States can destroy trust even when they cannot create it

Evidence

In this essay I wish to consider an example not of how trust might be created or sustained within a society but of how it might be destroyed. ! For although it may well be the case that no central agency is capable of intentionally creating trust where none previously or independently existed, it clearly does lie within the power of most effectively constituted agencies to destroy it, or, in Thomas Schelling’s words, to ‘spoil communication, to create distrust and suspicion, to make agreements unenforceable, to undermine transition, to reduce solidarity, to discredit leadership’ (1984: 211). — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1699

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s stated task of linking Saramago’s novel to Luhmann/Hardin — this asymmetry (trust destruction easy, creation hard) parallels how the white-blindness epidemic collapses the sensory substrate of familiarity and observability. — connects to: The state becomes responsible for growth it cannot control or offset. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 124
• DEEPTHINKING: The asymmetry between destroying and creating trust — destruction is cheap and accessible to any constituted agency, creation nearly impossible — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting insight about social order worth sitting with.