Indeed. I wonder if the internet also has something to do with this feeling. In a way, people are looking for justifications to doing things the wrong/illegal way. And in the past the information you got about how the world works is from other people around you. Now you can look up people in the same boat and apply whatever logic they did.
Engagement-optimizing media definitely are a part of it. That means both social media sites and classical news media. Both feed us a heavily warped view of the world - one in which nothing works, and everyone tries to cheat. That's because people being good, following the rules, helping each other and accomplishing things together is not newsworthy, and stands no chance against outrage-inducing stories.
trust emerges in situations with iterated interaction; defecting is most effective in anonymous or discrete situations, since there is less opportunity for punishment.
america has urbanized rapidly in the last half century, at the same time that family formation has broken down and life-long jobs have become a thing of the past. we are atomized and thrust into constant competition. i don't mean to idealize a past that i did not even experience, but there is something to be said for having roots and knowing your neighbors. we arguably have more opportunity at the cost of stable identity -- reputation and trust naturally accrete around the kind of stability we lack.
if you talk to older people, people around my grandparents' age or thereabouts, you will hear that they no longer recognize america, that it is fundamentally different than the culture they grew up in, in terms of values. i find myself thinking about this a lot.
> there is something to be said for having roots and knowing your neighbors
I think knowing your neighbors is overvalued. My evidence is Tokyo and living in transient, largely ethnically homogenous sharehouses — in ethnically homogenous areas — for long periods of time.
