Governing capacity is produced only by never having been governed before.

Evidence

The rulers in the citadel are the people who acquired the capacity or the tendency to trust each other, and hence to be cohesive, by being ungoverned. If you wish to govern, you must never have submitted to government yourself. Only the ungoverned condition of the savannah, desert, and mountain, engenders the kind of tribal group whose members trust each other and display cohesion. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1983

Categorization

• XREF: Direct resonance with the reader’s Luhmann/Hardin thesis: trust here is produced by ungovernedness, not by observable constraints — a competing causal story for how trust forms.
• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the usual premise that governance builds trust. Gellner claims trust accrues precisely where no government has ever constrained opportunism — a genuinely paradigm-challenging claim about the origin of trust.