Expectations of Trust

We denote the trusting individual with P and the Institution or Government with G.

1. Trust is not an atomic virtue: https://virtues.provable.dev/docs/hierarchies/#virtues-order
2. Trust in an Institution is not the same as Trust in a person
3. Trust from the point of view of P can be decomposed into virtues as:
   • faith
   • hope
   • harmony/generosity
4. Trust from the point of view of P can be decomposed into vices as:
   • lack of Reason (where reason should exist)
   • lack of Prudence
   • lack of Measurability/Transparency
   • lack of Competition (Government has a monopoly)
   • lack of Courage to upgrade an obsolete system or challenge a power
   • conformity to manipulation or peer pressure
   • lack of Empathy with others who are abused in the same manner presently
   • lack of Empathy with future generations to whom we will bequeath this system
5. From the point of view of G: needing the trust of the governed means:
   • inability to trust the public: not reciprocating with trust back
   • inability to exercise Fairness
   • inability to fulfill the moral duties and use the free solutions for solving this problem
   • willingness to abuse the public using lies or eluding the truth
   • keeping open options for further and greater abuses

Trust in an Institution

The Institution N that has no verification mechanism cannot be trusted. Trust means to have verification mechanisms and opt not to verify. This faith and hope are earned by the provable output of the institution.

It is better to think in terms of Warranted Trust [WT] instead of Trust. WT is a defeasible, scope-limited delegation by P to institution N for service S. It rests on independently checkable evidence and preserves practical rights of verification, challenge, correction, and reparation. P need not verify every transaction; failure of access to evidence or remedy suspends the delegation.

The institution N achieves high WT by having all these provable:

services rendered to population

1. A website that shows all solved cases (with identities redacted) that the users want to share voluntarily.
2. A category navigator/search with all types of cases that N is meant to solve. And the mapping from (2) to (1).
3. A prover of provenance for any external (or internal) information chain. Verifiable by means outside N's control. For example: Oliver, Provable Form, etc..
4. The detailed and provable accounting of how the budget money was spent in the previous work cycle. Could be achieved by using a WasmX Blockchain.
5. For every user U: access to the log of every time N's employees (identified by an internal ID) have read and/or edited U's information. Achievable today by using SQL DB Blockchain
6. The detailed and verifiable accounting of the votes (if election-based) that determined N's leader. Most ethical would be Continuous Voting.
7. Another institution J that acts as a prover/witness that all cases filed with N are answered promptly.
8. If the user U has proof that his case was filed but not answered or believes that the answer is not just: U can publish with J the case (with identities redacted).
9. N has the duty to have a direct link to the information every J/witness-type institution publishes about N.
10. A mechanism that allows outside volunteers to verify the internal ID (from point 5).
11. A public mechanism that allows whistleblowers to safely present any case.
12. Continuous Voting for the public's feedback about the output of the institution.
13. A pollable forum of proposals for service upgrade from the public to the institution.
14. A searchable database of volunteers and their quantified contribution to the institution.

services rendered to other institutions

15. A log of all services rendered to other institutions
16. A log of all services consumed from other institutions
17. A log of all (official) remedies, proposals for service upgrade from the other institutions
18. A log of all remedies and proposals for service upgrade made to other institutions
19. A log of heritage/legacy and gratitude for past institutions that contributed to the creation or functioning of this one
20. A log for the transgressions of the past that cannot be rectified (all those rectifiable should be fully rectified) for this institution or its institutional heritage.

(all these logs should have a leaderboard that is ordered either by the log initiator or by polling the public)

Lack of Responsibility

People trusting a public institution without a prior record of points 1-20 having been implemented and examined/in wide use is a dereliction of civic duty.

A government that benefits from public trust without verification is ripe to become abusive.

Historical Inertia

In the present, a government G has many more ways to abuse power than 500 years ago. In Europe, the power of G was checked by an institution that had Virtue as its stated goal: the Christian Church. Now the functions of the Church have been almost fully transferred to G. And together with the functions, the faith-based religion was hijacked and bestowed on the State.

In the age of rationality and the ability to prove: trusting the government is an unexamined inertia of misapplied religion.

Educational Deficiency

In the community of Sparta, the kids were taught to lie and to steal even for procuring a meal. In later traditional families, the father was the one to teach, especially the sons, how to lie and fight to protect the family and its resources. Later, the State covered the educational and military preparatory function. In modern times, it is the duty of obligatory education to understand the possible repercussions of a lie and how to apply modern verification methods. The education system does not teach that; the family also does not teach it, and together they create (absent a real war) a walled garden from crib to tomb in which the human remains deficient in knowledge. Some may become so criple as being unable to even imagine that lies and corruption exist. What can be said about a government that does not teach formal verification nor does it allow it upon itself? If there are pathological liars in such a society where the State cannot be verified: where would they want to work? How about any conspiracy: what positions would it want to occupy?

Should we expect a future breakout of this? Year by year, the State gathers the liars and conspirators to give them the means of power and does not allow for education about verification methods (because it has a monopoly on education). On the other hand, the population "trusts the government" and does not demand verification mechanisms.