I was around 12 and to this day I think that was the most corrupt student council we had.

Few months after 9/11 is when I figured it out so I was like 7 or 8

I don’t honestly believe such a number exists, but also, I think the age aspect of it is almost or entirely irrelevant.

I was 16 on 9/11. I remember watching john Ashcroft the Friday before talking about how the Pentagon couldn’t account for billions of dollars. Then i wake up on Monday morning to the planes hitting the towers.

I stopped trusting the government sometime around there

When I was about 20 in college I learned that saying shit like ‘the government’ is stupid. Because there is no ‘the government’.

There are agencies, institutions, and individuals in the government. All with varying levels of competence and corruption and incentives. Some of them are amazing, others are really shitty. Just like people or companies or anything. There are also multiple levels of government and so many people are angry at the feds over property taxes which has nothing to do with the feds.

And I learned to avoid interacting with people who think in massive generalized terms about anything, because they tend to be very emotional and very irrational.

what age do you stop trusting the alternative to government, which is corporations?

let me just remind you that at least the government is voted in, wheras corporations are just any assholes with enough money to buy things and pay wages.

I didn’t start caring about politics until the late 2000s. When I learned about how bad George W Bush was, it gave me a hint. Politics to me growing up, was just simply background noise, something I could ignore. It was until within Obama’s second term that I started to really see what was happening, so this was about 26 for me. Then 2016 since, I would say that my trust in the government has all but been broken and that was even before Trump had his first term.

For me, the second I understood what war really was, it was clear that governments are often evil and shouldn’t be trusted. That was probably around age 12.

I was raised to trust neither the government nor law enforcement.

For me, it was somewhere around 14. Maybe younger.

Sometime between the age of 8 and 12 I remember I started to question authority, not government of countries specifically, but just the concept of authority.

I always felt like teachers were against me for some reason… frequently I got marked for “bad behavior” and weren’t allowed to go on trips…

Then I learned about Tiananmen… for context my family were all born in China… my older brother who actually went through like 7th grade in China was so shocked learned about it in the US and I remember him telling me to look it up online…

Then I remember my mom started telling me about the One Child Policy and how I was the one born against policy…

So yeah… you can see how I’m starting to get very skeptical of things

Then I learn about all the bribery stuff in US Congress, SuperPACs… etc…

US Cops shooting people and getting away with it…

The infamous Gun Trace Task Force of Baltimore

The Great Firewall of China and the censorship…

Then my “arc” completed when I was 17 and got arrested on false accusations of “agravated assault” when I was acting in self-defence against a racist bully in school… even the school admin sided against me and tried to expell me…

So by age 18, I distrust governments… and authorities in general…

Especially the PRC Government and the US Government

I mean distrusting authorities is a very American thing to do…

(Distrust PRC significantly more intensely because of the fact that they tried to end my existence)

It’s not just age, it’s when you’re living. Someone growing up in the '50s probably had more trust in the government than someone growing up in the '60s, for instance. But it really feels like overall trust has dropped significantly since then and probably won’t recover. Part of the reason is we simply know more about what’s going on. There are still secrets, but not like there were in WWII and the decade after.

Not necessarily stop trusting it, but realize they’re either corrupt or incompetent… Or worse, both. Also, 35…

This depends a lot on where you live, under what kind of government, your socioeconomic background and the personality of your close friends and family.

I grew up in Argentina and I don’t think anyone believes they can really trust the government. Consensus among high school kids is that everyone is corrupt and exploiting legal loopholes is considered the norm.

Now I can’t say there was much of a privacy concern in my circles, in my experience, and that’s still the case today, decades later, in a totally different country. So yeah it depends a lot on a lot.

Don’t trust what politicians say, watch what they do. They are remarkably consistent then.