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Comment by closewith | Hacker News Reader

All examples of high trust societies show that those consequences must be social, because _by definition_, in a high-trust society, you must trust other people to do the right thing.

A punitive dictatorship or police state is not a high-trust society, even though laws may be strictly enforced. Likewise, in a high-trust society, behaviour is expected to be good and moral, even where not mandated by law.

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Trust has to be earned. High-trust societies are awesome, but you can't just expect people to trust that they're not going to be robbed in the street if people keep getting robbed in the street, or that the few criminals that do exist will suffer consequences for their behavior if they're not actually suffering those consequences. That sort of culture takes time to build.

> That sort of culture takes time to build.

It does. Generations. We should get started.

Just to be clear, I don't think policing is futile or unethical or anything. But it is symptom control and cannot improve your society. Leaning into policing as a panacea inevitably results in worse outcomes for everybody, police included.

And there-in lies the problem of modern society. There are no social consequences. The decline of religion and family with no suitable replacement has left most people without a peer group to exert these social consequences.

A lot of HN readers would get a lot out of watching more Star Trek: TNG.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_G...

Lots of people in the US are religious. This generally doesn’t seem to dramatically lower crime on a statistical basis (with all kinds of caveats.)

Far less than in previous generations. And just because people vaguely claim to be religious in some general sense today doesn't mean that their vague generalities provide them with communities that bring about social responsibility.

Yeah, a whole lot of Americans who still click the "religious" box on a poll are just going on habit and family tradition, or they go to a church that's become part social club and part community charity center. (Nothing wrong with charity, of course, but you don't have to be religious to be charitable.) It doesn't mean what it meant a few generations ago, when, probably coincidentally, there was less crime.

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