Comment by hakunin

I think relying on your judgement of character to determine trust is a decent tactic in personal life and interactions, but it doesn't work at scale.

People place trust in faceless institutions all the time. That's why you sit in a box that produces about 50 explosions per second when you drive a car. I don't think you would've gained much by being comfortable with the character of your car designer. If you think building cars is complex, laws and regulations are just as complex. And it takes teams of lawyers, hundreds of pages of documents, and a lot of data to figure out what makes sense. But it's easy to armchair-judge all of that as "just some faceless institution".

> what forces exist to prevent them from being corrupted?

Why are you right now not stealing from your work, or vulnerable people around you? Why are you not trying to screw over everybody you meet? Those forces and more. There's a lot of scrutiny built into most institutions.

> the growing cynicism in institutions is because of evidence of corruption

I don't think we use the word "evidence" the same way. Having perverse incentives is not evidence.