Distrust of the powerful poisons trust among the powerless as well
Evidence
Moreover, in the context of great differences in personal power, distrust is malignant. I cannot trust the egoistic Henry VIII, and therefore I cannot trust anyone else at court much either, because they might use anything I say or do to undercut me with Henry, to my great peril. Indeed, I may merely not trust Henry while actively distrusting my fellow courtiers. Henry need have no competitive interest with me, but my fellow courtiers do. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 482
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Critical causal mechanism for Blindness: once the guards dominate blind internees, the internees’ mutual distrust follows autonomously — a non-obvious downstream of vertical inequality.
Related
- Great power differentials make distrust spread contagiously among the weaker parties (similarity 0.91)
- Power inequalities block trust because the strong lack encapsulated interest (similarity 0.85)
- Horizontal distrust among subordinates follows from vertical inequality (similarity 0.83)
- Mutual trust cannot develop in unequal, nonreciprocal power relations (similarity 0.80)
- Loss of positional power can void the sanction backing a trust relationship (similarity 0.80)
- Subordinates under a powerful superior may come to distrust one another (similarity 0.80)
- Misplaced trust costs far more than forgone trust, making distrust come more quickly (similarity 0.79)
- Distrust needs less information than trust to form. (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Dominant powers benefit from engineering their subjects’ inability to trust
#expands(0.82) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 500 - Power holders can deliberately manufacture distrust conditions to secure control
#expands(0.75) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 501 - Self-fulfilling distrust becomes individually rational and resistant to disproof
#complicates(0.72) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2863