Distrust of power holders needs no theory but trust of them does

Evidence

Ordinarily, I am likely to distrust you if I believe your interests strongly conflict with mine. (My distrust might make no difference for any action of mine, however, because I might have no interaction with you.) Often, this is the position we are in with respect to government officials. We can imagine that their interests are not clearly ours. Trust and distrust of government and its agents may therefore be asymmetric. We may have knowledge and theory to distrust when it would be hard to have knowledge or theory to trust. From a Humean or Madisonian view of the corrupting influence of having power with the discretion to use it, one can theoretically distrust government officials in principle as sometimes likely to use their offices for personal benefit in ways that conflict with the public interest or any citizen’s individual interest. It is not so sensible to argue for a converse general principle that such officials are likely to share my interests and therefore to serve them. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 749

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Hardin/Luhmann synthesis — ‘familiarity’ is asymmetric too; we more readily form grounds to distrust strangers than to trust them, echoing the blindness experiment’s foundational distrust among the newly blind. — connects to: Republicanism distrusts the powerful, not the ordinary people, who need restraint. — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 947; The people who depute power are the proper judge of its abuse — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 303
• DEFINE: Clarifies Hardin’s asymmetry thesis: distrust of government is a principled position grounded in a Humean theory of power, while general trust has no parallel theoretical warrant.