The Second Force: Trust Collapses as Leverage Rises

As capability becomes abundant, something else is happening in the opposite direction: the institutional trust on which all large-scale coordination depends is eroding, measurably and across nearly every category of institution. Confidence in government, in the press, in science, in corporations, in the professions, in one another, has declined across much of the world over the period in which technological leverage has most rapidly risen. The two trends are not unrelated, and their conjunction is the heart of the danger.

Consider what it means for trust to fall precisely as leverage rises. Trust is the substrate of coordination; it is what allows people to rely on one another's behavior, to make and keep commitments, to act together across the distances that separate strangers. When trust is high, even modest capability can be coordinated toward great ends. When trust is low, even abundant capability fragments — each actor hedging against the others, each defecting in anticipation of defection, the whole system collapsing toward the war of all against all that political philosophy has always understood to be the condition that institutions exist to prevent. We are increasing the capability of every actor while decreasing the trust that would allow that capability to be coordinated. This is, in the most precise sense, a recipe for fragmentation under acceleration — more power, distributed among parties less and less able to act together.

To raise the leverage of every actor while lowering the trust between them is to hand more powerful instruments to a civilization progressively less able to coordinate their use. This is the central dangerous dynamic of our moment, and no amount of additional capability resolves it. Only the restoration of coordination capacity does.