Trust is an essential part of human relations and human organization. It is what holds the group together, whether it is a family, a clan or a tribe. The size of the group allows for quickly addressing a breach of trust, but also allows for quickly rewarding the holding of trust. A neighbor helping a neighbor in a small town will get immediate feedback from the rest of the town. This is the foundation of Western civilization. Small groups of related people are bound by trust with our groups into a nation.
In non-Western arrangements it is even more obvious. The complex relationships in the clan or tribe require trust that works like a unit of currency, passed between members in the group. At the center are the high trust members and at the fringes are the low trust members. It is what made the Mafia work for so long. They adopted the Arab tribal system which was impenetrable to western investigative techniques. The core people in the middle were insulated by layers of people bound by trust, like gravity.
Trust does not scale up very well when there are alien elements within the society. For example, the Jews in Germany learned this the hard way. They were used to pogroms and discrimination, as that had been a feature of Jewish life in Europe since the Roman Empire. Jews had been subjected to various forms of persecution, usually for money, but sometimes for vengeance. We should not sugar coat it. Sometimes, the Jews made trouble for the host populations and paid the price for it.
The fact is, trust between people is a function of blood. The closer two people are related,t he more they share in common in terms of ancestors, the more trust they can have between one another. The greater the biological distance and cultural distance, the greater the risk of conflict. Even though Jews lived as a high trust, insulated tribe in high trust societies, there was always friction and open hostility between Jews and their neighbors in the host counties. That often resulted in the persecution of Jews by the majority.
In modern times, Americans are struggling with this problem. Most white people still think the ideal America is one with a small Federal government and local control of their communities. This is based on the assumption of a 90% white country. That’s no longer America. All of those small, homogeneous communities with high levels of social trust are being displaced by a massive state and the invasion of tens of millions of people from non-white countries. As a result, America is becoming a low trust country with lots of friction.
Strangely, what may turn out to help avoid some ugly conflicts are things like this. The people claiming to be good at safeguarding your money are not worthy of trust when they fail in basic ways like this. Even rich people are finding that the system is not as powerful as it claims. Every day, we learn that the people claiming to have control of things don’t have much control and cannot be trusted. If multiculturalism depends on an all-powerful and competent custodian, then these failures may cause some rethinking of the project.
A whole lot of people who used to say they trusted the government “to keep us safe” during the Bush years are having second thoughts. It may be too late to roll back the surveillance state, but these events will foster a new attitude toward it from the commoners. The Bush years created a lot of skeptics, not just of government, but of the cognitive elite and big business. That doubt, if it turns into a genuine alternative to the dominant politics, could slow the push to create a majority-minority society.
The future is not written and the way to change course is for people to lose faith in the rulers. Regular failures by the folks promising us we can trust them is a sure way to grow skepticism among the people. Even the most gullible get tired of being screwed eventually. Liberals will never lose the faith, but the rest are persuadable. If they are not won over by appeals to reason and tradition, maybe scaring them will work. If the people stop trusting their guardians, maybe they will stop trusting their project.
