Borrowed Trust in a Broken Society
In the West, we used to live in a genuine high-trust society. No longer. Today, we’re a low-trust society, masquerading as a high-trust society, fueling a booming ‘trust industrial complex.’
In a high-trust society, the machinery hums quietly. People know the guardrails are intact, the institutions (mostly) work, and the people operating them, flawed as they may be, act in good faith. You don’t need to second-guess every contract, every handshake, every oral promise. You assume the wheels won’t come off.
Many people in the West still live inside that assumption. But that façade is long gone.
We no longer live in a high-trust society. Instead, we’re living in a low-trust society with trust industry scaffolding — an entire ecosystem of highly-paid intermediaries whose full-time job is to simulate the trust we no longer have in each other.
