Journal Entry no. 3
Can’t be surprised when something fails if you’ve never had faith about it in the first place.
“Trust is like blood pressure. It's silent, vital to good health, and if abused it can be deadly."
—Frank Sonnenberg
Trust is an interesting thing. Interestingly enough, like many other interesting things, it also causes quite an incredible amount of pain and pure annoyance for everyone involved. Presumably, a fair portion of that comes from the way that humans have evolved, and from human society in general. I don’t know if that’s true or not, and, quite honestly, I don’t really have the motivation to care. Unfortunately, even knowing where trust comes from doesn’t alleviate the pain. Fun.
Take something like the coronavirus, for example. Everyone’s in quarantine, and apparently, some people are stocking up on various things. This means that now, no one else can buy those things, and so therefore we have a shortage on those things. As a response to that, other people pointed out the fact that if no one stocked up on anything, the world wouldn’t have a shortage of those supplies anymore, or at least not to this extent. Which both makes sense, and would work—if two conditions (there might be more, I’m too lazy to think about them) are met. One, the world can’t lose a significant amount of “producing” power from the quarantine. It might be possible considering the amount of automation nowadays, and looking at the fact that companies haven’t completely stopped restocking/manufacturing things, it seems fairly plausible. But, the second condition is trust.
If I was living as a grown, self-sufficient (or not) citizen of the US (or any other country, really), and if I knew, for certain, (idk how, let’s just assume this person can see into the future for this particular situation or something) that there was going to be a severe shortage of basic supplies because people hoarded them, then I would probably do the same, out of pure necessity for my own survival. Not necessarily to an extreme extent, but certainly more than what I would normally get. And that’s where the problem lies.
If the government officially told everyone to not hoard supplies, some people might still naturally assume that other, not-trustworthy people were going to disregard the order/“not hear” the order and hoard supplies anyway, and therefore begin to hoard themselves because well “they’re doing it too.” The government couldn’t really do anything about it because there’s no good way to enforce that law (how do you tell someone that they can’t buy three packs of toilet paper instead of two) even if they did make it a law, and then we get into the same situation as before. Even if there’s no one buying like thirty packs of toilet paper in one go, if most people were to buy a couple more packs than usual, there would still be a shortage because the manufacturers aren’t prepared for the sudden increase in need. See, unless I’m being an idiot and missing something here, things are never going to work with our current society “setup.” And so, this is why we should switch to communism. If we did, then literally no one would be able to hoard, and distrust wouldn’t matter as much anymo—no.