High trust societies

When I was a young boy on a family drive from northern Minnesota to visit the cousins in Missouri, while creating a hill on a two-lane road in Iowa my mother remarked that driving required a great deal of faith. And I understood that on-coming traffic in your lane is not visible to you until you reach the crest and it is only trust that everyone is obeying the lane restrictions that allows you to maintain speed and confidence up the hill.

I've never forgotten that. A client in upstate New York who had just returned from a trip to visit his son in India mentioned to me a few months ago that driving in India was amazing and he did not see how everyone was not killed - there was no respect for lanes or traffic regulations. We discussed respect for the rule of law for a bit and I expressed my view that what was of concern to me in Iraq was not the ability of the Iraqis to understand and participate in democracy or the ultimate installation of at least a prototypical democratic government, but that there would be no respect for the rule of law. This respect is, it seems to me, a social contract of sorts, and it must be present and desired at a societal level in order to work. Perhaps it can be learned; more likely it depends on a culture exported to and (perhaps slowly) accepted by a society.
Professor Reynolds notes a review of The Anglosphere Challenge:

Empire allowed the British to spread to the new world, and to bring many new peoples into their high trust societies

'High trust' is a nice term for it and we in the United States are a high trust society. You trust that there is no unseen vehicle about to crest the hill in your lane. You trust that nobody sees sense in exploding a metro bus full of innocent people or explosively suiciding in a crowded cafe. Seeing that that trust is still possible is the most important thing we can do, and there are clearly identified people who are doing their best to destroy it.
Some people understand this intellectually, some people understand it in their gut, some people don't get it at all.