“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.
Barry Soetoro deleted that high trust society with the historic pen and phone.
People wonder how the Bolsheviks took over Russia with 12 time zones, well here we are conquered from within by quislings.
Lil’ Georgie Sorrows made sure Bathhouse Barry got the skids greased…back in 2005 when people had grown tired of Shrubya.
We used to be able to go to the East side of town where a buddy would hang with some urbanites he served with, not any more.
It was on limited pass with a don’t start none there won’t be none warning but Fundamental Transformation uber alles.
High trust has to be destroyed in the order out of chaos but how do the communists, Zionists, Satanists, masons, illuminati, globohomo, never break ranks?
They hate Whitey to the point of intoxication and will complete the Long March by any means necessary.
“how do the communists, Zionists, Satanists, masons, illuminati, globohomo, never break ranks?”
They’re all led by members of the same club.
The Russians never had freedom. We did. Solution? Import people who never had freedom.
Trust / functional civilization is a chicken / egg situation and ultimately rests upon variants of the nine-meals rule. After going without nine meals and no prospect for any more coming, you can’t trust anybody. A guy with no home? You can’t even trust him to not poop on the sidewalk. ( https://sfstandard.com/public-health/code-brown-doom-scooping-at-san-franciscos-scavenger-hunt-from-hell/ ) You can pretty much trust a guy with a paid-off late model car not to steal yours…altho as you note, he may put oppo stickers on it.
But I can’t trust some unidentified person in my fairly-well-to-do neighborhood to pick up dog poop out of my yard, either, or FTX multi-billionaire Bankman-Fried and his ilk, so it’s not just about materialism. Trust is really about character, and good character is in increasingly short supply.
So…standing in line, paying, waiting for the clerk to retrieve your item from the stockroom? Welcome to Soviet Amerika, citizen! Enjoy your stay!
Indeed. Trust is in short supply.
Brother Andrew said it best “WAR”
Indeed.
If you dropped a couple of $20s and an dusky hued urban yoof saw it, he would keep the money and likely sucker punch you to see if you have more in your wallet.
That’s part of the reason I stay out of cities.
John – – One of the best examples of a high trust society is Japan.
They are regimented and have a strong social set of behavioral taboos and duties. Starts in the home, reinforced in schools, and followed into workplace.
They also have almost zero immigration as becoming a citizen requires proof of Japanese parentage. Foreigners cannot buy land in Japan. Guest workers/laborers are from Brazil; they’re fully documented and controlled strictly. Even marrying a Japanese citizen and having children born and registered as Japanese will not get you citizenship. Foreigners born in Japan can never get citizenship.
All of this has created a nation where there is high trust because all have the same experiences in schooling and the societal expectations for behavior are deeply ingrained.
Note that I am not saying criminals follow the society’s expectations because they surely do not. And of course, foreign influences and culture invade society, so there are many Japanese who lament the “loss of the way it was in the old days….”
So why is ISLAM becoming the fasted growing religion in Japan?
Like the proverb about the camel’s nose in the tent, Islam starts off as wonderfully quiet neighbors until they gain strength and demand “rights”, later demanding YOU OBEY Sharia Law.
Yes, but they also have (or at least had) farmers’ roadside stands where they put their food out for sale, and people left money and took what they paid for. And left the pile of money alone.
“standing in line, paying, waiting for the clerk to retrieve your item from the stockroom? Welcome to Soviet Amerika, citizen! Enjoy your stay”
More accurately, welcome to pre-1916 America. Piggly-Wiggly, the first self service grocery store opened in 1916 in Memphis, TN.
Did not know that, thx! And thus did we forestall for a century Eugene Debs leading us into socialism with his jail-cell presidential campaign at that time. “Plus ca change….”
To be less oblique, let’s hope Trump can be more effective at overcoming creeping socialism in our time than Debs was at overcoming creeping capitalism in his.
Nice fact! But in all the stores I’ve seen, in most cases (from my reading) that was a service, not a control.
A millennium ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I applied for a job at a convenience store a short walk from my house. I was 15 at the time and somehow thought it would be a great way to meet chicks (it wasn’t). During my ‘interview’, the shopkeep showed me around the place and contrived to leave me alone for a few moments in the back storage room while he tended to something. When he returned, he asked me to turn out my pockets, which revealed that I had not, in fact, boosted anything from all that was easily within reach (though I have to admit that the thought did occur to me).
I was hired on the spot and repaid the man’s trust by working for him part-time, evenings and weekends, until leaving for college. I used the same vetting method myself at the store when it was my turn to screen applicants to replace me.
Remember ‘trust, but verify’? I recall that the phrase was lampooned in the media at the time as sort of a Cold War oxymoron, but you can’t fault the efficacy of the practice.
Indeed. And people will tell you who they are, if you ask them.
Well, we’re close to Boris Badenov’s observation from way back when, as follows:
“In Pottsylvania the Party Line is the Thinking Man’s filter.”
Applies to (perhaps) 70% of the USA. Sad.
Yup, though the cracks are showing up in the armor.
Hello and Thank you,
“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”. Exactly. Gun shots all around, magnified greatly B4 the hunting season and no one skips a beat.
Sirens, very rare, and appear to be ambulances. Yes, we really worry about that.
Yes. People pull over for them here, and look to see the direction the ambulance goes, because everyone knows everyone.
“But select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain—and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens.” ~ Exodus 18:21
“Election” fraud: owned! Side benefit: number of “officials” substantially reduced.
Yup. Too bad we didn’t listen.
The cost of being virtuous in returning lost $$ to strangers is not expensive. The finder didn’t earn the $$ or lose anything by giving back to the person who lost it. The reward for the virtuous is remembering the pleasure he gave to the person who had their property returned intact. The Universe was set more on its axis.
Very well said.
There is a very tribal aspect to low trust societies too, and I’m not using that word as code or a dogwhistle. The biggest political unit is MAYBE regional, but mostly familial. The vast majority of the world works that way.
We have pockets, and whole cities, that have devolved into low trust areas but we are still, overall, a high trust society. For a while. If we’re lucky.
n
(it’s ironic for the “every time” people that a lot of what our high trust society is built on, law and banking, comes from a certain group of people. They enabled western high trust society, through being a close knit and culturally monolithic group. For a counter example, look at what happens when you have muslims running your banking and your law…)
Very much so – the folks here in Modern Mayberry cheer for the H.S. team over nearby Modern Mt. Pilot. And we like Modern Mt. Pilot much better than we like the folks across the line. And so on.
My time here on the marble has taught me 1 Absolute Fact.
Diversity is The Problem…
Not…The Answer.
Period. Full Stop. Fact.
It certainly isn’t helping right now.