Growing up, on Halloween, my parents and seemingly every adult within a 20-mile radius instructed me and my friends to only ever eat prepackaged candy. Cookies or other baked goods might have shards of glass or razor blades baked in them by some nefarious neighbor.
Our neighbors just can’t be trusted. When my parents were young, they could trust their neighbors. But the world just isn’t what it was anymore. The world is falling apart.
That was the message the overculture gave me.
This is, of course, yet another iteration of the “nowadays” language that pervades our society. We perceive the world as growing worse, more dangerous, and less prosperous. But in reality, it is often simply that our brains are wired to perceive the past as more comforting and idyllic than the present.
In fact, this perception is so strong that we often perceive the world as getting worse even when it is actually demonstrably improving.
Since 1972, Gallup has polled Americans on whether they believe crime in their local area is increasing. Since 1989, Gallup has polled Americans on whether crime in the U.S. as a whole is getting worse. In both cases, more often than not, a majority of people report that both local and national crime rates have gotten worse over the last year.
But actual crime statistics from both the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Justice Statistics paint a starkly different picture. Over that span, violent crime in the U.S. has decreased drastically, from around 75 violent crimes per 1,000 people in 1993 down to around 38 in 2022. Violent crime has virtually been cut in half, all in a time when people believe it’s getting worse.
Similarly, there has never been any actual evidence of a problem with nefarious neighbors and dangerous Halloween candy, outside of perhaps a very few extraordinary cases. This has been thoroughly debunked as an urban myth.
And yet, it feels true to so many of us. The mistrust is baked in deep. And many of us continue to live by this belief and build our worldviews around it. Many of us are utterly convinced things are getting worse, even as they get better. Many of us are convinced that we can’t trust our neighbors, even when it’s the international corporations making their plastic-wrapped Halloween candies that have routinely deceived and poisoned us.
You actually can trust your neighbors. And in fact, trusting your neighbors and building networks of support with them is a foundational element of any sustainable, just, thriving world we’d want to create for ourselves. Together, we are strong, agile, and resourceful. Disconnected and mistrusting one another, we are weak and brittle.
As you celebrate Halloween tonight, perhaps ponder: What would it mean for you to actually trust and lean into community more, not less? How might you show up differently if you truly believed your neighbors were safe?
Peter Schulte
I help aspiring changemakers do good in the world and feel good in the process.