Rich ongoing relationships do not automatically produce trust under leadership competition

Evidence

Consider several social orders in which distrust has been pervasive and, therefore for each distruster, functional. Fredrik Barth argues that two of the societies he has studied as an anthropologist were organized by pervasive distrust. The Swat Pathan of northern Pakistan were an acephalous society of pastoralists loosely organized without anything vaguely like a state or higher authority. They were politically egalitarian, with a headman in each locality. The headman could be replaced at will by the other men. All were therefore constantly watchful of one another, and they could not be sure that the others would not betray them at any moment in struggles over leadership. The men spent most of their time together in the men’s house. In a sense, therefore, they had the natural possibility of having trust in one another grounded in rich, ongoing, and unending relationships. Instead, they lived without trust. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 460

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the reader’s baseline: Luhmann’s familiarity from ongoing contact is insufficient — strategic incentive to betray blocks trust formation, sharpening why monitoring alone cannot guarantee trust.