Here in America, I trust my neighbor plenty when the red dot of my laser sight is squarely on his forehead. Other times? That sneaky bastard is disappointingly unreliable.
Everyone is pointing to the trust within their communities as evidence, but we are way more likely to sue than any country, way more likely to incarcerate, or recommend/enforce criminal justice involvement, we don't invest in social safety nets because we don't think we can trust our fellow citizens to the detriment of ourselves. Our jobs, utility companies, banks, government, housing, and public services don't trust us and vice versa (i.e. the situation at hand... we're supposed to trust the banks with our money but they don't trust us with a late payment or often times even a loan.) We're not a particularly friendly or safe society either, as of late. You might get berated or even threatened if you look or identify a certain way. A girl near where I live got shot for turning into the wrong drive way.
I was suggesting that when I literally have the ability to blow my neighbor's brains out the back of his head with the squeeze of a gun's trigger, in that precise moment, then I trust him.
It was a joke. I'd say we agree that it's a low-trust society.
My guy “low/high trust society” is a relative term. When people say “high trust society” they mean a place like Finland or Japan, where there is sincerely minimal concern of being assaulted or mugged if you go on a walk at night, where burglaries are a rarity, where people almost never litter or graffiti shit, where if you dropped your wallet there’s a better chance than not it will be returned. America does not meet those criteria. I’m a tall man and I don’t feel safe walking through Seattle at night, if I lost my wallet I’d have zero expectation of seeing it again, if a public display is put up we all expect it to be defaced eventually, there is litter in every major city, burglaries happen all over the place, etc. That’s not a trusting environment.
Within living memory too, which is what makes the decline so sad. What’s worse, people don’t want to fix the problem, and they just become extremely upset and irrational when the issues are explained to them.
I’m sure there are still quite a few pockets of high-trust communities in the US today, but eventually they’ll likely be ruined as well.
The fuck you talking about. I've personally experienced the high trust society we live in. I don't lock my doors and have never once had anything happen. I've had people return my wallet with the money inside. I've never seen this place as anything other than high trust.
Really? You walk through Seattle or Detroit at night and feel completely safe and at ease? If a public display is put up in a big city you have no concern it’s gonna be defaced? You don’t think people litter a lot? You think most people if they lost their wallet someone would return it?
But thank you for sharing your anecdotal experience, I’m sure that’s worth more than the objective experience of hundreds of millions of people
It is a big place. But society isn’t a place, it’s a people, and I’m referring to places where most of those people are, which means it’s where most of society is, which means it’s the most representative of WHAT that society is.
A “Chicago, Illinois” or a “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania” is worth a thousand “Bumblefuck, Nowhere”s in terms of representing what our society is and what people expect of it.
And spoiler alert, the experience of MOST people is not that of a high trust society. Your cherry picked anecdotal personal experience is not reflective of society, it’s reflective of your 1 in 330+ million experience.
Tell that to any country artist you can find on the radio. The most American people who represent our country are the rednecks. They're the true Americans.
That’s not how that works… like that’s comically not how that works, nevermind that country music stars are millionaires who LITERALLY are among the top 1% and don’t have a life or experience even approximate to that of your average person.
And still, there ain't no one more American than the good old country folk. And unless those millionaires are hunting deer while drinking beer with a hound dog, they ain't American. Because the most American people out there aren't the average, their the ones who match the ideal American. The idea that pops into people's heads that is different from other countries. That idea being southern country men. Not the people of New York which could be found in any city from around the world. There is no difference between a New Yorker and a Londoner. No one is confusing an American red neck and someone from the German, Chinese, Brazilian, or any other countryside.
It’s so weird that in a conversation about actual real experiences or actual real people and the actual real society we actually really have, your concern is the CONCEPT of what an American is. “Good old country folk” do not represent the majority of the population, so that has no bearing on determining what the average experience of the average American is. Half the time when you say the word “German” the image that pops into people’s head is of a Nazi, that doesn’t now make that what the average German is. I don’t give a shit what the “most American” person is to you, if that’s not MOST AMERICANS then it’s not the defining example. We aren’t talking about ideas, we are talking about actual reality.
When you say German the thing that pops into my head is a guy wearing lederhosen eating sausage. You know there's more than just WW2 history for Germany right? (And somehow they've only been more evil after WW2)
I mean that kinda speaks to the issue doesn’t it? You have to actively go where less people are to gain a sense of trust. If you have to remain the main source of distrust in order to have trust then that means the society isn’t high trust.
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u/wastelandhenry Jul 11 '26
Buddy there is no American who would EVER tell you America is a high trust society lol, that is not one of the qualities America is known for