Lately, I’ve seen a great deal of discussion about “high-trust” and “low-trust” societies. Some of that may be the result of the media I read, but more likely it is because people are reaching for language to describe something new to them. When everyday interactions feel brittle, surveilled, and adversarial, you do not need a sociologist to tell you something fundamental has shifted; you simply need words for what you already know.
Years ago, I taught my children that if they were ever in trouble or lost, frightened, or hurt, they should not accept help from someone who approached them on the street, and they should not seek out police or other authority figures. Instead, they should go to the nearest house that looked occupied, knock on the door, and ask the adult who answered for help.
That instruction surprises people now, and sometimes it horrifies them. Yet it made perfect sense to me, especially since we lived in military housing. The people behind those doors were not truly random at all. They were neighbors, service members, and their families: individuals who had already been vetted, who lived visibly embedded lives, who were accountable to a chain of command and to one another, and who were known within a community that noticed who belonged and who did not.
The logic was simple. Predators do not usually live quiet, stable lives in close-knit neighborhoods where behavior is visible, and reputations matter. They insert themselves. They offer unsolicited help. They rely on urgency, confusion, and authority to bypass a child’s judgment. In large, impersonal systems, they often hide behind titles, uniforms, or institutional fog. A neighbor at home, anchored to a place, with lights on and a life others can see, is far more likely to help a child in genuine trouble than harm them, not because people are saints, but because most people are decent, and because decency is reinforced by visibility and accountability.
That rule only works in a high-trust society, and the fact that many people now instinctively recoil from it tells us something important about where we are.
High Trust and Low Trust, Defined by Experience
A high-trust society, according to Francis Fukuyama’s brilliant book Trust, is one in which ordinary people are treated, and treat one another, as moral adults. Trust is the default posture, though never blind. Think Ronald Reagan’s “trust but verify.” Intent and context matter. Rules exist, but they are tempered by judgment. Mistakes are addressed directly rather than bureaucratically, and forgiveness is possible because repentance restores standing. Accountability is personal and visible, disagreement is tolerated without exile, and people are expected to exercise discernment rather than outsource it.
Low-trust societies feel very different. In a low-trust culture, people are assumed to be lying, ignorant, or dangerous until proven otherwise. Systems replace relationships, procedures replace judgment, rules change without explanation, and authority hides behind process. No one is ever responsible; “the system” made the decision. Dissent is framed as risk, records are permanent, and forgiveness disappears. In such a society, you do not knock on a neighbor’s door. You wait for official help, defer to credentials, and are taught not to trust your own perception, even as you are expected to trust institutions that do not trust you in return.
That asymmetry is corrosive.
The West, and America in particular, did not arrive at liberty by accident. High trust did not emerge from optimism or naïveté, but from a moral framework deeply shaped by Christianity, which held two ideas in tension: that humans are fallen, and that humans are accountable. People are not angels, but they are responsible. Sin is real, but so is repentance. Authority is necessary but should always be limited, and no system stands above moral judgment because systems are made of the individual people within them. That framework made trust possible without denying human failure, allowing freedom to exist without collapsing into chaos and order to exist without hardening into tyranny.
What we are living through now is the slow erosion of that balance. As bureaucracy expands, judgment is replaced by procedure. As elites retreat into low-trust environments, they begin to assume deception everywhere. As institutions demand obedience while refusing reciprocal transparency, trust drains away. COVID accelerated this collapse by revealing how quickly authority could become arbitrary, how easily dissent could be punished, and how rarely error was admitted. The result is a society that still speaks the language of trust while operating on suspicion.
When a Low-Trust System Met a Storm Front
This fracture became political not because of theology, but because of experience, specifically, repeated experience with people who exercised power without accountability. Americans were told that “institutions” had failed them, as though institutions were impersonal forces of nature, when in reality, institutions are made of people. Bureaucracy is not faceless; it merely feels that way because responsibility is deliberately diffused. Decisions are made by human beings who choose process over judgment, insulation over explanation, and compliance over relationship. When those choices accumulate, the result is not neutrality but quiet domination.
Over time, this produces cynicism not only toward government, but toward truth itself. When people learn that explanations are selective, rules flexible for insiders, and errors never admitted, they stop assuming good faith. They comply outwardly and disengage inwardly, losing belief not because they are rebellious, but because belief has become irrational. This is the most dangerous stage for a republic, when citizens no longer trust the people who govern them but have not yet withdrawn their consent openly. It is where we are today, seeing that those at the top who demand our compliance have not been held accountable for their own behavior.
Into that stagnant atmosphere moved Donald Trump. Trump did not enter politics as a conventional reformer, but more like weather, a cold front crashing into a warm, settled system. When cold air collides with warm, humid air, it does not produce harmony; it produces storms, because static systems react violently to disruption once stasis has been mistaken for stability.
Trump spoke plainly where others spoke bureaucratically, named betrayal where others hid behind euphemism, and refused to treat power as sacred or process as moral cover. He forced conflict into the open rather than allowing it to be laundered through committees and consensus statements. To people embedded in low-trust bureaucratic cultures, this looked reckless and destabilizing. To people who had spent years being managed rather than respected, it felt bracing, honest, and authentic, even when uncomfortable. He trusted us, and we could tell. He asked the same questions we were asking, and he proved that he had our back. He was an actual high-trust leader, something that has not been seen on a national scale in America for decades.
Seen through this lens, Trump was not the cause of America’s trust crisis, but a symptom of it. His rise marked the collision between a low-trust governing class accustomed to managing risk through procedure and insulation, and a high-trust public that still expected to be treated as morally responsible adults. The turbulence that followed was not ideological chaos so much as a trust imbalance finally made visible.
What We Can Do to Rebuild Trust
The question, then, is not whether trust can be restored from the top down, but whether it can be rebuilt from the bottom up. High-trust societies do not exist because institutions declare them so, but because people behave as if trust is both possible and bounded. That means assuming good faith until evidence suggests otherwise, extending trust with verification rather than blind deference, and accepting that trust always carries risk, while recognizing that the alternative is something far colder.
What Americans can do begins locally and unglamorously. Trust must be rebuilt in the spaces where it still functions naturally — families, churches, schools, clubs, volunteer organizations, and neighborhoods — where people are known rather than managed, accountability is personal rather than procedural, and forgiveness is possible without erasing responsibility. High trust survives in these places not because people are perfect, but because failure is handled relationally instead of bureaucratically.
Americans can also practice high-trust behavior deliberately by speaking plainly, addressing betrayal directly rather than through back channels, refusing reputational sabotage, explaining themselves when challenged, and expecting explanations in return. High trust requires courage because it exposes people to misunderstanding and conflict, while low trust feels safer in the short term precisely because it avoids those risks. Avoidance, however, always comes with a cost, and the bill must be paid eventually.
Finally, Americans can stop outsourcing moral judgment. Low-trust societies train people to wait for permission to notice what is obvious and to suspend discernment until authority validates it. High-trust societies expect citizens to weigh evidence, tolerate ambiguity, and accept responsibility for their conclusions, not by rejecting expertise, but by refusing to treat it as a substitute for conscience.
Trust cannot be enforced. The moment it is demanded without reciprocity, it collapses. The moment it is managed as risk, it evaporates. The only way back to high trust is through lived example, through people choosing to behave as if moral adulthood still matters, even when systems suggest otherwise.
America’s future will not be decided solely by elections, court rulings, or bureaucratic reforms. Those matter, but they are downstream. The deeper question is whether Americans still believe that ordinary people, unsupervised, are capable of decency, and whether they are willing to live as if that belief is true. A society that answers yes can recover from almost anything. A society that answers no will eventually trade freedom for management and call it safety.
High trust is not naïve, soft, or easy. It does not arise accidentally. It is a discipline, and whether we rebuild it or lose it entirely is the real choice before us.
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