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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it is a bit too much, but in general, Western societies should work on educating people to greatly reduce their amount of trust in other people. Current Western trust levels are simply not reflective of reality: they were meant for a white society with a single, enforced religion, where everyone was shaking in fear of divine punishment. We live in a global world now and vast majority of it never had or expected a similar level of trust, they are taking advantage of you way too easily. Including billion strong nations that had no concept of God for millennia and no concept of conscience.

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I am not at all surprised that your name seems to be Russian. Before anyone accuses me of racism, I too am from the same region, and my mother is ethnically Russian.

Your mentality is typical of people from low-trust societies - "lol those naive Westerners" (lokhi[0] in Russian). But while individuals in high-trust societies can indeed be lokhi, everyone in a low-trust society is, collectively. They are giving up on the social development and institutions that only work well when trust in people you don't know is a societal value. They are defective at best, and nonexistent at worst, in a society where everyone treats each other with scepticism, disdain and distrust by default, until proven otherwise.

[0] https://russiapedia.rt.com/of-russian-origin/lokh/index.html (sorry for RT)

I am not at all trying to present it as a positive development. SURE, living in a high-trust society is a blessing. Both emotionally - it is nice being able to trust people and be trusted by default - but also economically, because it vastly reduces friction in doing business. In Russia yes, main consideration is building a set of conditions (frequently with external checks, escrows, etc) to make sure you won't be duped - that frequently takes more energy than it takes to actually get the job done. For this reason, i don't deal with any Russian speaking clients, for example, it's simply not worth it. I am all on the side of high-trust.

Thing is, it's not the case. The world outside of a narrow circle of rich, white, Protestant countries has never been like this, and those countries too, are losing it because of changing racial composition, and immigration from low-trust cultures. And in a global world, high-trust groups are simply being taken advantage of.

Reducing trust is better in some respects, but deeply harmful in others. What would be great instead is to increase accountability so that it's safer to trust. In the case of scam money transfers, a path to reversal would be a start.

The vast majority of commenters here vote to dismantle the methods of accountability. This proposition won’t happen as long as the PMC class remain insulated from rapidly rising crime.

Unfortunately, with the ridiculous level of trust people have in the West, that will be only a vehicle for more scams. Especially "path to reversal". Sure the world is overall low-trust and it creates a lot of friction. Only alternative to avoid the switch would be to never start globalisation.

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