Lack of government is what generates tribal trust.

Evidence

Tribal life, conditioned primarily by lack of government and the consequent need for cohesion, was the only source of a certain kind of trust, which bound men in groups, even though it was also haunted by the possibility of treachery. In the towns, there was specialization, no trust, and order based on fear. Religion provided an idiom in terms of which the various elements of the total society could communicate with each other. It provided the terminology for both tribal trust and urban fear. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2078

Categorization

• XREF: This is Gellner’s claim that trust arises precisely where observability is face-to-face — direct parallel to how Saramago’s blindness destroys the observability that underwrites Luhmann’s ‘familiarity.’
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox where trust (binding men in groups) coexists with the ever-present possibility of treachery is a dense, genuinely counterintuitive claim about trust’s origin: trust is born from the absence of government, not its presence — nearly a reversal of the Hobbesian framing the reader is building.