Inspired by a few other posts and memes flying about. When I was young movies and tbh real life you would come across old people telling you that can’t trust the gov. To keep your cash at home etc. tell em nothing.

I am feeling it. I always assumed maybe about 60 it will happen to me. I kinda linked it to idle minds or a cognitive decline but lack of trust for me has arrived a lot earlier and I think I can rationalise to myself it’s more based on the gov actions rather than my circumstances.

So wha do you think in the magic age number that trust in the gov erodes? I’ll start. 42.

I think mine was around 13.

Not necessarily stop trusting it, but realize they're either corrupt or incompetent... Or worse, both. Also, 35...

At what advanced age do you start?

I think I was around 13, but I'm also quite a few years younger in general. I have the feeling that especially gen z started to get political at younger ages than recent older generations, maybe due to growing up with access to so much information.

I would have said around 15-16, but I think it's also important to note that there are many degrees of trust between blindly trusting everything the government does and becoming some kind of "sovereign citizen".

I believe the government often doesn't act in the people's best interest and that many politicians are fundamentally corrupt. I do believe our institutions mostly manage to uphold our constitution though, and that my country has a functioning democracy. I don't keep all my money in cash at home, that seems both paranoid and unsafe.

This depends a lot on where you live, under what kind of government, your socioeconomic background and the personality of your close friends and family.

I grew up in Argentina and I don't think anyone believes they can really trust the government. Consensus among high school kids is that everyone is corrupt and exploiting legal loopholes is considered the norm.

Now I can't say there was much of a privacy concern in my circles, in my experience, and that's still the case today, decades later, in a totally different country. So yeah it depends a lot on a lot.

It would help if you specified which government.

That's a good point. What is the line? I think for me it is two things.

The voicing. Saying to others I do not trust them - usually followed by discourse and reasoning/grassroots activism

Taking steps to protects yourself/or obscure - for example starting to use cash or taking steps to avoid being surveilled.

I sound like my dad...keep ya cash close and tell em nothing

At this stage I would be surprised if there is a common majority of any countries gov...which do you think can be trusted?

Don't trust what politicians say, watch what they do. They are remarkably consistent then.

The older I get the more I trust it. The government is generally pretty large and reliable.

Seeing random scandals and over indexing on is a common issue. People love to make shit up and lie because they have no interest in the boring truth.

I was around 10.

I never truly trusted the government 100% from when i was a teenager. I get that we need a government to ensure "things work" and they need us to "turn the gears", but that's as far as it goes. They aint looking out for you

I was raised to trust neither the government nor law enforcement.

Sometime between the age of 8 and 12 I remember I started to question authority, not government of countries specifically, but just the concept of authority.

I always felt like teachers were against me for some reason... frequently I got marked for "bad behavior" and weren't allowed to go on trips...

Then I learned about Tiananmen... for context my family were all born in China... my older brother who actually went through like 7th grade in China was so shocked learned about it in the US and I remember him telling me to look it up online...

Then I remember my mom started telling me about the One Child Policy and how I was the one born against policy...

So yeah... you can see how I'm starting to get very skeptical of things

Then I learn about all the bribery stuff in US Congress, SuperPACs... etc...

US Cops shooting people and getting away with it...

The infamous Gun Trace Task Force of Baltimore

The Great Firewall of China and the censorship...

Then my "arc" completed when I was 17 and got arrested on false accusations of "agravated assault" when I was acting in self-defence against a racist bully in school... even the school admin sided against me and tried to expell me...

So by age 18, I distrust governments... and authorities in general...

Especially the PRC Government and the US Government

I mean distrusting authorities is a very American thing to do...

(Distrust PRC significantly more intensely because of the fact that they tried to end my existence)

I think trust in government is generally really high here in Scandinavia

That was one of my few thoughts

Why do you trust them? What are the indicators you see?

I probably stopped trusting it when I was a 16 year old libertarian.

I probably stopped trusting the government around age 10.

After going through and reading others' answers, I'm curious if you still think it's "an old man thing".

19, when 9-11 occurred. I was a truther for a while, not anymore, but ever since then it's been year after year of disappointment. Obama almost got us back on track but didn't have the guts to do things like completely close Gitmo or put an end to mass surveillance.

I was never raised to trust the government in the first place.

Trust would have had to be earned in the first place to have stopped. My understanding of the US government was shaped by being raised on a military base in the UK, 9/11 happened but was never exaggerated or propagandized to the degree that it apparently was in the US.

I think it depends on the trustworthiness of your government. Even then, it's a scale that slides depending on the situation. I'm in my 70s and feel my government is going through a very solid stage right now. My trust level is at one of the highest level.

what age do you stop trusting the alternative to government, which is corporations?

let me just remind you that at least the government is voted in, wheras corporations are just any assholes with enough money to buy things and pay wages.

18 when I was able to vote and started paying attention to what politicians said and did.

So that would make it voting age. After that you can trust individuals who run the government, but even trustworthy people in power can be held up by institutional inertia like police unions.

It's not just age, it's when you're living. Someone growing up in the '50s probably had more trust in the government than someone growing up in the '60s, for instance. But it really feels like overall trust has dropped significantly since then and probably won't recover. Part of the reason is we simply know more about what's going on. There are still secrets, but not like there were in WWII and the decade after.

When I was about 20 in college I learned that saying shit like 'the government' is stupid. Because there is no 'the government'.

There are agencies, institutions, and individuals in the government. All with varying levels of competence and corruption and incentives. Some of them are amazing, others are really shitty. Just like people or companies or anything. There are also multiple levels of government and so many people are angry at the feds over property taxes which has nothing to do with the feds.

And I learned to avoid interacting with people who think in massive generalized terms about anything, because they tend to be very emotional and very irrational.

I have never trusted them, I stupidly fell into the might be ok as someone will step up and regulate but I’ve been making steps to stop and protect more of my privacy.

For me, it was somewhere around 14. Maybe younger.

They're not mutually exclusive?

You can and should not trust either

For me, the second I understood what war really was, it was clear that governments are often evil and shouldn't be trusted. That was probably around age 12.

As soon as I knew what a government was. Age 12ish

Took another 18 years for me to actually have articulated reasons why other than "feels*

I don't honestly believe such a number exists, but also, I think the age aspect of it is almost or entirely irrelevant.

yes, go live in the nonexistent commune; it's a solution for 8 billion people.

You can not trust something and still live under it.

It's about being aware that you should be prepared for if things get worse.

I was 16 on 9/11. I remember watching john Ashcroft the Friday before talking about how the Pentagon couldn't account for billions of dollars. Then i wake up on Monday morning to the planes hitting the towers.

I stopped trusting the government sometime around there

Few months after 9/11 is when I figured it out so I was like 7 or 8

I was around 12 and to this day I think that was the most corrupt student council we had.

Ive worked for them and seen how things run. Its pretty normal and non ominous. The government it department was very well run, efficient, highly skilled, good worker rights. Nothing to complain about other than salaries being a bit lower than private sector.

My mum works for a welfare department and she also echo's that its just people doing their job and everything I said except the efficiency aspect because its a lot of face to face empathic type tasks you can't optimise it without making it souless.

As for the political parties themselves they are directly a representative of the population. The fact that some parities are incompetent and racist is exactly what I see reflected from half my country. I look at what they say and what they vote on and it tracks pretty closely. These people all seem to think they are improving the country even the ones who are fucking it up (looking at you David Seymour and Rawiri Waititi).

But I'm lucky to live in a country with low-ish corruption.

I trust some parts of government to be useful. Like food assistance or healthcare are useful and should be expanded. I don't trust that politicians will keep the useful parts useful though. Also gotta keep this in mind.

Exceptionally young, around 8 years old. Same goes for religious people lying to me.

Good.

11y 👀

Not every generation is the same. Many old people where I live and today still seem to trust it a lot, while the ones from when you were a kid probably saw WWII and the Great Depression.

What I'm saying is, it's less an age, and more what you've lived through.

Sadly, most people who understand this seem to just lurk.

Maybe each unhinged commenter scares away a nuanced commenter and a bit, until some kind of equilibrium is reached.

I fully endorse this point, but with an added caveat. The government is made up of people, just like any other organization, but there is often less money to be had in the public sector than the private sector (corruption notwithstanding) so often you wind up with people passionate about their work, but occasionally you have people who aren't talented enough to hack it in the private sector.