Social order rests on shared coordination that can tip abruptly into disorder

Evidence

Even social order is, of course, a tenuous guarantee. Generally, everyone coordinates on order in stable, working societies as, for example, in Los Angeles most of the time. But if something can signal a breakdown of order sufficient to ensure the failure of law enforcement, there can be a sudden dramatic tipping to disorder, as in the Los Angeles riots of 1992. If everyone seems to be relying on the police or the banks or the government, it is relatively safe for me to rely on them too. Still, this may be an unstable relationship that can suddenly tip. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 521

Categorization

• XREF: This directly anchors the reader’s integration of blindness as removing the observable substrate that sustains shared coordination on order — the tipping from order to Hobbesian predation in Saramago’s novel.
• QUESTION: What exactly constitutes the ‘signal’ that triggers the tipping in a population? Hardin leaves the stimulus vague — worth chasing in his other work.