Most citizens’ political expectations derive from mimicking other people’s expectations

Evidence

In the end, trust may still be crucial to the success of government. Those most attentive to government will also be those most likely to know enough about governmental actions and structures to know whether at least parts of the government and some of its agents are trustworthy. If they are also the people most likely to oppose government effectively in response to its failings, then the possibility of trustworthiness and the epistemological possibility of trust could be fundamentally important to the stability of government. The significance of their role in support of government might be ramified by the implicit support of those who act from mere expectations without articulate knowledge of the trustworthiness of government. The expectations of the latter group might be based in large part on the expectations of others, just as most of us know many of the things we know only in the sense that we gather that others think those things are true. Our crippled epistemology is little more than mimicry. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 727

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the mimicry/derivative-knowledge account of how the passive majority forms its political expectations.
• XREF: Mimicry-based expectations echo the reader’s Luhmann integration: when observability collapses (blindness), even second-hand mimicry has no substrate left to copy.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that most of what we know is gathered secondhand — ‘crippled epistemology is little more than mimicry’ — is a dense philosophical observation about the epistemic structure of mass politics.