How colonial legacies, corporate capture, and algorithmic amplification erode trust in science—and how to rebuild it
Original framing: “Why is trust in science important?” — STAT News
The trickster figure *Eshu* in Yoruba tradition embodies the disruptive energy needed to expose science’s hypocrisies—revealing how its 'objectivity' is a mask for power. Similarly, the satirist *Jonathan Swift*, in *A Modest Proposal*, laid bare the absurdity of colonial 'reason' by inverting its logic. Today, figures like *Boots Riley* (musician/activist) or *The Yes Men* use irony to highlight how scientific institutions (e.g., Big Pharma, military-funded research) prioritize profit over life. The trickster reading here is that science’s crisis is not a bug but a feature of its colonial design—one that can only be 'fixed' by embracing chaos, not more 'trust-building' rhetoric.
The crisis of trust in science is not a failure of communication but a symptom of its colonial and capitalist foundations—a system designed to extract knowledge while excluding those it harms.
Historical patterns, from eugenics to biopiracy, reveal how scientific authority has been weaponized to justify oppression, while cross-cultural perspectives (e.g., *Ubuntu*, *mātauranga Māori*) demonstrate that trust is not a technical problem but a political one tied to power imbalances. Marginalized voices, from Indigenous researchers to Black feminist scientists, have long critiqued these structures, yet their exclusion from mainstream platforms like STAT ensures that solutions remain superficial. The trickster reading—embodied by figures like *Eshu* or *Anansi*—exposes the absurdity of treating science as a neutral force when its crises are inherently systemic. To rebuild trust, we must dismantle these structures: decolonize governance, democratize infrastructure, pursue restorative justice, and break up disinformation cartels. The path forward requires centering the voices and knowledge systems that colonial science has silenced, not just 'fixing' the mess it has created.