How do high-trust societies form?
First, it's clear to me they're not just myths bolstered by propaganda, and they really are qualitatively different from their low-trust counterparts, which I understand, and consider to be "natural," requiring no explanation. I think it's a different concept than the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) thing, though of course, there's a lot of overlap. A related question: how do they unravel, and can this be arrested?
You are simply mistaken as a matter of fact about how much unprincipled exception the system can sustain as long as it is targeting sufficiently disfavored groups without the collapse of the rule for everyone else.