this is describing a tendency to shift the burden of trust from those immediately connected to you (e.g. your parents) to those more distanced from you (govt authorities). there’s economic efficiency arguments for this sort of thing: parents can’t keep up with state-of-the-art knowledge in every field, whereas specialization can allow for a system that does. but it creates more fragility (individual mistakes have widespread costs: see prescription opioids leading to mass addiction) and ossification (long after illicit/underground culture has learned something valuable it’s hard to take that mainstream: see the impact of psychedelics on PTSD or depression. or for a case to show that we haven’t reached complete ossification but just slower dissemination, ketamine for depression (which has achieved recent approvals after significant efforts)).
> this is describing a tendency to shift the burden of trust from those immediately connected to you (e.g. your parents) to those more distanced from you (govt authorities)
We still have both. Now we have a government saying your kid’s chemistry kit won’t include lethal substances. And you (or your parents) can buy a chemistry book and do whatever experiments you feel are safe.
We now have two layers of trust instead of one and you can choose which layer works best for you.