After returning from Vietnam, I lived in Portsmouth while attending UNH. I couldn’t afford a car and soon discovered I didn’t need one. I found it easy to hitch back and forth to school each day. It took only a few minutes longer than if I had driven, even for me, a disheveled-looking, long-haired hippie. Many of my acquaintances hitched, including a couple of female friends, who ended up thumbing their way in exotic places all around the world.
We trusted that hitchhiking was safe. However, a narrative emerged that hitchhiking was dangerous, especially for females. This was fueled by J. Edgar Hoover, who darkly prophesied that women who chose to hitchhike would likely never reach their destination.
Yet, studies have repeatedly shown, such as one by the California Highway Patrol in 1974, that hitchhiking is as safe as any other mode of transportation. Ginger Strand wrote in 2012 in the New York Times that hitching didn’t die a natural death: It was murdered.
“Our fear of thumbing a ride stems not from the facts but from a carefully calculated publicity campaign begun by the FBI and continued by law enforcement agencies across the nation. The end result is that we have largely turned our backs on the obvious efficiencies — for our wallets as well as the planet — of ride-sharing.”
That’s just one small example of how our trust network has been broken.
Yuval Harari, in an interview with Ari Melber on “The Beat” extensively discusses the importance of “trust networks” in human evolution. Initially, we trusted no one outside our family or clan. Harari attributes the success of our species to our ability to gradually build networks of trust over time: first with other tribes and federations, then with kingdoms and states and finally with other nations.
In essence, Harari asserts that our ability to trust is primarily responsible for the flourishing, interdependent society we enjoy today.
Distrust of government agencies like the FBI isn’t the only reason our trust networks are fraying: political gridlock, economic inequality, scandals and the isolating effects of the internet and social media play a significant role.
It is this distrust, according to Philip Bump in a recent Washington Post op-ed piece, that gave Trump his opportunity: “Trump’s return to the White House was heavily dependent on his ability to present an artificial world to American voters, an effort that succeeded because trust in institutions had withered.”
Nevertheless, Donald greased the skids and is the bellwether of what’s to come.
It’s incredible how quickly our views of the world have shifted. Today, we’re doomscrolling through chaos, dictatorships are on the rise, and almost everything is up for grabs. But less than fifty years ago, Francis Fukuyama announced, to widespread applause, that we had reached “The End of History.”
He wrote that history, which had previously been an evolutionary process, has now reached its final state of perfection in liberal democracy. He believed this form of government was so superior that he predicted it would become the ultimate and permanent model for all nations.
Today, it is clear that Fukuyama’s prophecy was way off course: History hasn’t ended in nirvana. On the contrary, discord and chaos now prevail, accompanied by a fascination with autocracy.
This suggests to me not the ever upward climb of progress but a cycle, similar to an individual’s life cycle, repeating itself over and over. Like people, societies, when they grow old, become paranoid, brittle and afraid of their own shadow. They reminisce about their golden years, oblivious to the tasks at hand.
To save ourselves, we need an infusion of youth.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com and jstim.substack.com.