Dealing with complexity, manipulation and trust

The world is complex, and issues are complex. Although they have always been complex, we haven’t always engaged with that complexity on any level of detail. Instead, we’ve tended to accept simple narratives, relying on trusted figures or prevailing assumptions to guide our understanding. Yet, as the landscape of information has broadened, so too has our exposure to intricacy and nuance.

In the United States, in my lifetime, we had three major channels of TV and truth was whatever Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor or David Brinkley said it was. Very few people understood the issue and very few went in depth. This opened us up to being manipulated by authority figures who wanted to get across a particular story. I just got to the part in the book I am reading now, Why Nothing Works, about the Mai Lai massacre as one example of the public being deliberately lied to and misled. The exposure of this and other events lead to a distrust of authority and the media.

Today, that distrust has contributed to media fragmentation. Instead of trusting one newscaster, we might get our news from a variety of sources. Instead of just accepting what one newscaster says, we might do a deep dive into the latest issue. In the past few years, on social media, I’ve seen people who have become instant experts on the latest topic- the war in Ukraine, vaccines, and so on. Social media influencers abound on any topic. And they are rewarded for creating distrust and controversy. Their “hot takes” get them views and money.

With this loss of belief in experts (the newscasters), I see a lack of ability to know who to trust. An example is a post I saw on the social media site, Threads, about sunscreen. The poster had heard a social media influencer say that some of the ingredients cause cancer. She was agonizing over using it for herself and her children, which was particularly important, given that she was albino. Luckily, someone was wise enough to explain that, yes, some of the ingredients in sunscreen are carcinogens at high doses, but that they are safe at the levels approved in sunscreens. How do I know to trust this? I don’t know anything about that poster, but I do trust that the FDA wouldn’t let something harmful be sold.

This issue is difficult, it’s not getting any easier, and it can get in the way of our relationships. I’ve written before about trust, which includes questions to ask.