I’ve lived in the US for a good amount of time, and have lived in Singapore and China for extended periods. My perception of both Singapore and China are that they are extremely safe. On top of that, the government of Singapore is functional and accessible in ways Americans are unfamiliar with (leading to further distrust of government). Singapore also has a reputation for being extremely non-corrupt. Both the US and China have a good deal of corruption but of different kinds. There was a great Freakonomics episode on this.
With respect to trusting government vs corporate power, we can only trust corporations to do one thing: maximize profit. Their interests only happen to align with ours to a first order approximation.
I definitely agree with the sentiment around what we can trust corporations to do. I feel that my main issue is that we can't trust governments to do anything. So that at least decreases entropy? The multi-agent part seems to help too, but this is also a simple model. Maybe my views would be different if I had similar lived experiences. I did enjoy that Freakanomics episode.
Mostly my belief is that things are complicated and people tend to oversimplify and that oversimplification leads to obscurification, which leads to substantial power imbalances. Which I a part I differ from many is that this can be done without directed action and that players that benefit don't need to actively collude (aka: no conspiracies required).