Well-founded confidence in collective trustworthiness is humans’ best condition

Evidence

The best condition for humans is an environment in which they are fortunate enough to have well-founded confidence (Dunn 1988, 84). This is not an individual-level problem but is, rather, a collective problem. For me to rely on not locking up my home or shop would require that I have confidence or trust in almost everyone. The individual-level problem here is to judge rightly what the collective behavior on trustworthiness is. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 538

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hardin frames trust as a collective problem: one’s own security depends on judging the aggregate, not any individual.
• XREF: Directly connects to Luhmann’s ‘familiarity’ baseline and the monitoring-collapse thesis the reader is building with Saramago’s Blindness.