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Comment by mellavora | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I think about this often. The US used to be a high trust society. It has lost much of that in my lifetime.

Causes:

Money is an abstraction of reputation and honor, and we have made it an (almost) total replacement. The problem with money is it does not have a record of how it was earned, unlike reputation.

Extreme individualism. Almost no sense of community or commons. Everything is about the ego.

Cars. Driving has become our main (and almost only) form of social interaction with our community. And it is all about "winning" as an individual, not about working together to get through a difficult situation. See all the HN comments about rude driving as the norm.

Could go on, won't.

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Multicultural societies, like empires, seem unlikely to ever reach a state of high trust. I'm struggling to find any historical counter-proof. The USSR tried to meld different cultures together for over half a century and its dissolution was immediately followed by ethnic separatism. The United States is also showing its cracks. New York, the melting pot par excellence, is a collection of many little ethnic enclaves and it's the farthest thing from high trust I could think of.

Acknowledging that it is a big city, and “high trust“ is a vague concept:

I strongly disagree with the characterization that New York City is “the furthest thing from high trust I can think of“

I have interacted with thousands of strangers there with near perfect shared understanding of basic city etiquette. That etiquette does not include warmth, and in fact the way that we have all learned it is someone being quite rude to us when we break the etiquette, but that the city functions at all suggests they are doing something right.

High trust isn't nearly as vague as you make it out to be, and basic etiquette is only correlated. There's lots of research in this area. Francis Fukayama published the influential book "Trust" in 1995. Some key highlights about what high trust is. 1. "The most important habits that make up cultures have little to do with how one eats one's food or combs one's hair, but with the ethical codes by which societies regular behavior". 2. "Among the cultural habits that consitute virtues ... some... in particular, reciprocal trust - emerge only in a social context". 3. "The social virtues, including honesty, reliability, cooperativeness, and a sense of duty to others ...". This is just the introduction to the ideas of trust in society and how it functions, it isn't a vague concept though.

The Holy Roman Empire? Lasted many centuries, multi-language, fairly decentralized.

The United States has only been legally multicultural and non-apartheit since .. the 1970s?

New York is notorious for its historical crime problems, but it also has enough trust to support a global financial centre.

> The United States has only been legally multicultural and non-apartheit since .. the 1970s?

That's only legally; socially, multicultural acceptance was lagging by decades. The majority of Americans disapproved of black/white marriages well into the 1990s[1]

1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-...

Monocultural societies are not any more likely to reach a state of high trust than multicultural ones. Society is made up of individuals with diverse personalities and opinions, even if they're of the same ethnicity. There will always be inner conflicts and disagreements that threaten its dissolution.

Sweden prior to 1990. Norway prior to 2010. Lived in both, know what I'm talking about.

Germany today and in the 1800s. You know why we have delivery services (Amazon etc, prior to that catalog companies like Sears etc)? It started as mail order, which started in Germany. Because the society had enough trust that you could mail money to a stranger and expect them to send you the product.

Also, the German post was a marvel of civic engineering. Government run projects at its best.

I'm in Germany and that time is long gone, I'd say that was pre-1990 or 1995. The trust is no longer there, and the German Post is a joke that is currently falling apart and hasn't worked in 10 days in many regions.

But can you send money through the system without expecting it to be stolen? In most postal systems around the world today, just the idea of sending money through the post sounds inherently naive.

This is how high trust societies break down: cynicism. By objective standards things are no less than they were at the height of trust, but people's expectations have shifted and so subjectively people feel things are worse and begin withholding their trust.

This is why wealth inequality can create such a dilemma, because even if everybody continues to become better off, if you feel relatively worse off, than from a social cohesion standpoint it's just as bad. As overall wealth increases, because of the power law (or whatever curve), you see an acceleration of absolute differences in wealth as the high end of the curve grows steeper. This dynamic makes for a quite difficult sociological problem, which perhaps can be categorized under the rubric, "mo' money, mo' problems".

I wouldn't send money through the Post, and the idea sounds naive to me as well.

I don't believe that nothing has changed, but it's hard to point to individual events that prove how they've changed, because they're small things that lead to changes, which lead to more changes. It's still very different between the cities and the more rural suburbs and fully rural villages, and you can see it very clearly when you watch for the small things, e.g. can you leave your bike outside a small store without locking it up. It is what it is, it's not coming back once it's lost.

Today, crime that abuses the remains of Trust is rampant. Old people are tricked out of money by abusing their trust in authorities and their general trust that when somebody calls and says their daughter had an accident, that their daughter had an accident, because nobody would do such a cruel thing. And yet they do, happily laughing about it on TikTok, killing trust.

Germany was a bunch of seperate states until 1871 when Prussia finished conquering its neighbours. I don't understand how that could be a high-trust monocultural society in the 1800s.

> I don't understand how that could be a high-trust monocultural society in the 1800s.

It makes sense if you squint hard, and understand that "culture" in such arguments, is being used as a proxy of something else that is no longer acceptable to say out loud in polite company. So it was a bunch of disparate states with different traditions, but the same European "culture" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

This is an extremely bad faith take. The person you are replying to said nothing of the sort and now you're implying that they're a bad person.

But not saying it out loud, of course. Just "the implications"...

I'd love to hear your good faith answer to gp's question on fractured polities that are now present-day Germany

>> I don't understand how that could be a high-trust monocultural society in the 1800s.

Bad faith.

And it goes the other way, if you want to play that game.

If what you were saying were true then "whiteness" couldn't possibly refer to things such as purely abstract cultural-norms (either don't exist or is weasel-word according to you). So then what are they referring to?

If my intepretation is in bad faith, I'm assuming you can answer GPs question then: how were the many pre-unification bavarian princedoms whose independent histories went back 100s of years monocultural?

I know about pretty significant low trust high paranoia and violence period in German history. Or even more of them.

To see Germany's squandered potential all we need to look to is Japan (clean, safe, high-trust country with almost no homeless).

They hawked a lot of stuff from Germany from that time period; Lots of loanwords, uniforms, civic systems copied. Germany really did lead the way. As did Anglos with the law.

The USA in my youth? Maybe I'm idealizing, but there has been several definitive and marked shifts. Also, you can look at history. When we settled the west, the people building the towns knew they were in it together, and built as community (not always and not always well, but there was a sense of it).

WWII, "the greatest generation", almost all of society knew that if they united for a great purpose, they could achieve great things. Of course there were heros, but it was always the team/the group which mattered.

I agree and I should have used a different verb than "reach". "Maintain" might be more apt. Maybe I know what you mean: I feel that way when I'm driving through my old hometown. My grandparents used to leave the keys in the door – they would never do it now! – and it felt like everyone knew each other. The passage of time was marked by seasonal celebrations like Carnival or Easter. The entire town was involved in one way or the other: some people decorated the streets, others arranged the dancing stage, others prepared sweets and pastries. We used to play a lottery-style board game for Women's Day. In the past the local priest arranged for the construction of apartment blocks: their original purpose was to provide a cheap, temporary housing for young couples. Now it's just a memory. My elementary school closed down a few years ago. The grocery store, the bakery, the dance hall, the stationery are gone. The apartment blocks have become a long-term solution for migrants and low-income residents. There have attempts to revive the community but they didn't catch on.

> WWII, "the greatest generation", almost all of society knew that if they united for a great purpose

Are you including the soldiers who rioted in England due to the way black American soldiers were being treated by the host country? (That is, black soldiers were being treated as equals). Meanwhile back in the states, American citizens of Japanese descent were in internment camps.

I guess "all of society" uniting entirely depends on who you define "society"

> almost all of society knew that if they united for a great purpose, they could achieve great things.

What purpose do we share?

We all have a stake in preserving our society/way of life.

Which society? Which way of life? Neither of these are static objects trapped in amber.

Honestly, this is such a sad comment. The real answer to that question is left as an exercise to the reader. Not putting in one iota of effort to find common ground with your fellow human beings is the bane of democracy as a form of government.

If the question should be left as an exercise, then I'm justified in asking it.

Democracy has nothing to do with what I've asked. We live in a world of various societies each composed of distinct histories, laws, ideologies, creeds, beliefs, cultures, etc. This is as true today as it was millennia ago, before the existence of modern democracy. None of these societies are or were interchangeable, whether across space or time, and many are mutually irreconcilable with respect to one another. Historically, these differences were "settled" with massacres and revolutions, where the victors stood righteous and the losers denounced as animals, barbarians, deviants, heretics, apostates, reactionaries, terrorists, and other terms of abuse. Today, these battles are waged in parliaments and on Internet forums, where the methods are less bloody the but rhetoric and reasoning (or lack thereof) remain relatively unchanged.

Societies, as they exist in the real world, aren't simply voluntary associations of rational individuals (as much as I would like that). They are, whether by accident or design, sets of historical decisions that have accumulated currency in a sufficiently large or sufficiently powerful group of people. These same people are willing to engage in violence or coercion to defend said decisions with little concern for truth.

and then you look at some monocultural societies, and don't see much of "high trust" there either...

Twisting history of USSR to something unrecognizable ... . Turns up that when you start ad bloody murdering dictatorship with a genocide on your own, you don't end up high trust society.

Purges, torture, violence prisons and tanks kinda destroy trust, really.

Meanwhile supposedly high trust usa had blows of violence on their own. It was better country overall, sure, but plenty of violence due to unreconcillabke groups.

> USSR tried to meld different cultures into Russian "culture" through genocides.

Riding subways in big metropolitan cities in any city in the world is one of the most glowing displays of humanity I ever see. Everyone doing their thing, club kids coming home while businessmen are going to work, someone dancing or singing, other people barely awake, 10 languages in one car.

Sure we're all just trying to get to our next thing, or home, some happy about it, some sad about it, some just tired. But I don't think you'll find so many ages, religions, languages, classes, reasons or moods shoved into one little moving car as a subway and for the most part people not only use it just fine in trusting ways, but deep down, like being among the crush of just humans being human. At least if it's not 100 degrees and the train is running late again.

But even then sometimes, you suffer together, not because of each other.

It is important to add that Nietzsche's idea that "God is dead" (more precisely, the role of religion in acting as a values substrate for society) has also slowly been playing out, which gives the forces you listed more space to grow.

The concept of the last man as an antithesis to what life should be about feels quite close to a description of some Extremely Online people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man

>The US used to be a high trust society

I don't believe this to be true, or I suppose I would require evidence for this claim that I haven't yet encountered in my life. I find when someone claims that "America used to be so much better" they're completely discounting the experience of all the people who weren't born into or existing in privilege or within the US "in-group."

The US has always been distrustful of the indigenous people already inhabiting the North American continent, of newly arrived immigrants, of black people, of single men. Single women were sometimes witches and murdered for it and only recently trusted enough with their own personal freedom, which is being curtailed again. Atheists were never trusted.

I really don't think the US was ever a "high-trust" society and there doesn't seem to be any evidence or foundation to claim that it was.

A society doesn't have to trust minorities to be a high trust society. Japan and Korean are arguably high trust societies but they clearly have lots issues with racism to "outsiders".

That is not an excuse for racism. It's just saying your points have nothing to do with high trust or not high trust

Nobody said trusting minorities was a requirement of a high-trust society but I believe you've completely underlined my point, unintentionally. Immigrants aren't "outsiders" for example. And women and single men, atheists and others I mentioned have nothing to do with race or ethnicity.

This is an ok summary: "High-trust societies display a high degree of mutual trust not imposed by outside "contractual, legal or hierarchical regulation", but instead are based upon "prior moral consensus". Much writing on the subject refers to Francis Fukuyama's 1995 book, Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity, in which he describes "the ability of various peoples to organize effectively for commercial purposes without relying on blood ties or government intervention".

A useful test imo is: would you feel comfortable leaving your expensive Macbook, unattended in public, confident nothing would happen to it?

In Tokyo? Sure. Chicago, Detroit, NYC... Maybe not.

People doing "the right thing" on their own, when nobody is watching.

The big American cities used to be more like Tokyo in that regard. Now, you get stolen from and everyone agrees you were stupid and its wholly your fault.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_trust_and_low_trust_soc...

> Money is an abstraction of reputation and honor

Not in every part of the world. In many places, the dominant culture assumes people got rich by cheating and stealing. Which doesn't mean rich people aren't courted -- money's attractive in and of itself; but they don't get much true respect by default.

Where is this place?

Sure checks out for my whereabouts in Eastern Europe... And it’s not just USSR legacy. It was there for a looong time since feudal era.

In my country (New Zealand), while we wouldn’t expect that wealth necessarily came from cheating and stealing, the idea of money as “abstraction of reputation and honor” would be foreign to most, I think. For example, while there were some Trump supporters here, I think nearly everyone was confused about the assumption that his personal wealth implied anything about his worth or worthiness.

> Money is an abstraction of reputation and honor

Money is an abstraction of _perceived_ reputation and honor, and therein lies the problem.

Yeah, US was a very trusting society until it started using money, cars and converted to individualism. If only we could go back to our Communist roots. /s

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