contrary to what abduhl wrote in his statement asking where the distrust comes from, I find myself thinking the exact opposite:
where does our inherent trust to government come from? When I work with you I have to prove that I'm trustworthy. That happens either through working together or by you looking at my track record on github, mailing lists or whatever else.
Yet, when it comes to government officials no such thing applies. We trust them based on the fact that they supposedly work for government and therefore are supposedly trustworthy. But their track record generally shows the exact opposite.
And yet when I come home in a perfectly safe, good area of London, if I want something from my neighbour, I have to wait for her to open her 10 locks and open a tiny bit of the door to hear her ask what I want from her.
The only reason I see that speaks for them is the appeal to authority. We trust them, because we trust that an authority that has more power than we do is more trustworthy than us and by extension anyone appointed by them is as well.
Yet, when it comes to government officials no such thing applies.
No. Government positions are subject to various oversights. Much of the role of democratic forms of government are precisely that oversight. Though yes, it's quite often very imperfect.
Elections, FOIA requests, investigative journalism, lawsuits, review by other branches (e.g., state of county/municipal, federal of state/local), accounting/accountability offices (GAO for the US federal government), etc.
People realize that oversight is a public aspect of most government activity, but they also see that the rules of oversight are created by government and that those who make the rules tend to occupy privileged positions and receive large donations from powerful parties who have an interest in influencing those rules. So while the ideal government is self-governing, there's a perceived lack of that quality.
In the US I think things are a bit different. The orthodox philosophy is that the government exists to serve the people, consists solely of the people it serves, and is only the embodiment of the collective ability of those people to act.
The UK, on the other hand, seems to have a very ingrained (and, perhaps, inbred) centralization around authority. For a long period, it was even believed that the hereditary power structure was divinely appointed (maybe some still believe this?). So, there is this long history of accepting external authority over you and this has likely permeated the culture over the many centuries it has been developing.
I don't know enough about UK legal theories to know if the government is still actually structured as an external entity, but I sometimes get the impression that people feel that it is, based on their phraseology.
In the US, there is still a sense that the people make up the government and it can be changed as desired (though there is little consensus on desires), but I do hear people even in the US that speak of government like that (I may have done it on occasion myself).
where does our inherent trust to government come from? When I work with you I have to prove that I'm trustworthy. That happens either through working together or by you looking at my track record on github, mailing lists or whatever else.
Yet, when it comes to government officials no such thing applies. We trust them based on the fact that they supposedly work for government and therefore are supposedly trustworthy. But their track record generally shows the exact opposite.
And yet when I come home in a perfectly safe, good area of London, if I want something from my neighbour, I have to wait for her to open her 10 locks and open a tiny bit of the door to hear her ask what I want from her.
The only reason I see that speaks for them is the appeal to authority. We trust them, because we trust that an authority that has more power than we do is more trustworthy than us and by extension anyone appointed by them is as well.