Distrust in Government: The Fable of the Belly

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Benjamin Paley
April 15, 2024

It doesn’t take a PhD in public administration to see that Americans are having a hard time trusting their government. According to the Pew Research Center, trust in the government “has returned to near record lows.” Given what’s happening in Washington D.C. right now, this is not unexpected.

Generally, there are two interconnected problems that contribute to high levels of distrust in government. First, the government’s prominent role in our lives—people are more susceptible to distrust the government because of its prominent role in their lives.

And second, interpersonal trust issues: people who distrust each other, distrust their government—one theory is that this interpersonal distrust comes from the appearance of impropriety from the government working with lobbying groups.

The question now becomes the following: What are the consequences of a society where people don’t trust their government or the organizations the government works with? What happens when people distrust the government so much that they are unwilling to do their part—like vote, pay taxes, serve on a jury or join the military? In trying to understand the problem’s source, I turned to literature. In Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, there is a great tale on what happens when people don’t trust the government and are unwilling to work with it.

Shakespeare has Menenius, a Roman noble, recite the fable to an angry mob of Roman plebs, who feel the senate is taking all of their wealth and hoarding it for themselves. They do not see the benefits. Menenius responds with “The Fable of the Belly“:

In former days, a man’s limbs did not work together as amicably as they do now, but each had a will and way of its own. One time the bodily members began to find fault with the belly for spending an idle, luxurious life, while they were wholly occupied in laboring for its support and ministering to its wants and pleasures. So the members entered into a conspiracy to cut off the belly’s supplies for the future. The hands were no longer to carry food to the mouth, nor the mouth to receive the food, nor the teeth to chew it.

They had not long persisted in this course of starving the belly into subjection, before they all began, one by one, to fail and flag, and the whole body to pine away. Then the members were convinced that the belly, cumbersome and useless as it seemed, had an important function of its own. They decided that they could no more do without it than it could do without them, and that if they would have the constitution of the body in a healthy state, they must work together, each in his proper sphere, for the common good of all.

Now, the version of the fable I quoted does not come from Shakespeare. It comes from one of the many versions of “The Fable of the Belly”, which can easily be found online. But all versions teach the same lesson: the dangers of distrust in society. “The Fable of the Belly” shows us what happens when distrust runs amuck. It reminds us that, even if it doesn’t seem like the government is doing its job, when society revolts (or strikes), the consequences could be dire for the entire population.

Like in “The Fable of the Belly”, we are living in a time when people are revolting. They don’t trust the government to do its job. And they don’t trust the organizations the government works with to do its job.

There is no easy answer to this issue. Rebuilding trust takes time. But now is the time to start rebuilding trust, albeit slowly.

I’ll leave you with that.

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Author: Benjamin Paley graduated in 2022 from the Shepard Broad College of Law in 2022 with a J.D. and in 2018 from Florida Atlantic University with a Master of Public Administration degree. He can be reached at [email protected].

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