Destructive knowledge cannot be unlearned, only managed through trust

Evidence

The first is that the knowledge of how to make these instruments of destruction is ineliminable in principle except by their large-scale use. This knowledge and the possibilities which it embodies are with us for as long as anything we could sensibly think of as our way of life, or civilization itself, is going to continue. The problem is not how to rid ourselves of this knowledge. We cannot unlearn it. The problem is to stop it getting rid of us. The second reason is that the level of threat, and its erratic but rapid intensification, are themselves a product of obtrusive structures of well-founded mutual mistrust. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1268

Categorization

• QUESTION: The phrase ‘well-founded mutual mistrust’ recurs — how is trust/mistrust constructed such that anxiety itself scales threat? Worth pinning the mechanism.
• XREF: ‘We cannot unlearn it’ resonates with the blindness novel’s irreversible contagion; asymmetric information (sighted wife) vs. symmetric nuclear knowledge.
• APHORISMS: ‘The problem is to stop it getting rid of us’ functions as compressed life-advice about technological risk governance.