A fiduciary and philosophical response to Joel Suss’s Financial Times “Free Lunch” column (26 Oct 2025) on America’s polarised economy.
by Peter Kahl, 2025-10-29
This paper situates America’s present political and economic turmoil—brought to international attention by Joel Suss in the Financial Times (Opinion – Free Lunch, 26 October 2025)—within a deeper epistemic crisis. It argues that the paralysis of U.S. governance and markets is not merely institutional or ideological but fiduciary: a collapse of trust across civic, governmental, and corporate domains. Extending Suss’s diagnosis of “polarisation paralysis,” the paper identifies the underlying pathology as epistemic clientelism—a systemic exchange of recognition for conformity that corrodes autonomy, cooperation, and innovation. Drawing on the Relational Theory of Epistemic Clientelism (Kahl, 2025e), The Newborn’s First Cry as Epistemic Claim (Kahl, 2025d), and Epistemic Humility and the Transposition of Ethical Duties into Epistemic Duties (Kahl, 2025g), the study synthesises psychology, philosophy, and governance to explain how dissonance-intolerance becomes the economic motor of distrust. Through this lens, partisan gridlock, policy uncertainty, and corporate risk aversion appear as symptoms of fiduciary breach—the failure of institutions to act as epistemic trustees. The paper concludes by proposing a framework of fiduciary epistemic stewardship—anchored in candour, humility, and pluralism—as a civic and economic remedy for rebuilding trust in the American polity and, by extension, in liberal democracies worldwide.
polarisation, fiduciary ethics, epistemic clientelism, epistemic humility, cognitive dissonance, fiduciary trust, epistemic stewardship, epistemic governance, fiduciary collapse, epistemic psychology, political economy, democratic institutions, social epistemology, United States, Financial Times analysis, Joel Suss 2025, current events USA
Kahl, P. (2025). Trump’s economy of distrust: Fiduciary epistemic collapse in political economy. Lex et Ratio Ltd. GitHub: https://github.com/Peter-Kahl/Trumps-Economy-of-Distrust DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17473766
v1 published in Great Britain by Lex et Ratio Ltd, 2025-10-29.
© 2025 Lex et Ratio Ltd. The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work and to object to its derogatory treatment. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes with attribution and without modification.
Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .