Institutional safeguards precede trustworthiness, which precedes trust

Evidence

If our expectations are stabilized at a high enough level of cooperativeness, we may finally be able to treat much of the behavior we expect to encounter as a relatively benign force of nature, just as microeconomic theorists of the market essentially do. … Hence life in a harsh ghetto or in a society that has broken down into violence and rabid self-seeking, as in Somalia at the end of the twentieth century, is hampered by the prudent lack of trust and by the disastrous lack of institutions to enable joint enterprises to proceed even without much trust. Introducing trust in such a context would be pointless. What is required for a constructive atmosphere is trustworthiness, which cannot easily be established by individuals across a whole society that has destroyed it. Again, before trustworthiness can be established there must first be institutional safeguards against the potential for disastrous consequences of dealing with others so that people can begin to take the risk of cooperating in ways that, if successful, would lead to trust relationships. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 849

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to Hardin’s trust-as-encapsulated-interest thesis and Luhmann’s familiarity prerequisite; also connects to the reader’s Saramago integration where the wife’s sane witness functions as an institutional safeguard enabling cooperation. — connects to: Mutual trust predates and is prerequisite for civic virtue. — Adelin-Costin Dumitru, Forging the Resistive Republic: Social…, 33; Institutional vigilance operates alongside rather than against interpersonal trust — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 1299