The quest for safety drives people. There are those who, in pursuing security under the government’s umbrella, flaunt laws and traditions yet claim to deserve state privileges nonetheless. Others maintain severe traditions that reject the state’s authority and claim sovereign privilege.
This oddly hypocritical juxtaposition in our ideological stance pairs with self-preservation strategies. When a Kafkaesque scenario of distrust in leaders, prevailing narratives, and corporate entities leaves us in a “zero-trust” society, there is seemingly little benefit and much potential harm in extending trust to any institution. As a result, we drop back into fractious local networks of individuals to seek communion, safety, and trust.
Counterintuitively, trust is not necessary when something is reasonable: no trust is extended when we all agree. And so, to invoke trust, we must evoke irrationality: social tests that go to unreasonable extremes bind loyalty, creating in-group and out-group affiliation.
While rationality should lead to trust, it is more of a survival imperative to adopt irrationality, making it more reasonable when system trust is lost.