Where conservatives are right is that trust seems to be pretty strongly hereditary--not genetic, but hereditary. You get it from your parents. If they trust people, it's likely that you will too.
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Trust, in other words, is highly culturally bound and remarkably persistent. Areas ravaged by the slave trade--in both Africa and the Americas--still have lower trust. French low trust levels may have something to do with the French revolution. Former USSR still struggling.
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Unfortunately, we know how to destroy trust--communism, authoritarian/totalitarian governments more generally, civil wars, slavery. Building it up is harder.
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But it definitionally can't be impossible; high-trust cultures got that high trust from somewhere, because one thing we do know is that forager groups don't start out trusting strangers. So we can build a more trusting society. We just have to work at it.
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That's where size and diversity does come in as a handicap. It will be harder than it would be in a smaller, more homogenous nation. But "harder" doesn't equal "impossible". And we're America, dammit; we chew up "harder" for breakfast and lunch on "darn near impossible".
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American social cohesion has been higher in the past, and it has risen there from lower levels around the Civil War. So we can do this. But we have to decide to do it, and because we're so big and diverse, we'll have to work like hell at it.
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And if you want to start somewhere: if you are screaming at people who differ from you politically, denigrating them, "othering" them, in an effort to try to get friendlier business regulation or a bigger welfare state ... well, remember that those screams destroy trust.
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Which means that in your effort to achieve a policy you want, you, personally are undermining the very social cohesion that has allowed Denmark to do these things with pretty minimal fuss and great success.
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But we don't need to shut down immigration to do it, and we also don't need a giant welfare state to do it--Danish high trust levels greatly precede the welfare state.
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What we need society is the will to do it. And that starts with the willingness to see every. single. one. of our fellow Americans as one of "us" rather than one of "them", regardless of race or ethnicity, or region, or religion, or politics, or gun ownership, or taste in novels.
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You know what society used to view everyone as one of "us"? Pre-massive third world immigration America
Even the dullest of marks eventually picks up on the game
Your solution? Double down on the War on Noticing Things - brilliant


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