>I had this view as well until I realized it’s predicated on living in a high trust society. At some point you reach a critical mass of crime that is so rampant, and the rule of law has so broken down that it’s basically Mad Max out there, and then these idealistic philosophies start to fall apart.

I see "High Trust Society" so much as a weird racist dogwhistle, but feel free to disabuse me of that notion.

I live in an extremely high crime area. Because cops abuse the law to keep their numbers up. If someone checked they would see that my local McDonalds car park is one of the biggest crime hotspots in the country because of administrative detections made on minor drug deals there.

It just so happens that my area is also where the government dumps migrants, refugees and poor people. Its also the case that they test welfare changes here.

I haven't had a single incident here in 6 years. We often forget to lock our doors. My wife takes my toddler walking around the neighborhood at night. I wave hello to the guy across the road who I have like 99% certainty is dealing drugs (Or just has a lot of friends with nice cars who visit to see how long it has been since he trimmed his lawn).

That said, if you turn on the tv 2 things are apparently happening. 1. We are under attack by hordes of immigrants tearing the country apart. 2. We are under attack by kids on ebikes mowing kids down in a rampage of terror.

Politicians, in order to be seen to be doing things, bring laws in to counter these threats. People bash their chests and demand more be done.

But the issue is that its just not happening. My suburb is great. The people are generally lovely, even those in meth related occupations.

When you complain about the trustiness of the society, consider that your lack of trust might actually be the problem? Nothing is necessarily going to break down because you didnt make your neighbors life worse by supporting another dumb as shit law. "Oh no crime is so rampant" buddy you need to get over yourself. Societies don't fail because of socially defined Crime they fail because people prioritise their perceived safety over everyones freedom.

> I’m not defending government surveillance, or the idea of considering someone innocent until proven guilty

Exactly what you are defending.

>what happens when the entire system fails due to misplaced idealism?

Its at threat from the idealism that you can just pass one more law to fix society.

>don’t feel like the government is adequately protecting them.

They come up with a bunch of dumbshit laws like the OP. Thats the result.

Re: High trust society general means people are pointing to some implicit unwritten structures that stop something from happening.

Collective notions of shame, actual networks of friends and families that reinforce correct behaviour or issue corrections.

Think about simply how credit networks form and function. And why visiting a food truck or medieval travelling doctor for your vial of ointment is different from buying special products from a brick and mortar establishment.

Basically if you or the network has a harder time back propagating defaults and bad credit in a way that prevents future bad outcomes then that is a loss of high trust.

This isn't about race really unless you are operating at the level of some biological or genetic connection to behaviour ... But that is a pretty strange place to be as there a whole host of confounding factors that are much more obvious and believable and I cast serious doubt that even a motivated racist would ever credibly be able to do empirical studies showing causal links between any given genetic population cluster and the emergent societal behaviour. These are such high dimensional systems it just seems insane to even think one could measure this effect.

The invisible substrate is the society unfortunately ... And we are all bad at writing it down and measuring it.