[hliyan]

> society has got quite a lot out of being generally high-trust

I agree. The vast majority of times you pass someone on the street and don't expect that person to turn around and stab you in the back and take your wallet, is not because of the existence of laws, but because of the existence of trust. Laws (particularly criminal code) must exist for the minority. This is one of the reasons why I hate "trust-less" systems -- societies cannot function that way. It's as if a program was not trusted to access even the memory that was allocated to it, and the OS had to check permissions and run validations on every single CPU instruction issued by the program. Trust saves resources.