As soon as I heard about deepfakes a few years ago, I realized that we are in serious trouble. When you can no longer trust your eyes, everything is in doubt.

But when it comes to the erosion of trust in our formerly most trusted institutions, those institutions have no one to blame but themselves.

There have always been some dishonest people who put money ahead of *everything*, but with the abandonment of religious values, that trait is now spreading unrestrained. And when companies are headed up by people whose performance is judged only by quarterly profits--people who will have moved on to the next "better" position at another company in a couple of years--it is inevitable that companies will put short-term profit ahead of everything.

There have always been some people who tell lies in the name of their ideology. But with the growth of more and more virulent ideologies, those lies are now embraced instead of denounced. When there is profit to be made from those ideologies, the motive to lie and to embrace lies increases ten-fold. But even more terrifying are those who are so devoted to their ideologies that money is not even a consideration in the decision to lie.

The point is that untrustworthy people are now being rewarded by our institutions instead of rooted out of them. That inevitably makes those institutions untrustworthy.