The end of “they know best”

New forms of expertise in an age of institutional doubt

“The idea that you work hard, pay your dues and follow the rules is being pushed back on,” Mike Nicholson of Progressive Masculinity explains in an interview. The former English teacher sees this during his workshops with boys up and down the country - the questioning of old social contracts, and ideas such as hard work will bring you success over time, or if you follow the rules, you’ll be OK.

As he says, it’s not about laziness or entitlement, but rather a growing feeling that schools don’t provide what’s needed to equip you for life. This is not entirely surprising, Mike points out, when cuts have gutted careers advice and practical subjects. The route from school to livelihood now feels blurred, making it harder to believe in the deal itself, causing a crisis of faith.

But it isn’t just that they’ve stopped believing the system will open up for them - there is also what Mike describes as, “a growing sentiment that real-world knowledge is being concealed, especially around business and finance,” something we’ve seen in our ethnographic research with boys and young men in particular. It’s the belief that the system is fixed against you, and to get anywhere, you almost need to shortcut or circumvent it and the institutions involved.

For anthropologists, this makes it a critical time to understand the shifting norms that aren’t always easy to decipher. It seems that what’s changed is, for much of the modern era, institutions have mediated public life, and this is now being challenged – something we are seeing in our research into topics such as health and wellness and elitism. Even though there have always been other streams of knowledge, institutions broadly told us or guided us as to what counted as knowledge, what counted as good behaviour, and how we should live together. But that vertical order is faltering. As political theorist Margaret Levi writes, trust is “a contingent exchange between citizen and institution.” That exchange now seems to be weakening.

In the 2024 Ipsos Veracity Index, only 11 per cent of Britons said they trust politicians to “tell the truth.” Trust in the police has also dropped sharply: in 2023, only 56 per cent said they trust police truth-telling - down 7 points from 2022 and about 20 points from 2019. Professions tied to power, media or politics remain among the least trusted.

The pushback against handing over trust - and the deference it requires - came through strongly in our ethnographic work with young men in the US and UK. Many described a void now filled by online mentors and influencers, fuelling an interest in hustle culture and “bro-finance.” These narratives promise money now and respect now: invest in crypto, buy NFTs, take these supplements. For many, this feels far more compelling than a vague route to “who knows where,” managed by a faceless “them.” As one viral video puts it: “They don’t teach you life skills in school because independent people can’t be controlled.”

Sociologist Anthony Giddens described modernity as disembedding, the way social life gets lifted out of local contexts. His classic example is simple: buying bread no longer involves the baker you know, but an app, a warehouse, and a logistics chain you will never meet. Trust moves from people to systems. Today, we may be seeing an extension of this: knowledge disembedding, where what counts as ‘knowing’ itself detaches from institutional guardianship and is reassembled through networks, platforms, and peer publics.

In this environment, self-publishing is seen to convey a sense of transparency, of horizontal knowledge that can be easily accessed. And rather than being hidden behind a paywall, it is often pitted against institutions seen as over-complicating issues. As political analyst Katherine Fieschi recently told us in an interview: “The minute anybody asks a good question to which there’s no easy answer, they’re branded part of the elite, trying to bamboozle you.” Complexity itself becomes suspect.

As William Davies describes in Nervous States, “the politics of feeling” means that truth is not necessarily judged by evidence but by resonance. The question morphs from “Is it true?” to “Who seems honest saying it?” Authority seems to have shifted sideways - from institution to individual, from mandates to gut feel. The social contract is being rewritten through direct action, self-made expertise, and performances of legitimacy. Authority has become distributed - the podcaster, the YouTuber, the “citizen investigator.”

And this horizontal learning shapes wellness culture more broadly - as seen in the 2024 Ipsos Global Wellness Study which finds that 65 per cent of young people now say they get health information from friends, family, or social-media peers rather than professionals. Even powerful medications like GLP-1 weight-loss drugs migrate into this peer space: influencers on TikTok and Telegram share experiences, side-effects, sourcing tips, and even unlicensed versions such as retatrutide. We are seeing a growing buzz around micro dosing – and for many, a discourse morphing into a form of modern self-care – sitting alongside supplements, biohacking and hormone balancing.

But there can be consequences, as one of our participants told us recently – “I try anything my friends at the gym suggest or if it feels right on TikTok.” This has led him into danger – notably a series of debilitating headaches for which he was sent to the neurologist for an MRI. “I was really panicked. I had the MRI and as soon as I had it I remembered - I put two and two together and I realised it must be the high quantities of salt I was drinking every day that my friend at the gym recommended. I came off it pretty quick!”

And it’s no wonder - in a recent interview Colleen Derkatch author of Why Wellness Sells, explains that the wellness industry “offers little ways to cope with big problems, if only momentarily,” by reframing structural pressures such as inequality, insecurity, climate despair and even illness - as matters of personal discipline. People everywhere want agency over their health (add Ipsos stat about 8/10 globally wanting more agency) but rather than altering structural causes, lack of access to quality healthcare, long working hours, individuals are told to optimise, detox, or self-manage.

But perhaps as Colleen Derkatch tells us – this amounts to a kind of soft gaslighting: structural incapacity becomes private fault. In this ‘disembedded knowledge frame’, the social contract of support, of state and citizen, becomes a contract of self-improvement. As one young participant told us “TikTok has started whole new concerns in my body I never worried about before – now there are so many things I should be doing to look after myself.” In our research online, we found a barrage of messages that suggest most illnesses can be avoided – with one influencer saying “there is no such thing as illness.”

But as Mike Nicholson of Progressive Masculinity says this pushback is wider then health and finances - he is seeing some growing trends online as part of this breaking down of social contracts – for example more content emerging from vigilante groups, particularly self-titled paedophile hunters. With trust in governments, media, universities, and police falling, it feels like citizens are no longer waiting for permission to act. People don’t stop caring about their idea of right and wrong – these groups want to reestablish a moral order and new moral actors have stepped in where they feel official ones are felt to be faltering. Paedophile-hunter groups pose as minors online, confront alleged offenders and post the footage; a 2022 University of Hertfordshire study found nearly half the public approve of these tactics. Citizen patrols and anti-migrant groups, documented by The Guardian, claim to “protect communities” amid migration tensions. Online, shame pages and doxxing operate as informal courts of public justice. They may not always be violent, but they are acts of moral authorship in spaces where legitimacy feels up for grabs.

What we know as anthropologists is that every society has established cultural norms as to what is acceptable in terms of behaviour – but this is being questioned. But when public figures mock civility and official channels lose credibility, those who feel excluded from authority construct their own.

But perhaps people are not retreating from civic life but rebuilding it through immediacy - peer judgment, participatory scrutiny, public correction. There is an argument that trustworthiness now depends on “showing your workings.” For institutions, that might mean shifting from command to collaboration - explaining decisions, acknowledging limits, sharing ownership of knowledge – a point made by political analyst Katherine Fieschi in a recent interview with us. Or we morph into what Byung-Chul Han calls a society of transparency, a world in which legitimacy is earned by visibility rather than process - the performance of authenticity: livestreamed meetings, radical candour, CEOs on TikTok.

And perhaps this is where modern anthropology has something vital to offer. It helps us understand how old norms - work hard, wait your turn, trust the system - are being replaced by new reflexes - see for yourself, act now, make your own authority. Citizenship only works when people are engaged as participants rather than managed as subjects, and we may be watching that renegotiation happen in real time. Maybe the task now is not to restore hierarchy, but to practise a kind of responsible horizontality - a way of sharing knowledge, authority and accountability between institutions and citizens without abandoning rigour or public trust