Institutions deliberately engineer distrust to block group mobilization against them

Evidence

Distrust and even merely the lack of trust can be very useful and can be strategically manipulated. As Anthony Pagden (1988, 127) notes, “Although it may be the case that no central agency is capable of intentionally creating trust where none previously or independently existed, it clearly does lie within the power of most effectively constituted agencies to destroy it.” For example, the structure of prisons and the behavior of prison guards often provoke distrust between prisoners. Among the most obvious devices, setting up the cells so that any one prisoner cannot see any other but every one of them can hear the noise of every other creates tensions and hostility between individual prisoners. They can become virtual enemies rather than allies who might pose a common front against the guards of the system. Some of what critics think of as unnecessarily punitive and insulting treatment is functional in provoking interprisoner distrust and hence in blocking group mobilization. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 487

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Saramago’s group-therapy ward in Blindness, where quarantine barracks are arranged so the blind cannot see but can hear each other, and where distrust among the blind blocks common front against the authorities. — connects to: China’s pervasive social distrust stems from totalitarian destruction of traditional affiliations — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1240; State propagandists, bots, and amateur conspiracy theorists form reinforcing alliances. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 396; Foreign actors weaponize genuine minority distrust by impersonating activist groups — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 201 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies a key asymmetry in trust theory: trust cannot be intentionally created but can be intentionally destroyed — central to Hardin/Luhmann integration.
• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the standard trust-as-positive framing: distrust itself is a manipulable institutional resource, and punishment is functional rather than merely cruel.
• ADDENDUM: This architectural-arrangement point (can’t see but can hear each other) is a natural extension of the monitoring-collapse argument for the trust/Blindness integration — physical observability is precisely what’s engineered away in prisons and what blindness eliminates accidentally.