There is a lot of commentary out there today about the fact – and it is a fact, an indisputable one for anyone with eyes to see it – that the United States of America is basically a dying empire inhabiting the geographical footprint of the American nation, and that it will eventually break up into constituent pieces that will thrive or collapse on their own merits as nations.

I have been arguing along these lines for quite some time. The United States of America is devolving rapidly, breaking apart at the seams. In my view, the most likely outcome is that the USA will break up into anywhere from four to seven different nations.

Southern Commiefornia will probably break away and unite with a number of other coastal blue-state areas; the heavily Mexicanised border states will probably form another regional entity; “New England” will likely re-emerge as a united political entity; and the Midwest and deep South will likely form their own regional blocs.

I am sure that there will be a couple of other enclaves that pop up, of various shapes and sizes and compositions, but I don’t think that they will last long. Ultimately, people will band together with those who are most like them, and who believe in the same things that they do.

Assuming that I am right about the composition of the future nations of the once-USA, the defining factor that will determine the success or failure of each of those nations is:

Trust.

It is an axiom of human history that successful civilisations are defined by trust. When you trust people and, more importantly, institutions to perform their advertised functions, Good Things Happen, very fast.

You trust your government to do a good job of maintaining peace, security, stability, and infrastructure – and your government repays that trust by providing those things, keeping tax rates low, keeping the tax system itself relatively simple, and avoiding really stupid mistakes like, oh, say, invading Iraq over non-existent weapons of mass destruction that resulted in the genocide and extermination of nearly the entire Christian population of the Middle East.

You trust your King (or President or Prime Minister or Grand Poobah or whatever) to keep your people safe, and everyone else the hell away from your “nation” – however your nation is defined, and your King repays that trust by upholding the laws of the land, keeping your countrymen safe, keeping the nation itself out of expensive and deadly foreign wars, and keeping his pecker in his pants around your women.

You trust your neighbour when he asks to borrow your lawnmower that he will return it promptly once he is done, in pretty much the same condition that he borrowed it from you, and he repays that trust by keeping an eye out for your kids when they’re playing in the neighbourhood park, watching over your property when you are away, and generally just being a decent person.

And so on, and so forth.

Trust is the key characteristic that binds entire civilisations together. High-trust societies create powerful, functional, stable societies that succeed because the concept of the nation binds everyone together. You care about your fellows because they look, talk, dress, act, worship, and comport themselves very much like you do. You belong to their community, and they belong to yours. That is what makes a nation – common ties of history, blood, ethnicity, belief, and culture.

Historical examples include, but are not limited to: Meiji-era and modern Japan; imperial China (back when they weren’t getting their butts handed to them on a regular basis by the Mongols and then the Manchus); the British Empire; the Roman Empire; the Roman Republic; the Greek city-state of Sparta; and so on, and so forth.

And, of course, the United States of America, from the Revolution all the way through to about 1965.

We know what a high-trust society looks like. Think of the USA in the 1950s. You knew your neighbours and they knew you. Your kids played outside quite happily with their kids. You had many institutions in common with your fellows – your school, church, barber shop, neighbourhood store, policeman, firefighters, mayor, city councilmen, and so on. Trust bound you all together and gave you a shared identity and sense of purpose.

That ethos still exists all over the USA. You just have to get out of the big cities to find it. Go into any decent-sized village or town an hour or so away from the coastal shitlibopolises, and you will see it right away.

High-trust societies build good roads, have excellent plumbing and sewage, are clean and safe and orderly, maintain beautiful gardens and aesthetically pleasing environments, and generally are very good places to live and work and raise children.

That is of course why so much of the Dirt World wants to go to high-trust societies – because they are nice places to be, while Dirtworldistan is, well, not a nice place to be.

But of course, fixing their own screwed-up societies is too much hard work and effort – and I’m not making light of that, it’s a fact. Building trust into a low-trust society is extremely hard work if the culture for that trust does not exist in the first place.

What does a low-trust society looks like?

Well, start with the exact opposite of all of that, and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what it looks like. But it’s still just an abstraction, an idea, nothing more.

The best quick description of a functional low-trust society that I have ever seen comes from the classic Martin Scorsese film, Casino. I refer specifically to the scene in which Sam Rothstein shows how everyone is watching everyone else:

That, in a nutshell, is what you have to do in order to accomplish anything of any note in a low-trust society. You have to be on the lookout constantly for stupidity, laziness, dishonesty, corruption, and lack of quality.

The mental stress that this causes upon any man used to living in a Westernised, high-trust nation, is immense. And, because nobody really trusts anybody else, a number of incredibly stupid and frustrating workarounds have to be put into place, which cause considerable time wastage.

For instance, let’s say that you need to get a package delivered to your doorstep.

In much of the USA – even in at least some of the bits of it rapidly turning into reasonable facsimiles of the Dirt World – it is still possible to order something off Amazon and have it delivered quickly, efficiently, and without problems. If you live in a residential building with a reception desk, the package will be left with the folks at the desk for you to collect. If you live in a house, it will be left on your front porch.

Implied in that entire transaction is the idea that you trust your neighbours not to steal your shit.

In a low-trust society, however, fraud is a huge and constant problem. Packages will get stolen. Packages will fail to get delivered. Packages will be signed for by people who claim to be friends and family of yours, but then you will never see hide nor hair of whatever it was you ordered.

So, in a low-trust society, you get around this by forcing everyone to provide state-registered identification and use one-time passwords for two-step authentication for everything.

This is all fine and dandy, and indeed the use of OTPs and TFA is becoming quite prevalent in the West as well.

The difference between such systems in a high-trust society, and the same things in a low-trust one, is the degree of active stupidity involved. This stupidity makes life much harder in the event that you actually need to get anything important done.

Let us take government-issued identification as an example.

In the USA, your state-registered ID is basically your driver’s license. With that you can do virtually anything. If you have a passport as well, then you’re golden. And if you need to get a new driver’s license, you rock up to your local DMV, or whatever it’s called in a given state, provide your passport and Social Security card and old driver’s license if you have it, then wait for 3 hours while the fat ugly black woman behind the counter gabs and gossips and files her nails and occasionally deigns to do some real work.

The process is simple and transparent, if bureaucratic and frustrating.

In a low-trust society, however, there is a severe deficiency of common sense, logic, and transparency, at every possible level, and this expresses itself most immediately in terms of a near-total lack of competence.

Where I am right now, there are about ten different forms of ID that are considered acceptable, and they all perform overlapping functions. The passport is one of them, but by no means the most widely accepted – which, if you think about it, is downright idiotic, since modern passports have biometric data embedded within them.

There is a national ID card, which is analogous to the SSN in the USA. There is a taxpayer ID card. There is a voter registration card. There are ration cards. There are other various forms of ID that you can use – but not one of them is considered “universal”.

And if you want to get a new form of ID, the circular logic involved is astonishing.

Let’s say you want to renew your passport. To do so, you have to provide proof of identity and proof of residency. The fastest way to do this is to provide your national ID card.

But to get a national ID card, you should at least provide your most recent passport as proof of identity and residency.

You see where this might cause a problem if you have one or the other but not both?

This is where the incompetence comes in, and it stems directly from the fact that people do not and cannot trust each other.

Let’s say you want to open up a bank account. To do so, you must provide a national ID card. But what if you don’t have one? You have to apply for one. And what if your passport was issued overseas, and therefore has a foreign address in the back? Well, then it’s not an acceptable document –even though it is LITERALLY the most important form of government-issued identification.

Or let’s say you need to send something overseas via a courier, like FedEx or DHL. You need to provide two forms of “Know-Your-Client” identification. Typically, this is your passport and national ID card.

But, again, if you don’t have an ID card, you’re screwed.

So now let’s say you get fed up of the constant delays and runarounds and stupidities created by this inane requirement for an ID card, and you decide to apply for one. Oops, sorry, big problem: even though you are a citizen of the country, and that is proven by your passport, if you have not been resident in the country for at least 182 days of the last 12 months, you don’t qualify and can’t get one.

The result looks something like this:

Yeah. It doesn’t matter what you do, you’re screwed – and as a result, a whole lot of other people and institutions end up screwing themselves too.

You see the point here. Lack of trust in a society, among and between and within its constituents and peoples, kills economic activity, human progress, and simple peace of mind. It imposes massive frictional costs to doing business, getting things done, and living a simple peaceful life.

Trust erodes in a society depending on a number of factors, but the biggest one of them all is diversity. That isn’t my opinion, mind you; that is the uncomfortable (for liberals and civic nationalists) conclusion reached by the very liberal Dr. Robert Putnam, a researcher at Harvard who published a landmark study in 2007 in which all of his research indicated that the more diverse a community is, the lower the bonds of societal trust are and the lower the desire within that community is for collective action on anything.

He was so utterly horrified by his own data that he refused to release the actual study derived from them for years, and the conclusion of his study itself was essentially a finger-wagging lecture about the need for MOAR EDUMACAYSHUN to make people more tolerant and kind and nice and fuzzy and all sorts of other crap.

The problem is that his own study controlled for the impact of education on social trust. It didn’t help one damned bit.

The fact is that trust varies in inverse proportion to diversity. Societies that have managed to make diversity work, have done so through means that are utterly cold-blooded and draconian by Western standards.

The best example that I can think of is Singapore. That country is about 70% Chinese – and if you’ve never spent much time around Chinese people before, you should know that they can be by far the most racist people on the entire planet. The remaining 30% is composed of ethnic Malays, Indians, Filipinos, and assorted Westerners, and that causes no end of problems with the dominant Chinese faction, who (more or less correctly) view Singapore as their turf.

The manner by which law and order is enforced in Singapore is, indeed, draconian. I used to live down the road from a Singaporean High Court judge – not Chinese, by the way – and he once very memorably told my family that there was no point in trying to make excuses when the police come knocking; all he ever needed in order to know where anyone in Singapore was at any given point in time, was to ask the police for the relevant bit of footage at the relevant time.

There are cameras in Singapore everywhere. The entire country is one big surveillance state. That is why you don’t need personal self-defence weapons in the streets. Everything is very safe, clean, orderly, and quiet – and it is because the velvet glove of the living experience conceals the very real iron fist of the state.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I really like Singapore. It’s a wonderful place to live, work, and play, especially for people with young children. But it is far from a model of what a healthy Western society can operate along – in no small part because Singapore itself is quite tiny. Trying to impose that kind of surveillance state on PommieBastardLand, or the (former) USA, or any other big Western nation, is an exercise in utter futility.

A low-trust society always devolves into a dangerous, lawless, inefficient, unlivable hell over time. A high-trust society has its own problems – all you have to do is look at very high-trust Japan to get an idea of what I’m talking about – but the maintenance of peace, prosperity, and stability are not among them.

How do you create a high-trust society?

By getting rid, through hopefully peaceful means, of the elements of that society which cannot and will not fit in.

This is not a pleasant solution. It is not the kind of thing that will make people sit around a fire and hold hands while singing kumbayah. It is deeply politically incorrect even to dare to suggest such a thing.

Nonetheless, the facts are what they are.

Diversity breeds distrust. Distrust breeds dyscivic behaviour. Dyscivic behaviour leads, always and everywhere, to the collapse of once-superior and strong civilisations. To argue otherwise is to ignore the often-harsh and painful lessons of history, in which high-trust societies became low-trust ones and started falling to pieces, gradually at first, then faster and faster, until nothing was left of them but a few charred and broken remains.