Trust is the most critical factor upon which societies’ functionality rests. Relationships of trust are foundational at all times. In small tribal groups, trust is personal because everyone knows everyone else. As societies scale up, personal trust is no longer possible, so trust tends to manifest in the set of rules by which the society is governed, and in leaders or other prominent people. In high trust societies, people are generally self-governing. They follow rules that make sense, and that they believe are in the best interests of all. They don’t need to be monitored or coerced.
It takes a long time of relative stability to create a high trust society, because trust takes a long time to build. Expanding trust is characteristic of expansionary times in general, when commerce is increasing across long distances, and people come to recognise common humanity in a wider range of others who are not exactly like them. Unfortunately, trust takes very little time to destroy once expansionary times come to an end and the wealth pie begins to shrink. In fact the erosion of trust typically begins well before actual contraction, because late stage expansion tends to be characterised by a loss of integrity in leadership and increasing corruption. Rules become increasingly nonsensical or contradictory, and move towards benefiting the few at the expense of the many. Trust disappears as these factors become increasingly obvious.
As the population becomes aware that elites are above the law, a tipping point is reached where the rule of law ceases to exist in most people’s minds. They don’t see why they should follow rules that are not in the general interest, and that tend to impose wildly disproportionate sanctions of those at the bottom of the financial food chain. Conceited elites look at the rest of the population as closer to livestock to be exploited than as fellow citizens. They may think of themselves as a different – and superior – species. At this point, the population ceases to be self-governing, and elites, who never trusted the masses, impose repressive surveillance and control mechanisms.
Elites know what typically happens to those in power during a substantial contraction. They want to remain safely unaccountable for their many transgressions, so they seek to control every aspect of the lives of everyone else as a means of self-preservation. Technology has unfortunately made this more feasible than ever before. The techbros of Silicon Valley have managed, through the criminal DOGE initiative, to steal everyone’s private data that was held by the government, and they already had access to people’s personal information and social connections through their social media accounts and other online presence. This allows them unprecedented control over people, through the social credit scores mediated by programmable digital finance that they’re busily developing.
However, extreme centralisation, especially at that level of resolution, requires a huge increase in socioeconomic complexity, and socioeconomic complexity is a function of surplus energy available to society. The energy available to society is currently being deliberately reduced through both the war in the Middle East and the war between Ukraine and Russia. In the Middle East, 20% of global oil supply, and 40% of the supply of oil for export, is mostly offline, although this is partially mitigated by pipelines, railways, road transport, and shipping deals with non-combatant countries. Countries are currently burning through their reserves, but those will be exhausted by approximately early September, and in some places much earlier. In the Russia/Ukraine war, energy infrastructure is being deliberately targeted by both sides, and Russian oil exports are being subjected to blockades and piracy. There is not going to be sufficient energy for a major increase in socioeconomic complexity. There won’t even be enough to maintain the current level. Elites do plan to prevent more than a bare minimum of energy access for most people, but even if they deprive the masses, they still won’t have sufficient energy for their plans to succeed, other than perhaps fleetingly. Compounding a lack of energy with the outright collapse of the trust horizon is a guarantee of failure.
China is the best example today of a very low trust society. Western elites envy the level of control the CCP has over the people and seek to emulate the highly repressive Chinese police state that developed as a consequence of the erosion of trust. People there are denied access to any information about negative happenings, in order to prevent them blaming their government. They are not allowed to criticise the government or oetition for change. The country is already slipping into an economic depression, led by the collapsing real estate sector, and people are becoming increasingly desperate as they may not be paid for months. There is no social safety net, and no help for people who are struggling with mental health as a result of the atomisation of society. When people snap, as they’re increasingly doing, they engage in revenge against society attacks, such as frequent incidents of deliberate vehicular manslaughter.
As western countries watch trust evaporate, their revenge against society attacks tend to be mass shootings, especially in America where trust is disappearing at a very rapid rate due to obvious and overwhelming political corruption. All the countries that pushed the covid lies and coerced people into taking toxic shots, are following this trajectory. Europe, led by incompetent political zealots, is tearing itself apart in a self-inflicted horror show. Australia is becoming highly authoritarian. New Zealand is deliberately digging itself into a monstrous debt hole, so as to tax people out of their homes and hand the real estate to billionaires seeking to escape the consequences of their own actions.
More and more people are waking up to an understanding that the elites consider most of us to be ‘useless eaters’ and wasters of financial resources. The poor, disabled, and elderly are being particularly targeted for removal, amid a general depopulation drive. Even if their plans for societal control fail, as is very likely, they will still have created so much chaos in the attempt that population reduction will be inevitable. Major shortages of both energy and food are coming due to the impact of the wars, and conflict is likely to spread as trust decays further. Trust determines effective organisational scale, and as it collapses, political aggregations will fracture as the ‘us vs them’ dynamic reasserts itself. To be effective, work at community scale. Build and nurture relationships of trust before it’s too late, because those will be the bedrock people will need to rely on when the centralised life-support systems fail.
