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 This kind of trust is so much a feature of a modern democracy that people seem never to think about it. This kind of responsibility is also so much a feature of modern democracy that even when individuals indulge their selfish impulses and do things like cheating on their taxes, they know that they are not only breaking the law but also doing something wrong. They must make excuses to themselves for shifting their burdens onto other people who do pay their taxes.
-Contrast these beliefs and attitudes of ordinary people in a democracy with the beliefs and attitudes of people living under a totalitarian regime. If, for instance, people do not see national taxes as benefitting themselves and their friends and neighbors, the only reason to pay those taxes is the fear of getting caught. The only reason to break copyright and/or censorship laws to publish [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat|samizdat]] literature during the time of the USSR was to fight the system that was controlling and doing injury to the public.
+Contrast these beliefs and attitudes of ordinary people in a democracy with the beliefs and attitudes of people living under a totalitarian regime. If, for instance, people do not see national taxes as benefitting themselves and their friends and neighbors, the only reason to pay those taxes is the fear of getting caught. The only reason to break copyright and/or censorship laws to publish [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat|samizdat]] literature during the time of the USSR was to fight the system that was controlling and doing injury to the public. The only "reward" was a vacation in the Gulak archipelago.
+Maintaining the bonds of trust and responsibility not only means that the leaders will do things like build and maintain roads to the most isolated farms in the country, but also that the people will pay for the road system they benefit from by paying for the projects through taxes.
+As a child growing up in a sleepy farm community, the street in front of my house was just there. It didn't occur to me that my family had to pay for the street sweeper to come by once in a while and remove leaves or trash. As a teenager I guess I knew that somebody had to pay for building and maintenance, but it was so much an accepted part of life that I never thought about how the whole system of streets in regular grids, sewer lines available underground on the same grid, etc. all went back to planning and development a century earlier. I didn't think I owed anybody anything for all that work and care.
+As a child I was told the police would catch me and throw me in jail if I did anything wrong. As I moved toward adulthood, I learned more about the legal system of the community. It never occurred to me that there could be any real problems. Some of my acquaintances in high school thought that one particular policeman was cranky and unfair to them for some disagreement about what they could be permitted to do in or with their automobiles. But that was it. The police were just a fact of life, and it was something of a revelation for me to learn that we actually had elections every four years to elect the head of the police at the county level, for the office we called "sheriff."
+In a system in which trust and responsibility are regularly maintained, young people can be born and grow to adulthood knowing what expectations and benefits fall upon them, but not have any clear idea of why things were constituted that way and need to be maintained that way.
+In a population in chaos, divided among people with different ethnic identities, religious identities, political identities, skin colors, etc., it will not at all be expected or accepted to have a form of organization that does not break into divisions along those lines or have the loyalties of people distributed among their own various identities. It will be something new and original for them to learn to trust and feel responsibility to someone who, e.g., comes from some minority population with no great group power of its own, but also someone who is truly competent in helping them achieve their own valid personal goals.