Broken Guardians: A National Crisis of Truth

There are four institutions in America we entrust to safeguard truth. Before we can fix America’s problems, these institutions must earn back the faith they’ve squandered.

America needs institutions it can trust to tell us what is true. Individual flourishing, democracy, and civilization depend on it.

In America, there are four classes of institutions we’ve entrusted to safeguard the truth:

• The mass media entrusted to tell us what’s happening in the world

• Academia and the sciences entrusted to safeguard knowledge about how the world around us works

• Major corporations entrusted with information about markets and the things we need

• The state entrusted with the ultimate truth of power

These institutions serve as four guardians of truth. For different reasons, each is now failing in that duty.

When people wonder why America is currently in turmoil, a major reason is that Americans have understandably lost faith in these guardians. Before we can fix America’s problems, we must find a way for these institutions to earn back the faith they’ve squandered.

WE NEED INSTITUTIONS THAT SAFEGUARD TRUTH

All civilization depends upon institutions that safeguard truth. Arguably that’s all civilization is—a collection of institutions responsible for maintaining and passing down the truth.

Imagine you want to determine the temperature at which water boils. You could run a series of experiments yourself. After a hundred experiments boiling water under various conditions—different quantities of water, containers made of different materials, different ambient temperatures—you would have a good idea of at what temperature water boils. Alternatively, you could read the answer in a book written by someone who has already done that work.

Examining the truth of every fact you rely upon is a terrible waste of time. Often it’s impossible, since it can take centuries of iterating, generation after generation, before we know something is true. A Neolithic cave dweller, no matter how smart or wise, couldn’t discover the foundations of quantum mechanics starting from scratch even after devoting an entire lifetime to the problem. If we had to determine the truth of everything ourselves, we would still believe the sun revolves around the earth, lightning comes from angry gods, and health has something to do with humors.

This isn’t to say we must defer to experts with credentials. I know from personal experience in the years I spent litigating cases as a lawyer that any conscientious, committed, and reasonably intelligent person can figure out almost anything. I variously had to develop an expertise in the medical effects of cholesterol medication, software engineering for desktop operating systems, chemical manufacturing of polyester fibers, the commercial real estate market, and many other things, and each time I ended up knowing as much about how these matters pertained to my case as any of the PhDs whose expert reports we lawyers helped to draft. Credentials and degrees are simply proof that someone has done the baseline work to become capable of researching an area, but anyone can do that work.

The real problem is the human lifespan is far too short for each of us to become an expert in everything we need to know. We need to make decisions about what’s safe for us to eat, what to do when we get sick, how to produce the things we need, or how to make sure our children grow up safe and happy. As democratic citizens, we also can’t make decisions about who to vote for, what policies we want, or what our government should do, unless we have a good understanding of what humanity knows to be true. We have no choice but to rely on others who can put in the necessary years of work to determine the facts of the things we need to know.

This is why we created institutions and charged them with determining, recording, and communicating the truth. These institutions learn what others know and report it. They conduct research and add the results to our collective knowledge. They share important facts about the things we eat, consume, and use. They tell us how those with power are using their authority to affect our lives. These institutions are essential to our survival, but only work when they have our trust.

What makes them guardians of truth isn’t their intelligence or knowledge. In fact, these institutions frequently get things wrong, which is fine so long as they correct their errors. They’re guardians because of we demand from them integrity and judgment. They pledge to abide by sacred codes of honesty and transparency, fairly sorting through competing claims to reveal their best understanding of the truth regardless of their own interests, beliefs, or even the likely consequences.

This responsibility isn’t easy, since it conflicts with human nature and the incentives of wielding power. These institutions are continually under pressure by powerful groups to serve them instead of carrying out their mission. They’re often tempted to abuse their own power to alter society instead of informing it. Others will always be trying to seize control of them to enlist them in crusades. If these guardians fail to hold back such temptations and assaults, the civilization that depends on them will crumble.

FAILING GUARDIANS

Throughout my life, there were always places we could turn to determine what was true. There were media channels we trusted to report what was happening around the world, and to help put it into perspective. We trusted academics and universities to research claims and tell us how the natural forces of our world actually worked. Major corporations were trusted to tell us the realities of commerce—facts about the foods we ate, products we relied upon, and how we made our living. Most of all, we trusted government to behave like a democracy responsive to its people.

We trusted mass media to tell us what was happening around the world. When something happens in Colorado, or New York, or Paris, or Karachi we have no way to know ourselves unless someone tells us. When politicians in Washington take bribes, or fail to vote the way we asked, we need to know. When bond traders in New York or London react in a way that will affect our retirement savings, we need to know. We need to understand these facts, how they fit together in context, and what we think they mean.

We created academia and the sciences to research fundamental truths about the nature of our world. This includes not just professors and universities, but also organizations meant to research and learn the truth like public-minded entities and advocacy groups. It takes years to get up to speed in any field, and a lifetime to apply it to discover new knowledge. We need people willing to devote entire lifetimes to gathering this information and telling us what they’ve learned.

It may seem strange to consider, but major corporations are also guardians of the truths concerning our markets. We trust them to supply the food we eat, medicines we take, cars we drive, toys we give our children, banks that keep our money, databases that maintain our data, and products we put on our skin. In this role, they serve as gatekeepers to commercial and market truths. We need them to behave honestly and with integrity, or else our entire market system fails.

Finally, we trust the state to govern responsive to our needs and subservient to our Constitution and democracy. The state must take our interests into account, keep us safe, and obey our demands revealed during the last election. This only works if the state treats us as citizens with dignity and provides us with transparency, truth, and accountability. Otherwise, it’s an unaccountable ruler and we citizens mere subjects over which it rules.

Each of these guardians, however, has now broken America’s trust. That isn’t to say nothing they say is true, but rather that we no longer trust everything they say is true, or that they’re telling the entire truth. Too often, instead of providing true information, they provide what’s essentially propaganda. Information is cold hard truths you provide an equal so they can make good decisions according to their own priorities. Propaganda, on the other hand, is a message meant to manipulate someone to believe what you want them to believe. Even if based on technical truths, it’s provided with the goal of turning another person into a mere object to manipulate and control to substitute your goals for theirs.

Too often, these institutions have stopped treating us as equals entitled to cold hard unvarnished truths, but sought to shape our beliefs to control our actions. While most of what they say is true, not all of it is, and trust is only trust when you’re trustworthy all the time. Even when everything they say is technically true, if there are truths they refuse to share, or truths twisted into a narrative that’s intentionally misleading, that’s not acting as a guardian. If you’ve lied once, how can anyone know whether this isn’t another one of those times in which you’ll lie?

There are many reasons this might have happened. It might have to do with tribal politics, causing people to feel they have a moral license to manipulate to win their moral wars. Perhaps it has to do with a culture that increasingly celebrates cynicism and selfishness over service. Perhaps it’s the result of new technology creating tools and data allowing easier manipulation. Perhaps it’s universities focused on shaping the future professional elite instead of discovering knowledge, or corporations that no longer believe they have any obligations beyond their share price, or government officials with contempt for the people they’re supposed to serve who believe they have a right to rule them. Perhaps it was always this way and we simply didn’t know until modern technology exposed it. Whatever caused it, it’s deeply corrosive to democracy.

No one should blame the individuals trapped inside these institutions. Most mean well and do their best trapped inside dysfunctional machines. They genuinely want to meet their duties and honor the truth, but the institutions they serve are broken. There are too many bad incentives, pressure to compromise integrity, and bosses who demand to sacrifice truth for other goals. However, allowing these institutions, meant to be guardians of truth, to lose their trust has contributed to much of the current turmoil in America

REBUILD INSTITUTIONS OF TRUTH

It’s a common refrain that America is in turmoil because ordinary people in the public square say things that aren’t true. Anyone who truly believes this doesn’t know their history. In every era, there were crowds of people speaking to large audiences on important issues in ways the consensus believed was crazy. They sent out pamphlets, stood on soapboxes, held rowdy meetings in taverns, sent typewritten newsletters across the country, created organizations, held rallies, hosted radio shows, or communicated in many other ways. It also isn’t a new partisan problem, since there are people aligned with both parties that spread false and irresponsible ideas. The only thing that’s different today is the method of communication, and the failure of the institutions we trusted to backstop their claims.

In today’s America, how can anyone really know for sure what’s true? We can’t know for sure what happened if we weren’t personally there. We can’t vet whether a study has fudged data, whether it can be replicated, or whether its author was pressured by peers to slant a conclusion to fit a narrative. We don’t know whether the claims on a package might be misleading, or whether a price is fair, or whether our call is actually important to anyone. We have no means to determine what our government isn’t telling us, or what it’s misrepresenting to cover up mistakes, or what it’s hiding under questionable claims of national security.

If we can’t determine what’s true ourselves, and if there’s no one we entirely trust to tell it to us straight, we no longer have means to validate anything. We’re lost, forced to default to whatever flatters us or feels right. We dismiss things we don’t want to hear because there’s no reason we must believe it. This is why America is now politically chaotic. People are capable of sorting through bad information. The problem comes when there’s no longer any institutions they entirely trust to tell them which information is bad. Can you expect anything other than breakdown and chaos in our national debate? Can you blame anyone for falling back on believing whatever they want to believe?

This is the national crisis everyone is ignoring. If we want to fix America and restore stability, we must first rebuild institutions capable of earning back people’s trust. Before we can start to worry about practical reforms like creating policies, adjusting institutions, or correcting past mistakes, we must rebuild institutions worthy of popular trust. Yet I rarely hear reformers even recognize this problem, much less offer solutions. With AI soon bringing undetectable new tools to manipulate and obscure the truth, this problem is only going to keep getting worse.

Fixing this problem won’t be easy, and won’t be quick. It takes years of consistent good behavior to win back trust once you’ve lost it. Even in the best-case scenario, in which our institutions for sharing truths immediately cleaned up their acts, this problem will be with us for many years. This is why we must get started on it now. Any reform movement that doesn’t include a plan to restore faith in our institutions of truth isn’t serious, because it isn’t targeting one of the major sources of the problem it seeks to solve.

If we want to fix America, we must begin by restoring our four great guardians of truth—or risk losing the foundation of civilization and our democracy.

What do you think about the guardians of truth? Join the conversation in the comments.