Totalitarian regimes can sustain themselves by deliberately cultivating pervasive distrust.

Evidence

Perhaps the greatest deliberate experiment in pervasive distrust was that of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union during the purge years of the 1930s. Although the apparatus of those years was not fully dismantled soon thereafter, the war with Germany required enough cohesion to make such deep distrust harmful even to Stalin’s personal rule. Pol Pot’s rule of Cambodia similarly depended on radical use of distrust. In general, pervasive distrust is more quietly used than it was in these two dreadful cases. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 467

Categorization

• XREF: Pervasive engineered distrust mirrors the society-wide monitoring collapse in Blindness, but here as an intentional state project rather than a sudden sensory catastrophe — a useful counterpoint to Saramago. — connects to: Distrust is a self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling social dynamic.; Power holders can deliberately manufacture distrust conditions to secure control; Systems that need distrust must also neutralize it to survive. (+13 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 467

Broader Connections

• Power holders can deliberately manufacture distrust conditions to secure control #corroborates (0.95)
• Dominant powers benefit from engineering their subjects’ inability to trust #corroborates (0.90)
• Distrust is a self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling social dynamic. #expands (0.85)
• Self-fulfilling distrust becomes individually rational and resistant to disproof #expands (0.80)
• Distrust is self-reinforcing because it starves itself of corrective information #expands (0.80)
• Distrust of the powerful poisons trust among the powerless as well #expands (0.78)
• Systems that need distrust must also neutralize it to survive. #qualifies (0.75)
• Trust can be deliberately created by fabricating distrust #qualifies (0.72) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1666
• Distrust strategies can become autonomous habitual routines #expands (0.72)