Ongoing relationships are what constitute society, not mere individuals

Evidence

A core part of sociology is work on ongoing relationships that involve iterated interactions, as in the vast literature on iterated prisoner’s dilemma and large-number prisoner’s dilemmas or collective actions (some psychologists and sociologists prefer to call these social dilemmas). That is to say, motivations generated within relationships are at the heart of our understanding of social and interpersonal interactions. Indeed, it is ongoing relationships that make it meaningful for us to speak of society rather than merely of an aggregation of individuals. A misfortune of much empirical work on trust through survey research and experimental games is that it generally misses any relational aspect of the choices and commitments of the subjects, although surveys and games could be designed to capture relational elements of the interactions. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 877

Categorization

• XREF: Iterated interactions within relationships underwrite Hardin’s observable constraints. When blindness removes the ability to track interactions, society reverts to an aggregation of individuals — echoing the reader’s Saramago framing.
• SEED: Possible essay angle: how experimental economics and survey methods structurally exclude the relational dimension of trust, and what blindness fiction reveals that surveys cannot.