Beyond a certain social scale, societies must rely on egoistic rather than thick-trust motivations

Evidence

3 No egoistic motivation by itself will do. … Conclusions 1, 2, and 3 together imply that if anything will do by itself it will have to be non-egoistic micro-motivation. This will presumably have to be something like ‘thick trust’ - reliance on and between a group of persons in terms of their known dispositions, personal relations, and so on. It is not easy to see how this could be extended beyond a very small society. The only apparent way of taking it beyond that is to identify a particular set of people, a government or elite group, in whom thick trust is invested, and whose activities, example, or regulation serve to sustain cooperative activities throughout the society; but if this is conceivable at all, I find it impossible to see how such a structure could be the basis of our arrangements without an arrant degree of traditionalist or charismatic mystification. … 4 Non-egoistic micro-motivation will not do by itself, for us. … ‘We’ are inhabitants of the modern world, involving vastly complex and complexly interrelated societies, which achieve an immense amount through impersonal relations. In particular, we do a great deal by relying on egoistic micro-motivations, and it is a remarkable achievement of the modern world to have brought this about. Indeed, it is obvious beyond a certain level of social size and complexity that we must rely a lot on such motivations, because of (R1): the kinds of mutual knowledge needed to stabilize egoistic micro-systems is easier to bring about in such circumstances than the kinds of knowledge involved in ‘thick trust’. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 219

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘thick trust’ as reliance grounded in known personal dispositions, contrasted with impersonal institutional forms.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Saramago analysis: collapsed thick trust in a blinded society reverts to pure egoistic predation, and to Luhmann’s familiarity as its small-scale precursor.