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I continually wonder how anywhere developed a high trust society in the first place. All I see, everywhere around me, is low trust behavior destroying all the traditions and institutions that made high trust Europe great. I can scarcely imagine how the opposite process could have ever occurred. I'm not aware of anywhere else in the world it even exists. I'm not aware of any other historical cultures one would describe as "high trust". Which is not to say there aren't any, I am just literally professing my ignorance. The existence of high trust societies has become something of a mystery to me, in light of everything I see around me.
It's increasingly difficult for me to even lay out in objective terms what I would define as a "high trust" society. Maybe a measure of how much state capacity bleeds off to corruption? Maybe the likelihood that any good or service you try to procure isn't fraudulent? The chance that any given person you meet isn't lying about who they are and what their capabilities are? An understanding of natural rights that are pro-social? Like respect for private or public property, or other people's time and effort.
But maybe that's a result of having grown up in a post-Demoralized society. You read about the billions of dollars of welfare fraud the Somali community has been doing in plain sight, and Tim Walz's administrations utter spinelessness and/or complicitness in it, and it's hard to see anything other than a civilization that has decided stopping crime is too mean. That taking any measures, no matter how one inarguably just, to secure it's continued existence, is just too cruel.
Perhaps by centuries of punishing even the most minor offenses by death?
Japan comes to mind, but I'm no expert.
"We have agreed to abide by these terms. If you do not, I will kill you." "Excellent. We have agreed to abide by these terms. If you do not, I will kill you." "Good."
Carry this forward a number of centuries, where your word is your bond(or you die), and, well...
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This seems likely to be the largest effect.
Social selection effects 'alone' seem insufficient. Gotta actually remove/filter the least cooperative/most dangerous defectors out of the gene pool for a few generations, allowing the cooperators to proliferate.
The other factor is probably there being even higher-trust subpopulations that were either allowed to live in isolation, or those subpopulations leave to a new land and form a society where everyone is extremely high trust (and defectors get burned to death or killed off by the elements). Then norms these cultures produce probably rubbed off on others they came into contact with.
Butttt if we're going with long-term evolutionary explanations, I'm a fan of the idea that long, harsh winters tend to produce human populations that are good at long term thinking and directly linked to that, cooperation in iterated games. "If we start fighting over food supply now, all it will achieve is everyone dies when winter arrives."
Then of course winter itself forcing people to live in close proximity and anyone who was intolerable to be around would likely be kicked out of the house and would more than likely die.
A good test for this would be to see if current Inuit cultures seem to have similar 'high trust' norms.
I recently was reminded of the series they have over there where literal toddlers are sent on errands that require them to operate very independently and overcome some basic obstacles, and navigate the risks of the local environment.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=z5GB-uiX4f4?si=7rg1ZGv38B4Ue86c
And nobody finds this odd, every single person does their best to assist without overly coddling the kid, and generally you get the sense the entire social structure of this community is designed for the safety of their children.
That's the dream, imho.
The Inuit have had some weird trust building exercises, but today, their culture is dominated by severe alcoholism, and there are probably as many living in slums in the cities of their ancestral lands receiving welfare as there are in the ancestral environment.
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Inuit cultures might not be a useful example, though they don't invalidate your guess either. They didn't grow crops, so the whole food supply thing didn't apply as much. Their survival is an amazing adaptation of opportunistic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to an extreme environment, but they could not sustain a large, growing civilization as we understand it that way. As for current, their population are still low, and any anthropoclimatologic (I'm proud I've actually legit used this word now) study of them, at least here in Quebec, is hopelessly tainted by their interaction with europeans and their descendants.
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But this theory has to contend with Russia, which has been low-trust (by European standards, anyway) for long before Communism.
I'm actually unfamiliar with the criminal justice practices of Tsarist Russia, was the death penalty meted out with regularity?
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According to that article, relatively few people were actually sentenced to death under the Bloody Code.
They were instead sentenced to a fate worse than death. To whit, Australia.
It seems the Bloody Code was only the tail end of it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13rojx5/henry_viii_executed_nearly_70k_people_maybe_more/
Compare with modern-day Oklahoma, which tops the US rankings with 3.101 executions / 100,000 / 48 years, roughly 1/300 of Henry VIII's score.
I don't know how this compares to other parts of the world around the same time, but the other aspect of this is that executions will only bring about an improvement in social trust if they're administered in a somewhat "orderly" fashion, as punishments for crimes of which the accused is more-likely-than-not to be guilty. (A comparable death rate brought about by indiscriminate mass killing will not have the same effect.) In England I'd guess the legal execution regime prevailed at least 600-700 years, starting from the time of Henry II if not earlier.
Oh, sorry, I agree with your broader point. You see the same with the very stern rule of the samurai in Japan. I just wanted to make a joke about poor old Australia.
I've often speculated that the frontier served a similar purpose for the US, actually, functioning as a place where you could send those who struggled to fit in or behave, or where they would remove themselves. A sort of capital punishment where nobody has to lose their capita if you will.
But then on the flip side you have Russia, again, where the frontier was where they sent malefactors for centuries, and things got worse.
And, you know, the US’s cartoonishly high violent crime rates.
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You know, I probably should have thought of Japan. Especially with how much right wing twitter is idolizing them these days.
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