Arnold Kling on Trust in Society

The big problem of the human race is the problem of extending trust beyond blood kin.  In traditional society you just don’t trust people who are not blood kin.  That works pretty well in an agricultural village but it begins to be a problem in the city.  So mankind has developed the radical notion of extending trust beyond the limits of blood kin.

As Arnold Kling puts it: 

A high-trust society is one where trust extends beyond one’s clan or village. Trust within families is something that can be taken for granted, even in a low-trust society. A high-trust society is one that has found a way for trust to extend to strangers.

All this was developing nicely in the nineteenth century with capitalism, which rewards trustworthy behavior with lowered costs and increased profits.  But a parallel movement was the development of “fraternal” associations in which men pretended to be brothers.  It was an ingenious way of dealing with the trust issue.  Why not say that people that you trust are your brothers (or sisters as the case might be)?  Then you can have the comfortable feeling that people you trust are virtual kind.

The nation state is another way of pretending that people who are not your kin, but who speak the same language are in fact kin.  Again, we talk about the mother country, pretending that we are all children of the same mother.

But then along came the progressives and the academic middle class with the welfare state.

The welfare state replaces the contractual and fraternal bonds of trust with the vertical relationships of patronage and clientage.  It lowers the level of trust in society.  This works well for liberals who become responsible for negotiating between the competing interest groups in the welfare state.  They like it because it gives them power.

But it infantilizes ordinary people. Instead of being responsible themselves for building trust with other people, which is an essential skill in the democratic capitalist economy, they become subordinates—at work and in society.

When we conservatives fix the Broken Society one of the big tasks will be to resume the building of voluntary fraternal organizations in which people interact as equals and build trust networks.

We know it can be done because ordinary people did it successfully in the nineteenth century before the academic middle class came to power and wrecked the voluntary fraternal sector.