When public trust erodes

This is not merely an Australian issue but a challenge the West faces. The traditional belief in democracy has historically fostered trust in government, but as officials fail to heed the public’s calls for transparency, efficiency and accountability, public discontentment will grow. If this continues, society may descend into collective anger or despair, leading to widespread social unrest and potentially threatening the stability of the state.

In such a scenario, state tyranny is gradually established not necessarily out of the power hunger of a dictator or a civil war but out of a deliberate or negligent mismanagement of governments of public sentiments and concerns that makes people too desperate to beg for any control a state uses for social order. Strangely, the erosion of public trust leads to that of social order and cohesion, which leads further to the public request for the total erosion of freedoms in an authoritarian or totalitarian state, which, as in the case of the conformity-based society, is not interested in public trust anymore but in unconditional public obedience.

The absence of meaningful public trust could also lead to widespread violence and profound nihilism—epistemological, political, social, and psychological. This nihilism would permeate all facets of public life. When a deep sense of nihilism seizes people, they feel that their governments have betrayed them, and now they have nothing to lose - they become extremely dangerous. It will either make them mad to destroy everything or succumb to their depression. Ironically and sadly, only the first option will give people a last hope to recreate everything by destroying them first. And it may well be a transnational movement in the West. Nobody knows what comes from this inevitable mayhem - a more robust democracy or a new tyranny.