Rulers deliberately destroy social trust to extract compliance and revenue.

Evidence

Trust, in Doria’s view, was a necessary condition of both wealth and virtue. In the interest, then, of reducing the wealth of the citizens of Naples to a politically and fiscally acceptable minimum, and their political virtue to zero, the crown had set out to destroy the pre-existent bonds of trust within the society. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1772

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Blindness/Saramago thesis — deliberate, systematic degradation of trust as governance strategy, and to Luhmann on trust as a mechanism for reducing social complexity.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inverse of the usual story — trust destruction as a planned administrative project, not collateral damage — worth sitting with against both Hobbes and the novels of societal collapse.