My general stance is that it doesn't, not beyond the small groups of a few hundreds of people, roughly Dunbar's size and not much bigger than that, that human beings have lived within for hundreds of thousands of year.
Let's take a modern example to see why I don't trust the process of "trust building" in the first place. Social media platforms tell us that direct messages are encrypted, so that people can feel safe about sharing private information. Okay, sounds good, but how am I supposed to verify that there is genuine encryption happening? Am I just supposed to take the word of social media companies, the ones that explicitly optimize for profits, and treat their users as cash cows for ad revenues and engagement, to the point of making their platforms as addictive as possible? Surely not, we can't trust social media companies themselves to be honest about what they do with our data, there is a blatant incentive to lie here.
So what is the "solution" then? Supposedly, there are laws and the external auditing companies to make sure that businesses only keep as much data as is absolutely necessary, and never of a confidential matter, meaning that while businesses optimize for profits and outreach, there is (or supposed to be at least) another side which focuses on enacting the law.
But how do we know that this third-party is trustworthy? Because those institutions are also run by people who are fallible and corruptible, and those institutions also need large amounts of money to at least maintain themselves, if not grow in order to meet the growing list of problems in our increasingly complex technological world.
What this shows is a simple yet essential principle of trust-building: you can't just sidestep the problem with another middleman. If I don't trust the companies to handle my data well, how am I supposed to trust the security consultants to care about my needs and do a good job? How am I supposed to trust the people writing and enacting the law? How am I supposed to trust the politicians who steer our society? What is the feedback loop to make sure that there is a trust-building process happening, with the people who are supposed to protect my interests?
If this sounds paranoid, then consider that I am not making a definite claim on what those people in power are doing, I am merely raising the simple question of how would we even know what they are doing? Even if they were angels with perfectly good intentions, which they clearly are not, how would we know?
We can only be sure in our knowledge if we can trace back the reasoning and the evidence, which is why there is much validity in the process of science, when it is not tainted by selfish purposes. But how would you do this with companies and institutions? This is once again the basic problem at the root of conspiracy theories: when you live in an opaque environment, but also depend on it to survive, you start to formulate to yourself and others theories that try to explain how that environment works so that you may navigate it better, but that also fundamentally cannot be tested out in practice, because of the very fact that the environment is opaque!
I am not saying that no definite knowledge of Reality, or trust in one another, can be built. I am just saying that you can't rely on chains of proxies if they do not bottom out to things that you can know for sure.
If I live with a friend or a romantic partner, then I can get definitive proof of whether I can trust them or not based on the simple act of living with them, especially if we both go through difficult times together. Trust in other people is the result of living with them, seeing their character, growing with them, facing hardships together, and resolving our differences.
This process cannot be bypassed forever. I could use trust by proxy, which means trusting the judgement of someone whom I trust, but ultimately the ground of all trust is living with other people, and getting the direct proof that we can live well with one another.
But society does not work this way. People go to work, drive cars around, send their children to school, pay back their mortgage, eat food grown from another continent, and much more, not out of a conscious decision, but because there is essentially no other option. That doesn't mean that the option we are stuck with is necessarily bad, though it is getting worse with the inevitable collapse of society, but it means that people end up rationalizing something that they never chose in the first place. They look at the past, a past which is presented to us through modern frames, and say that we have it good, but no matter what you think of our society, there is no choice between living in this, and one of tight-knit groups living in much simpler, and yes of course, more dangerous ways, but also free from oppressive governments and institutions. 1
There are some feedback loops to society, which is why for instance food companies cannot sell you literal poison that would kill you in mere hours, or why you cannot get thrown to jail just because your face looks a bit funny to the police officers, or why road accidents are fairly unfrequent and go punished, and why children do learn how to read after their long years of school (though whether they want to read at all is another question), but by and large, these loops ensure a certain minimum level of quality, but never the kind of high trust and high competency that leads a group to flourish and thrive.
I can feel very confident that my neighbors aren't going to murder me on the street and try to loot my house, but whether there is enough trust for me to allow my kid to roam around at night, or for me to leave my house unlocked, is another thing altogether. The rise of mass immigration is moreover a huge factor in the decline of social trust, and that can hardly be denied by anyone who actually has to live in poorer areas of the West.
Returning to trust, the main factor that makes me trust people I do not know is whether they have skin in the game, in proportion similar to what I do. I trust that people on the road will drive well enough to not crash into me, because a crash is a headache for both parties involved, and so they clearly do not want that. Or I can trust that the people living inside the same apartment complex as I do do not want to burn down the building, since they too live there. (though if they were feeling suicidal, maybe they wouldn't care)
But when this mutual bind of skin in the game is no longer present, how could you trust anyone with anything serious? How can you trust that the food and agriculture companies aren't slowly poisoning you over time for instance? As I have said in the previous section, there are institutions that can provide a basic level of food safety, but health is an entirely different thing. It's a slow and complex process, involving tons of intertwined feedback loops that we cannot possibly unravel, and our decline in health is equally difficult to track. Thus, I would trust a farmer who grew the very same food that he ate, but I wouldn't trust a company that exports their products all the way to other continents, even if in practice I unfortunately have to rely on them.
Likewise, I also do not trust teachers, academics, doctors, lawyers, managers, bankers, consultants, and so many more, because they are all middlemen. They do things for other people, but do not face the direct consequences of a job badly done. If they were people that I lived with and knew firsthand whether I could trust them or not, sure I would be fine with this decoupling of consequences, because our shared context is all of the binding that I need.
So at the end of the day, I don't trust a highly complex and atomized society such as ours. Trust needs time, shared context and mutual skin in the game to develop, and nothing can replace that. Modern society has none of those things, which is why we see abuse again and again and again, in all domains: health, money, law, schools, work, medicine, politics, information, advertisement, etc.
Proxies are an attempt to systematize the process of trust, but I hope it's obvious to anyone that they do not solve the problem at its roots. How do you know that you can trust the proxy and the credential that they build? If you want to hire a person for your company, how do you know that you can trust the resume, and the degree, and the school in which the person got their degree? You can't, which is why the best recruiters try to get as much unfakeable signal as possible from the recruitees: conversational skills, attitude, hands-on knowledge, past projects, that type of stuff.
All of those unfakeable signals being, again, a result of spending time together. Not something you can automate or systematize, because time is how qualities are revealed. I almost want to say that that statement is actually metaphysical, not merely how human trust is built. 2
Credentials can measure non-conscious realities, like how many years someone has spent in school, how many tests they have passed, and a test itself only measures your ability to faithfully reproduce the information asked by the teacher, or perform a standardized procedure. But the test can always be gamed, because tests are attempts to scale discernment, which necessarily turns them unconscious, and thus fundamentally undiscerning because of their rigidity.
And this is why I don't trust modern societies, because they are built on unconscious processes and interfaces, and maintained by unconscious people. All of this sounds abstract until you look at the complete lack of love everywhere in the world. No love in relationships, just fear and neediness. No love in movies and books, just romanticized fantasies. No love in business, no love in the office, no love in supermarkets, no love in the hospital, no love in schools, no love in universities, no love on the street, no love on the road, no love at home, no love in the bed. And how could you trust a loveless world?
1 I am talking about hunter gatherers here. No doubt that medieval peasants had to deal with tyrannous kings and landlords.
2 See for instance Self and Unself by Darren Allen, and how he describes how character is experienced through time, not space.
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Trust Incentives Mediation Interface Powerdynamics Atomization Tower
2026-04-16