Switzerland’s founders probably knew of America in the fourteenth century. If only they had set sail across the Atlantic Ocean…

Now if you read books about influence and persuasion one of the big things to get people to do what you want is to involve them in some arduous task to get into an organization. People who do this are more likely to defend and push for the organization.

So everyone getting military training, keeping firearms in their houses, etc. would be a big influence.

It would also reduce friction. In the military there may be people you can not stand but…the mission is important so most of the time arguments are moderated. There’s no alternative if you need to work together. In cases like this the opponents can just agree not to speak with each other or avoid bringing up known contentious issues. This may be a factor.

Fritz Lang tried to warn them, I think, with M. The children were a stand in for ordinary people.

Got some Swiss German ancestry myself. I got taught some things growing up that turned out to be absolute garbage. I’m still a tad bitter about it. Because of it, I’ve become something a nihilist in the original Russian sense of the word.

But then how did people who seem as intelligent and successful and honest and well organized as the Germans allow themselves to be drawn into such a mess? In their financial affairs they’d ticked all the little boxes to ensure that the contents of the bigger box were not rotten, and yet ignored the overpowering stench wafting from the big box. Nölling felt the problem had its roots in German national character. “We entered Maastricht because they had these rules,” he says, as we move off to his kitchen and plates heaped with the white asparagus Germans take such pride in growing. “We were talked into this under false pretenses. Germans are, by and large, gullible people. They trust and believe. They like to trust. They like to believe.”

If your first question to this statement from the article wasn’t, “and what are the racial makeups and nationalities of these people?” I’m not sure I can help you.

They tried to move to Germany and got caught in an apartment scam. They were exactly the sort of people who get scammed. The sort who think life is all lederhosen and yodeling.

How do people get to be that way? Where do absurdly high trust societies come from? (It’s no mystery how they die.)