It is an unfortunate fact of our historical moment that across the world, people seem to be united by a worsening lack of trust in established institutions. There are many reasons for this, but the following stand out as common across the world:
- Since the 1990s, new technologies have created unprecedented new wealth among the already wealthy, while increasing income inequality to levels historically associated with mass suffering, political breakdown, and conflict.
- Climate change has gone from a future scenario to an everyday reality, even as most nations continue to slow-walk or overtly oppose meaningful efforts to rapidly reduce climate pollution.
- All nations are bearing some burden from a worsening tangle of interacting and compounding crises, including climate change, income inequality, spillover pathogens, Nature loss, and other costly threats—the so-called Polycrisis.
- Financialization—the process whereby financial arrangements that require future repayment of debt plus interest take over more of the core cost of any given product or service—is adding new indirect costs to everyday goods and services.
- Together, these dynamics have embedded higher costs in the price of nearly everything. While some advanced technologies continue to show rapidly decreasing cost profiles, cost of living is rising faster than incomes.
- 78 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, most nations continue to treat human rights with either excessive nuance or overt hostility, leading many to believe their governments are not on their side.
- Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have made it possible to create near light-speed campaigns of false and misleading information, creating a worsening threat of systematized disinformation.
All of these dynamics, which are observable in everyday life around the world, have something in common: They undermine the individual moral and practical sovereignty of people, households, and communities. This means even in countries where individuals enjoy the most civil liberties, people feel less free and less safe.
This general atmsophere of degraded public trust creates further problem dynamics: Above all, it is the perfect political environment for divisive demagogues who obsess over one or more phantom menaces to make people suspicious of others in their own society. We see this playing out in anti-immigrant politics in many parts of the world, most visibly in the United States, where the Bill of Rights is now routinely ignored by the federal administration.
When human rights are ignored, political systems become brittle, lose their adaptive capacity, undermine public trust, and can become a source of instability rather than security and opportunity. The social media age has exacerbated flaws in the ways political leaders seek public support—with many high-profile cases of people in public office spending their time seeking “likes” instead of working diligently to earn public approval.
2026 has provided a hopeful alternative to the slippery slope of collapsing trust: In Minneapolis, the world has been able to witness a constructive community-driven response. People have voluntarily self-organized to support vulnerable neighbors, even to the extent of putting their own safety at risk to protect others, nonviolently.
The example is so surprising and unusual the people of Minneapolis have been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, by US-based magazine The Nation. The Minneapolis community response also, however, aligns with commonly held views of where and how trust is rooted and most available.
People consistently describe those closest to them as more trustworthy and tend to have less friction or mistrust with their local communities than with abstract political movements or faraway institutions. At the same time, it is well-documented that one of the motivators for use of social media is the desire to create wider bonds of community and belonging that feel less available amid the rhythms of everyday life in our time.
If community-level responses are the most promising way to respond to polycrisis and trust breakdown, most societies will need to learn new ways of structuring decision-making at the national level. We still live with hierarchies that are rooted in ancient and medieval understandings of public authority. Even democratic societies that favor universal human rights have adapted ancient hierarchies to representative government.
People need more decision-making authority in their communities and in municipal government, and the benefits of such inclusive processes need to be brought to bear on national policy processes.
- In the US, for example, 3 of every 4 people are concerned about worsening climate change, including more than 70% of Republicans.
- Even greater numbers recognize the uneven impact of climate change on different populations, demographics, and regions.
- And yet, big money contributions from a handful of major political donors have been able to shape a uniform block among Republicans that block US climate policy.
- That a majority of Congress can represent a minority of the population, and then be captured by the wealth of just a few people, suggests self-government is an illusion.
People in communities are being affected by costly climate impacts now, creating economic setbacks that can undo decades of personal and collective achievement. There need to be ways for people to exercise greater moral sovereignty over national policy planning.
This shift can be helped by consumers having better access to complex, multidimensional quality ratings that provide strategic foresight for everyday decision-making. This is what the Active Value Trust Ratings (AVTR) system is intended to achieve.
Large-scale complex systems are unwieldy and not designed to be accountable. A focus on respecting people’s right to know, and right to choose health, safety, freedom, and economic inclusion, can allow us to build the integrated data systems and quality insights people need to understand their world factually and make values-based choices.
