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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

What concerns me is the possibility of a zero-trust society that nonetheless shambles onward by having a lot of law enforcement. It's kind of like that in Russia, where you're often buying adulterated foods at the grocery store, but there is nothing you can do about it and the mafia (a.k.a. the government) won't let it get bad enough to outright kill everyone. So, it goes on forever. China might be another example, where the history of communism followed by capitalism under cultural authoritarianism has virtually eliminated the social fabric, but the system clings on through extraordinary measures.

In fact, if you look at these "low-trust" societies, all of them have some reason why they haven't been replaced by the high-trust subcultures that you mentioned, reasons usually involving guns.

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I mean, that was the case even moreso in the Soviet Union right? They are the inventors of the phrase “Trust, but verify” after all, as well as the term “politically correct” (before it turned into a slightly different culture war term).

I think Trust is not really one singular thing either, and it kind of falls apart when you look at places like China or Japan. For example in Japan people don’t generally fear petty theft of bikes or electronics, but they have women-only train cars and the government forces smartphone cameras to make a sound to prevent creepshots. In China you have the zero-sum “it is good for me when others fail” mentality but also Guanxi and genuine patriotism.

Probably technology and law enforcement does allow large scale societies to persist with extremely low trust, but the more concentrated power becomes, the more that state’s continuance is subject to the whims of a small number of people that could either change their mind (like Gorbachev) or fuck things up so badly that they get overthrown (Romania). I think it helps that leaders and police/secret-police also live within that broader low-trust society and so they do have some incentive to not make it too bad.

> What concerns me is the possibility of a zero-trust society that nonetheless shambles onward by having a lot of law enforcement.

I consider law enforcement a critical part of a high trust society. I can operate a business and offer lower prices because I don't have to spend extra money on security to defend my goods because I trust that the law will punish thieves. Many times in society I won't do something because, e.g. speeding, because I know the law will come down on me for doing so, even if I know in the short term it would be advantageous for me.

I think there are a few different but related concepts bundled in “law enforcement” here.

A low-trust authoritarian state that restricts personal freedoms has to use heavy handed policing/secret policing with severe punishments to maintain that system. Without heavy policing the state would probably collapse internally.

A regular place needs policing to prevent the kinds of crimes we consider unambiguously bad like murder, theft, rape. Like I mentioned elsewhere trust/cooperation is game theoretical, and I think that shows up in our genes such that there are always some latent number of people predisposed to antisocial behavior. So you always need that.

But in the second case, the level of trust does reflect how much policing you need. If there is not much crime you don’t need that many police. You probably do always need some but the real world demonstrates that some places just have more criminality (low trust) and require more police.

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