The rulers of a slave society — assuming that they do not mind what slaves think — can restrict their trust in the slaves and in the viability of their society to the belief that the slaves are not going to commit mass suicide. They simply trust to the fact - not invariably borne out by historical evidence — that most humans, even under extreme conditions, have a preference ordering which ranks life before death. Here, trust must be understood in the limited sense of trusting the effectiveness of coercion as a motive for cooperation

Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking…, loc. 2725