Distrust can be engineered to replace trust while preserving social order

Evidence

In 1710, the Neapolitan social critic Paolo Mattia Doria gave us an account of the Spanish destruction of Neapolitan society in the previous century. This is a remarkably subtle account of how to dissolve trust relations within a society while still preserving order in the society, at least order enough not to require substantial Spanish investments in maintaining the order. The Spanish created a new aristocracy dependent on Spanish support and thereby replaced a society based on trust by one based on honor (Pagden 1988, 133). — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 489

Categorization

• XREF: The trust-to-honor substitution parallels the doctor’s wife substituting authoritarian direction for the collapsed moral order in Blindness.
• SEED: Could seed an essay connecting colonial divide-and-rule (Spain in Naples) to contemporary platform-mediated distrust economies.