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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Reason of most scams is the absurd level of trust existing in Western countries.

When i first saw Upwork where hours were paid by the tracker in a guaranteed manner and people SIGNED for it, i knew West was doomed. I still find it hard to believe people can be that easy to dupe.

Level of trust in the Western societies needs to be radically reduced through government propaganda, church and other channels. The world has become global. Westerners are now a small minority in an ocean of people where the manner of relationship that will be seen as sociopathic in the West, is the everyday norm and always have been. If they won't adapt, they will cease to exist. The cozy world where one could trust another because they all shared fear of God and had a reputation to lose, is gone.

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A high trust society is actually a good trait, not a bad one. It’s rather easy, lazy even, for a culture to devolve into a low trust minima. That’s basically the default state that people have endeavoured to evolve out of.

I think it’s also the kind of thing that can easily overwhelm anxious minds. The kind where “what if it’s a scam?” leads them to never taking a risk, donating to a cause, doing someone a favour.

Not that there isn’t a fight to be fought here. But waving the surrender flag on fostering a trusting society is a very weak move.

"A high trust society is actually a good trait, not a bad one."

100% agree, and seeing it erode is painful (e.g., toothpaste now locked behind plexiglass).

But to steelman the parents point, while it is be good to be high trust society, that society may be poorly adapted when rapidly integrated into a low trust globalized world.

There's little societal trust in e.g. Russia, and yet they're getting massively scammed by Ukrainian call centers every day. People selling their only housing, sending all their savings for “safekeeping” overseas, are daily news. Not just old ladies (but them too), but also middle-aged intellectuals who were supposed to know better.

It's all using the same schemes that have been explained in the news over and over again, there's little innovation on that front. You have to be living under a rock the for past few years to fall for them, and yet people do. I think there's simply a certain amount of marks in every society, regardless of how its members trust each other, and the only reliable way of protecting them is managing everybody's lives DPRK-style.

I think the only reason of why it works is that Ukrainians are an even lower trust culture, and they are better and more cynical at duping people. Plus, in Ukraine many people see it as their patriotic duty, and perhaps rightfully so, so these kind of jobs are likely to attract quite sophisticated people who will be able to pull off very believable scams, not some social rejects or worse, forced labor sitting in Myanmar jungle, as it is in Asia vs USA scams.

Trust is necessary for social development & advancement, and low trust countries & societies are also low on the development index. The development of advanced economies is predicate on the "absurd level of trust" in western countries.

The cost world you describe didn’t emerge because of fear of god (which has been prevalent for milleniums, mostly everywhere) but the abondance of cheap energy and goods, basically since oil starts getting processed but other minor factors helped too. Democracy and peace emerges when peoples aren’t scared to miss food anymore.

In the US food is plentiful. Poor people die of obesity related illness. But trust is plummeting because of a decline in social cohesion. Building a high trust society is hard, and there is no monocausal solution. You can't plug in god, or food, into a low trust society to flip it to high trust.

Food is plentiful here, but unevenly distributed. Childhood hunger is still a serious problem.

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/14/childhood-hunger-food-insec...

During the initial pandemic, great strides were made in the United States to mitigate childhood poverty, but these measures were quickly overturned. Now the administration wants to defund SNAP and other food security programs. Alas.

I think the underlying concept you're looking for is corruption versus rule of law. Blaming the victim versus expecting consequences for the perpetrator etc.

Classic Russian thinking that the only motivating force is fear. No wonder you get stuck with homicidal tyrants ruling over you time after time.

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