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This does sort of feel like the kind of thing I might think and wonder about and then do a lot of work doing a study and some research and writing up an article and in the end everyone says "yeah, no duh!"
What you're saying is that with the shift to autocracy, all these trust problems will become manageable?
once you know the way to solve problems is to pay off the people with power you start to trust people again, because things are working the way you were told they would.
So following this through, does it mean that autocracy is the preferred government for a country that sleepwalked past the tipping point where corruption is entrenched because the institutions that could uproot it are themselves deeply corrupt?
No, it just means that in autocracy everyone assumes institutions are corrupt, so no trust is broken. If you don't have trust, it cant be broken.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
once you know the way to solve problems is to pay off the people with power you start to trust people again, because things are working the way you were told they would.
or in other words: people in power are corrupt, but they usually are corrupt equally for everybody.
Corruption makes things less democratic in a pure democracy by granting more soft power to some individuals' 1/N office ( N= population size).
So following this through, does it mean that autocracy is the preferred government for a country that sleepwalked past the tipping point where corruption is entrenched because the institutions that could uproot it are themselves deeply corrupt?
Now if you are in a high trust society, you may have a lot of leveraged businesses or governments who have gotten loans or permission to do something based on past trust history. If the trust degrades systematically Investors may want returns faster, or interest rates go up, or partnerships don’t happen. That’s why low trust places don’t grow as fast - trust is the oil for growth engines and lack of it is sand for the same.
Corruption also does a lot of small-profit-for-the-corrupt that leads to massive damage to the overall society via second and third order effects. (example: someone stealing copper cables that stop electricity to entire cities for a while).
However, it's not that simple there's a different kind of trust that comes with these types of social structures and they usually trust that as long as they keep their head down nothing will change. You can obviously draw parallels with conservatives here, but in reality people more often than not just want to live their life.
Democracies tend to be a lot more active politically and promote transparency so there is trust that your government is being transparent and that your vote matters. Of course if you find out that your political activism and votes don't accomplish anything due to corruption you check out and start disliking your government. Autocracies don't have political movements to begin with (exceptions apply) so it is way less impactful. There's way more comparisons to be made, but in general they roughly boil down to the same thing.