In the digital age everything has changed, research has shown that peer to peer influence is most powerful, the distrust in the general populace is growing and culminating in dissatisfaction and urgency.
It is also a rather windy exercise, because even if we can come up with a list of "powerful interests" we distrust, the hard part is deciding what to do about them without being counterproductive.
Amazingly, this surge in historically rooted hatred and distrust of powerful Western invaders, meddlers and remote controllers has come yet again as a shock to many American policy makers and commentators, who have promptly retreated into a lazy "they hate our freedoms" narrative.
Powerful forces perpetuate violence, distrust and lack of dignity, until it's hard to imagine a different future.
Yes, we've talked about the revolving door until we're red or blue in the face (the door is bipartisan and spins across party lines) but this mantra bears its own perpetual repetition, a powerful reason for our distrust of the people who make and enforce our laws and regulations.
Both movements are doggedly anti-establishment — distrusting politically powerful and privileged elites and the institutions those elites inhabit.
Because Japan is so ill at ease with debate about its past, other nations understandably distrust a more powerful Japan.
In an age of rampant distrust of the powerful, Germans still trust the government (the former president, who had to quit, is being charged with accepting less than $950 toward payment of a Munich hotel bill).
Another charitable assessment is that Mr Putin is seeking to defend his protégé from the powerful security service clans who distrust Mr Medvedev's liberal-sounding speeches on personal freedoms and corruption.
But polls show Spaniards are worried about the nation's problems, and the current mood is one of distrust of the powerful as the nation suffers the consequences of a long economic crisis and political corruption cases pile up in courts.
