[aprilthird2021]

Of course it is, it's a brutal military dictatorship where the last (and only) democratically elected leader was overthrown by the army and died in prison.

Those kinds of systems, where people are convinced their opinions and convictions don't matter, lead to problems like this

[dash2]

This might get the causality backward. Most high trust societies were high trust before, not after, they became democracies.

[aprilthird2021]

I think most democracies were founded as such and so the society and democracy were born at the same time

[inglor_cz]

Nope, democracies are usually much younger than the underlying societies.

For example, the vast majority of Europe is now democratic. 200 years ago, most of Europe was autocratic and even exceptions like the UK were at most very incomplete democracies with limited suffrage.

But the constituent nations and ethnicities are very much the same, even though political boundaries have shifted; an English, Polish or Spanish person can read 200 year old texts without much effort. There wasn't any seismic shift comparable to the collapse of the Roman world and the subsequent rearrangement of nations and ethnicities across the continent. Krakow is still Polish, Budapest is still Hungarian and Milan is still Italian.

Only in a few places like Breslau/Wroclaw there was a meaningful population shift.

[aprilthird2021]

But most democratic countries in the world are not in Europe. Most of them were born as democracies: India, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, USA, etc.

[dash2]

US society existed and was plausibly high-trust for more than 150 years before 1776.