For the record, my favorite kind of societies, where I feel most comfortable living, are high-trust and low-regulation.
The dominant culture in which most of us reading this now live is the opposite: low-trust and high-regulation.
But how do you build trust? How do you make a more high-trust society. No one can do it alone, but tiny gestures well-placed can add up.
One of what I consider the strongest components of a high-trust society is citizens who insist on speaking directly with each other, instead of letting the media and politicians be our entire mouthpiece for us.
For those of us deeply conditioned and socialized in the dominant mainstream culture, it can be challenging to have discourse across differences and divides, but it’s really the only way to arrive at meaningful solutions.
Small-scale simple things many of us can do to help build a higher-trust society include starting a little free library; saying good morning to people we pass on the street in our neighborhood; offering water to people on a hot day.
Another thing I do is when I have a 24 hour bus pass and I’m not going to end up using it for the whole 24 hours, I’ll find someone to give it to. This morning I actually taped a bus pass to a nearby bus-stop pole, with a note saying “24-hour bus pass good till 11 AM Friday.”
It occurs to me that the benefits of taping that bus pass to a bus-stop pole are
1) it might have greater odds of finding someone who needs it; and
2) even if lots of people who see it don’t need it, it increases trust by conveying the idea that “this is the kind of neighborhood or society we are”; “this is the kind of neighborhood and society where we share extra resources with each other.”
BTW in Permaculture Design, the sharing of a bus pass that would otherwise go unused is an example of one of the three ethics: “sharing surplus.”
(The first two ethics of permaculture design are 1) care of the earth; and 2) care of people and all other living things.)