low-trust environment
season two
Hello. Guess who’s having a fabulous Pluto transit?
I’ve spent most of this substack trying to pick at and unravel a bunch of different little problems I have with millennial feminism, contemporary gender discourse, the trans civil rights movement, art schools, the culture of online illustration, pop culture, coercion & dependency, furries, going to the doctor, religion, being insane, and “hate.” I’ve only recently started to learn a bit more about history. (In my defense, I didn’t realize until now just how useful it is, to know things about history.)
Most of these things are supposed to work for me, and they don’t, which really ruined my mind for most of my life. I know I’ve been very clumsy, trying to think-out-loud like I do, and I’m very grateful for the kindness and patience of people who have shown up and stuck with me through it. I think I’ve figured it out, that all of these problems I’ve been circling around are really just one big problem that worms its fingers into everything everywhere all at once.
I think I finally understand what is going on in America right now, and have some reasonable suggestions for how to fix it. I also feel that I finally know how to make money, cure my disorders, improve my memory, love my neighbor, make my father proud, and truly be myself. I mean, I haven’t done all that yet, that’s going to take a while. But still, I have Seen The Light! How lucky I am, to reach my final destination at only 33.
I hope you know I’m joking. I am not A Person One Should Aspire To Be Like.
Point being, it will take a while to explain how and why my thinking has changed, so I’d rather just show you instead. But I know you have no reason to trust me— lots of people think they know what’s up in America right now, and they are desperately, horribly wrong. But unlike even the dumbest of pundits, I have no real credentials to demonstrate any expertise or prove that I know better than anyone else. I only think I finally have something real to give you, dear reader, but in order to set a precedent for a trusting relationship between us, I want to make it very clear that do not intend to sell you a goddamn thing. It’s always been important to me that my work be free, if only because “ad man” is exactly the kind of man I don’t want to be.
So instead of trying to convince you that you ought to see the world as I do, I would like to invite you to visit my world and peer through my lens, if only for a visit. I will do my best to show my work and give lots of examples of what I mean, so that you can understand and judge for yourself if you find my lens useful to you.
LOW-TRUST ENVIRONMENT
I don’t think anyone realizes just how foreboding it is when pundits use the phrase “low-trust environment” to describe contemporary America. Society only works at any level when people trust each other, and when they don’t, everything falls apart. But trust is not something you can establish once and forget about it— it has to be maintained. You have to keep showing up for your people if they are going to keep trusting you into the future.
But when resources like money are scarce, trust becomes especially difficult to maintain— fear and desperation compel us to shun outsiders, circle the wagons, and protect the children. People with good intentions throw themselves blindly at conflicts out of a genuine sense of purpose, but unguided by any coherent strategy that would lend logic to how they express their feelings.
Political turmoil means that misplaced trust could be very costly. It can be a foolish choice, to trust those who have the power to hurt you or your loved ones, or to hurt society at large. It’s effectively impossible to safely trust anyone until you really know them, once you’ve had time to see the color of their character. And even then, individuals can still choose to betray you if their own interests compel them so.
That is what is happening in America right now— everyone is aware that our systems for generating trust and enforcing the social contract have been exploited by corrupt people, and it has destroyed our ability to trust one another at any scale. I don’t know that anyone has pinpointed trust— its absence and misplacement— as the reason American culture and politics are both in freefall. I think rebuilding our trust in each other, somehow, is perhaps the guiding light for how we might get our democracy back on the rails.
It’s beginning to look like fascism is just what happens to a democracy when it succumbs to entropy. Our systems are repeatedly exploited by liars and thieves, they are allowed to pillage without consequence, and so people conclude that the system itself needs to be replaced, even if its immediate replacement will definitely suck way more. Everyone’s collective trust in the social contract decays beyond the point that it can be recovered without a calamity to re-set the socioeconomic playing field.
For Germany, that calamity was a series of costly wars begun by an empire too big for its britches. But America is much larger and richer and more advanced than 1900s Germany, and the world today is interconnected in a way it has never been before. We Americans are right to fear that our calamity— if it comes in the form of irreversible climate collapse or a spontaneous nuclear war— may effectively end the world as we know it.
But we have not hit bottom yet, and there may still be time. It seems now would be a good time to whip out our parachutes and at least try to ensure that we strike ground at a survivable speed. I suppose if we want to make it out without two broken femurs, we will have to do the government’s job for them, to fill peoples’ needs by providing what the government refuses to. We must rebuild our trust in one another, but we must do it with a careful balance of honesty and discretion. We must re-evaluate who is truly trustworthy, and really understand why we think of them that way. It would at least be good, I think, to be more conscious of who we place our trust in, and to say out loud “I don’t trust you” more often, and see what shakes out.
That has always been my goal here, I just didn’t realize it until this week. I’ve got a lot of ideas for things to write about through this lens, so I’m very excited. But I’m laying it out here because I would also like to see what other writers might do, should they try on this lens for themselves.
What if we analyze specific media or genres on the basis of how they try (and whether they succeed) to generate trust with the audience, in this world where there is just so much media? What if we discuss the problems of social media (with the ubiquitous score-count of Likes and wild-west comments sections) based on how undermine our trust in each other— not only interpersonally, but at the scale of our entire society? What if we evaluate the things and people we like/dislike by considering whether or not they have earned our trust, and try to articulate how they did it? That sort of thing.
Anyway. All of this to say, dear reader, that I am finally getting serious, but I think we will still have fun here. I am probably going to re-open paid subscriptions soon, because I would like to move on from illustration commission work and focus more on writing and doing other related things, which means I will have to pay my rent some other way. If I’m ever unclear, or if there’s anything you’d be interested to hear more about, please always feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer.
Welcome to Season 2 of The Art Of Gender, and as always, thank you so much for reading.