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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.
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.
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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