> I don’t think you have ever actually lived in one.
I lived in societies of high and low information trust, and observed first-hand what happens on transition. If trust in public information is high, people contribute and challenge common sources of information, and there is high expectation and punishment to rectify, improving the quality and transparency of commonly agreed information.
In low trust environments, people start to distrust everything, initially seek out explanations but then largely gravitate towards information sources which confirm their assumptions or own bias, because they lack time, energy and skills for any other path. To stabilize themselves, they then build a mental "fortress" around their belief which is periodically fostered not by challenging it but by seeking out others who confirm it.
Advancing in this direction increases the general consensus that there is no common ground (because this requires common trust in some information source), it gets increasingly difficult to educate such fractured groups, because there is no longer a path for many to accept inconvenient truth in light of a more convenient "alternative truth".
This is poisonous in a democracy, because common agreement on facts is what's so crucial for this process.
Hence my learning that it's not a healthy direction for a society (and also the reason why systems attacking democracies don't aim to gain trust, they build distrust)
> but the most ideologically open cultures I’ve seen are LIT.
There is a huge difference between a ideologically open society and a low information trust society. Accepting other ideologies requires trust.
A low information trust society breaks down trust not just in institutions but also among citizens, which is the fertile ground for polarization and actively prevents open ideology.
You may have the wrong understanding of the terminology. A high-information-trust society doesn't mean that everyone blindly accepts a leader, it describes a system where trust is maintained. In a functioning democracy this happens because society constantly challenges institutions, as it DEMANDS to be able to trust them.
In low-information-trust systems, the consensus is that no one can be trusted. So no joint effort is taken to hold power accountable, everyone plays to his own fraction which erodes common grounds, solidarity and citizen power.