Guest Post from David Lewis
On trust, institutions, and what happens when authority outlives obligation
Welcome. What follows is a guest post that originally appeared on David Lewis’s Cultural Notes Substack back in January, used here with David’s kind permission. I share it because it sums up my dismay about the corporatization of business—and the bad things that follow from it—better than I could write it myself.
David Lewis is an Australian musician, historian and essayist who writes about how music, folklore, and popular culture shape the way we think. He also co-hosts the New Politics Podcast, which has for me been a useful window into Australian politics.
He’s on Substack Notes @dlewis and you’ll find his writing on Substack here. I recommend his writing and I encourage you to subscribe.
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On trust, institutions, and what happens when authority outlives obligation.
Originally published here on Jan 07, 2026
by David Lewis
I was recently speaking with a small business owner who was struggling to keep staff. He wasn’t a bad employer. He paid well, conditions were reasonable, and in several cases he had gone beyond what the rules required rather than merely complying with them. By any ordinary measure, he was acting in good faith. Still, people didn’t stay. At first, he reached for the explanation that has become almost reflexive: millennials. They were unreliable, uncommitted, insufficiently grateful for the opportunities on offer. He said this without venom, more in puzzlement than anger. He genuinely couldn’t understand why what had once worked no longer did.
I suggested, carefully, that it might be more complicated. As we talked, something shifted. He realised it wasn’t just millennials. Gen Z employees came and went just as easily. So did people his own age. Even Gen X — the supposedly pragmatic, institutionally loyal generation — showed little inclination to stay put. That was the moment the problem clarified itself. This wasn’t about youth. It was about trust.
For much of the twentieth century, institutions — businesses, universities, professions, governments — operated on an implicit bargain. If you showed up, behaved reasonably, and did your part, you would be offered a degree of stability, security, and meaning in return. That promise was not always honoured, but it was widely believed. Belief mattered. It shaped behaviour, encouraged patience, and sustained loyalty even when conditions were imperfect. People stayed not because everything was good, but because they trusted that institutions would, over time, reciprocate. That trust has largely evaporated. And once trust goes, behaviour changes — not out of spite or entitlement, but out of rational self-protection.
What we are living with is not simply cultural drift or generational attitude. It is the long moral afterlife of neoliberalism — not as an economic doctrine, but as a lived social order. Neoliberalism promised flexibility, efficiency, and freedom. In practice, it delivered something more corrosive: the systematic transfer of risk from institutions to individuals, while leaving institutional authority largely intact. Over time, security was privatised, employment made provisional, careers fragmented, and failure reframed as personal rather than structural. Institutions learned to insulate themselves. Individuals learned they were on their own. This lesson did not need to be taught explicitly. It was absorbed through casualisation, outsourcing, disappearing pensions, and the steady normalisation of instability. Once institutions stopped absorbing risk, they forfeited the moral basis on which loyalty had rested.
The small business owner I spoke to hadn’t broken any rules. In some cases, he had exceeded them. But neither had the institutions his employees had grown up watching. They had done something worse. They had retained the language of commitment while withdrawing the substance of protection. Workers were told loyalty would be rewarded. It wasn’t. Students were told education guaranteed security. It didn’t. Citizens were told expertise was neutral and benevolent. It often wasn’t. So now, when even a decent employer asks for commitment, employees silently ask a different question: why should I believe you’ll be different? This is not cynicism. It is pattern recognition. Under these conditions, work becomes transactional not because people lack character, but because institutions trained them to expect nothing else.
What many employers now experience as unreliability is better understood as withheld belief. People no longer behave as though institutions will catch them if they fall, so they keep moving. They do not invest emotionally in structures that have shown themselves brittle or self-protective. They do not trade flexibility for promises that resemble those their parents were given — and saw broken. This is why appeals to work ethic and generational virtue consistently miss the point. They mistake a legitimacy problem for a discipline problem. Institutions continue to assert authority, but they no longer reliably command belief. Authority without belief produces compliance at best and disengagement at worst.
The same pattern is visible across public life. Universities struggle to assert intellectual authority, not because knowledge is devalued, but because they are increasingly experienced as corporatised service providers rather than custodians of truth. Public health messaging fractures not primarily because people reject science, but because institutions that speak in its name are no longer trusted to act transparently, proportionately, or with restraint. Even fringe movements gain traction less through persuasion than through disbelief — a refusal to grant institutions the presumption of good faith they once enjoyed. This does not make bad ideas sound. It does explain why they spread. When trust collapses, people do not become more rational. They become more defensive.
The tragedy is that institutions often respond to declining trust by doing precisely the wrong thing. They moralise, tighten control, and speak with greater certainty and less empathy. But legitimacy cannot be commanded back into existence. It can only be rebuilt when institutions demonstrate — consistently and visibly — that they understand the lived conditions of those they claim to serve, that they are capable of restraint, and that they are willing once again to share risk. Compassion is not indulgence here. It is the precondition of authority.
The small business owner I spoke to did not suddenly become a bad employer, nor had he failed to meet his obligations. But he grasped, perhaps for the first time, that even good faith now operates inside a system that no longer rewards belief. Trust cannot be assumed. Loyalty cannot be requested in advance. Stability must be demonstrated repeatedly, not promised rhetorically. This is not a generational failure. It is the accumulated consequence of institutions that retained authority while shedding obligation. Until that is faced honestly, institutions will continue to misdiagnose the problem — and blame individuals for behaviour they were methodically taught. The cost is not merely disengagement at work or disbelief in public life. It is the slow erosion of legitimacy itself.
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My gratitude to David Lewis for allowing me to share this guest post.
That’s it for today. See you Friday.
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Cheers,
Bill
