SOCIAL CAPITAL : THE CONSERVATIVES : HOMOGENEITY=TRUST The conservative vision o

SOCIAL CAPITAL : THE CONSERVATIVES : HOMOGENEITY=TRUST

The conservative vision of man, is that he is a wild beast that must be tamed through constant training, and adhere to social structures that encourage his good behavior – particularly marriage. In the Mormon community for example, I have often heard is “An unmarried male between 17 and 22 is a threat to society.”

But this is incorrect really. It’s the negative statement, not the positive. The positive is provided by Fukuyama (better than all others I think) “..shared norms or values that promote social cooperation, instantiated in actual social relationships..”

Again, that’s still distracting, because it doesn’t address the behavioral issue that they mean to develop: TRUST. Social capital is the set of shared norms, values, habits, traditions that facilitate cooperation by increasing TRUST. Trust meaning predictability of taking risk with persons outside of your family group, without fear of loss attributable to one party taking advantage of the other through deception (fraud, lying) or asymmetry of information (fraud by omission).

The west is a high-trust society. It is actually the ONLY high trust society. It is so because westerners have outbred (protestants at least) such that they actually were an extended family, with very rigid norms, and as such adaptation to norms demonstrated trustworthiness and avoidance of them untrustworthiness.

There is nothing different about trust in any given society other than how far it extends outside the family.

SO, conservatives, although they cannot articulated it, are constantly engaged in the process of fighting to maintain the homogeneity of the absolute nuclear family, and a set of conformative rules around the absolute nuclear family, and particularly prevention of free riding and cheating, because these ‘bad behaviors’ reduce trust and the ability to form dynamic and frictionless relationships for cooperation and mutual benefit.