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 observes this during his workshops with boys across the UK: the questioning of old social contracts and ideas such as the notion that hard work will bring you success over time, or that if you follow the rules, you’ll be okay.

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, as 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. Mike suggests that this creates frustration, making boys vulnerable to predatory online actors promoting hustle culture and harmful ideologies

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 today a critical time to understand the shifting norms that aren’t always easy to decipher. What appears to have shifted is that, for much of the modern era, institutions mediated public life; this basic arrangement is now being challenged, as we see in our research on 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, with only 11 per cent of Britons saying they trust politicians to “tell the truth.” And more broadly, professions tied to media or politics are among the least trusted.

The pushback against handing over trust and the deference it requires comes through strongly in our ethnographic work with young men in the US and UK. Many describe 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. In this shift, trust itself moves from people to systems. Today, we may be seeing an extension of this: ‘knowledge disembedding’, where what counts as ‘knowing’ detaches from institutional guardianship and is instead reassembled through 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 self-made expertise and performances of legitimacy. Authority has become distributed via the podcaster, the YouTuber, the “citizen investigator.”

And this horizontal learning shapes wellness culture more broadly, with 65 per cent of young people getting health information from friends and 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 that is morphing into a form of modern self-care that sits alongside supplements and hormone balancing.

But there can be consequences, as one of our participants recently told us:

“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. In other words, people naturally want agency over their health, but rather than addressing structural causes (such as lack of access to quality healthcare or long working hours), individuals are told to 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 online research, we found a barrage of messages suggesting that most illnesses can be avoided, with one influencer stating, “There is no such thing as illness.”

However, as Mike Nicholson notes, this pushback extends beyond health and finances. He is seeing some emerging trends online as part of this breaking down of social contracts, for example, the rise of vigilante groups. 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 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.

As anthropologists, we know that every society has established cultural norms regarding what is acceptable behaviour, but today these are 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, such as peer judgment and participatory scrutiny. There is an argument that trustworthiness now depends on ‘showing your workings.’ For institutions, this might mean shifting from a command-and-control approach to one of collaboration, explaining decisions and 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 through, for example, livestreamed meetings or CEOs on TikTok.

And perhaps this is where modern anthropology has something vital to offer. It helps us understand how old norms of work hard and wait are being replaced by new reflexes: see for yourself, 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.