zlacker

The one thing that struck me about Covid and the response was the western world rock bottom levels of trust in their governments (broadly defined).

To me that's the real story - the demonstration of what amounts to a loss of legitimacy.

(FWIW shutdowns did not bother me much, I got the two mandatory vaccines my jurisdiction required for air travel but refused the boosters, I generally wear masks in public because better safe than sorry.)

>>LAC-Te+(OP)
I think it boils down to a vicious cycle. Institutions are worried about a loss of credibility and are as a result very unwilling to acknowledge where they have been wrong, changed their minds or about any uncertainties that still exist. As a result people get the wrong impression and highly overestimate the competence of those institutions, and the confidence that their solutions warrant. Which makes those institutions even more afraid of loosing credibility. Which lead to some very comical parallel realities, like the WHO not aknowleding that COVID was airborne till 2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30939200

Or differently put, if you have absolutely unrealistic expectations and deferred any critical thinking to another party, you are putting said party in a very very difficult situation. And if they not just lack the backbone to tell you this, but start pretending to be that competent and certain to match your expectations, it can become very dangerous.

>>cf141q+3F
I'm not really saying COVID caused it. I'm saying in early 2020 institutional trust was already so slow that every newspaper and government department on earth could have said "the sky is blue" and a lot of people would have said "fuck you no it's not" by default.