Social trust.

[randomness]

Alex Harrowell writes:

But trust is an interesting concept. If you knew for a fact the people you dealt with were honest, you wouldn’t need to trust them. Trust and betrayal go together. High-trust societies are ones where people behave as if they could trust each other, and that choose to deal with the inevitable abuses of trust in certain ways. Low-trust societies are ones in which people behave as if they cannot trust each other, and especially, as if there was no realistic hope of sorting out abuses of trust later.

I actually wonder if the distinction is really about what happens after a breach of trust is discovered. J.K. Galbraith’s bezzle, the inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in an economy, is a universal phenomenon but the means of dealing with it differ dramatically. When an aeroplane crashes into the ground, in the UK or, say, the Netherlands, the first people on the scene after the fire brigade are the AAIB inspectors, whose mission is to establish the facts. In Italy, or Greece, the first people after the fire brigade are the police, come to arrest any of the crew who survived. The distinction is telling. If you can’t expect justice, and you can’t expect the truth, you might as well practice cynicism like you practice an instrument, as a skill or even an art.

In a sense, social trust is an ideology. We choose to believe that our neighbours are basically decent people in a civilised society, or that of course they’re all the same and all crooked, but wouldn’t you be if you had the chance, and so you better look after number one. And if it is an ideology, it is part of the political sphere and it can be changed.

Comments

[stolen_tea]

I think civilization is basically just a social construct. :)

It would be nice to combine this insight with some of the stuff from Nudge, like the "good fences make good neighbors" and "locked doors keep honest people honest" sayings. It seems like it would be an advantage (in terms of longevity and stasis) for a culture to have subtle little traditions that nudge people in the desired direction, and which make deviations just enough of an effort to be not worth doing without a good reason.

[dpolicar]

Yes.
It has never occurred to me to frame it this way before, but yes. Absolutely right.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. People in my hometown don't lock their doors when they go out -- but if you were caught stealing, you'd be ejected from the community. There are some people who can't lock their doors because they haven't repaired the locks. (They go on vacation anyway.) It helps that Iowa has a strong "level playing field" ethos -- if you're well-connected, you'll be punished less, but only through careful efforts to keep the facts from coming out; there is little tolerance for the sort of case-by-case discretion which allows the authorities in Massachusetts to turn everything into an exercise of personal connections.