Trust is a deliberate choice, not merely a fortunate evolutionary by-product

Evidence

We might even agree that, in a certain number of billion years, the universe is likely to contain only those planets — or underdeveloped countries — whose inhabitants happened to hit on the right sequence of cooperative moves and to behave, to just the right extent, as if they trusted each other. On the other hand, we would also like Earth — and our children - to be among them. Evolution has bestowed upon us the mixed blessing of being able to generate intentionally the as if behaviour. Knowing this, we can hardly avoid the responsibility of considering trust a choice rather than a fortunate by-product of evolution. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2820

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s Hardin thesis: trust as an intentional, observable constraint rather than an emergent lucky accident. Resonates with the doctor’s wife’s deliberate maintenance of order throughout Blindness.
• SEED: Could anchor an essay angle on how trust collapses into Hobbesian predation when observability is removed — the causal inversion of this passage.
• APHORISMS: “trust a choice rather than a fortunate by-product of evolution” reads as genuine life-advice about the responsibility to deliberately generate trusting behavior.