“I know what you mean, Blair. Trust’s a tough thing to come by these days. Tell you what – why don’t you just trust in the Lord?” – The Thing
He also broke up with his moonshiner girlfriend, but he says he loves her still.
One of the places we vacationed once upon a time was Branson, Missouri. It’s absolutely a tourist town. One of the places we went was Silver Dollar City®. It’s like one of the large theme parks you’d find almost anywhere. It’s also a nice place to go, not like that theme park that discriminates against the blind – Seaworld®.
I was walking there with The Mrs., The Boy, and Pugsley when we were all a decade younger than we are today. All of a sudden, a young blonde man who looked like a fullback ran up to me. He was probably 19 or so. “Sir, sir, sir! You dropped this!” He handed me two $20 bills – they’d been in my pocket after getting change from buying sodas for the family. They’d fallen out.
I was . . . stunned. I couldn’t see this happening in most places that I’d been. I thanked the young man, shook his hand, and he loped off to catch back up with his girlfriend.
That is the example of a high trust society. People do things like that because they’re the right thing to do. They get enjoyment out of doing them. When I was surprised by behavior, like I was by that kid handing me cash, it made me feel great. It gave me hope for society.
This also gives me hope for society.
It was also a lesson for The Boy and Pugsley on how to behave. Here is a person who could easily have walked away with $40, but who did the right thing and returned it. No one would have ever known except for him and his girlfriend. But, I’m betting, he didn’t want to have to live with being the type of person who didn’t live his life virtuously.
I think it also made the kid feel great to do something nice. He got a great story to tell people about the goofy man with the little kids who dropped forty bucks out of his pocket.
Trust is crucial for a really high-functioning group of any type, from a family to a state to a country. Trust provides a glue that keeps people together, and gives them common ground to collaborate. People who trust each other tend to reciprocate, cooperate, and take care of each other. It’s like the Mafia, but with fewer people being “taken care of”.
Trust also leads to prosperity. Trust plays a huge component in how easy transactions are. In a society where people keep their word, contracts aren’t as important because honor is important.
Where do you live?
Trust leads to greater governmental stability. While there have always been awful people in government who were only out for themselves, I think we’ve reached the bottom in having awful people at all levels of government. There are some good ones, but the FBI is generally pretty good at having them transferred to Fairbanks.
One of the things about cities is that they tend to breed anonymity. In Modern Mayberry, we ignore gunshots and get concerned when we hear sirens. In most cities, they ignore sirens and get concerned when they hear gunshots.
They were going to film part of the Transformers movie in Detroit, but Michael Bay said they couldn’t afford the CGI costs to repair the buildings.
A high trust society requires rule of law instead of rule of men or rule of The Party. It’s that trust that the judicial system is impartial and does its best to send guilty folks to jail (or worse) and let innocent folks go free, no matter who they are. There hasn’t ever been a perfect justice system, but if the people feel that it’s as good a system as people can create, it does the trick.
So, that’s what it’s like living in Heaven. What does a low trust society look like?
- High levels of apparent corruption,
- Low confidence in public institutions,
- High crime rates,
- Political polarization,
- Lack of any sort of sense of a coherent society, or common goal, and
- Social unrest.
It’s clear that, as a nation, we’re closer to a low trust society than a high trust society. Rather than just being a social or philosophical question – it’s one that costs money and determines what services are available. An example is the new Walgreen’s® store in Chicago. Apparently, Walgreen’s© got tired of having urban hunter-gatherers wander in and loot the store in broad daylight with little fear of any sort of legal jeopardy. Walgreen’s© has closed nearly 30 stores in just San Francisco alone.
I guess they were asking for it. And, yeah, I’m back on Twitter®.
Walgreen’s™ decided to build a store with no shelves, just a little kiosk where people can pick products from a digital tablet. The idea of wandering down the shelves, shopping leisurely, comparing one product against another is dead in this store. Pick the Preparation H™ and some clerk will wander to a shelf in the back room and pull a tube down and stick it in a bag.
Then, after the customer pays, they’ll hand them the stuff. Walgreen’s© used to trust customers in Chicago. Now, they don’t. Their revenues will go down (nobody ever goes to the store to buy cashews, but when you walk by them . . . ) and their costs of having to have people run to get products will go up.
Why? Stores are being looted on a regular basis.
Meanwhile, you could walk into Wal-Mart® here in Modern Mayberry and see every towel neatly stacked, all of the shelves full, and nobody stealing anything. Yeah, they check my receipt as I walk out the door now, but the lady at the door only pretends to look at it.
Wal-Mart™ makes money here. The Walgreen’s© in Chicago doesn’t. San Francisco, plagued by a new breed of criminals that the police won’t arrest (or if they are arrested, the DA won’t charge) systematically loot store after store of products when they’re not busy pooping in the streets.
San Francisco is now low trust. This is spreading. I wonder where it will end up next? Oh.
