I blame the net for most of it. The more we know about government, the less we trust it. That makes perfect sense.

Electronic connectivity has brought about a change in human society easily as great as the telegraph and railway of the 19th century combined.

The veil that shielded our elites, even in western democracies, has been lifted.

That is bound to lead to massive upheaval. The more you look at it, the more is looks like the 1930s.

It’s not clear to me that this is any worse than any of that. It may simply be a part of civilization figuring out what it wants to be when it grows up.

My take on the situation is the that elites on both sides of the political spectrum, and in the business community have failed. They have gamed things in their favor, and the citizenry (again, on both sides of the spectrum) is reacting to these failures.

We know that capitalism works, and we know that it produces enough wealth to create workable “safety nets.” What no system can do, is pay for both a corrupt and greedy set of elites (Big Union, Big Biz, Big Gov) AND a safety net.

It’s time to toss failed institutions like political parties, ruling elites, worthless education and banking bureaucracies, and the “controlled chaos” of the bureaucratic regulatory state.

These institutions DESERVE to have lost the trust of the people. What is needed now is NOT a new trust in newer, better institutions, but a renewed trust in our ability to govern ourselves.

If you can’t govern yourself, you WILL be governed by someone, and probably very poorly.

I think two issues intertwined resulted in the British rioting. One is the progressive evaporation over the past 40 years of parental and societal mentoring of, and control over, the activities of youth, who accordingly follow human nature when unconstrained in this way, and behave as a pack, leading each other on.

The other issue is that probably unconsciously, many who lack formal qualifications and a foot in the door to the white collar world know that they are being written out of the story, economically and politically. As Marx predicted, we are witnessing an inexorable long term shift of wealth-creation capacity in capitalist societies away from labour and more towards capital itself. That coupled with the progression towards a knowledge-based economy means those not employable in the white collar world are merely superfluous. And since they don’t constitute a numerical majority (unlike in Marx’s era) they are politically powerless too. So what have they, the Excluded, got to lose? What reason have they got to behave themselves at all times, purely for the convenience of the successful and upwardly mobile they see all around them, and whose ranks they will never join anyway ? Every so often words like inclusivity get bandied about by left-leaning political leaders, but in cold reality all governments of all political persuasions have been just so much flotsam, passively swept round in circles towards the plug-hole of wealth and capital concentration.

J

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1569/trust-i n-government-distrust-discontent-anger-p artisan-rancor)

Public negative view of institutions (effect on way things are going in the country):
Banks & financial institutions: 69% Negative
Congress: 65% negative
Federal Govt: 65% negative
Large corporations: 64% negative
National news media: 57% negative