I recently read Jordan Peterson's "12 Rules for Life" and one of the things he mentioned that really struck me, was that people who suffer from agoraphobia (fea

I recently read Jordan Peterson's "12 Rules for Life" and one of the things he mentioned that really struck me, was that people who suffer from agoraphobia (fear of public places) eventually end up with the same fear (that they have when outside) inside their own homes; but since they're already home there's nowhere for them to go so they're stuck in perpetual fear. It's also known by psychologists that a fear gets strengthened whenever an individual purposefully avoids the fear-generating situation (e.g. a public place), and it progressively gets weakened when you routinely expose yourself to the fearful situation. So, regarding mistrust between individuals and using credit scores to try and "solve" this... I expect that dystopic technological surveillance "solutions" such as Chinese social credit scores will actually over time weaken trust between individuals in the same way that purposefully avoiding public places increases someone's agoraphobia. If you are a generally mistrustful person, then you're not going to start trusting people more due to social credit scores. Trust is an act of faith, and faith is necessary when you don't actually know. Imagine someone who is not registered for most social credit systems (perhaps because they're privacy conscious) comes to ask you for help or wants to do business with you. Is a social credit system going to make other people more trusting of that person? Of course not, it's going to make them more distrustful of that person. Also, as someone has already mentioned, by letting people snitch on one another, credit score systems will foster even more distrust between people. It reminds me of the Stasi in Eastern Germany, where neighbors and even spouses would report one another's activities to the secret police. These systems foster further distrust, instead of trust. As humans we need to overcome negative, fearful emotions like distrust by learning to judge character and to have courage and compassion, not by trying to outsource all our emotional and cognitive responsibilities to "apps". The 20th century was full of social horrors, including China (e.g. Mao's famine in which 10s of millions of people starved to death due to forced collectivisation of farms). I get the feeling that the 21st century will have its fair share, and schemes such social credit scores will play their part in bringing them about.