When Pretending Just Won’t Do
Lifted from the comments, on a theme we’ve touched on many times – namely high-trust societies and those who struggle with the concept:
This is not what “high trust” *means*. High trust is not something that you can personally manifest. It doesn’t care about your emotional reaction to events. You cannot instantiate a high trust society by being nicer and nicer and nicer in the face of fraud and theft and graft. https://t.co/OGSh2IDugO
— wanye (@xwanyex) January 27, 2026
A thread ensues. With relevant illustrations.
Readers may wish to ponder the implication that a high-trust society can somehow be maintained unilaterally, simply by not caring about the number of people who violate that trust, and who do so repeatedly, whether in ways that are audacious or just wearyingly routine but nonetheless degrading.
As if pretending not to mind the evaporation of civilised, reciprocal standards – and pretending not to be alienated by primitive behaviour – somehow means that said behaviour isn’t there and didn’t happen. And that it won’t happen tomorrow, or the day after. And with ever greater boldness.
As if a high-trust society means letting antisocial fuckers act with impunity.
Such are the wonders of the progressive mind. In which, noticing routine and shameless thievery, the screwing over of others, is apparently much worse than indulging in it.
There is, I think, an assumption, most obvious among progressives, that in a civilised society you should just stand around impotently and demoralised, carefully averting your eyes, so that the bedlamites and ferals can do whatever they like, over and over again. As if the civilised aspect of the society will never require maintenance and enforcement of a kind one might call vigorous. As if it all just happens automatically, for free.
The idea that you shouldn’t want a society in which people just stand around pretending not to notice a young man with Down syndrome being mugged, for instance, is, for some, quite troublesome, ideologically. And perhaps psychologically. There being a great deal staked upon the pretending.
But it seems to me that this learned impotence – this cowed affectation – is much more corrosive and demoralising than a world in which the degenerate and predatory – say, those who choose to mug the disabled in broad daylight – know that they run a risk of being given a good kicking.
A good kicking that they deserve. And upon which, the gods would smile.
“High Trust society is when you keep leaving your wallet unattended and buying a new one no matter how many times it gets stolen. Just keep trusting no matter what and then you have high trust”
Not entirely unrelated, on habitual fare-dodging as terribly radical, altruistic, even.
Another progressive innovation.
From your post:
He doesn’t care if it’s other people being robbed.
There did seem to be quite a lot of displacement taking place. And all weirdly uniform. As I said in the post,
To say nothing of the growing and unsustainable budget deficits in several supposedly progressive cities, due in large part to rampant, unchallenged fare-dodging.
Perhaps most notably, Seattle’s public transport network, on which an estimated 70% of passengers are now freeloading with impunity. While the woman put in charge of the network boasts of how “people are feeling more welcome on our system and less afraid to use it because there’s less of a fear of fare enforcement.”
This being progress, you see.