Comment by hakunin
That feeling you just expressed of higher trust to your local doctor than to a head of a large institution: it came from having a pretty good idea what your local doctor does, and no idea what a head of an institution does. The growing problem with cynicism in our society is not because there's evidence of corruption, it's because nobody knows how anything works, but everybody gets fed "look at these bad incentives" by pundits (especially alternative media ones) all day. Everything is complex. Just because it is doesn't make it nefarious.
An institution's whole point is to be a system where you don't have to trust individuals. It's a way to deal with complex nature of our reality. People should really learn what institutions are, how they function, what accountability mechanisms they contain, instead of blaming them based on conjecture. "Look, this bad thing happened. And this person has this bad incentive. Now we know the whole story." We don't.
No not really, trust in my local doctor comes from having a personal relationship with him and trusting his character enough to trust his word. There are things that are going to be beyond my understanding, but if I can trust his character enough to believe he’d rather see me healthy even at the expense of a bigger paycheck, then I’ll do it. How people place that same trust in faceless institutions is beyond me. Again - what forces exist to prevent them from being corrupted? Absolutely the growing cynicism in institutions is because of evidence of corruption. We gave them undeserved trust, they abused it, and now we see the effect of that.