Coercion can substitute for trust when freedom is restricted

Evidence

The rulers of a slave society - assuming that they do not mind what slaves think - can restrict their trust in the slaves and in the viability of their society to the belief that the slaves are not going to commit mass suicide. They simply trust to the fact - not invariably borne out by historical evidence - that most humans, even under extreme conditions, have a preference ordering which ranks life before death. Here, trust must be understood in the limited sense of trusting the effectiveness of coercion as a motive for cooperation (see Williams, this volume). — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2725

Categorization

• XREF: Reinforces the reader’s Hobbesian-predation reading of Saramago: when monitoring collapses, the remaining order rests on pure coercion of the sighted over the blind, not trust. — connects to: Birth-place restricts freedom, whether this enslaves or enables; Presuming society already failed justifies coercive intervention for certainty — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1059; Exploiting willing freedom yields greater returns than coercion (+2 more)