Disregarding big worldwide conspiracies (like against big pharma, anti-vax, big oil, different political factions, ideologies), or systemic political corruption, etc. As a European if you buy a product or service in your country, or have it for free from your government, what do you trust/not trust?
Food standards, water treatment, road quality, fake stores (that sell scam products openly without fear of reprisal), electrical wiring, gas pipelines, building quality, cleaning quality, medical services (trust some countries’ medicine but not yours), teaching quality, petrol/diesel, government website/local council services, etc.
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Outside of generaly trusting in France’s and Europe’s quality and safety standard for everything, i distrust the abilities of any institution to correctly take care on the online space and generaly trust in our military and diplomatic capabilities
I trust most of those things except wiring. Especially old buildings and expansions like the garden shed are often just hacked together and are not up to code.
You cannot survive a day in Slovakia with blind trust…..
I generally trust the institutions. Is everything perfect? No, certainly not, but I don’t buy into conspiracy theories etc and generally Germany is a good place to be. That hospitals could and should be better isn’t a secret given everyone knows they are critically understaffed.
The exception is that if there are gouvernment construction works (roads, buildings), when they announce what it’s going to cost and how long it’s going to take, I double the time and expect the costs to be 3x the estimate.
I kind of trust all of them except teaching quality. My 7th grade “chemistry teacher” was actually just the math teacher filling in a vacancy on a long-term basis. She wasn’t a bad teacher in general, but a chemistry teacher should actually know chemistry. Most of that stuff is very heavily regulated and seems to work fine.
As for animal-derived food however, I do have a bias towards domestic produce. There are some other issues like the general quality of life (as we rank pretty high) but most importantly it’s about antibiotics as general supplements. I don’t want to give money to people who ensure I might live to see a world where the medical system doesn’t work.
And yes, that also goes for several other EU countries, but their flags aren’t on the packaging for easy recognition.
Being Norwegian, I am programmed to inherently trust everyone and everything except everyone and everything foreign.
Honestly, I love living in Belgium because sure,it’s not 100% but I generally live a life trusting everything.
If something doesn’t end up that way I deal with it but that’s relatively rare and I feel bothering to pay attention to avoid some of those is more work than just dealing with some of the issues that can arise from that attitude.