Pressure Forges Trust
(draft) Subhed.
Unfortunately, prosperity breeds complacency.
To explore that point, let's explore its opposite. Imagine for a moment that you lived in the former East Germany, where one citizen in seven was an informant, reporting others’ actions to the Stasi, the state police. At the surface level, East Germany was clearly a broken, low-trust society. But the way most citizens got by was through the grey or black markets, more specifically through personal, informal, underground networks of care.
Because the possible punishments for stepping outside the official system include imprisonment or worse, the stakes in these underground networks are very high. Those high stakes pressure-test trust between individuals. They anneal it and strengthen it, to the point where once the high stakes are gone and life is more “normal,” say after the fall of the Iron Curtain, people may become nostalgic for the bygone era, however dysfunctional it may have been ("Ostalgie").
This bonding pressure of high-stakes environments is one reason soldiers miss war. High stakes lead to high trust. Prosperity can't hold a candle to that.
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.