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I’m ‘stolen valoring’ a post from the Sunday thread and reposting it here for higher exposure (ht @odd_primes):
Recently there was a viral explosion on Kiwifarms > Twitter about a nebulous low trust Indian cultural behavioural trait. This honor culture trait isn’t something that is unique to India. There has however been a huge influx of Indians into the West both through immigration and through internet presence that has left cultural ripples. The memetic word is called ‘Izzat’ even though this is an Urdu word that only vaguely venn diagrams against the concept.
I’m beating around the bush, but I’m pretty much talking about scam culture, being the winner, getting one up on the people that are outsiders to ‘my group’, and getting status points for exploiting my outgroup.
I’d like to reiterate that this isn’t an Indian only issue, but it’s a culture clash between high and low trust cultures and is worthy of discussion.
Edit: Don't drunkpost. This is a culture war issue that should have been given better care in an OP.
2nd edit: Actually quoted the post.
3rd edit: Added a link to the 'patient zero' tweet.
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.
High trust is fairly natural when people live in the same place for many years or even multiple generations, and when the population density is low enough that people can keep track of one another and remember their actions. Also when you have concepts like "honor", and everyone has lots of children resulting in large families. If you think back to the past, it makes sense. Even if you could get rich by scamming those around you, the results wouldn't be good.
Things looks different now. We're still tearing down Chesterton's fences today and calling it "progress", while claiming that the remaining fences are what's causing all the problems we're seeing, and I'm afraid we'll keep doing this until we live in a dystopian world, and that the vast majority still won't be able to wrap their head around what went wrong.
I'd call high-trust "Good faith" or "Investing into ones local environment, rather than exploiting ones local environment", a sort of presumption of alignment. Psychology plays a role too, when people treat me as if I'm a kind person, that makes me want to be more kind. Which reminds me, everything is probably made worse by modern media
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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.
Was pre-Communist Russia particularly low trust? It was certainly highy authoritarian and absolutist, but I don't think that's the same thing as low-trust. Even the relative destitution of the Russian people isn't really indicative of low trust and I would say more to do with Russia's lack of industralisation and entrenched serfdom. But previously other European countries had entrenched serfdom and were high trust (e.g. medieval France)
My only cultural touchstone is Crime and Punishment, which does imply a certain level of high trust in Russian society at the time. Indeed, one of Dostoevsky's main points with his writing is that these new modernist (and ultimately proto-Communist) ideas becoming popular at the time destroys morality and society.
I think it was, at least compared to western europe or east asia. I lived in Russia in the early '90s, and it was extremely low trust as a society. Everything is accomplished through bribery, nepotism and blackmail, nothing through official venues. The people don't trust the government or each other, the government doesn't trust the people or itself.
There are various Russian theories about this, but the most popular I recall was that Russian society evolved under extremely harsh foreign domination, the Mongols, Golden Horde, Polish-Lithuanians etc. and their own homegrown psychopaths. Russian elite society is incredibly low-trust and untrustworthy, moreso than the rest, hence the regular purges that have marked all of Russian political history.
Recall the tale of the murder of Rasputin, and if it sounds crazy, realize that the Russian nobility did shit like that constantly.
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The thing to remember about Slavs is that they were (as the name would imply) slaves. They were in the borderland between the Mongols, the Muslims, the Germanics, and the Vikings, and constantly getting rolled and subjugated by all four. As you can see from other ethnic groups that were slaves for generations, it does not make you high trust. It makes you servile in the face of brutality, cruel when you have power, distrustful, melancholic, and constantly scheming for any advantage.
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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.
Remove a handful of dangerous cities and the US doesn't have high violent crime rates. Half our murders are in two counties.
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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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