CONCEPT
The Radius of Trust
Fukuyama's term for the circle of people to whom an individual or community extends cooperative expectation — the boundary whose width determines whether a society can sustain complex organizations among strangers or is confined to kinship-bound cooperation.
The radius of trust describes how far an individual or community extends the expectation of cooperative behavior beyond the immediate family. High-trust societies — Germany, Japan, the Scandinavian nations, the United States at its institutional peak — extend the radius to include strangers, professional associates, civic institutions, and abstract entities like the state. Low-trust societies — southern Italy, much of Latin America, significant portions of China — constrain the radius close to kinship. The width is not a cultural verdict but an institutional diagnosis: it depends on whether professional associations, civic organizations, and educational systems exist to socialize members into norms of cooperation beyond the family. The AI transition systematically redraws the radius across all societies, and the direction, Fukuyama's framework predicts, is contractionary.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The mechanism of contraction is structural rather than intentional. The radius of trust has historically been expanded through the need for cooperation. People