Americans No Longer Have Faith in Our Major Institutions, and So Is the Collapse of Our Civilization Inevitable?

If the American people have lost faith in almost all of our major institutions, how is our civilization going to survive?  If any collective effort is going to work, people have to believe in that effort.  That is true whether we are talking about a sports team, a business partnership, a romantic relationship or a nation as a whole.  When people stop believing, it is just a matter of time before failure arrives, and at this point the American people simply do not believe in those that are currently running our society.  In fact, a recent Gallup survey discovered that faith in our major institutions has dropped to depressingly low levels.  The survey asked people if they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in a long list of prominent institutions, and these were the results…

• Small business: 65 percent
• The military: 60 percent
• The police: 43 percent
• The medical system: 34 percent
• The church or organized religion: 32 percent
• The U.S. Supreme Court: 27 percent
• Banks: 26 percent
• The public schools: 26 percent
• The presidency: 26 percent
• Large technology companies: 26 percent
• Organized labor: 25 percent
• Newspapers: 18 percent
• The criminal justice system: 17 percent
• Television news: 14 percent
• Big business: 14 percent
• Congress: 8 percent

For nine of those major institutions that Gallup has been tracking since 1979, the average score has dropped from 48 percent to 26 percent over that time.

And Gallup says that confidence in almost every institution is currently at or near all-time lows…

Most of the institutions rated this year are within three points of their all-time-low confidence score, including four that are at or tied with their record low. These are the police, public schools, large technology companies and big business.

Only four institutions have a confidence score significantly above their historical low: the military, small business, organized labor and banks. However, the lows for these institutions were recorded more than a decade ago, while the recent trend for each has been downward.

Of course the truth is that most of our major institutions fully deserve these low scores.

Our federal government, our schools, our medical system, our major corporations and the mainstream media have all become beacons of corruption and incompetence in recent years.

Everywhere you look, society is breaking down and things are getting worse.

Let me give you one small example.  In New York City, the rat problem has become so severe that they have just held their very first “Anti-Rat Day of Action”…

As New York City gets tough on its rodent problem, the first Anti-Rat Day of Action was held Saturday in Harlem.

City agencies, including the sanitation department, teamed up to show and tell people how to keep rats out of the community.

The city’s first rat czar was also on hand to provide times.

If you live in a city that needs to appoint a “rat czar”, you should probably consider moving.

According to one resident, there are “rats the size of Crocs” running around all over the place…

“We’ve had rats the size of Crocs just running up and down the street. Like a Croc shoe? A average size eight, running up and down the street,” Harlem resident Ruth McDaniels said.

Harlem is part of one of four mitigation zones in the city that will get additional funding to help combat rats.

Yuck!

Once upon a time, America’s shiny new cities were the envy of the entire world.

But now our major cities have degenerated into rotting, decaying hellholes.  For instance, just consider what has happened to St. Louis…

In 1950, St. Louis was the eighth-largest city in the United States, with a population of 856,796. Today, that number has fallen to less than 300,000, a drop of some 65 percent. Major employers — Anheuser-Busch, McDonnell-Douglas, TWA, Southwestern Bell and Ralston Purina —have dramatically reduced their presence or left altogether. St. Louis is consistently ranked one of the most dangerous cities in the country. One in five people live in poverty. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has the highest rate of police killings per capita of the 100 largest police departments in the nation according to a 2021 report. Prisoners in the city’s squalid jails, where 47 people died in custody between 2009 and 2019, complain of water being shut off from their cells for hours and guards routinely pepper-spraying inmates, including those on suicide watch. The city’s crumbling infrastructure, hundreds of gutted and abandoned buildings, empty factories, vacant warehouses and impoverished neighborhoods replicate the ruins of other post-industrial American cities, the classic signposts of a civilization in terminal decline.

I wish that I could tell you that St. Louis was an exception.

But it isn’t.

All over America, cities are descending into chaos, and violence is out of control.  One particularly disturbing incident in Oakland has made a lot of headlines in recent days…

Shocking video has emerged of a woman being pistol-whipped and dragged across gravel by two thugs in Democrat-led Oakland as the city grapples with a surging crime wave.

The attack happened on Wednesday August 16, 6.15pm on International Boulevard, and left the unidentified woman with severe injuries, police investigating in the East Bay city said.

Conditions in Oakland just continue to get worse and worse, and at this point things are so bad that some local business owners are comparing conditions in the city to the Vietnam War…

This latest incident is an example of violent crime running rampant across the Dem-led city, with business owners now comparing the area to a ‘battleground’ akin to wartime Vietnam. It’s become so severe that the city’s police force are also warning residents to secure their homes while they’re inside.

This is our country now. You might want to get used to it, because things aren’t going to turn around any time soon.

In the early days of our country, Americans made “the Protestant work ethic” famous all over the world. Our forefathers worked insanely hard, and they passed down a truly great society to us. But now we don’t want to put in that same level of work.

Instead, we just keep getting lazier and lazier.

If a new bill that was just introduced in Pennsylvania becomes law, any business that has at least 500 workers will be forced “to reduce their work week from 40 to 32 hours a week”…

When those rare 3-day weekends pop up on the work schedule, it’s an office-wide celebration! Well, what if that was every week?

A new bill to create a four-day work week is about to be introduced in the Pennsylvania legislature.

It would require businesses with more than 500 employees to reduce their work week from 40 to 32 hours a week.

However, less work hours will not mean less pay!

Doesn’t that sound great?

Hey, I have an idea.

Let’s just not work at all and see how that turns out.

Sadly, we are even passing on our laziness to our kids.

In Portland, teachers will soon be banned from giving “zeroes” to kids that cheat or fail to do their assignments…

Portland Public Schools is workshopping new “equitable grading practices” that bar teachers from assigning “zeros” to students who cheat or fail to turn in assignments.

The district’s initiative aims to address “racial disparities” and “inequities” in grading and instruction, a “journey” that the district began “during the pandemic,” a handout reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon says. “Grading for equity,” the handout states, includes eliminating “zeros” as a grade—even when a student cheats or fails to turn in a test or assignment. It also calls for no penalties for late work and no grades for both homework and “non-academic factors,” such as “participation, attendance, effort, attitude, [and] behavior.”

Are you kidding me? If this keeps up, how will we compete with the rest of the world? The truth is that we won’t.

Our society is crumbling right in front of our eyes, and unless we find a way to turn things around we won’t last much longer. But at this point most Americans simply do not have any motivation to make this country a better place. Most of them would rather sit on their sofas stuffing Cheetos into their faces as they watch Netflix.

Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.