High Trust Societies, Low Trust Societies, Red Dawn, and Castro

“There is no promise you can make that I can trust.”  The Lord of the Rings:  The Two Towers

Anyone seen my hobbits?  I know I left them here.  Or maybe the name was similar?

Note:  I’ve had a tremendous number of emails since the Civil War post.  If I haven’t gotten back to you, I will shortly.  Thanks!!

On Friday and Saturday, The Mrs. and I took The Boy and Pugsley off to the nearby Big City for the weekend.  The Boy and Pugsley had a 10 hour class, split between two days.  That left The Mrs. and I to ride around the town.  The Mrs. and I had lived in Big City years ago, so Big City was familiar, even though 8 miles of what had been vacant farmland when we moved away had been converted to strip malls, chain restaurants, big box stores, and the rest of the standard commercial establishments that make up nearly every generic copy of Big City in the Midwest.  The farms had character.  Each was different.  This?  This was as featureless and bland as Bernie Sanders’ forehead covered in mayonnaise and Monkee’s® music.

We stopped at one fast food restaurant for a snack while we waited for the boys to finish class for the night.  We ate for a bit, and then I got up to get more iced tea.  I walked back to the table.

“Now that’s why I’m glad we don’t live here anymore!”  The Mrs. was furious.

Confused, I looked around, and back at the table.  Nothing seemed to be amiss.

“Okay, umm, why?”

“That little kid,” she gestured at a little blonde guy of about 10 who was busy running around the table near his parents, “just ran between your chair and the table.”    I had only slightly pushed my chair back in when I went to go get tea, but there was less than a foot between my chair and the table.

He also had a pretty cool boomerang that he kept throwing at me, but I never could quite catch it.

As far as indiscretions go, it wasn’t up there with armed robbery using a chicken as a weapon, but the point was made.  These parents were letting their kid run wild in a fast food restaurant.  We never saw that behavior in Modern Mayberry.  We’d figured out the “why” of that fairly soon after we moved there.

People here in Modern Mayberry don’t have the option of anonymity.  If I cut a person off in traffic, it might be the principle of the school.  If I am a jerk to a clerk at Wal-Mart®, we’ll hear about it, because the clerk knows someone I know.  Who?  I’m not sure.  But in a small town, there’s someone in common.

In Modern Mayberry?  You have a reputation.  Your family has a reputation.  People aren’t horribly nosy here, but word spreads.

When I was young, I liked the concept of libertarianism, enough to even join the Libertarian party and vote for people who had zero chance of being elected.  It wasn’t too bad – you could always see that you were one of the 10 or so votes the candidate got on election night.  The idea of Libertarianism is simple:  Go do (more or less) what you want.  Don’t hurt other people.  Enjoy.  Repeat.  Libertarianism is really just individualism on a large scale, but with more Star Wars® t-shirts and fewer showers.

I never had braces.  But I also never raced across a field to give a beat-down to the British.

The United States was (more or less) founded on this type of individualism, though I have no idea how Ben Franklin smelled, and I think he was a Star Trek© fan instead of Star Wars®.  Liberty was one of the few things that all of the members of the Constitutional Convention could agree upon – the folks from Massachusetts weren’t entirely sure about the folks from Georgia, and vice versa.  But if Massachusetts would promise to leave Georgia pretty much alone, Georgia figured they could at least try to make it work.

This lasted until 1860, but that’s another story.  Spoiler:  Massachusetts won’t take, “It’s not you, it’s me,” for an answer.

Thankfully, the American people also had a built-in safety valve – they could move West at any time their neighbor (or state!) annoyed them.  This added, especially in the Midwest and Mountain areas, a strong sense of, “Leave me alone, you’re not my supervisor.”  People would move into an areas with a weak government that couldn’t do much for them.  It also couldn’t ask much of them.

First two seasons of Archer were pretty good.  I wouldn’t go much past that.  Not for kids.

Individually was the norm, if I can get away with saying that, and the individuality was, like a hipster convention, nearly identical from one person to the next.  Generally, as long as behavior was circumscribed by the predominant values of the time, it was all good.  The values that were both required by and created by that streak of individualism were:

• Fair Play – that there were rules, and, generally we were all expected to abide by them. Sure, rich people got a better deal, but even they were not completely above the law.  I don’t care if you are my supervisor – you’re not cutting in line.
• Meritocracy – the best person generally got the job, generally got the promotion. Was there nepotism?  Was there political favoritism?    But those words still have negative connotations.  And when smart people get hired into a family business, they know that the goofy, entitled son will get the corner office before they do.  But if your kid has the highest GPA?  They’ll be valedictorian.
• Personal Restraint – Just because it’s illegal doesn’t make it moral. And just because you have the right, doesn’t require you to do it.  Either by guilt or by shame or by good common sense, Americans had generally shown the prudence to show restraint.
• Generally Accepted Norms – One of the lessons that I’ve shared with my kids is a simple one: where politeness fails, laws follow.  The one guy in the subdivision decides he wants to recreate Jurassic Park®-level vegetation in his front yard will mow because his wife doesn’t want to catch abuse from the other wives as they sacrifice puppies to Gorto or play cards or whatever women do when men aren’t around.
• Faith in Fellow Citizens – If your car breaks down on a lonely night in winter, it’s likely that the next person who passes by will stop and to help. The colder it is, the lonelier it is?  The more likely they are to stop.  They feel safe in stopping, because of the next point, an obligation to stop.
• Sense of Community – On Friday night, the local football stadium will be filled. People will know where you sit, and you’ll see familiar faces every game. You know the owner of the restaurant you go to every Friday.  The auto repair place knows the names of your kids, as does the barber and the dentist.  The superintendent of schools has sent you handwritten notes, at least one of them good.

Yes.  These are generalizations, and I could certainly generate examples of when we didn’t live up to these values in the United States in the past.  But these values are, generally, the rules that we have to all follow to make things work in a high trust society:  recognized property rights, independent courts, and faith in our elected officials.  You don’t trespass, because that’s old man Smith’s place.  Yeah, the judge likes to drink a bit too much on Friday, but he sentenced the robbery suspect to 10 years and didn’t charge the shopkeeper who shot him up.  And Sheriff Buford sends your kid a certificate, just for graduating high school.

Actually, we’re pretty welcoming, as long as you don’t send paratroopers first.

The result is that you get a society where people can work together, voluntarily.  Things like park boards and school boards and town councils and county supervisors are the most effective forms of government, and have the most impact on a typical person’s life.  The Sheriff is more important than people in Washington, because the Sheriff is actually accountable, and has to live with the people he’s protecting.  He also knows when not writing a ticket is the right answer.

However, when societies are built on nepotism, separatism, egos, immorality, or freeloading, that trust disappears.  The Sheriff won’t arrest a murderer because he’s a cousin.  Or of the same faith.  Or of the same race.  Cars are stolen with regularity, because everyone believes that anyone who is wealthy isn’t to be admired and emulated, but hated.  Why?  Because the only way to get ahead is to cheat.  And anyone who has more than you has cheated, right?

High trust societies produce wealth.  Polite children.  People who act honorably.  They have stable governments with an emphasis on rights for common men.  People pay their taxes, and act together.

Low trust societies are characterized by poor social trust.  High theft rates.  Low wealth.  Their governments are often stable, because they’re collective and totalitarian.  At least the election results aren’t in doubt.  How can you doubt an election where the winner gets 98% of the vote?

Is it ironic that someone who hated capitalism died on Black Friday?

The truth is that you can’t combine a low trust society and a high trust society.  The values of a low trust group in a high trust society will destroy the high trust society after time.  Why?  You can’t win a game of cards when everyone else is cheating.  You can’t have peace when another country has declared war on you.  In a war of values, the lowest common denominator wins.

Our car ate up the miles between Big City and home.  We finally crossed the last little creek and headed up the hill, past the farm that flooded every other spring, and heard the familiar crunch of gravel under our tires as I stopped near the mailbox.  The mailbox was open, and had probably been open since Saturday, but our mail was still there.

We were glad to get home.

Mall pic by Dj1997 [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]