Coercion substitutes power for trust and breeds its own betrayal

Evidence

Coercion, or at least its credible threat, has been and still is widely practised as a means to ensure cooperation; in its extreme form, to ensure submission and compliance. But it falls short of being an adequate alternative to trust; it limits the extent to which we worry about, but does not increase trust. On the contrary: coercion exercised over unwilling subjects — who have not pre-committed themselves to being prevented from taking certain courses of action or who do not accept the legitimacy of the enforcement of a particular set of rights — while demanding less of our trust in others, may simultaneously reduce the trust that others have in us.!! It introduces an asymmetry which disposes of mutual trust and promotes instead power and resentment. As the high incidence of paranoid behaviour among dictators suggests, coercion can be self-defeating, for while it may enforce ‘cooperation’ in specific acts, it also increases the probability of treacherous ones: betrayal, defection, and the classic stab in the back. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2734

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Hardin thesis: coercion as a substitute that fails precisely because it removes the observable, mutually-accepted constraints on opportunistic behavior that genuine trust requires.
• SEED: The paranoid-dictator observation is a sharp kernel for an essay on why coercive systems structurally manufacture distrust and treachery — institutions of fear as self-defeating mechanisms.