Socially extensive trust requires an aristocracy to create it, which then undermines it

Evidence

I have argued that a socially extensive trust cannot be created except in and by what I have called ‘aristocracies’; that having been so created, there is good reason to believe that the aristocrats will undermine it; and that if trust is to be maintained, this will have to depend either on conditions which are external to the social arrangements in question or on strategies which are internal and which, although perhaps directed by what could be called an ‘aristocracy’, might at first sight seem to preempt anything one would want to describe as ‘trust’ at all. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1663

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s core thesis: the doctor’s wife in Saramago’s Blindness plays precisely this ‘aristocratic’ role as the sole sighted guarantor of order, and Hardin’s claim that trust requires observable constraints parallels the internal strategies preempting trust.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘aristocracy’ as the reader uses it — not nobility but any directive elite capable of imposing initial trust-generating conditions.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox — trust requires an aristocracy, aristocracies undermine trust, maintenance then preempts trust itself — is a dense, layered argument about the unstable foundations of social order that resists one-sentence summary.

Related

• Broad social trust arises only in aristocracies, which then undermine it. (similarity 0.94)
• Setting conditions for extended trust logically drives toward aristocratic social ordering. (similarity 0.87)
• Thick trust cannot extend beyond small groups except via mystified elite authority (similarity 0.85)
• Political parties and armies can create trust by creating distrust (similarity 0.84)
• Extended interpersonal trust cannot reinforce itself without external mechanisms (similarity 0.83)
• States can destroy trust even when they cannot create it (similarity 0.82)
• Social order produces the conditions that generate trust, not vice versa (similarity 0.82)
• Trust can be systematically dissolved while a society is preserved (similarity 0.81)
• Rulers deliberately destroy social trust to extract compliance and revenue. (similarity 0.81)
• Trust’s interconnected structure makes it fragile across whole systems (similarity 0.81)
• Blind trust in authority can be culpable stupidity rather than virtue (similarity 0.81)
• Distrust can be engineered to replace trust while preserving social order (similarity 0.80)
• Socially extensive and enduring trust is inherently difficult to create (similarity 0.80)
• Anarchism’s defining weakness is its capricious account of trust’s incidence (similarity 0.80)
• Functional trust cannot generate itself without imposed initial conditions (similarity 0.80)