Breaking a distrust equilibrium requires coordinated multi-agent action

Evidence

Such perverse equilibrium states might be extremely stable, unless there is finally intervention from outside. They are stable because anyone who tries to be cooperative is at risk of being exploited by others. To move away from pervasive untrustworthiness, and hence distrust, requires moves by several or many at once and cannot easily be started by a single member of the community. An endogenous change that might break the equilibrium would be a change in the relative wealth and prosperity of one family that made it willing to take the risk of relying on others for their services. Thus initial inequality would often be mutually beneficial just because it would lead to new kinds of useful networks and relationships. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 475

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s Saramago integration — the doctor’s wife is the single exogenous agent who breaks the Hobbesian equilibrium in Blindness; Hardin here argues a single member cannot do it endogenously, an instructive contrast. — connects to: Well-brokered cross-organizational coalitions coordinated large-scale resistance — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 577; the MOC “The Viral Refinery: How Preexisting Fringe Fears Get Smelted Into Mainstream Reality”
• QUESTION: Does Hardin’s claim that one person cannot break the equilibrium imply Saramago’s wife is implausible as an exogenous force, or does her sightedness make her just that outside intervention?
• DEEPTHINKING: The counterintuitive conclusion that initial inequality can be mutually beneficial because it seeds cooperation-generating networks is dense and runs against egalitarian intuition.