of the Year. Rather than just piling on to the beleaguered golfer’s woes, Rich was actually making a serious point. In many ways, the shocking collapse of Woods’ public persona was indeed a fitting symbol for a decade filled with so many people, organizations and things that just weren’t what they seemed.
It’s all too easy to list the many disgraces, excesses and false alarms of the past ten years, especially in the US – Y2K, Enron, Worldcom, dot.com, SARS, bird flu, abusive priests, missing weapons of mass destruction, trumped up intelligence, Abu Ghraib, steroid-taking athletes, bribe-taking referees, philandering politicians, the response to Hurricane Katrina, housing prices, sub-prime loans, mortgage-backed securities, derivatives, Wall Street bonuses, Bernie Madoff, ‘balloon boy’, Climategate, the swine flu pandemic, and now even the once-idolized Mr. Woods. I’m sure you could add plenty of your own disappointments no matter where you live, but especially if you’re in the West. In India and China, for example, the past decade has been defined by growth, opportunity and rapidly expanding roles on the global stage.
These individual and organizational debacles could be more easily dismissed as just the latest chapters in the ongoing human comedy were they not so clearly part of a growing trend of public (again, at least Western) disillusionment with all manner of authority and expertise. While there has always been a healthy societal cynicism toward the rich, the powerful, and the allegedly all-good and all-knowing, public distrust of politicians, lawyers, regulators, doctors, scientists, professors, accountants, pundits, researchers, consultants, CEOs, NGOs, multinational and religious institutions and, most recently, risk managers and airline security operations has risen sharply, even spreading to mainstream attitudes towards globalization, American leadership, and sometimes capitalism itself.
Many have noted that US populism and anti-intellectualism are on the rise, with Sarah Palin, the Tea Party Movement and much of the blogosphere seen as emblematic of a growing distrust of traditional sources of authority. Indeed, the easiest way to interpret the astonishing recent senate election results here in my home state of Massachusetts is that the majority of voters simply did not trust the Democratic party’s plans for health care and spending, just as voters stopped trusting George Bush and the Republicans not so long ago.
