I think of it more in terms of a highly secure and decentralized online videogame. Most people will be happy just to play the game, some people will start guilds and min/max, some people will try to cheat. When someone is found cheating, the system gets patched to prevent others from doing it. The dynamics of a game nudges people into behaving within the incentive structure of the game mechanics - even though technically they could strip naked and /dance for a month straight.
In any well designed online game (please don't use shitty ones against me), cheaters aren't able to hijack the entire system or ruin an economy. Their exploits break the game temporarily and most of the time it doesn't affect that many people. In bad cases, the state gets rolled back, the exploit patched, and the game continues. Sometimes things are just unavoidable, and everyone counts their losses.
I think blockchain has the potential to make fairer and more resilient systems, and with new incentives as well. We can use game theory to try wildly different societal structures, and quickly switch to another one if one doesn't work well.
On some level, trust always has to be present. If we make the rules trustless, enforcement becomes the bottleneck (until Robocop?), but it's still potentially better than what we have now where we simply have to trust millions of other people not to fuck with anything too much.