Institutions should cultivate trustworthiness, not trust itself

Evidence

Apart from teaching children the capacity to trust others (largely by being trustworthy to them), there is little point in cultivating trust. Rather, if the law or political institutions are to be used on behalf of trust, they should be used to cultivate trustworthiness and to block the kinds of action that would most severely abuse trust. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 329

Categorization

• XREF: Inverts the reader’s framing: Hardin argues trust follows from blocked severe losses, which parallels how the wife’s sight blocks predation and thereby restores the possibility of trust in the blindness state.
• ADDENDUM: The claim that trust follows from secured trustworthiness supports the sacrifice argument’s theme that institutional/ritual constraint underwrites stable social order.