Agreed, and it's also hard to consider the US as on some kind of general decline from high trust to low trust. American honesty has always been highly contextual. All it takes is a look into how we treated written agreements with Native Americans to see how small the radius of this value extends. Native societies were "high trust" in the sense that they had no ability, at least initially, to comprehend that settlers would sign an agreement with the full knowledge that they would renege on it as soon as the conditions had favorably changed. This is much more in keeping with a game theory style decision making process than anything related to an adherence to a higher moral virture or whatever. Native peoples experienced this process one by one, and eventually none trusted the word of colonialists ever again.

High/low trust at root refers to how you behave to other members of your nation, not foreign peoples. Every nation ever has always tried win zero-sum interactions with other nations (e.g. who gets the land, resources), and all existing nations today continue to do so. Native American societies may have been high trust internally (within the tribe, clan, nation boundary) but certainly screwed over other Native American societies (e.g. the Haida and Tlingit practiced hereditary chattel slavery of foreign tribesmen for hundreds of years before European contact). What I'm getting at is that there effectively is no such thing as "high trust" in international relations so your example isn't cogent.

Point taken, but consider the context of where we are in this thread: discussing immigrants and foreign contract workers cheating in interviews and on their resumes for positions within the United States. Perhaps your point is more applicable to how the idea of high or low trust cannot apply to workers operating in a culture foreign to their own.

The example of inter tribal slavery doesn't actually apply to what I'm talking about. Slavery, and highly destructive, unprovoked raids which sometimes concluded with massacres of women and children were normal in the Americas. Is enslaving a member of another band or tribe a violation of trust? Is engaging in unprovoked war raids a violation of trust? These practices would not come as a surprise to anyone living within raiding territory of a warlike people. Trust can only come into play when a party to an agreement, whether tacit or explicit, has an opportunity to violate what was agreed upon.

Saying "Every nation ever has always tried win zero-sum interactions with other nations" conceals that there were actually vast differences in the way colonialist powers conducted themselves in relations with Native American tribes. The (at the time British) Canadian government honored treaties much more often and in better faith than US authorities.

When you're getting colonized, I don't know if it really matters whether the colonizers honor their promises more or less. Consider the Maori, the gold standard for a colonized people who managed to get a full treaty with the British very early on, even securing representation in government in the mid-1800s. Are they meaningfully any better off as a result of these agreements, relative to other indigenous groups? Not really, and in recent times they even seem to have slid back on many important welfare and quality of life metrics, despite changes in NZ policies towards Maoris that should have had the opposite effect. Sure the Maori may have built up "trust" in the colonizers' treaties, but since they were an out-group it didn't affect their day-to-day interactions, so they didn't reap the benefits that go with being part of the high trust society.

My point is that in-group relations is not the same as out-group relations. High trust is about how you treat members of your in-group. Enslaving foreign people is most certainly a "low trust" move (how can I possibly enter an agreement with you when I know you might just show up one day and enslave me?) but it's fully possible and consistent for the perpetrator to belong to a high trust society.

I think you'd be surprised by just how possible it would be to enter into a successful and good faith agreement with a warring tribe which has enslaved or massacred your people. Spanish colonists in New Mexico did so with the Comanche despite the Comanche holding hundreds of captive New Mexicans who they had kidnapped. How did this work? The New Mexicans honored their treaty, and the Comanche established a degree of personal trust with their governer, Juan Bautista de Anza. This treaty was signed in the wake of massacres on both sides, and the captives were not returned. The Comanche continued to raid and kidnap in other regions of New Spain after the treaty was signed. Part of the reason you might find something like this hard to believe is because of your own cultural attitudes about war and slavery, but these are not universal attitudes.

Your example of the Maori is perfectly analogous to what happened in Canada/ But regardless of how things turned out, why did the British honor treaties when they had no incentive to do so? How do you account for this difference in a world dominated by purely rational decision making when interacting with those outside of your culture?

Why did they honor treaties rather than just continuing with open conflict? The juice wasn't worth the squeeze. In general you only fight a war when a) you're being attacked or b) there is something to be gained by doing so that, in expectation, is more valuable than the cost of the war. If there'd had been mountains of gold in Canada to be won, or if the indigenous peoples had put up less of a fight (imposed less of a cost), you can bet the British would not have signed any treaties. Same with New Zealand.

Yeah, I mean one thing that's interesting about the world is that every country cheats, but we all cheat in our own ways. I don't think there's anyway to get around it.

That said, I don't really want American culture to continue down this "if the ends justify the means" trend that we've been on. We're not cut out for it! We'll get our lunch eaten.

America, as a country, is "dollar" wise and cents foolish, which is a good thing to be, if we invert the meaning of original phrase.

America has been "going down the road" of ends justify the means since WW2. What exactly was the massacre in the Korean war and Vietnam war if not. And sanctions to starve citizens of numerous countries. Etc etc.

Bretton Woods was an own goal by Europe because they couldn’t stop killing each other for centuries. America benefited because immigrants who leave are typically quite bright and willing to take risks.

The perfect storm of incompetence created the system we inherited from our forefathers. It benefits Americans, but maybe the wealth is also killing us due to massive obesity and sedentary lifestyles on top of a greedy litigious society.

No system is perfect.