Across the board, trust in our institutions in the United States is at an all-time low. Trust in the media is at an all-time low. Trust in church is at an all-time low. Trust in the scientific establishment is at an all-time low. Trust in government is at an all-time low. And, of course, trust in academia is at an all-time low. Because of our lack of trust in institutions, Americans also mistrust one another. You might think that it would be the opposite, that we mistrust one another, and therefore we mistrust our institutions. That’s not the case. Our institutions shape us, and the way that we interact with the world is through the mechanism of institutions. If you grew up in a religious community, going to church helped shape you. The rules of the church helped shape you. The people you spent time with shaped you. The institution of your family shaped you. Your school or university shaped you.  As we lose faith in all of those institutions to shape us, we are incapable of coming together anymore. Institutions tend to foster a common orientation, which is why Alexis de Tocqueville was such a big fan of them. It’s why in Democracy in America, he made the suggestion that one of the things that made America so different from all other countries was the plethora of social institutions in which Americans were enmeshed. He noted that in most other countries, people had formal institutions that they were forced to interact with, but in America, everybody was a member of a social institution or many social institutions — and that created this extraordinary social fabric that was durable, that allowed for innovation, that allowed for freedom.  Without trust, there can’t be freedom at all. If the institutions that provide the shaping function that set the rules for our lives, the way we interact with the world, die, so does the social fabric. And then, when the social fabric dies, we stop attributing decent motivation to each other. Instead, we start engaging in what the philosopher Alistair MacIntyre called “emotivism”: the belief that everybody except for you is motivated by something nefarious. Instead of having a political conversation, what you do is attribute a motive to the person’s policy. You shouldn’t be attributing motivations to other people unless you have good evidence that their motivation is malign. But that’s what we jump to when there is no trust. I trust my wife. I’m not worried that when she criticizes me, it’s coming from a terrible place. I trust the people that I go to synagogue with. If they have a critique or we have a disagreement, I don’t immediately jump to, “They do it because they hate me.” “You’re doing it because you hate me” is the death of politics, because if that’s the case, then how exactly are we supposed to live together and work together and create policy together? Religious institutions used to be truth-making institutions, but the question of whether those institutions ought to pursue truth has been supplanted by the idea that they ought to do politics. In many cases, they have become progressive bastions where people go to eat pizza and play guitar rather than unite with some eternal value. That is why many people don’t attend anymore. Why go there when you can go to a sports event instead? We saw the scientific establishment move from evidence to narrative, most obviously during COVID. The result for an enormous number of people was to completely discard science in favor of nonsense that has zero evidence to back it. The slide from truth to narrative is almost invariably followed by a slide from narrative to conspiracism or nonsense. The move from seeking the truth at universities to “We are going to engineer a population of discontented people who believe that the system must be turned on its ear” led people to stop trusting the universities. The American government was built to pursue one fundamental principle above all: epistemic humility, the idea that you might not be correct. If you think you’re always correct, you might want to be a tyrant.  Humility with regard to other people in your society, the idea that maybe they’re right on occasion, maybe you’re wrong on occasion, has to be rooted in trust of our fellow citizens. We have checks and balances in the United States government to prevent it from swinging side to side to stop radical things from happening. That is legitimately the point of the American government. Unless we have a very broad agreement on something, it should not happen. That is why we have a bicameral legislature. It is why we have three branches of government. But when that wears away, when we hate each other, what we end up with is a battle to the death in the blood sport of politics. We get angry at the checks and balances because it’s not possible that people who oppose me are correct; those people are malign. “Those people want bad things to happen to me and to my family, and so I’m going to grab the government. I’m going to kill the filibuster. I’m gonna stack the Supreme Court. I’m going to add states willy-nilly to the United States Senate, and then I’m just going to run right over everybody.” In the absence of rebuilding trust in the institutions, you end up with a war of all against all on the governmental level. And things will not go well. When you get rid of the fundamental epistemic humility of the government, checks and balances give way to a centralized tyranny. If you don’t trust your neighbor and you think your neighbor is taking advantage of you, you might say that the government should just do what you want it to do. Grab that brass ring and do exactly what you want with that power. In order for a solid debate to take place, there must be a fundamental sharing of values and rules of the road. There ought not to be debate about fundamental propositions, because if you are having to debate individual value — such as the idea that individual human beings have individual worth — you’re arguing with something outside the system. If you have to argue with somebody about the worthiness of truth, that is not an argument that can ever be won, because truth itself is an assumed value. This is why, in the Declaration of Independence, when the Founders said that there are certain rights that are self-evident, they didn’t mean that they prove themselves. They mean that these are the fundamental building blocks of a society. And if you question them, the society crumbles. Only a carefully cultivated moral culture that values truth and evidence and logic and moral decency, that actually protects free speech and property rights and equal rights under the law, is capable of restoring our institutions. We shouldn’t be debating about fundamental moral matters, things like “lying is wrong.” If I have to debate you about that, there’s no debate. Individual human beings have moral worth, and their autonomy has moral value. Those are the values that we begin with, and those are the values that need to be embodied in institutions.