[opportune]

I mean, that was the case even moreso in the Soviet Union right? They are the inventors of the phrase “Trust, but verify” after all, as well as the term “politically correct” (before it turned into a slightly different culture war term).

I think Trust is not really one singular thing either, and it kind of falls apart when you look at places like China or Japan. For example in Japan people don’t generally fear petty theft of bikes or electronics, but they have women-only train cars and the government forces smartphone cameras to make a sound to prevent creepshots. In China you have the zero-sum “it is good for me when others fail” mentality but also Guanxi and genuine patriotism.

Probably technology and law enforcement does allow large scale societies to persist with extremely low trust, but the more concentrated power becomes, the more that state’s continuance is subject to the whims of a small number of people that could either change their mind (like Gorbachev) or fuck things up so badly that they get overthrown (Romania). I think it helps that leaders and police/secret-police also live within that broader low-trust society and so they do have some incentive to not make it too bad.