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let me try to break things down for you, art--my apologies if my way of writing made what i was trying to say seem too abstract--but then again, you seem to be in adjudication mode yourself here, so i assume that being designated abstract means being marginalized....so one more try....
i am not sure, ultimately, what you mean by "trust the government"---trust is too often a synonym for passive acceptance, or a passivity legitimated with reference to some god. these days, trust the gvt would seem to entail accepting the current largely conservative ideology along with it, checking your intellect at the door in exchange for a flag, etc.
as for government, here too it is unclear--the state? which? all its functions, obvious and near-invisible? the delivery of services? the redistribution of wealth? does the system of social reproduction count as part of "government"? the various institutions of social control (e.g. the church, television, etc.)
when you think about government, are you thinking about the particular bureaucratic institutions, or do you include an idea of social reality, social consequences in your picture? do you really think you can consider the state apart from the social environments it interacts with? on what basis?
when you think about politics, governance, how do you define the terms? are you really thinking about anything? how do you know? a common sense notion of government is a ideological notion.....does trust mean that you are willing to have your understanding of "reality" sliced and diced and rearranged by the shifts in political wind? and why would you do that? because thinking is "corrosive of the self and society"?
these are not abstract questions, art--they get to the heart of things "in world history"--itself an absurd abstraction--why not think more about the immediate american situation?
since i work as a historian myself, i have a fair notion that when you collapse into a "common sense" understanding of the basic terms for analysis, you evacuate anything that you might have to say of interest---that "reality" is not something given in advance---that what you say and how you say it matter very much in staging a view of the past, of the present....there is no obvious, immediate definition of anything in the social world.
thinking is hard sometimes. it requires that you sift through your premises, check information, experiment with arguments, be willing to admit that you are wrong. being critical of the regime under which you live requires that you think--more often than not, to try to maintain a position that enables you to at least try to get a view of what is happening around you....in the states, you try to remain coherent in the face of the narcotizing influence of the vast american ideological apparatus that would reduce your world to a series of vacant slogans and divert your thinking to questions of which consumer durable to buy--to counter these require some effort, some struggle---and the result of these operations will often put you in opposition--i would say that if by trust the government you mean allow yourself to be lulled to sleep by the fact of your having benefitted by the way the current system is working, to substitute "it works for me" for analysis, then no i do not trust it, i would not know how to.
paraphrasing someone famous, an unconsidered life is not worth living, even in the context of nice things, a nice residence, etc. this gets to very personal things, that i would be happy to talk about--but am wary of getting shoved off to the side again and ultimately just talking to myself, so will stop here for the moment.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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