importing low trust

and the decline of high-trust society

so, here’s an interesting chart:

it shows what many have long lamented: the erosion of high trust society in the US. the chart stops in 2010. one can only imagine the depths to which it has plummeted today.

now, we all know that correlation is not causality and does not prove that A begets B, but sometimes it sure can get pretty provocative and just because something is not hard and fast proof does not mean it should be lightly dismissed either.

so let’s, for the sake of being provocative, look at a second chart.

now this one is almost certainly incorrect for recent values and probably reads far too low but the overall data shape is interesting. immigrants as a % of US population peaked at 14.7% in 1910. it then began a sharp decline reaching a low of 4.7% in 1970. from there it began to rise again reaching 14.3% in this series and likely more like 18% in actuality as the numbers for recent years look to be 10-20 million low. there is no way the absolute number of immigrants grew by only 2.9 million from 2019 to 2023. this means we’re likely at record levels since the civil war by quite a large margin.

i don’t have the raw data for these, so let’s do a little overlay to see if we can get an approximation.

we’re basically just eyeballing here, but one can see what seems like a correlation. social trust broadly rose from 1925 to 1960 reaching a high plateau from the early 1940’s through 1965 at which time is started to drop sharply.

people tend to rhapsodize this period as “the good old days.”

perhaps it’s a coincidence that it correlated with low levels of immigrants, perhaps not, but the fact is that it was a period of low immigrant percentage in the US (8.8-4.7%) and also a period when the countries that immigrants came from were tightly controlled.

i added two red lines to demarcate 2 specific pieces of legislation that had major effects on immigration one in 1924, the johnson-reed act and one in 1965, the hart-celler act which basically eliminated the core provisions of johnson reed.

these acts seem perilously undertaught in school so let’s explore.

another singificant driver in this act was the so called “red scare” (which proved well founded) and much of this act worked to keep out “dangerous ideologies” like marxism in the years after the russian revolution.

the net results of this were that immigration, particularly from southern and eastern europe, dropped significantly and quotas for countries like syria, set as low as 100/year, caused immigration from the low trust societies and the third world to drop like a stone.

this act arose as a direct response to and repudiation of wilson and his globalist league of nations and “gentleman’s agreement” views.

it was criticized at the time as a “move toward unilateral control and away from international agreements.”

this may sound familiar to claims today.

history may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme…

then came the 1960’s and the american gutshot and upheaval of the viet nam war. hart-cellar was seen as a civil rights bill adding a “non-discriminatory” demand to immigration and opening up many new paths for “refugees” to jump the line and break the quota numbers.

quotas and caps were gone.

this changed US immigration patterns dramatically

in 1960, 70% of immigrants were from europe, predominantly the north and west.

by 1980, nearly 80% came from latin america, asia, and africa.

this surge coincided with an absolute plummeting in social trust.

again, there is no proof of causality here just from the correlations, but it’s not exactly a stretch of imagination to conceive that large scale importation of people from low trust societies could have an effect on the trust of the society seeking to absorb them.

one could also seek to flip this over and say “well, you imported people with low trust so they brought the average down.”

the trust levels of blacks and hispanics for others is notably lower than other groups. some would say this is because they are discriminated against, others that the lack of trust comes from being from untrustworthy low-trust cultures. i suspect the latter to be a primary driver as this same lack of trust exists in their home societies where they are the vast majorities and hold the positions of power.

pew research cites a number of studies on “multi-ethnic societies being lower trust.”

Scholars have argued that higher levels of ethnic diversity are related to lower levels of social trust, and the U.S. population has been growing more racially and ethnically diverse.

i’ve certainly seen some of this firsthand in places like minneapolis, once a bastion of unlocked-door high trust now a seriously low trust “don’t drive to that part of town at night” unmelted pot of low trust, high agression cultures like somalis.

feel about it as you like and ascribe to it whatever motives or relationships seem sound, but in the end, there are some strong correlations here:

the composition of america has altered and with it, trust has lessened greatly.

i fear we are headed into a “backlash stage” from much too much much too fast. past a point, immigration, especially immigration with no selectors for merit or even capacity or desire to assimilate starts to feel like culural assault and this ~14%+ range is right where the backlash hit 100 years ago.

and at a certain point, non-assimilable cultures and immigrants selected not for desire to get with the american program but rather to break and prey upon it start to pose existential threat to the first world golden rule structures that underpin the american way and american exceptionalism.

when you see this sort of in group preferencing to commute the sentence of an illegal CDL truck driver who killed three people or 100 other responses to other matters like it like it over and over again, what is one supposed to do? even those who do not commit crimes often support those who do.

in the game of “high trust civilization” you need to avoid and admit your own infractions.

consider this question:

if you were playing pickup basketball against a team who had one player that kept tripping you, kicking you in the groin, and throwing elbows to the face and the rest of his team kept saying “no foul! no foul! play on!” and piling on you if you disagreed, how long are you going to want these people on your court? at what point are they as complicit as the dirty player they cover for?

high-trust society is a powerful but fragile thing, hard won and easily undermined by those who would take advantage of it.

it feels to me like we’re reaching a tipping point where either groups assimilate and accede to actual golden rule american exceptionalism, or the americans are going to start calling the fouls whether those committing them care or not and will turn on them in earnest as being outside the social contract and no longer afforded its protection.

calling anyone who values high trust civilization “racist” and “xenophobic” has played out as a tactic.

it’s over now and a high functioning society of high agency people going into self-preservation mode is a helluva thing.

the nature of the free societies of moral people is ultimately this:

police yourself or get ready to get policed by others. hard.

living as privileged outlaws and takers is not an option that will be tolerated for long.

and a high trust society will at some point defend itself and its values.

and reality denial is not a strategy.