Weak distrust needs only rare expected violations, not likely ones

Evidence

I need not think it very likely that any official would be as brutally unconcerned with my interests as the Tuskegee and radiation experimenters seemingly were with respect to their experimental subjects. I need merely think it quite likely that officials will occasionally—perhaps only rarely—find it in their interests to violate mine, and that they will do so. For example, they often have an interest in covering up errors of judgment even when exposure of such errors is necessary to correct them. Therefore, on the encapsulated-interest account, I can sensibly distrust them even though I could not have any chance of being able to know enough to trust them—even in the event that they might be trustworthy toward me, as most of them might in fact be. Logical limits that block the possibility of trusting perversely enable us to distrust. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 759

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s integration: distrust arises from a logical inference about incentives even where knowledge of trustworthiness is unattainable — parallels how Saramago’s society, stripped of observability, rationally descends into Hobbesian predation.
• DEEPTHINKING: The asymmetry — logical limits blocking trust perversely enable distrust — is the chapter’s pivot and directly supports Hardin’s claim that trust requires observable constraints, dovetailing with the reader’s thesis.