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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

This is the most intelligent take on internet trust issues that I've seen. The conclusion is overly glib though: it took centuries for high-trust societies to develop the mechanisms that allow them to function as such, and even small changes can upset that balance (as we've been seeing in the real world over the last couple of years). We shouldn't assume it will be trivial to bootstrap those kinds of institutions on the internet.

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People forget that institutions take time to develop. They also forget that high-trust institutions frequently begin with a dictator. The end-point is high-trust/low-coercion, but you can't get there from low-trust/low-coercion. First you have to go through a high-trust/high-coercion state, after which you can gradually taper off the coercive elements as institutions mature and the individual actors get used to the new normal.

This is exactly how the liberal societies of the west evolved. But don't remember that any more, though.

This isn't how the Unites States evolved. Arguably, the success of the experiment still hasn't been fully established, but the major institutions that govern the US system were more or less present right from the beginning.

That's a take. I'm assuming you mean "The US as created by white European invaders who had to decimate a local indigenous population using slavery and warfare after purging itself of imperial overlords" right?

Like the US in its current coast to coast form didn't spring out fully formed from Liberty's bosom. It also had centuries of European innovation that lead to it.

There was never any coercion in the US. All those black people simply begged to be chained and beaten for centuries. The tribes? They just really wanted to travel to Oklahoma. Women were naturally granted the right to vote in 1776 without any strife or suffering.

Whitewashing history to make it more palatable is dangerous.

We're talking about whether or not coercion is necessary to bootstrap a high-trust society. Are you arguing that those types of coercion were fundamentally necessary to establish the United States? Or are you forgetting this context in order to have something to be upset about?

Yes, I am arguing that. There is no way the US is the world power it was through the late 1800s and beyond, without centuries of coercion [0].

[0] https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-eco...

One of the key arguments against slavery was that it help the South back from being able to have a modern, industrial economy. If slavery was the key ingredient to being a world power, the slave states would not have had their asses thoroughly handed to them by the free states in the Civil War.

> Women were naturally granted the right to vote in 1776 without any strife or suffering.

Depends on the state, if I'm remembering correctly. New Jersey allowed certain women and african americans to vote until (I believe) 1806.

Dirtying history to make our advancements larger is also dangerous.

Provide some evidence then. What percentage of women could vote then? What percentage of blacks? If it's not a significant amount, your reply isn't much of a rebuttal.

The original requirements were the same for everyone - white or black, male or female - though thanks to the doctrine of coverture, married women would not have the assets to qualify. (Married women could generally not own property independent of their husband) Coverture was not applied universally however, and many married women still voted. See [0]

> That all inhabitants of this Colony, of full age, who are worth fifty pounds proclamation money, clear estate in the same, and have resided within the county in which they claim a vote for twelve months immediately preceding the election, shall be entitled to vote for Representatives in Council and Assembly; and also for all other public officers, that shall be elected by the people of the county at large.

It's probably also worth noting that these restrictions applied to men, too.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_Jersey_Stat...

On that note, a couple states in the Western US were early adopters of womens' suffrage, mostly to boost their numbers and/or to sway women into moving west; Wyoming is the famous example, but Colorado, Idaho, and - surprisingly enough - Utah all had formally legalized womens' right to vote in general elections prior to 1900.

Rolling back to the original point, that the US was High Trust right from the start, doesn't the point that there were major barrier's to entry for being part of the "democracy" for both men and women show that there was some inaccuracy to that statement?

Oh, didn’t you read? All men are created equal. It’s a classless society!

The ruling part of the early United States were English settlers, so they brought their high trust society with them.

Eh. Reality is more complicated.

Some of the English settlers were decent people with functional societies.

Some of them were basically the christian Taliban.

No, they were not.

The heavily religious communities in the early US didn't display any of the tribal behaviour commonly seen amongst the Taliban (which are the cause of most of the governance issues in Afghanistan), just the extremely strict adherence to religion which is in some ways a superficial similarity as the average person in those times was as fanatically religious as only the most hardcore Christian today.

For instance Cousin marriage wasn't a thing at all (which is one of the main ways of maintaining tribal cohesion) while it is still extremely common in Afghanistan and the Middle East today.

Certain English settlers were such hardliners and so terrible to everyone who didn't adhere perfectly to their doctrine that Rhode Island and parts of New Hampshire were settled be people expressly fleeing them. No, they didn't have the tribal politics but the hard-line religiousness and correspondingly harsh treatment of everyone else was the comparison I was going for any anyone who has studied the first hundred years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony knows that comparison is apt.

Nit picking over the particulars of how they ran their society does not make them any less a bunch of fundamentalist jerks.

The Fed?

Careful. Soon you'll be arguing for the dictatorship of the proletariat. "Dictatorship does not necessarily mean the abolition of democracy for the class that exercises the dictatorship over other classes; but it does mean the abolition of democracy (or very material restriction, which is also a form of abolition) for the class over which, or against which, the dictatorship is exercised." -- Lenin.

I'm not being completely serious, but I do find it extremely interesting that this whole idea of high-coercion at the start followed by a gradual easing off as people accept the new culture is one that has been tried explicitly. Or... at least claimed to have been tried ;-). Marx and Engels split no hairs about the authoritarian nature of revolution and when Lenin and Stalin later tried (presumably) to manage the situation they found it necessary to maintain that dictatorship in order to combat the ever present trend toward bourgeoisie and capitalism. But it was all supposed to end eventually.

For me, I see parallels between that and the current air of "It's a scary world out there. Trust your government to take care of you. Give us more powers so that we can make our communities whole." No authoritarian revolution, but a very real reach towards cracking down on bad people in the name of the community. And once utopia (though not a communist one) is reached, the power will simply not be necessary.

Having said all that, it was Confucius who said that if you are lax at the beginning and then become more strict, you will be seen as a tyrant. However, if you are very strict at the beginning and become more liberal over time, people will see you as magnanimous. When I used to teach at a high school, I used that idea and it did, indeed, work very well.

Reminds me of The Republic, where Plato describes an ideal government of selfless, enlightened rulers that would over time devolve down into democracy, which then would end up in tyranny, because the people would choose a tyrant to get rid of the chaos.

Unrelated, I was unaware of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but that explains to me why communism ends up as a system of control: because it started out as a system of control in the first place. And why it's liberal (at least in the 1910s) intellectuals that were attracted to it: they were the ones ruling society in that system, which, as every intellectual knows, is The Way It Ought To Be. Of course, it got co-opted by the political sorts because control in the real world requires weapons not ideas.

I disagree profoundly with pretty much every claim made here. The analysis of the inception of liberal societies is very likely wrong.

A bare "wrong!" is a very weak reply that adds only noise to the discussion.

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