If the American people have lost faith in almost all of our major institutions, how is our civilization going to survive?  If any collective effort is going to work, people have to believe in that effort.  That is true whether we are talking about a sports team, a business partnership, a romantic relationship or a nation as a whole.  When people stop believing, it is just a matter of time before failure arrives, and at this point the American people simply do not believe in those that are currently running our society.  In fact, a recent Gallup survey discovered that faith in our major institutions has dropped to depressingly low levels.  The survey asked people if they have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in a long list of prominent institutions, and these were the results…

Small business: 65 percent
The military: 60 percent
The police: 43 percent
The medical system: 34 percent
The church or organized religion: 32 percent
The U.S. Supreme Court: 27 percent
Banks: 26 percent
The public schools: 26 percent
The presidency: 26 percent
Large technology companies: 26 percent
Organized labor: 25 percent
Newspapers: 18 percent
The criminal justice system: 17 percent
Television news: 14 percent
Big business: 14 percent
Congress: 8 percent

For nine of those major institutions that Gallup has been tracking since 1979, the average score has dropped from 48 percent to 26 percent over that time.

And Gallup says that confidence in almost every institution is currently at or near all-time lows…

Most of the institutions rated this year are within three points of their all-time-low confidence score, including four that are at or tied with their record low. These are the police, public schools, large technology companies and big business.