Yuval Noah Harari, always ready with a digestible morsel for the TED-addled masses, recently declared that “democracy runs on trust, dictatorship on terror.” Itās a line with the crispness of a fortune cookie and about as much analytical depth. Designed for applause, not interrogation, itās the sort of soundbite that flatters liberal sensibilities while sanding off the inconvenient edges of history.
Letās be honest: this dichotomy is not merely simplistic ā itās a rhetorical sedative. It reassures those who still believe political systems are like kitchen appliances: plug-and-play models with clear instructions and honest warranties. But for anyone whoās paid attention to the actual mechanics of power, this framing is delusional.
1. Trust Was Never Earned
In the United States, trust in democratic institutions was never some noble compact forged through mutual respect and enlightened governance. It was cultivated through exclusion, propaganda, and economic bribery. The post-WWII boom offered the illusion of institutional legitimacy ā but only if you were white, male, middle-class, and preferably asleep.
Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, women ā none were granted the luxury of naĆÆve trust. They were told to trust while being actively disenfranchised. To participate while being systemically excluded. So no, Harari, the machine didn’t run on trust. It ran on marketing. It ran on strategic ignorance.
2. Dictatorship Doesnāt Require Terror
Equally cartoonish is the notion that dictatorships subsist purely on terror. Many of them run quite comfortably on bureaucracy, passive conformity, and the grim seduction of order. Authoritarians know how to massage the same trust reflexes as democracies ā only more bluntly. People donāt just obey out of fear. They obey out of habit. Out of resignation. Out of a grim kind of faith that someone ā anyone ā is in charge.
Dictatorships don’t extinguish trust. They re-route it. Away from institutions and toward strongmen. Toward myths of national greatness. Toward performative stability. Itās not that terror is absentāitās just not the whole machine. The real engine is misplaced trust.
3. Collapse Is Bipartisan
The present moment isnāt about the erosion of a once-trustworthy system. Itās the slow-motion implosion of a confidence game on all sides. The old liberal institutions are collapsing under the weight of their hypocrisies. But the loudest critics ā tech messiahs, culture warriors, authoritarian nostalgists ā are no better. Their solutions are just new brands of snake oil in sleeker bottles.
Everyone is pointing fingers, and no one is credible. The public, caught between cynicism and desperation, gravitates either toward restoration fantasy (“make democracy work again”) or authoritarian theatre (“at least someoneās doing something”). Both are dead ends.
4. The Only Way Forward: Structural Reimagination
The only viable path isnāt restoration or regression. Itās reinvention. Systems that demand unconditional trust ā like religions and stock markets ā are bound to fail, because they rely on sustained illusions. Instead, we need systems built on earned, revocable, and continually tested trust ā systems that can survive scrutiny, decentralise power, and adapt to complexity.
In other words: stop trying to repair a house built on sand. Build something else. Something messier, more modular, less mythological.
Let the TED crowd have their slogans. Weāve got work to do.
Philosophics 