How To Overcome Distrust Of Authority

Individualist western cultures traditionally tend to champion our rights as individuals over our responsibility to others in the community. Things are kept in balance by the legal system which dispenses justice by limiting the freedom of those who choose to consistently break the law, and the capitalist economy which rewards us for providing value to other people who we might not even know or otherwise care about. These safeguards prevent most people from focusing too much on themselves to the exclusion of other people.

For the most part, this system works fairly well. When it doesn’t work, the person who suffers most is usually the one who is unwilling or unable to exercise their freedoms constructively within the confines of the legal and economic system. While there is certainly structural inequity in all cultures, this can often be overcome by playing the societal game effectively and reaping sufficient rewards. The key is to exercise personal responsibility at all times and avoid playing victim to our circumstances. Those who choose to do so, despite whatever hand they may have been dealt in life originally, get rewarded. Those who rebel mindlessly get punished either directly by the legal system, or indirectly by their failure to contribute to the economic system.

I like to surround myself with successful people, so I tend to avoid people who rebel against everything. I see it as a form of self-sabotage. While it’s easy to get upset at other people who violate my personal value system, I recognise that it’s usually a complete waste of my time and energy to engage with them. If they break the law, there’s a legal system for dealing with that. If they just plain behave badly, social or economic karma is likely to catch up with them. Moralistic debates on social media rarely make any difference so I usually don’t participate in them. Getting on with my own life is a much more productive and fulfilling use of my time.

Wear the mask dude, it’s for your own good.

However, every now and then a situation arises where other people’s self-defeating behaviour has sufficiently wide-ranging potential to impact us, and the current COVID-19 pandemic is one example. Defeating the virus requires community-wide co-operation by people with a diverse range of backgrounds and belief systems to isolate under lockdown or practise social distancing so that the virus stops propagating and dies out before taking a large swathe of our friends, siblings, uncles, aunts, parents and grandparents with it.

The government is the obvious body to coordinate such a huge community effort. While New Zealand clearly benefited from a relatively small population and geographic isolation from the rest of the world, they have successfully eliminated COVID-19 transmission in their country by everyone working together under the guidance of their widely-respected and charismatic prime minister.

One of the problems governments face in implementing community-wide efforts to restrict transmission of the virus is that it involves getting virtually everyone to do things that are unpleasant, such as staying at home for extended periods, self-isolating, avoiding travel, quarantining and wearing masks. Not everyone is keen to play ball, and the worst offenders are those who fundamentally distrust the government’s efforts to contain the virus in the first place.

Classic examples include:

• Denying that COVID-19 exists, that it’s a serious problem, or that it requires our attention.
• Disregarding the scientific evidence.
• Sharing memes on social media with misinformation without fact checking them.
• Placing more trust in social media posts shared by friends with no training in epidemiology than in experts working in the field their whole lives.
• Refusing to get tested.
• Discouraging other people from getting tested.
• Claiming that the test is too painful, ineffective or has some other ulterior motive.
• Refusing to wear masks because it infringes on their freedom.
• Choosing to believe, study and “research” unscientific nonsense as if it were fact.
• Gathering in large groups to demonstrate against otherwise worthy causes at inappropriate times.
• Participating in large parties and family gatherings.
• Indulging in conspiracy theories.
• Accusing people who follow science-based expert advice of not thinking for themselves.
• Becoming defensive or aggressive when their ideas, beliefs and behaviour are challenged.
• Generally adopting a “Don’t tell me what to do” attitude.

For some people, the threat of a fine or imprisonment may be required to get them cooperating. Even then they present a significant risk because it doesn’t take too many people doing the wrong thing to undermine the community effort before the virus is able to spread again and the whole effort becomes worthless.

The underlying problem here is a deep distrust of authority. Rather than seeing government restrictions as a community effort to work together to solve a common problem, they’re seen as an opportunity for an authoritarian government to openly oppress it’s citizens. This may be partly true in some countries with dictatorial or otherwise oppressive leaders, but not in your average western democracy.

If you fundamentally distrust the government though, it’s easy to see this as an opportunity for those in power to impose their tyrannical will on the rest of us. So what causes some people to become so distrustful of authority figures?

Traumatic early life experiences with authority.

The original authority figures in our early lives were our parents. Principally our father, but also our mother. Older siblings, teachers and other adults in our childhood also played an important role. Together, they were responsible for keeping us safe and meeting our earliest and most fundamental needs in life. Their impact on us is extremely strong and leaves an imprint that goes deep into our nervous system, continuing to affect us many years later as an adult.

We unconsciously project our experience of our parents and other significant childhood authority figures onto the authority figures in our adult lives. If we have unhealed trauma in our early relationships with them, this is likely to cause us to distrust all adult authority figures including the police, governments, and even conceptual entities like science.

If your nervous system has been programmed from infancy to distrust authority, you’ll find plenty of evidence to confirm your deeply held existing beliefs. In fact, to believe otherwise will cause you painful cognitive dissonance. Psychologist Leon Festinger found in 1957 that people will often alter their beliefs just to avoid this unpleasant inner conflict. Having our existing beliefs validated, on the other hand, feels good; even if those beliefs cause us to self-sabotage. We are comfortable with what is familiar, not with what is necessarily good for us. If you had traumatic experiences of authority figures as a child, it’s easier to believe that the governments of the world are conspiring against you than it is to go within and heal your underlying trauma.

Adding fuel to this fire is the fact that there are good reasons to distrust plenty of authority figures:

• Poor teachers at school may have compensated for their lack of ability to engage students with harsh punishment.
• Police sometimes arrest, imprison and abuse innocent citizens.
• Scientists don’t always agree, and occasionally commit scientific fraud in the hope of furthering their careers.
• Religious leaders use made-up doctrine to control the lives of the faithful.
• Food manufacturing giants market junk food-like-substances at us that are designed to fool our taste buds into thinking that it’s good for our body, when in fact they make us sick.
• Pharmaceutical companies make billions marketing drugs at us rather than advocating for healthier lifestyle-based solutions with fewer side-effects.
• Doctors don’t always come up with the right diagnosis or treatment in a timely fashion.
• Alternative practitioners sell placebo treatments while keeping a straight face because they haven’t done enough solid research to know that they don’t actually work.
• Justice is stacked in favour of the rich who can afford effective legal representation.
• Politics attracts narcissistic candidates who put their interests ahead of those of the community, and then routinely lie or distort the truth to us.
• Graft and corruption exists in all fields, virtually everywhere.
• We all lie at times and are prone to self-deception of the worst kinds.

No wonder we end up not trusting authority figures.

The two classic opposing responses to tyrannical authority figures are to either submit in fear or rebel in anger. A healthy response to benevolent authority is to comply because you recognise the advantages of cooperation, especially when the payoff is staying alive longer. In the COVID context, submission in fear may not feel good, but at least it doesn’t have the potential to undermine everyone else’s efforts the way rebelling in anger does.

Anger is often not well managed in our emotionally stifled western society and repressed anger against childhood authority figures can get triggered unconsciously in adulthood. If we have unresolved anger towards our father for instance, we may well find ourselves rebelling against the government; even to the extent of denying that there is a problem in order to avoid cognitive dissonance. Because this happens unconsciously, we may not even be aware of the real reason why we’re doing it.

The fact that self- and community-defeating efforts to “stick it to the man” make no logical sense is a big clue that the behaviour is being driven by emotional trauma.

Most of us like to think of ourselves as mature, logical, self-determined people, so when trauma drives our behaviour we need a rationalisation to justify why we are acting like a two-year-old. As a result, those who rebel against the community’s efforts to contain COVID-19 offer all sorts of bizarre justifications for what otherwise looks like absurdly selfish behaviour.

How else can they justify complaining about the inconvenience of wearing a mask while people are in hospital dying an agonising death on a ventilator? Obviously, this kind of thinking is mind-bogglingly childish without some kind of big conspiracy-based rationale. This is why people come up with absurd justifications for their rebellious behaviour and trying to argue with them, especially on social media, isn’t likely to get anywhere.

If reading this article makes you angry, that’s a clue that you’ve got some childhood trauma being triggered. When the truth offends us, the problem lies within us, not with the truth.

The solution to overcoming distrust of authority is to heal the emotional trauma that our childhood authority figures caused us and release the pain we carry from our nervous system. This involves expressing the anger we still feel deep down towards the person or people who hurt us, so we stop projecting it onto other authority figures like the government unconsciously.

If you’re one of the people fighting against the community efforts to control the virus, the place to look is within, not to your community of fellow conspiracy theorists. Specifically consider your relationship with your father, your mother and other childhood authority figures such as older siblings, teachers, ministers and other adults who may have mistreated you. Learn to express your repressed anger, sadness, pain and grief in a constructive manner so that you can heal whatever trauma you’re still carrying in your nervous system around authority figures.

Then you’ll be in a better place to make truly rational community-minded decisions about how to respond when the government asks (or even demands) that you cooperate in doing something mildly unpleasant in the short term so that we can all return to living with the kind of freedom we normally enjoy in the long term.