Nobody believes anything anybody says any more.
There are parts of the world where this is not the case. North Korea might be an example. But for everywhere else suspicion and cynicism rule.
Let’s take the simplest of things like a fire alarm.
Now, there was a time, when life was recorded in black and white grainy film and before stop motion and CGI was invented, that following a fire alarm sounding, workers would carefully shuffle out of a building and quietly assemble at a designated point and await further instructions.
Today, when a fire alarm sounds in a building, the workers ‘can’t be arsed’ to leave. They believe or want to believe that there is no fire. They will, as a first choice, assume the fire alarm is sounding because there is a fault, it is another annoying test, it’s been set off as a joke, or … well, anything but it’s sounding because the building is on fire and their life might be in danger.
Even if they mentally concede it is a fire, they assume it’s happening in another part of the building and nothing to do with them, most unlikely to affect them, and will all be dealt with without them having to bother to evacuate the building.
These are the same people who are confused and unsure about whether or not man ever landed on the moon. And for them, every politician, every policeman, every authority figure, is not only out to get them, but is actually completely corrupt and useless and working to their own agenda. Ok, that may be the case, but the concept of having faith in things being as they seem has disappeared.
Why so?
It is probably not good to be so loving and trusting of a boss or leader (like North Koreans) that they are elevated to a deity. It is a good thing to search for the truth, and to try to see all arguments, but we seem to have gone completely the other way. We don’t believe anything any more.
I would guess that this is part of the process of mind-freeing from the enforced group-think that comes from centuries of religious indoctrination. Being let off religions’ oppressive leash leads humans to ‘go wild’ for a while, and probably that’s what we are doing. Going wild and running about with our newly freed brains, enjoying the lack of restriction and indoctrination and the associated control by fear.
So, maybe it’s a good thing. For a while. However, we mustn’t become too complacent and too permanently cynical. We have to not be too wild for too long! The danger is that another shepherd will round us all up again whilst we’re not looking and impose another pen around us disguised as something other than the religions we’ve been breaking free from. Something like ‘environmentalism’ for example.

I don't believe a word of this.
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Disbelief is a huge issue Chris. If one lives in a permanent state of skepticism and refusal to commit to the world, this life denying stance which leads to either isolation, ignorant cynicism, or worse a kind of reactionary embracing of conservative credos of various flavours down the line, and that's what worries me. Freedom can be terrifying, especially if one doesn't have the tools to handle it. Education in all its forms to my mind is the answer. If people live in an environment where they are able to freely inquire and are able to think clearly, are shown how (its a skill set) the deeper malaise of a refusal to believe – anything – this kind of adolescence we are going through that you are talking about probably wouldn't be as intense and all pervasive. by the way corporate groupthink and and management think/newspeak is replacing the kind of isolationatist skepticism we're discussing here. Its alarming the rate people are being turned into corporate robots.
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