Silence and violence reinforce each other until faith and fear become indistinguishable

Evidence

Next, there is the relationship of mutual reinforcement: greater quantities of omertd diminish the risks attached to the use of violence; at the same time, the higher the expectation that violence will be used, the higher the likelihood that silence will be scrupulously observed, to the point that it becomes impossible to say whether omertd is maintained out of faith or fear (Franchetti 1974: 31). — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2214

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The fact that coercive and normative mechanisms amplify each other until external observers can’t tell belief from fear is a profound point about the observability of interior states — silence produced by fear is observationally identical to silence produced by loyalty, collapsing the distinction that matters to trust theory.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s thesis: observability reaches a limit where internal motive is masked — even a sighted observer (doctor’s wife) could not tell faith from fear, complicating Hardin’s observability premise. — connects to: Silence transforms bystanders and emboldens perpetrators — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 151