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High Trust, Low Trust, And The Coming Breakdown

“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.

Friday Memes, Because I have to get up early tomorrow.

“Not random at all, maybe, like there’s some pattern here?” – Silence of the Lambs

Whenever I hire anyone, I throw away half the applications I get randomly.  I don’t want to work with unlucky people.

Apologies – I gotta get up very early tomorrow, and need some sleep.  Here are some random memes I found that I’ll share so I can prove I was thinking about you.  Don’t forget to celebrate #HumilityMonth this June!

Memorial Day, 2023

“If words cannot repay the debt we owe these men, surely with our actions we must strive to keep faith with them and with the vision that led them to battle and to final sacrifice.”—Ronald Reagan

AA gun at Corregidor.

Last year when The Mrs. was putting flowers on the graves of her relatives, my job was to drive the car while she located the locations. It was her first year when she actively did that for all of her relatives. Her mother had done that previously, but since my mother-in-law passed, that duty of remembering the family had fallen to The Mrs.

I saw one gravesite in particular, and I decided to research it. It stuck out, because it was the grave of a United States Army officer who died in May of 1942. I was curious.

Thankfully, there was at least some information about this officer online. He had been born elsewhere, but went to high school here in Modern Mayberry. His particulars weren’t all that unusual for a young man in the 1930s: he loved baseball, he graduated, went to college, got a degree, got a job, and got married.

While in college, he was in ROTC, so he graduated as a 1st Lieutenant in the Army Reserve. I think even in the mid-1930s people could see the writing on the wall that there was the real possibility of war, so I imagine a core group of people with officer training was just what they wanted on the shelf.

His life was, I imagine, the same as millions of lives in that quasi-Depressionary era. He and his wife welcomed a baby into the world 1940, but by early 1941 the young officer had been drafted back into the Army. He was sent, half a world away, to Manila. I’m sure he told his wife as they shipped him off that his job, thankfully, was to be in the rear with the gear. It would be other people that would really be in the crosshairs of the enemy. Besides, it would be crazy of the Japanese to make a strike at Manilla. That would mean war!

He was at the airfield in Manilla on December 8, 1941, when the Japanese attacked. The planes he was supposed to serve hadn’t arrived. The troops that were supposed to protect the airfield hadn’t arrived. Yet his Company had. On Christmas Eve, 1941, his group was given the task of demolishing the airstrip and leaving nothing the Japanese could make use of.

This is generally not a good sign.

Then, every man in his Company was given a rifle and told they were now members of the Provisional Air Corps Infantry.

This is an even worse sign.

Our young officer and his troops were then ordered to join the defense of Bataan. Bataan is a peninsula that forms the northern part of the entrance to Manila Harbor. To really control Manila and use it as a base, you have to control Bataan. The original allied plans had called for falling back to Bataan and holding out, but MacArthur had thought that defeatist, and planned on a more active defense.

When the Japanese attacked, there weren’t enough supplies for MacArthur’s plan, so they fell back to Bataan, where there also weren’t enough supplies for the defense of Bataan because they stopped shipping those because MacArthur had changed his mind.

The Japanese general who would later be fired because it took him too long to defeat the combined American-Filipino army at Bataan also noted that the Americans had numerical superiority, and in his opinion, could have retaken Manila. I’m not sure that going through this exercise made me think more highly of MacArthur . . . .

If you’re not familiar with the Battle of Bataan, it took over three months, and ended up the largest U.S. Army surrender since the Civil War. Over 76,000 troops were captured.

To my knowledge, there is no written record of the Provisional Air Corps Infantry during the Battle of Bataan, though there is a record that on March 4, the 1st Lieutenant was promoted to Captain, just before MacArthur high-tailed it out of the Philippines to safety in Australia.

The troops at Bataan were officially surrendered on April 9, 1942. But in this case, the Provisional Air Corps Infantry was not part of the surrender, and was ordered to the island of Corregidor. Over 20% of the men of the Company had already been lost.

Corregidor was an island that resembled a battleship – at the time of the Japanese invasion, it was bristling with coastal defense guns, mortars, anti-aircraft guns, and minefields. Now that Bataan was taken, the last thing required to control Manilla Bay was that the island forts fall. Corregidor was, by far, the biggest of these.

The Navy ran the guns, but the defense of the beach was the responsibility of the 4th Marine Regiment, along with a ragtag group of other orphan units, including at least one Company from the Provisional Air Corps Infantry and a young Captain from Modern Mayberry, who were sent into the foxholes with the Marines to guard the beaches since they had combat experience from Bataan.

Sometime in early May, the young Captain was in one of those foxholes with several Marines, and a Japanese artillery shell hit, killing them all. Even the very date this happened isn’t clear, and his family wouldn’t even hear of his death until a year later.

I don’t know what this young officer from Modern Mayberry did during his time in battle on Bataan and Corregidor – it’s nearly certain that no one alive does.

His wife later remarried, half a decade after finding out her husband was dead. His son still bears the name of a father he never knew, if he’s still living.

There is a white cross in a field in Manilla, surrounded by green grass that is regularly cut, where it is said, his body lies. The marker here in Modern Mayberry is only for remembrance, to let people like me know he lived.

And, I saw it, and learned his story, and every year around this time, I tell a few people from Modern Mayberry who haven’t heard about him. The Mrs. plans to put some flowers out for him, but even if she doesn’t, I’ll spend some time thinking about him.