The prison, Mafia, and Habsburg overlords and to a lesser degree perhaps the managers and owners of Japanese firms all benefit from the same structural failure of their subjects. Their subjects do not cooperate when it would be mutually beneficial to do so because they lack the seeds of trust and the institutional backing that would allow them to risk reliance on one another. As Hobbes (1968 , 1.13: 184–85) argues of his state of nature, they may even become preemptively hostile and untrustworthy—indeed, they rationally ought to do so for the sake of their own survival. Furthermore, they compete in harmful ways, taking advantage of one another because, unable to cooperate for mutual benefit and unable to protect what they have, they struggle over shares of what exists rather than producing more to use in trade.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 500