By Welf Herfurth

Here is my latest article “Trust: The Invisible Foundation of a Free Society”. It is from a National-Anarchist perspective.

It is rather long, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.

Trust: The Invisible Foundation of a Free Society
By Welf Herfurth – August 2026

Every functioning society depends upon something that cannot be legislated, manufactured by government, or printed by a central bank: trust.

We rarely notice trust when it is present. We notice it when it disappears.

Every day, we place an extraordinary amount of trust in people we barely know. We assume that the person approaching us on the pavement is not going to attack us, that our neighbor will not steal from us, that the shopkeeper will sell us what the label promises and that a handshake or a promise still carries some meaning. We expect most people to follow the basic rules of society even when nobody is watching.

Civilization operates through millions of these small acts of confidence.

Without them, ordinary life becomes exhausting.

Stephen R. Covey captured the principle succinctly when he wrote:
“Trust is the glue of life.”

That glue holds together more than personal relationships. It binds families, neighborhoods, businesses, voluntary organizations and ultimately nations. When it begins to dissolve, formal institutions must replace with rules, enforcement and supervision what people previously achieved voluntarily through mutual confidence.

Friendship without trust becomes suspicion. Marriage without trust becomes surveillance. Business without trust requires ever more contracts, lawyers, and verification. A community without trust eventually becomes little more than a collection of strangers occupying the same geographical space.

And when people stop trusting one another, they inevitably begin looking somewhere else for security.

Increasingly, they look to the state.

Trust, Freedom and the State
There is a profound relationship between social trust and political freedom.

A society in which people largely regulate their own behavior does not require government to regulate every aspect of life. Families, customs, neighborhoods, churches, clubs, associations, and informal expectations perform much of that work. People cooperate because cooperation is normal and because antisocial behavior carries social consequences.

But when interpersonal trust declines, demands for formal control tend to increase.

If I cannot trust my neighbor, I want regulations protecting me from him. If I cannot trust strangers, I demand more police and surveillance. If communities can no longer resolve disputes themselves, they turn to government. As families, associations and neighborhoods lose authority, bureaucratic institutions gradually assume their functions.

This creates a paradox.

People surrender freedom because they feel insecure, while the very loss of social trust that created that insecurity makes greater government control appear reasonable.

The state does not necessarily have to seize freedom dramatically. Citizens may voluntarily surrender it one small piece at a time in exchange for promises of security, stability, and protection.
A high-trust society can afford considerable liberty.

A low-trust society increasingly demands supervision.

Edmund Burke understood society as something much deeper than a temporary economic arrangement. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, he wrote:

“Society is indeed a contract.”

But Burke’s contract extended beyond the people who happened to be alive at a particular moment. Society, he argued, represented a partnership between the living, the dead and those still to be born.

That idea becomes particularly important when discussing immigration, cultural change, and national identity. A nation is not merely the population currently occupying a geographical territory. It possesses inherited institutions, customs, historical memories, and obligations accumulated over generations.

Every generation has the right to change that inheritance. But surely it also has a responsibility to consider what it is passing to the generation that follows.

Brazil: When Distrust Becomes Part of Everyday Life
I see the consequences of low social trust in my everyday life in Brazil.

Let me make something clear: I love Brazil. I have chosen to make my life here, and there is much about Brazilian society, its people, and its culture that I deeply appreciate.

But loving a country should not require pretending that its problems do not exist.

One thing I have found difficult is the distrust that can surround ordinary transactions. People often seem to approach dealings with the assumption that somebody may be trying to take advantage of them.

As a gringo, that feeling can become particularly uncomfortable.
When I receive a quotation for a repair, a service or a purchase, a little question sometimes appears in the back of my mind:
Is this actually the fair price, or am I being charged more because I am a foreigner?

The real problem is not losin a few reais.

Once trust disappears, every transaction requires verification. You ask Brazilian friends what something should cost. You obtain several quotations. You check prices online. You negotiate when perhaps negotiation should not even be necessary.

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth because I do not want to approach people with suspicion. I would much rather begin with the assumption that somebody is dealing honestly with me.

My personal experience also corresponds with a broader problem. OECD data based on Latinobarómetro (*1) have found exceptionally low levels of interpersonal trust in Brazil, with only a small proportion of Brazilians saying that most people can be trusted.

That matters far beyond the occasional inflated price.
When distrust becomes normal, society compensates through contracts, security guards, cameras, gates, passwords, lawyers, bureaucracy, and government regulation. Every individual precaution may be perfectly rational, yet collectively they reveal the enormous social cost of living in a low-trust society.

Germany: 2015 and the Question of National Cohesion
Germany provides another example, although from a very different perspective.

On 31 August 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared:
“Wir haben so vieles geschafft: Wir schaffen das.”
“We have achieved so much: we can manage this.”

Those words became far more significant than Merkel probably expected (*2). For supporters, they represented humanitarian confidence and a welcoming Germany. For critics, including myself, they came to symbolize something very different: the assumption that because something could be managed administratively, its deeper cultural consequences were therefore acceptable.

But a nation is not simply an administrative system.

The migration crisis of 2015 represented an extraordinary moment in modern German history. Germany received asylum seekers on a scale unprecedented in the history of the Federal Republic.

Government institutions and municipalities struggled with the numbers, while German society witnessed both an extraordinary volunteer movement and an increasingly bitter political reaction against the government’s policies.

The question was therefore never simply whether Germany could provide accommodation, welfare, schools, and administrative support for newcomers.

The more important question was what rapid demographic, and cultural transformation might do to the relationships of trust upon which German society depended.

My objection is not that every immigrant threatens German culture. Such a claim would be absurd.

My argument concerns scale, speed, and integration.

A society can integrate newcomers when there is a strong culture into which they are expected to integrate. But difficulties inevitably arise when large numbers of people arrive from societies with substantially different religious traditions and attitudes towards family, authority, women, sexuality, community and the relationship between religion and state.

Those differences do not automatically produce conflict. But neither should we pretend that they do not exist.

When political leaders respond to such concerns by treating national identity itself as something suspicious or outdated, they risk weakening precisely the common ground necessary for successful integration.

After 2015, Germany became increasingly divided not simply between Germans and immigrants, but between Germans themselves.

One side regarded openness as a moral responsibility. Another regarded uncontrolled or inadequately controlled migration as a betrayal of the government’s responsibility towards its existing population.

That is a crisis of trust.

Some citizens begin distrusting immigrants. Immigrants may distrust the society receiving them. Citizens distrust one another. And, perhaps most importantly, people begin distrusting the government that is supposed to represent them.

The deeper question was never merely whether Germany could accommodate large numbers of people.

It was this:
What effect would doing so have on the cultural trust, solidarity and identity that made Germany a functioning society in the first place?

Australia: When Immigration Becomes an Economic Question
Australia provides a third example from my own experience.

During the 1990s and 2000s, immigration increasingly transformed Australia’s major cities. Growing numbers of migrants arrived from Asia, including China and India, many through an immigration system deliberately designed to attract skilled, educated and economically successful newcomers.

The problem was not that these people were Chinese or Indian.
The problem was that immigration did not occur in an economic vacuum.

Housing is finite.
Land in desirable areas is finite.
Infrastructure has limits.

When population increases faster than housing and infrastructure can accommodate it, somebody pays the price.

In Sydney and Melbourne in particular, housing became increasingly expensive. Foreign property investment also became politically controversial. Foreign investment and immigration are separate phenomena, but both formed part of the wider debate about population growth, housing demand, and affordability.

This distinction matters because resentment can easily be directed towards the wrong target.

When an Australian family watches the suburb in which they grew up become unaffordable, it is tempting to blame the immigrant family that can afford the house.

But the immigrant did not determine Australia’s immigration numbers, housing policy, or planning system.

The government did.

Nevertheless, the social consequences can be very real.
People who feel priced out of neighborhoods where their families have lived for generations may be forced further towards the metropolitan outskirts. They watch familiar neighborhoods change culturally and economically and can begin to feel like strangers in places they once considered their own.

From that experience, resentment grows.

Established residents may begin distrusting newcomers whom they perceive as competitors for housing. Newcomers sense that resentment and may retreat more strongly into their own communities. Both sides can consequently lose confidence in political institutions.

An economic problem gradually becomes a social one.

The Australian experience also demonstrates why immigration cannot simply be discussed in terms of GDP. A government may declare immigration economically beneficial in aggregate while individual citizens experience overcrowded infrastructure, unaffordable housing, and the disappearance of familiar communities.

Both things can be true at the same time.

A society, after all, is more than an economy.

Three Countries, One Problem
Brazil, Germany, and Australia are enormously different societies, and the causes of distrust within them are equally different.

Yet my experiences in all three points towards the same underlying principle:

Trust is easier to destroy than to create.

In Brazil, distrust can appear in everyday transactions.

In Germany, mass migration, and the political response to it contributed to profound arguments about culture, borders, and national identity.

In Australia, high immigration combined with housing shortages and investment pressures contributed to a perception among some citizens that government had placed economic growth and population expansion ahead of the interests of established communities.

In each case, once people believe that others are taking advantage of them, competing unfairly with them, or changing their society without their consent, trust deteriorates.

And once citizens no longer trust one another, they demand protection.

Immigration, Multiculturalism and Belonging
There is an important distinction between immigration and multiculturalism.

Immigration simply means that people move from one society into another. Multiculturalism, at least in its stronger ideological form, can imply something different: that newcomers should not necessarily be expected to assimilate into a dominant national culture because multiple cultures should coexist permanently within the same political territory.

That sounds tolerant.

But it raises a difficult question:
What holds everybody together?

If society increasingly consists of communities maintaining separate identities, institutions, historical narratives and sometimes conflicting values, citizenship risks becoming merely administrative. People possess the same passport without necessarily possessing the same sense of belonging.

The danger is not diversity itself.

The danger is fragmentation without an overriding common identity.

A successful plural society therefore requires something larger than its constituent groups: a common language, basic civic values, loyalty to the political community, acceptance of its laws and enough cultural overlap for strangers to recognize one another as fellow citizens.

Without that foundation, multiculturalism risks becoming multiple societies occupying the same state.

And once common identity weakens, politics changes too.
Citizens increasingly think of themselves as members of competing groups rather than participants in a common society. Politics becomes a struggle over resources, recognition, representation, and protection.

Instead of asking, what is good for our society, politics increasingly asks, what can my group obtain from the state?

Government becomes the referee between competing communities.

And referees acquire power.

The weaker the horizontal relationships between citizens become, the more important the vertical relationship between citizens and state becomes.

That should concern anyone who values individual liberty.

The Security Bargain
Fear has always been one of the most powerful justifications for political authority.

People frightened by crime demand more policing. People frightened by terrorism accept greater surveillance. People frightened by social disorder accept restrictions they might previously have considered intolerable.

People who no longer believe that their communities can protect themselves demand that institutions protect them instead.
The old political warning is therefore particularly relevant:
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

The familiar expression has a complicated history. Its underlying idea can be traced to Irish lawyer and politician John Philpot Curran, who declared in 1790 that liberty depended upon “eternal vigilance”. Variations of the phrase were subsequently used by numerous political figures. Whatever its precise authorship, the principle remains powerful.

Liberty rarely disappears because citizens consciously decide that they no longer want to be free.

More often, it disappears incrementally because every additional restriction seems reasonable when introduced.

Cameras. Databases. Identity checks. Speech restrictions intended to prevent communal conflict. More policing. More regulations. More monitoring. More bureaucratic intervention.

Each measure can be justified individually. Accumulated over decades, however, they can fundamentally change the relationship between the individual and the state.

The citizen ceases to be primarily a free person responsible for himself and his community and increasingly becomes a managed individual dependent upon institutions for protection.

Ironically, governments may then find themselves expanding state power to manage social tensions created partly by failures of earlier government policies.

Human beings are remarkably talented at creating a problem and subsequently establishing a department to administer it.

Diversity Is Not the Same as Division
None of this means that immigrants are inherently untrustworthy or that ethnically homogeneous societies are automatically peaceful, free, or harmonious. History provides far too many counterexamples for such a simplistic claim.

Nor does immigration inevitably destroy social cohesion.
The critical questions are scale, speed, integration, and common identity.

A country capable of absorbing newcomers into an established civic culture may strengthen itself through immigration. A country that receives exceptionally large numbers of newcomers while simultaneously teaching that assimilation is unnecessary, national identity is embarrassing and cultural differences should remain permanently institutionalized is conducting a quite different experiment.

The serious question is therefore not simply:
Is immigration good or bad?

It is:
How much cultural and demographic change can a society absorb while maintaining the trust necessary for a free society?

There can be no universal answer. Different countries possess different histories, institutions, and capacities for integration.
But pretending that the question itself is illegitimate prevents an honest discussion.

Rebuilding Trust
The alternative to fragmentation is not racial purity, cultural isolation, or hostility towards foreigners.

It is rebuilding the idea of citizenship.

A functioning society should be capable of telling newcomers confidently and without embarrassment:
You are welcome to become one of us.

But one of us must mean something.

It means learning the language, respecting the law, understanding the country’s history, accepting fundamental civic principles, and participating in the wider society rather than remaining permanently separated from it.

Integration also works both ways.

Existing citizens must be prepared to accept newcomers who genuinely join the national community rather than treating them perpetually as outsiders.

The objective should be neither forced uniformity nor permanent multicultural fragmentation.

It should be a shared society.

Governments can enforce laws, but they cannot order citizens to trust one another. Trust grows slowly through common experience, predictable behavior, reciprocity and belonging. It can take generations to create and remarkably little time to damage.
That makes social trust one of civilization’s most precious forms of capital.

When citizens trust one another, thousands of everyday relationships can operate without government involvement. People organize themselves. Communities solve problems. Associations flourish. Cooperation becomes voluntary rather than compulsory.
When trust disappears, bureaucracy fills the vacuum.

The greatest political danger of a low-trust society may therefore not be conflict itself. It may be what frightened citizens become willing to accept in order to escape that conflict.

A free society depends upon more than constitutions, elections, and declarations of rights. It depends upon millions of people believing that the strangers around them are, despite their differences, members of the same community.

Once that belief disappears, freedom becomes considerably more difficult to maintain.

Where people no longer trust one another, they eventually demand somebody powerful enough to stand between them.

And that somebody is usually the state.

A Possible Alternative: National-Anarchism and the Return to Community
If the problem is the erosion of trust within increasingly large, anonymous, and fragmented societies, perhaps we should question one of the fundamental assumptions of modern politics: that bigger is always better.
Bigger states. Bigger cities. Bigger bureaucracies. Bigger economic systems. Bigger political structures governing increasingly diverse populations from increasingly distant centers of power.

National-Anarchism offers a radically different answer.

As I understand it, National-Anarchism begins with the principle that human beings should be free to organize themselves into small, autonomous, and voluntary communities rather than being forced into one enormous political, economic, and cultural system.
The word national in this context does not necessarily mean the modern nation-state. It can refer to a people, community, culture, or tribe: a group connected through shared values, traditions, identity, and mutual loyalty.

The anarchist element is equally important. The objective is not to create another centralized nationalist state imposing one identity upon everybody. It is to reduce centralized authority and return decision-making to communities themselves.

Different communities could therefore organize themselves according to very different principles.

One might be culturally conservative, another socialist. One might be Christian, another Muslim, Buddhist, or secular. One might emphasize traditional family structures, while another might experiment with radically different social arrangements. Some might organize collectively, others around private property and individual enterprise.

I do not have to want to live according to your values in order to recognize your right to live according to them.

And you do not have to adopt mine.

That is the crucial distinction between coexistence and enforced uniformity.

Instead of asking how millions of people with fundamentally different values can be made to live according to identical political rules, perhaps we should sometimes ask why they must.

Trust Through Community
The idea that human beings naturally organize themselves into communities is considerably older than the modern nation-state.

Aristotle famously observed in his Politics:
“Man is by nature a political animal.”

By political, Aristotle referred to man’s natural existence within the polis, the political community. His larger point was that human beings do not naturally exist as entirely isolated individuals.
National-Anarchism begins from a similar recognition but draws a radically decentralist conclusion from it.

If community is natural, community does not necessarily require an enormous centralized state. Indeed, the larger and more anonymous the political structure becomes, the further political authority moves from the actual human relationships upon which society depends.

This brings us back to trust.

Trust develops most naturally where people know one another, share expectations and understand the unwritten rules of their community. In a smaller autonomous society, people are not merely anonymous taxpayers or administrative numbers. They are neighbors, friends, relatives, colleagues and members of voluntary associations.

Reputation matters. Responsibility matters. Reciprocity matters.
If I behave dishonestly towards somebody today, I may have to face him again tomorrow. That creates a form of social accountability that no government regulation can completely reproduce.
The objective is not to create isolated fortresses frightened of outsiders.

Independent communities could trade with one another, visit one another, cooperate, exchange ideas and form agreements wherever their interests overlap. Cooperation does not require cultural uniformity.

The principle is simple:
I respect your community’s right to exist according to its values, and you respect the same right for mine.

Different tribes do not have to become one tribe in order to live peacefully beside one another.

Neither Globalism Nor the Nation-State
This is why I see National-Anarchism as an alternative both to globalism and authoritarian nationalism.

Globalism tends towards increasingly large political and economic structures. Traditional nationalism offers another centralized answer: one state, one political authority and usually one officially preferred national identity.

National-Anarchism rejects both approaches.

It asks why political organization must always move upwards.
Why not move downwards?

From international institutions to nations. From nations to regions. From regions to towns. From towns to communities. And ultimately from the community to the individual.

Political authority should exist as close as practically possible to the people affected by it, while communities should possess the greatest possible freedom to determine their own social and cultural arrangements.

The Right to Leave
There is, however, an essential condition.

A community based upon voluntary association cannot simply become a miniature authoritarian state.

If people are free to create communities according to shared values, individuals must retain meaningful freedom to leave those communities. Without that principle, decentralization merely replaces one form of coercion with another.

The purpose should therefore not be to divide humanity permanently according to race, ethnicity, or religion, nor to assign individuals to communities at birth.

It should be to maximize freedom of association.

People should be able to build communities with others who share their values while recognizing that everyone else possesses exactly the same freedom.

That reciprocity is fundamental.

I cannot demand autonomy for my community while denying it to yours.

And the warning that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” applies here too. Decentralization does not magically make power benevolent. A village council can become authoritarian. A religious community can become authoritarian. A tribe can become authoritarian. A family can become authoritarian.

Power remains power whether exercised from a marble parliament building or a wooden table in a village hall.

National-Anarchism must therefore hold two principles in tension: the right of communities to preserve themselves and the right of individuals to leave them.

Without community, radical individualism can produce atomization.
Without individual liberty, community can produce tyranny.
A viable decentralized society must protect both.

Unity Without Uniformity
Perhaps one of the great political mistakes of our age is the belief that peaceful coexistence requires everybody eventually to become culturally interchangeable.

It does not.

Human beings have always formed communities and tribes. The challenge is not to abolish that instinct. Thousands of years of human behavior suggest that project is unlikely to end particularly well.

The challenge is to create political arrangements in which different communities can coexist without constantly attempting to dominate, assimilate or control one another.

That requires autonomy and mutual respect.

It also requires accepting something modern politics sometimes finds surprisingly difficult:
People have the right to be different from us.

Really different.

Not merely different in food, clothing and festivals while accepting exactly the same worldview underneath.

A genuinely plural world would contain communities whose values we might strongly dislike. Tolerance therefore cannot mean you may be different provided that you think like me.

It must mean recognizing the freedom of others to organize their lives differently while demanding the same freedom for ourselves.
Returning to Burke’s conception of society, he described it as:
“a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

A genuine community is not created every morning. It inherits stories, customs, places, traditions, obligations, and memories from those who came before it. It changes them, certainly, but it does not begin from nothing.

National-Anarchism therefore recognizes something that both extreme individualism and globalized mass society can overlook: people often want to belong to communities possessing continuity through time.

But recognizing our own desire for cultural continuity logically requires recognizing the same desire in others.

If Germans have the right to preserve German culture, Indians have the right to preserve Indian culture. If Christians have the right to establish Christian communities, Muslims, Buddhists, pagans, atheists, and others must possess equivalent freedom.

Otherwise, autonomy becomes merely another word for domination.

From Dependence Back to Responsibility
This approach also changes our relationship with government.
When every social problem is sent upwards to the state, citizens gradually become dependent upon institutions increasingly remote from their everyday lives.

National-Anarchism reverses that direction.

Responsibility returns to families, associations, neighborhoods, and communities, and ultimately to individuals.

That does not guarantee harmony. Nothing does. Small communities can suffer corruption, prejudice, incompetence, and conflict just as large states can.

But when power is decentralized, failure is decentralized too. One community’s bad decision does not necessarily have to become everybody else’s bad decision.

Different communities can experiment with different solutions. Successful arrangements can be copied voluntarily. Failed arrangements can be abandoned.

That is vastly different from forcing millions of people into a single political experiment from which there is effectively no escape.

A Different Understanding of Diversity
The National-Anarchist answer to diversity is therefore neither compulsory assimilation under a powerful nation-state nor compulsory multiculturalism administered by an even larger bureaucracy.

It is autonomy.

Let a traditional community be traditional and a progressive community be progressive. Let a religious community organize around faith and a secular community organize without it. Let collectivists experiment with collective ownership and individualists organize around private property.

Then, as far as practically possible, allow individuals to choose the communities with which they wish to associate.

This produces a much more demanding definition of tolerance.
Tolerance does not mean:
“I tolerate your differences provided they remain within boundaries determined by me.”

Real tolerance means:
“I may profoundly disagree with how you choose to live, but I recognize your right to organize your community according to your values, provided you recognize the same freedom for mine and allow individuals meaningful freedom of association.”
That is coexistence without uniformity.

Freedom Requires Trust
Aristotle reminds us that human beings naturally form political communities. Burke reminds us that those communities extend across generations. And the long tradition of political liberty reminds us that power must always be watched, wherever it resides.
National-Anarchism brings those ideas together in an unusual way.

It accepts the human need for identity without demanding a centralized nationalist state. It accepts cultural differences without demanding that every culture be compressed into the same multicultural society. It accepts community without abandoning individual freedom. And it accepts that people can profoundly disagree about how life should be lived without concluding that one side must acquire control of the state and impose its answer upon everybody else.

National-Anarchism therefore offers me not a perfect society, because such a thing does not exist, but a different political principle:
Trust where trust can realistically exist. Autonomy where differences cannot easily be reconciled. Cooperation where interests overlap. Mutual respect where values differ.

Instead of constantly expanding government to manage increasingly fragmented societies, we could rebuild society from below.

Instead of demanding that strangers surrender more freedom so that the state can protect them from one another, we could restore responsibility to communities capable of governing much of their own affairs.

Instead of attempting to eliminate human differences, we could acknowledge them.

And instead of demanding that every tribe become part of one enormous tribe, we could learn to live beside one another.

This does not mean communities must isolate themselves. Different peoples and cultures can trade, communicate, visit one another, exchange ideas, and cooperate wherever their interests coincide.

What they should not have to do is surrender their identities or autonomy merely because peaceful coexistence has been confusing with cultural uniformity.

For me, that is ultimately what National-Anarchism should mean:
My community does not need to rule yours.

Your community does not need to rule mine.

Neither of us needs a distant state ruling both of us simply because we are incapable of accepting our differences.

And that brings us back to the principle with which this discussion began: trust.

Trust cannot be manufactured by legislation or created by political slogans. It cannot be imposed by nationalism, multiculturalism, globalism, or government decree.

Trust develops between human beings who recognize obligations towards one another. It grows through familiarity, reciprocity, and shared experience, and through the understanding that membership in a community carries responsibilities as well as rights.

Perhaps, therefore, the political structures of the future should become smaller rather than larger.

More local rather than more distant.

More voluntary rather than more compulsory.

More human rather than more bureaucratic.

National-Anarchism does not promise a world without disagreement. Such a promise would be dishonest and contrary to human nature.

It proposes something more realistic:
A world in which we do not have to agree in order to respect one another’s right to live differently.

Freedom does not require us all to become the same. Peace does not require us all to belong to the same tribe. Tolerance does not require us to abandon our own identity in order to respect somebody else’s.

A society built upon trust cannot be imposed from above. Trust must grow between people, families, and communities.

Perhaps the first step towards recovering freedom is rediscovering the human scale at which that trust can genuinely exist.

A free society cannot simply be administered from above. It has to be built from below.

(1) Latinobarómetro
(2) Wir schaffen das