Trust-eroding domination made organized crime a plausible historical response.

Evidence

The sketchy historical account given thus far does not amount to an analytical exposition of the causes that generated the mafia or its less renowned but equally fierce twin entities, the camorra (Naples) and the ‘ndrangheta (Calabria). But on intuitive grounds, it makes a criminal response plausible. Most of the ingredients were there. How they merged into a coherent structure is something we shall consider below. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2132

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s central thesis — distrust engineered by domination generates private enforcement structures (mafia) as substitutes for failed trust, mirroring Hardin’s claim that trust requires observable constraints. — connects to: The term looting conflates opportunistic crime with survival-driven appropriation. — John Drury, The role of social identity processes…, 111
• SEED: Angle for an essay: organized crime as the institutional afterlife of systematically destroyed trust — the mafia as private order arising where public order taught its subjects to distrust everyone.