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The age we live in these days is one of confusion, mendacity, and willful ignorance. In the West, governments have long lost the trust of their citizens, as anti-establishment parties continue their ascendance.

While the number of Europeans trusting their governments hovered around 35 percent recently, in the US only 16 percent of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center this year said they trust their government “most of the time.” It is no surprise either that citizens no longer trust most of the media, its objectivity or independence.

Today the mainstream media is almost entirely owned by billionaires and conglomerates, from the Murdoch family’s News Corp to Bloomberg, AT&T, the Bertelsmann or Bollore groups in Germany and France, or Gazprom in Russia. Many of these owners lean toward the right, often pushing their media to discredit and smear other outlets or politicians on the left or in the center.

The result, when neither politicians nor the media are trusted, is that institutions no longer function as intended and citizens turn to other sources of information, often ones spreading even more disinformation, thereby further deepening the ambient sense of confusion.

The only thing most citizens are certain of is that there is deception in the air. Politicians make manufactured promises they will not honor, while the media distracts us from the real issues at hand.

Many Western parliaments are no longer considered to be holding the debates that matter to people, who instead take to the streets to express their opinions, since polling is also considered to be controlled by special interests and agendas. It is no exaggeration to say that the democratic institutions that once provided progress and stability are crumbling in front of our eyes.

One example showing our confusion and willful ignorance, of course, is the environment, arguably the most important challenge we are facing for our future survival and well-being.

We paid lip service to our environmental challenges by getting 196 parties to sign a Paris Agreement that many never had the intention of applying to themselves.

Instead of the average 1.5 C set as a limit of global warming, we are currently on track for more than 2.5 C of warming.

Following the conflict in Ukraine, countries like Germany are again burning coal instead of using Russian gas, so we are turning the clock back.

When we see that such important global accords as the Paris Agreement are no longer worth the paper they are printed on, we obviously lose trust in politics as a whole, particularly as we see the weather going crazy in front of our eyes, pushing those of us who can to seek shelter. Earth is no longer made of rock, but of eggshells.

Unfortunately, this process has led us to a point where we are losing human participation and the ability to think straight about issues and to discuss them intelligently and respectfully between ourselves.

The New York Times recently published an investigation about the overuse of America’s groundwater. It is an issue no one has been paying attention to, and which greatly affects the future of the US.

While no one was looking, of course, aquifers were being overexploited and may never be able to recover. Nobody saw these problems below America’s beautiful rivers, forests and mountains, but the consequences of overuse of aquifers are dramatic.

The upshot of this age of confusion is that despite the many good intentions expressed, even when alerting the world about alarming evolutions, we still do not possess the collective ability and responsibility to do something about it.

Everyone is stuck trying to win the argument rather than to secure the future. Most worrying is how we are not even shocked or motivated to fight as a result, when we should all be focusing at a minimum on cutting waste, which would make a tremendous difference on multiple levels.

Sleepwalking is not an answer. We must start paying attention to the bounty with which God has provided us in terms of intelligence and a sustaining environment, electing to use it rather than abuse it.

• Hassan bin Youssef Yassin worked with Saudi petroleum ministers Abdullah Tariki and Ahmed Zaki Yamani from 1959 to 1967. He led the Saudi Information Office in Washington from 1972 to 1981 and served with the Arab League observer delegation to the UN from 1981 to 1983.