Character and Trustworthiness Matter Far More Than General Trust

Sean Last reports that the famous Robert Putnam study, suggesting that ethnoracial diversity in America is a cause of reduced trust, has major defects.

This is not surprising.

In addition to the reasons Last mentions, white Americans share many cultures of trust and distrust across the country. For generations, ruling groups regularly succeeded in propagandizing Americans to trust individuals Americans should not have trusted--gurus, athletes, celebrities, politicians, billionaires, smooth talkers, and ethnoracial outgroups, keeping whites from noticing important facts.

Even whites living in run down apartments, surrounded by hostile ethnoracial outgroups, are more trusting of the wrong ideas and peoples than they should be. For decades, whites have been more distrusting toward political factions they don't identify with than diversity, though that seems to be changing.

Generalized trust is not that important. Being generally trusting is not far from acting gullible. Trustworthiness is more important, as is knowing when to trust and when not to trust. Character counts most.

Various media empires have been calling themselves the "most trusted news source" for decades. But what do such sources specialize in: greed, gossip, trivia, sensationalism, sex scandals, war mongering, celebrity worship, emotive manipulation, anti-white bigotry, personalities over policies, knee jerk deontology, and horse race political coverage. Television itself is a poor method to convey well-reasoned arguments. The word is more important than the picture. Tune in, turn off your reasoning. The beloved Tom Brokaw and Walter Cronkite were talented in con artistry.

As much grief as Baby Boomers get, the fact is that leaders born before 1946 enacted many major multicultural policies, including Brown v. Board of Education and the 1965 Immigration Act, before most Boomers were old enough to vote, bribe or propagandize. High levels of trust probably aided individuals born before 1946 in organizing for their own economic benefit but also helped their elites screw future generations culturally, genetically, and economically.

The now elderly or dead elites played the biggest roles in shoving Randism, neoconservatism, third wayism, and cultural Marxism down our throats.

The Silent Generation and the Greatest Generation had stable, middle class jobs with defined benefit pensions unlike most individuals since. Despite what many Millennials and others imagine, the economy became much worse for young working families with children between the mid 1970s and mid 1980s. As part of the then new normalcy, older Americans decided that high seniority workers should be paid two to three times what younger workers receive for doing the same jobs. Pre-Boomers decided that finance and various other parasitic activities should be rewarded far more than ethical work. Pre-Boomers created the McJobs economy for younger individuals in the 1980s and late 1970s. It was a Grand, Unstated Bargain. Older workers keep their union jobs. Younger workers get McJobs. Never mind that young families with children have greater expenses for child rearing and other costs. Some young wives worked out of preference and some out of the new necessity. Pre-Boomers decided that television and other forms of hedonism were good things. Pre-Boomers supported integration or segregation instead of self-determination. Pre-Boomers implemented the deluge of bait-and-switch politics we live with now. Nixon ran on getting us out of Vietnam in 1968, then he ran on the same thing in 1972. as if getting out of Vietnam were spectacularly complicated.

Individuals born after 1945 deserve our share of blame. Whereas the oldest generations organized for perceived economic self-interest and horrible political fads, younger generations did little to stop the fads and advantage taking. Instead of organizing for good causes, younger Americans wasted efforts on street protesting and other showboating that the lobbyists, politicians, and billionaires largely ignore (or use for their divide-and-rule practices). Younger generations keep falling for fallacies. When you don't have power and leverage, bait-and-switch is what you get. Older Americans had leverage with private sector labor unions but corruption and multiculturalism wrecked many unions. Public sector unions still have considerable leverage, but they are even more prone to corrupting influences.

Many individuals from the Lost Generation, GI Generation, and Silent Generation got a raw deal, especially chronically disabled veterans, not to mention from the austerity of the Great Depression. The biggest problems aren't generational. The bigger issue is the groupthink fanaticisms of various elite factions across generations, the casual treatment of the rest of us as mere means to their own arbitrary, horrendous ends.

Downwardly mobile individuals should look at the bigger pictures over time rather than simply comparing themselves with their parents. Parents and their friends are a small sample and unrepresentative sample of a cohort.

No one should convert to cultural Marxism simply because Putnam other social scientists made mistakes in survey research. The overwhelming majority of evidence against cultural Marxism comes from other areas.