Consider a more extreme grounding for distrust in government. For an easy case, consider an individual who has been abused by government in the past, as were the subjects of the notorious Tuskegee experiments designed to watch the progress of syphilis in untreated black southern prisoners, or the subjects of supposedly harmless exposure to radiation in various experiments by U.S. government agencies to find out what effects such exposure might have (for the latter, see D’Antonio 1997, 41–42). Such an individual has good personal reason to be wary of distant government officials, indeed to distrust them in a relatively unspecific and vague way that might have no counterpart in trust.

XREF: Connects to the Tuskegee syphilis study and Cold War radiation experiments as historically documented cases of state harm against citizens.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 758