Good old-fashioned trust is in short supply these days. It has been worn down and worn away by millions of advertisements and campaign ads that are indistinguishable from lies, decades of telephone scams of every conceivable kind and by a deluge of trickery and criminality on the internet. We are the daily target of credit card scams, time-share scams, tax scams, identity theft scams – if you can imagine it, somebody else has thought of it already, and tried it on us. The fake news can’t be trusted, and even the most plausible conspiracy theories are hard to believe. There are disturbing rumors that even our most exalted political leaders sometimes fail to speak the exact truth. Only Pollyanna herself could fail to get the message: lies work. A writer called Michael Young warned us about this 60 years ago, in a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy. Many readers were blindsided by the word “meritocracy.” It had a fine ring to it, suggesting to my naïve young mind that the best, most