Setting conditions for extended trust logically drives toward aristocratic social ordering.

Evidence

If we put these three reasons together — if we accept that the less information we have, the more trust we need, if we accept that if we are even to approximate interpersonal trust in wider social settings, and reliably reproduce it, we have to concede the codification of virtue in convention, and if we accept that we have to have explicit and elaborated reasons to adopt it and act on it — then I think that we are driven to the conclusion that the only possible society is an aristocracy. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1527

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely arresting conclusion: the argumentative chain from epistemic scarcity to codification to explicit reasons lands not on egalitarian institutions but on aristocracy — a striking inversion of the usual trust-and-civility narrative.