Destroying state confidence causally reduces interpersonal trust and cooperation.

Evidence

Sicilians were able to rely on neither the fairness nor the protection of the law. Not having confidence in the state leads to not trusting other individuals in many contexts, because the state cannot be relied upon to prevent the worst possible outcomes from various joint endeavors and contractual relations. Rather than risk such outcomes, individuals may refrain from cooperating at all. Hence by wrecking the conditions for trust between pairs of individuals or families, the Spanish could substantially reduce the prospects of cooperative endeavors to oppose or hinder their rule (Pagden 1988). — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 492

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Hardin’s central claim that trust requires observable constraints — here the state as the guarantor whose collapse ripples into pairwise distrust. Connects to the reader’s Hobbesian-degradation reading of Saramago. — connects to: Intergroup apologies can make relations worse without preexisting trust. — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 1487
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this claim that state distrust generalizes to interpersonal distrust survive in settings without the state’s breakdown, e.g. authoritarian regimes with functioning law?