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Notes -
I read a good post a long time ago about how the main effect of the 70s serial killer wave culturally was not only (as is widely noted) to make way for a lower trust society in general - teenagers don’t hitchhike much anymore, etc - but specifically to make way for the end of a society (the Protestant European America, Canada, Britain, and much of the rest of Northwestern Europe of, say, 1890 to 1965) in which sociopathic behavior was uniquely easy to get away with compared to almost any other time and place in human history. You can see this even in period crime novels, at which one sometimes guffaws at the preposterousness of the trusting behavior shown by e.g. victims, but which was in fact seemingly accurate for the time.
Countries like Japan and Spain are relatively high trust, although less so than say Denmark, but they’re high trust in a completely different way to the kind of ‘sitting duck’ societies that the NW Euro Protestants had constructed in places like England and Minnesota by the 1950s. There’s still an inherent sense of friend and family and tribe and the stranger. As you point out for Catholic Ireland (and the same is true in Islamic countries as in North Africa), the same social stipulations worked or work on a much more ‘objective’ level that at least attempted to guard against the possibility of lying.
Another thing to remember is that those people were very very stupid. They believed straightforward ads. They were shorter than we are. Didn‘t get enough to eat, especially with the great depression. Flynn effect. Some vietnam/korea conscripts had three meals a day for the first time in their lives.
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