What holds a society together under strain

Watching a society under prolonged strain from close up, the thing that surprised me is which structures turned out to carry the weight.

What people actually rely on

Family first, extended well beyond the household: cousins, in-laws, the relatives in another region who can take three people at short notice.

Then the neighbourly and workplace networks: the building group chat, the colleagues who organise a delivery, the parents from a school class.

Then volunteer organisations, which in this country occupy a space that in many others is filled by state agencies, and which are trusted more than most institutions.

Formal institutions come after all of that for most everyday purposes, though people rely on them absolutely for the things only they can do.

The trust pattern

Trust here is high in specific institutions with visible output and low in the general political category — a pattern that is consistent across surveys.

Interpersonal trust in known people is high; in strangers, moderate. That is a normal profile for a society that went through the 1990s, and it explains why so much organising happens through personal networks rather than through formal membership organisations.

What the strain revealed

That informal capacity can be mobilised extremely fast and cannot be sustained indefinitely without institutional support. Volunteers burn out; families supporting three displaced relatives run down their savings.

The policy implication

Support the informal networks rather than replacing them. They do things a state agency cannot, at a speed a state agency cannot, and they need money and rest rather than instruction.

That informal networks matter more than institutions under strain is something I witnessed directly: in the first weeks of 2022 what kept my team going was not procedure but people who knew each other. The policy implication is a fine one — trying to institutionalise those networks breaks them. What can be done is for the institution not to get in their way.