Dr. Jamil Zaki

from a population that doesn't trust itself and doesn't trust anybody.

In fact, this is an old part of the authoritarian playbook, is to make sure that people suspect one another and can't band together and discover common cause.

So again, I think that mistrust of government, understandable.

But total mistrust of everything that we hear actually can be a tool of the status quo.

Because if you believe that nobody can be trusted, there's no point in trying to fight for any type of positive social change.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, cynicism tracks all sorts of negative outcomes in our lives from worse mental health, worse physical health, earlier death, lower salaries.

I mean, you name it.

If it was a pill, it would be a poison.

And people who recover from cynicism likewise tend to recover their ability to connect and then have all the benefits that come with it.

You know, when I started work on this book and I was thinking about the trust deficit, one of the challenges that I laid out for myself was to ask, is there any place in the world where the trend went in the opposite direction, where an entire culture went from being untrusting to being more trusting?

And I discovered that that has happened and it happened right here.

we have been losing faith in one another for 50 years but in fact the first half of the 20th century in the u.s was this incredible rise in solidarity and trust from the 1890s which was a very cynical decade to the 1950s which although far from perfect was a much more trusting time than before or since

So we have done it through social programs, through social movements, and through what, well, at that time, something known as the Christian social gospel.

The U.S.

became a much more community-oriented place, and people grew faith in one another.

And if we did that before, I believe we can do it again.

You know, one angle that we haven't talked about, Mike, is the effective cynicism on parenting.

So there's some really interesting data that came out recently where parents were asked, what should your child believe about the world if they are to succeed?

And most parents thought that their kids should think the world is a dangerous place.