> You have to understand how gears shift from there. Trust is essential for business transactions and specifically for long term investments. You can’t make massive leaps in technology or medicine or many other areas without trust (a lot of money on a leap means if you don’t trust the other side or the government to keep conditions stable, you won’t see a return).

I am not quite sure, how exactly you mean "trust". For example there are countries, that I would consider quite corrupt, but that are able to leap ahead. I would say there can be a lot of trust, even in a corrupt system, if the ones making the leap, are part of the corrupt system, and trust that system to continue to "work". But you could say: "Well, then there is trust!"

Ultimately, I think where there is more trust, there is more to destroy, so any betrayal of this trust, causes more damage, than in a low trust environment, where there was not much trust to begin with.