You trust strangers because a medieval Church banned cousin marriage
You trust strangers because a medieval Church spent centuries telling you who you were forbidden to marry.
Crossbencher · 02 August 2026
You trust strangers because a medieval Church spent centuries telling you who you were forbidden to marry. That isn't a metaphor. It's a chain, traced link by link.
Begin with the human default, because trust in strangers isn't it. Across most of history and most of the world, the load-bearing unit of loyalty wasn't the individual and not the nation but the extended kin group - the clan, the lineage, the cousinage. You married in: close, and often repeatedly, because marriage was how a family kept property, alliance and obligation inside the blood. Cousin marriage wasn't a scandal. It was the wall the whole social order leaned on. Trust ran along bloodlines and stopped where they stopped.
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