Changing a conquered people’s customs destroys the expectations underwriting social trust

Evidence

Thus, concluded Doria, by compelling men to change their customs, by making it easy for them to abandon the hard but virtuous ways of their ancestors, for the easy, unthinking, and ultimately destructive ways of the Spaniards, a society based on trust had been replaced by one based on honour, a rich and just community by an impoverished and unjust one. … In Doria’s account the Spaniards had done to the Neapolitans exactly, and by the same means, what (according to Herodotus) Croesus had advised Cyrus to do to the Lydians: ‘Make them wear tunics under their cloaks and high boots, and tell them to teach their sons to play the zither and the harp, and to start shopkeeping. If you do that, my lord, you will soon see them turn into women instead of men, and there will not be any more danger of their rebelling against you.’ As Schelling observes with reference to this passage, such cultural strategies, although aimed at habits and motivations, ‘at the same time deny the development of expectations and the confidence’ which is the basis of trust in one’s neighbour and, in the larger sense, trust in society itself (1984: 208). — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1829

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s core Luhmann/Hardin frame: cultural engineering removes the observability and predictable expectations that trust requires — cross-domain parallel to Saramago’s blindness destroying shared expectations.
• CANDY: Croesus advising Cyrus to disarm the Lydians through luxury, music, and shopkeeping is a delightfully quotable bit of ancient soft-power theory.