Ask Lemmy

I was raised to trust neither the government nor law enforcement.

Not necessarily stop trusting it, but realize they're either corrupt or incompetent... Or worse, both. Also, 35...

Sometime between the age of 8 and 12 I remember I started to question authority, not government of countries specifically, but just the concept of authority.

I always felt like teachers were against me for some reason... frequently I got marked for "bad behavior" and weren't allowed to go on trips...

Then I learned about Tiananmen... for context my family were all born in China... my older brother who actually went through like 7th grade in China was so shocked learned about it in the US and I remember him telling me to look it up online...

Then I remember my mom started telling me about the One Child Policy and how I was the one born against policy...

So yeah... you can see how I'm starting to get very skeptical of things

Then I learn about all the bribery stuff in US Congress, SuperPACs... etc...

US Cops shooting people and getting away with it...

The infamous Gun Trace Task Force of Baltimore

The Great Firewall of China and the censorship...

Then my "arc" completed when I was 17 and got arrested on false accusations of "agravated assault" when I was acting in self-defence against a racist bully in school... even the school admin sided against me and tried to expell me...

So by age 18, I distrust governments... and authorities in general...

Especially the PRC Government and the US Government

I mean distrusting authorities is a very American thing to do...

(Distrust PRC significantly more intensely because of the fact that they tried to end my existence)

This depends a lot on where you live, under what kind of government, your socioeconomic background and the personality of your close friends and family.

I grew up in Argentina and I don't think anyone believes they can really trust the government. Consensus among high school kids is that everyone is corrupt and exploiting legal loopholes is considered the norm.

Now I can't say there was much of a privacy concern in my circles, in my experience, and that's still the case today, decades later, in a totally different country. So yeah it depends a lot on a lot.

I was never raised to trust the government in the first place.

When I was about 20 in college I learned that saying shit like 'the government' is stupid. Because there is no 'the government'.

There are agencies, institutions, and individuals in the government. All with varying levels of competence and corruption and incentives. Some of them are amazing, others are really shitty. Just like people or companies or anything. There are also multiple levels of government and so many people are angry at the feds over property taxes which has nothing to do with the feds.

And I learned to avoid interacting with people who think in massive generalized terms about anything, because they tend to be very emotional and very irrational.

Not every generation is the same. Many old people where I live and today still seem to trust it a lot, while the ones from when you were a kid probably saw WWII and the Great Depression.

What I'm saying is, it's less an age, and more what you've lived through.

I never truly trusted the government 100% from when i was a teenager. I get that we need a government to ensure "things work" and they need us to "turn the gears", but that's as far as it goes. They aint looking out for you

Don't trust what politicians say, watch what they do. They are remarkably consistent then.

I probably stopped trusting it when I was a 16 year old libertarian.

I was around 10.

It would help if you specified which government.

I would have said around 15-16, but I think it's also important to note that there are many degrees of trust between blindly trusting everything the government does and becoming some kind of "sovereign citizen".

I believe the government often doesn't act in the people's best interest and that many politicians are fundamentally corrupt. I do believe our institutions mostly manage to uphold our constitution though, and that my country has a functioning democracy. I don't keep all my money in cash at home, that seems both paranoid and unsafe.

I don't honestly believe such a number exists, but also, I think the age aspect of it is almost or entirely irrelevant.

what age do you stop trusting the alternative to government, which is corporations?

let me just remind you that at least the government is voted in, wheras corporations are just any assholes with enough money to buy things and pay wages.

Exceptionally young, around 8 years old. Same goes for religious people lying to me.

I didn't start caring about politics until the late 2000s. When I learned about how bad George W Bush was, it gave me a hint. Politics to me growing up, was just simply background noise, something I could ignore. It was until within Obama's second term that I started to really see what was happening, so this was about 26 for me. Then 2016 since, I would say that my trust in the government has all but been broken and that was even before Trump had his first term.

I trust some parts of government to be useful. Like food assistance or healthcare are useful and should be expanded. I don't trust that politicians will keep the useful parts useful though. Also gotta keep this in mind.

At what advanced age do you start?

I think mine was around 13.

11y 👀

18 when I was able to vote and started paying attention to what politicians said and did.

So that would make it voting age. After that you can trust individuals who run the government, but even trustworthy people in power can be held up by institutional inertia like police unions.

I think it depends on the trustworthiness of your government. Even then, it's a scale that slides depending on the situation. I'm in my 70s and feel my government is going through a very solid stage right now. My trust level is at one of the highest level.

Trust would have had to be earned in the first place to have stopped. My understanding of the US government was shaped by being raised on a military base in the UK, 9/11 happened but was never exaggerated or propagandized to the degree that it apparently was in the US.

I probably stopped trusting the government around age 10.

After going through and reading others' answers, I'm curious if you still think it's "an old man thing".

I think I was around 13, but I'm also quite a few years younger in general. I have the feeling that especially gen z started to get political at younger ages than recent older generations, maybe due to growing up with access to so much information.

I was around 12 and to this day I think that was the most corrupt student council we had.

Few months after 9/11 is when I figured it out so I was like 7 or 8

I was 16 on 9/11. I remember watching john Ashcroft the Friday before talking about how the Pentagon couldn't account for billions of dollars. Then i wake up on Monday morning to the planes hitting the towers.

I stopped trusting the government sometime around there

As soon as I knew what a government was. Age 12ish

Took another 18 years for me to actually have articulated reasons why other than "feels*

For me, the second I understood what war really was, it was clear that governments are often evil and shouldn't be trusted. That was probably around age 12.

For me, it was somewhere around 14. Maybe younger.

It's not just age, it's when you're living. Someone growing up in the '50s probably had more trust in the government than someone growing up in the '60s, for instance. But it really feels like overall trust has dropped significantly since then and probably won't recover. Part of the reason is we simply know more about what's going on. There are still secrets, but not like there were in WWII and the decade after.

around the age of 10 I got into the skater scene. That lead to the punk and metal scene. So probably around that age is when I started questioning why things were the way they are, and lost any trust in authority.

19, when 9-11 occurred. I was a truther for a while, not anymore, but ever since then it's been year after year of disappointment. Obama almost got us back on track but didn't have the guts to do things like completely close Gitmo or put an end to mass surveillance.

The older I get the more I trust it. The government is generally pretty large and reliable.

Seeing random scandals and over indexing on is a common issue. People love to make shit up and lie because they have no interest in the boring truth.