@jackson

Switzerland's trains have no gate fares; you just walk on and sit down. Japan's reality show "Old Enough!" features toddlers as young as two running errands alone through busy cities. Both work because of invisible shared social scripts that create trust between strangers. Americans often dismiss these as "surface-level politeness." But those "meaningless" rituals do a lot of heavy lifting. Take small talk, for example, a topic Tamara Winter says she’s the “strongest soldier” of: "When I'm doing small talk in business, I'm trying to see if you know how to read social cues. I'm trying to see what appropriate disclosure looks like when you're just meeting people. And beyond that, I'm trying to see if you're the kind of person I want to be around for extended periods of time." Scale this up to the societal level, and you get what Charlie Munger called “a seamless web of deserved trust." Small, seemingly insignificant soft details are the seeds of a much more robust, hard scaffolding that produces safe, thriving societies. When strangers can reliably signal goodwill, consideration, or trust, entire systems work differently. You get the bookstore owner in Montecito who told Tammy, "Just mail me a check" when she forgot her wallet. Switzerland's honor-system transit. Japan's kids navigating cities solo. Conversely, when these scripts break down, life gets high-friction fast: plexiglass on toothpaste in your local CVS, private security, gated communities. Trust becomes a luxury good available only in curated enclaves. It’s not hard to imagine the path to the physical world of Stevenson’s Snow Crash. When norms hold, you get the freedom to move through the world without negotiating every interaction. The “pointless” rituals aren't pointless. They're the foundation that lets strangers become collaborators. In our latest Dialectic conversation, Tammy talks more about rebuilding these types of societal substrates with intention. All links and transcript available below:

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