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I mean if so thats posteriors in the direction that Henry was being very stupid. With drunkenness there is some level of excuse to be made for making a bad decision as you have imbibed a substance that is known to cause impaired decision making. Taunting a sword-wielding gangster while sober is Darwin-Award level behavior. Maybe BC is right and a sizable portion on the native British population is just retarded.
Ehh this is what happens when an honor culture meets a legalistic culture. I don't think high/low trust has anything to do with the outcome of taunting weapon wielding strangers at night.
The UK has, in the past few decades, generally been a place where you can assume you're not going to be murdered by a man with a sword.
People in the UK have adapted to the social reality that you are not going to be murdered by a man with a sword.
We can call this quokka behaviour, but I think it's quite reasonable to expect -- once your society has established that murder-by-men-with-swords is a completely bizarre and outlandish thing to happen -- that you are not going to be murdered by a man with a sword; any more than you're going to be mauled by a dinosaur or beamed up by an alien.
Calling the guy who was murdered "very stupid" for not expecting to be murdered by a man with a sword, in a culture where being-murdered-by-a-man-with-a-sword is extremely unexpected, is itself Very Stupid, and in rather poor taste.
Calling him "retarded" is also retarded.
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The common talking point about low-trust and high-trust society is a high-truster saying, "Why can't we just have fistfights? Why is everything a fight to the death?" and a low-truster replying, "Of course everything is a fight to the death." Another fun fact: didn't people used to just walk around armed (whether with guns or with swords)? They still insulted each other right?
I suppose you can insist on calling this honor culture and legalistic culture, but i think now we're just arguing over meaningless words.
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