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There's a tendency to overstate both the moral judgement on successful men having affairs in the past(often there was none- and even if there was, it was a lot less than we'd expect) and the panopticon in practice. You could just go somewhere no one knew your face(the other side of the city, say) and use an assumed name. Nobody would know.
I was required to read, in high school, memoirs of a fifties child from a 'broken home'(they did exist). And hoo boy did he tear through a high-trust society. He nearly gets molested by his dad's gay friend, tells someone about it, and is handed a war trophy rifle and told not to let it happen again. On the word of a fifteen year old boy. Based, you might say, but this is the same society where he opens a checking account in someone else's name with no ID, because he's tall for his age(due to shoe inserts. He also has fake glasses to make him look older) so it's plausible he looks like an adult, who's gonna question. He uses the same hack to get ahold of booze, condoms, change his grades, etc. When he's living with his mother(in elementary school this time) she converts to Catholicism(a very serious commitment at the time) to try to get an exit strategy from her abusive, deadbeat boyfriend. The nuns who are supposed to be taking care of him so she can work are unable to, because he just... leaves, and then fakes correspondence between the two(he doesn't want the abusive boyfriend gone, he lets him skip school to work on cars and run around in the countryside). Eventually the nuns distract the boyfriend enough for his mom to take him and leave cities, he never finds them again, and she leaves the church(too many rules, I suspect) and marries a dickhead who beats him for not getting A's. So he just... never goes to class, except to change his grades. Manually, with a pencil on his report card. No, they don't type it up, who would lie? He did, as it turns out. He uses the same trick to get a scholarship into a prep school, which he promptly fails out of, and celebrates this achievement by drinking in a bar at 17- nobody asks for his ID, he just claims to be 18. That incident is prompted by his friend group knocking up a local girl, but nobody knows who did it- so they just argue with each other until someone folds and claims to be the daddy, and marries her with the explicit intention of divorcing after two years.
A high trust society makes it really easy to get away with stuff by just... lying all the time. His dad also tells just cartoonish lies all the time, the few times we see him. The high-functioning and successful older brother, when we see him, is mostly believing the two pathological liars in his life claiming blatantly implausible things to beg for favors and money. So are the other responsible adults. The kids fight, drink, shoplift, smoke cigarettes, borrow cars to go joyriding, have early sex(some of this is implied to be rape), skip school, etc etc. When they're caught by authority figures, they just lie about who they are, and the cops call the wrong set of parents to ask their kids to beat them. Men have to marry the girl they knock up, but most of the female characters in the story- except his mom, who might be some rose coloured glasses but also has an abusive partner of some description for most of it- are promiscuous, so it's more about which man gets caught holding the bag than who the actual dad is. The main character's stepsister is strongly implied to convince her 'good boy' boyfriend to sleep with her after she discovers she's pregnant by a half-caste townie she was cheating on him with so she can blackmail him into marrying her. Everybody is scamming each other absolutely all the time and everybody falls for it in a way that just seems totally implausible. Teachers, cops, bank employees all accept unlikely stories of sudden changes with no verification or supporting evidence.
This is what high trust societies are like. You can totally just tell not the truth and get away with it. There's discussions of izzat on the motte- I don't know, but it's hard not to see similarities in the worst examples of jeet behavior our anti-Indian racists come up with- to my mind the issue with Indians is less lying and more 'they don't like to pay their bills and they treat their workers like crap' than outright dishonesty. In the fifties, you could totally just tell the hotel employee you were married but the name change got caught up in paperwork. This wasn't 90's Ireland where honeymooning couples need a copy of their marriage license to rent the same hotel room. People just shew up out of nowhere and did whatever they want with flimsy excuses and everyone let them. I'm curious as to what our resident Japanese have to say about life in notoriously high trust and homogenous Japan- is just... saying stuff going to get you your way all the time, even if it's obviously untrue?
What’s your theory on how they sustained a high trust society given this kind of defection? Are these just small-community mores being applied to larger places that hadn’t yet come to terms with their size?
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