Personal-bond ‘aristocracies’ are often the only way to start cooperation amid distrust.

Evidence

This applies equally to the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad’, to the Florentine bankers of the late Middle Ages (Becker 1981) and to the mafia networks of ‘friends of friends’. Fragile as these ‘aristocracies’ — as Hawthorn calls them -— may be, always in need of external reinforcement both by sanctions and by success (in satisfying at least some people’s interests), they often represent the only means of instigating a cooperative relationship that would otherwise fail because of uncertainty or frozen distrust. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2846

Categorization

• XREF: Connects squarely to the reader’s Hardin/Luhmann synthesis: ‘frozen distrust’ is exactly the state Blindness induces once observability collapses, and ‘aristocracies’ are the doctor’s-wife-led group emerging to re-secure cooperation.