Comment by Fredy_Ke

This resonates strongly from an African perspective. In countries like Kenya, corruption is almost an open secret — people expect it, budget for it, and navigate around it. Paradoxically that "normalized" corruption causes less acute trust erosion because nobody trusted the system deeply to begin with. In democracies the social contract is explicit — you voted, you participated, you expected accountability. Betraying that feels personal. The delta between expectation and reality is where trust dies. The real question isn't which system suffers more — it's which system has better recovery mechanisms when trust breaks down.