Reason of most scams is the absurd level of trust existing in Western countries.
When i first saw Upwork where hours were paid by the tracker in a guaranteed manner and people SIGNED for it, i knew West was doomed. I still find it hard to believe people can be that easy to dupe.
Level of trust in the Western societies needs to be radically reduced through government propaganda, church and other channels. The world has become global. Westerners are now a small minority in an ocean of people where the manner of relationship that will be seen as sociopathic in the West, is the everyday norm and always have been. If they won't adapt, they will cease to exist. The cozy world where one could trust another because they all shared fear of God and had a reputation to lose, is gone.
A high trust society is actually a good trait, not a bad one. It’s rather easy, lazy even, for a culture to devolve into a low trust minima. That’s basically the default state that people have endeavoured to evolve out of.
I think it’s also the kind of thing that can easily overwhelm anxious minds. The kind where “what if it’s a scam?” leads them to never taking a risk, donating to a cause, doing someone a favour.
Not that there isn’t a fight to be fought here. But waving the surrender flag on fostering a trusting society is a very weak move.
"A high trust society is actually a good trait, not a bad one."
100% agree, and seeing it erode is painful (e.g., toothpaste now locked behind plexiglass).
But to steelman the parents point, while it is be good to be high trust society, that society may be poorly adapted when rapidly integrated into a low trust globalized world.
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The far right have a story, that ppl like you are duped to believe.
Sometimes cynical(/fear driven) people have such strong biases, they are the most easy to dupe.
Sorry, are you saying that the main reason immigrants from Eastern Europe and India become rich is through scamming hapless fools? Not through, say, hard work and educational opportunities? And are you saying this is a change, or how it’s always been?
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Japanese people are not very religious but are very high trust and high on the development index, much higher than the Middle East in my opinion.
Japanese people believe that are the Gods themselves, if we put it into Western perspective. They are indeed the most trustworthy people i got to work with (but also extremely procedure-driven, formal, slow on decisionmaking, and painfully anal when it comes to matching even the tiny details in requirements - so i found it really hard to work with them). Although it has nothing to do with trust.
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Man you've got some weird social darwinist perspectives on the evolution of trust. Play this game - https://ncase.me/trust/
As a reasonably successful immigrant from Eastern Europe, mostly not true in my experience. You do have some people, ahem roma/gypsies ahem, that abuse the hell out of social benefits for example, getting them from multiple countries at the same time, etc, but for normal people, the reason they succeed is the fresh start and being an outsider in my opinion.
For older immigrants it's an opportunity for a fresh start that kicks them out of the daily monotony and puts them in the sink or swim of early adult life again.
For younger immigrants, we're mostly the top X% of talent coming from mostly well off families. Couple that with needing to be at least better than the average to compensate for your immigrant background and we either do very well, or go back to where we came from... After all with the experience of being mediocre in the west you can go back and sell yourself as a top achiever with experience in the country where the company headquarters/clients are.
Why would they come here for those reasons? We actually have decently functioning courts and relatively much lower corruption. If they wanted to get rich dishonestly, they would be much better served paying off regulators and politicians in their home countries where those practices are more normalized and less subject to enforcement agencies given some measure of independence through public service unions.
There's little societal trust in e.g. Russia, and yet they're getting massively scammed by Ukrainian call centers every day. People selling their only housing, sending all their savings for “safekeeping” overseas, are daily news. Not just old ladies (but them too), but also middle-aged intellectuals who were supposed to know better.
It's all using the same schemes that have been explained in the news over and over again, there's little innovation on that front. You have to be living under a rock the for past few years to fall for them, and yet people do. I think there's simply a certain amount of marks in every society, regardless of how its members trust each other, and the only reliable way of protecting them is managing everybody's lives DPRK-style.
I think the only reason of why it works is that Ukrainians are an even lower trust culture, and they are better and more cynical at duping people. Plus, in Ukraine many people see it as their patriotic duty, and perhaps rightfully so, so these kind of jobs are likely to attract quite sophisticated people who will be able to pull off very believable scams, not some social rejects or worse, forced labor sitting in Myanmar jungle, as it is in Asia vs USA scams.
Trust is necessary for social development & advancement, and low trust countries & societies are also low on the development index. The development of advanced economies is predicate on the "absurd level of trust" in western countries.
The cost world you describe didn’t emerge because of fear of god (which has been prevalent for milleniums, mostly everywhere) but the abondance of cheap energy and goods, basically since oil starts getting processed but other minor factors helped too. Democracy and peace emerges when peoples aren’t scared to miss food anymore.
In the US food is plentiful. Poor people die of obesity related illness. But trust is plummeting because of a decline in social cohesion. Building a high trust society is hard, and there is no monocausal solution. You can't plug in god, or food, into a low trust society to flip it to high trust.
Food is plentiful here, but unevenly distributed. Childhood hunger is still a serious problem.
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/14/childhood-hunger-food-insec...
During the initial pandemic, great strides were made in the United States to mitigate childhood poverty, but these measures were quickly overturned. Now the administration wants to defund SNAP and other food security programs. Alas.
I think the underlying concept you're looking for is corruption versus rule of law. Blaming the victim versus expecting consequences for the perpetrator etc.
Classic Russian thinking that the only motivating force is fear. No wonder you get stuck with homicidal tyrants ruling over you time after time.
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