The Radius of Trust: How a Society's Reach of Empathy Decides Its Fate
We are used to thinking of trust and empathy as private virtues — qualities a person either possesses or lacks, scattered unevenly across a population the way height or temperament is scattered. On this view, some peoples are warm and some are cold, and there is not much to be done about it. I want to argue something less comforting and more useful: that trust and empathy are not moods but variables, quantities a society can be measured by, and that the measurement decides everything. There is a number that governs whether people will cooperate to save their own lives, whether a state can be believed when it matters most, and whether a ruler treats his population as fellow citizens or as a hostile crowd to be managed. The number is the radius — how far beyond the self and the immediate family a person is willing to extend trust and fellow-feeling. Stretch it wide and a society can do almost anything together. Let it contract to the size of a household, or a single skull, and the same society becomes ungovernable except by force, incapable of collective action, and indifferent to mass death happening in plain sight. ...