Societies built on mutual distrust can stabilize into enduring structures.

Evidence

My paper on the mafia indicates how a society based on mutual distrust can develop into a stable social structure and reproduce itself over a long period. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 92

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Interestingly inverse of but parallel to the reader’s ‘Opting out of the Legal System’ diamond-bourse material — there, distrust is solved via reputation and arbitration; the mafia case shows distrust institutionalized as the stable equilibrium.
• QUESTION: How does mafia society make mutual distrust stable? Presumably threat-of-violence substitutes for trust — but then what observable constraints underwrite it, connecting to Hardin?
• XREF: connects to: A republic’s stability rests on assurance that all will respect shared rules. — Adelin-Costin Dumitru, Forging the Resistive Republic: Social…, 18; Stable domination requires legitimating ideology plus fragmentation of the ruled. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 588