Chapter Ten
Hope for the Future of Trust
Although this book began by lamenting the decline of trust since the 1960s, perhaps this is a good time to point out that returning to that earlier, simpler time is neither possible nor desirable. Scholars have suggested that when trust was higher from the 1940s to the 1960s, it was perhaps a state of naïve trust. Trust was assumed without much basis.1 Much has changed to rupture our innocence. In the age of twenty-four-hour news, the media has become more negative, aggressive, and salacious. In the United States, we came to know much more about Bill Clinton's life than we ever knew about Roosevelt or Kennedy. The raw opportunism during the financial crisis in 2008 was witnessed on a global scale. Our ...
