Chapter 11 — Signals vs Returns
The Core Mechanism of Trust Breakdown
There is a common mistake, repeated across nearly every domain of modern trust failure.
People assume that what has deteriorated is morality.
They say:
People are more selfish.
People are less loyal.
People are less serious.
People are more avoidant.
People are more narcissistic.
People have no integrity.
This language is satisfying because it restores the familiar genre: decline as character.
But it does not explain what is most diagnostic about the present moment—namely that the same complaints recur across contexts that have nothing to do with romance or personal temperament.
The physician says the patient “won’t follow through.”
The employer says the employee “is disengaged.”
The citizen says the government “doesn’t listen.”
The parent says the school “just sends emails.”
The friend says the friend “is always warm but never there.”
The investor says the founder “keeps talking but won’t deliver.”
The buyer says the seller “keeps promising but won’t close.”
The language changes. The pattern remains.
That is not the signature of moral decline.
It is the signature of a structural substitution.
This chapter names the substitution with a distinction so simple it is easy to underestimate: signals versus returns.
A signal is an expression that maintains flexibility.
It communicates orientation—interest, sympathy, respect, openness, alignment—without requiring future constraint. The signal may be sincere. It may even be intense. It may carry genuine feeling in the moment of utterance. What distinguishes it is not falsity. What distinguishes it is cheapness.
A signal is low-cost, and therefore reversible.
A return is an action that changes the state of an interaction.
It allocates time. It creates consequence. It closes an option. It binds the future. It imposes cost on the actor, not merely on the recipient. Returns do not “express.” They commit.
Signals preserve optionality.
Returns reduce optionality.
Signals keep interaction alive.
Returns move interaction forward—or end it.
This is the entire mechanism.
We can state it bluntly:
Trust is not produced by signals. Trust is produced by returns.
This is not a romantic claim. It is not a moral claim. It is not a personality claim.
It is the cold arithmetic of coordination.
A working rule (canonical)
- Signals = low-cost engagement that sustains attention
- Returns = costly action that changes state
When systems permit signals to substitute for returns, they do not become kinder.
They become extractive.
If signals are so clearly insufficient, why are they everywhere?
The answer is not “because people are shallow.”
The answer is that modern conditions have made signaling structurally optimal.
Under anomie, what disappears is binding—shared enforcement that makes time, refusal, and obligation legible. When binding disappears, coordination still must occur, but it is no longer governed by stable rules. It becomes improvised, privately regulated, and asymmetrically priced.
In such conditions, signals flourish for three reasons.
(1) Signals are the cheapest way to remain socially solvent
Modern life requires continuous visible participation. Silence is interpreted as hostility. Withdrawal is interpreted as pathology. Absence is interpreted as disrespect. The social cost of non-response has risen while the institutional capacity to sustain real engagement has declined.
So people signal.
They like. They react. They message. They reassure. They express. They nod. They affirm. They agree. They soften. They keep doors open.
This produces the appearance of connection without the burden of coordination.
Signals are the currency of social solvency: proof that you are still present.
(2) Signals allow upside without downside
Returns require exposure.
To return is to take risk: you may be rejected, contradicted, embarrassed, obligated, or made accountable. To return is to lose optional futures. It is to constrain yourself.
Signals avoid that.
They preserve the upside of engagement—social warmth, attention, belonging, intimacy, status—without paying the downside of commitment.
This is not villainy. It is incentive.
In an environment where exit is cheap and accountability is diffuse, the optimal strategy is to harvest upside while minimizing irreversible acts. Signals are perfectly suited to that regime.
(3) Anomic systems reward the appearance of coordination
Here the most important shift occurs.
Under anomie, systems increasingly reward performative alignment rather than actual settlement. Institutions—corporate, educational, political, even therapeutic—often treat expressive compliance as equivalent to substantive coordination.
One can “be aligned” without acting.
One can “support” without paying.
One can “stand with” without doing.
One can “care deeply” without changing behavior.
The signal becomes treated as contribution.
This is why signals flourish: they count.
They are recognized, rewarded, and socially credited.
The system gives people points for sounding cooperative even when cooperation requires cost.
This is a profound structural error. Once it occurs, signaling becomes not merely common, but dominant.
If signals flourish because they are cheap and rewarded, returns decline because they are expensive and penalized.
This is the part modern culture refuses to face directly.
Returns require something modern life increasingly treats as oppressive:
loss.
To return is to accept that to choose is to exclude.
To act is to foreclose.
To decide is to disappoint alternatives.
To commit is to incur risk that cannot be undone.
And yet this is the only way coordination is possible.
A society that cannot tolerate loss cannot coordinate.
It can only signal.
Returns decline for several tightly linked reasons.
(1) Returns create asymmetry, and asymmetry is now treated as injustice
Every return creates differential exposure.
One person makes the offer.
One person responds.
One person proposes.
One person accepts or refuses.
One person closes the loop.
This asymmetry is not ideological. It is mechanical.
But modern discourse increasingly treats asymmetry as suspect. People demand symmetry not in dignity—which is legitimate—but in function—which is impossible.
In response, people withdraw from return-making behavior because return-making behavior makes them the visible author of consequence.
Signals allow everyone to “participate” without anyone being responsible.
Returns force responsibility into view.
(2) Returns produce enforceable meaning
Signals are deniable. Returns are legible.
A person can signal interest and later claim it was casual.
A person can signal openness and later claim they were overwhelmed.
A person can signal alignment and later claim they were misunderstood.
Signals preserve plausible deniability.
Returns destroy it.
To show up, to pay, to deliver, to vote, to close, to refuse, to commit—these acts are hard to reinterpret.
They bind the future.
And binding is precisely what anomic systems have ceased to tolerate.
(3) Returns are punished as “pressure” or “control”
When a system withdraws enforcement, any individual who attempts to restore it is misread as authoritarian.
To return is to force state change.
And forcing state change—without institutional legitimacy—now looks like coercion. Even when the return is merely procedural.
Thus:
- a clear “yes/no” becomes “harsh”
- a deadline becomes “aggressive”
- a boundary becomes “manipulative”
- a demand for delivery becomes “toxic”
- a request for closure becomes “intense”
- a call for standards becomes “gatekeeping”
This is not because standards are inherently bad.
It is because, under binding failure, standards feel like domination.
The system has abdicated authority, and individuals who attempt to reconstruct it look like usurpers.
Returns therefore decline not because people are incapable, but because return-making is socially costly.
A society can moralize itself into permanent signaling.
And it has.
Every anomic environment produces its own form of fraud.
Not fraud in the criminal sense, but fraud in the structural sense: the extraction of value without reciprocal cost, justified through morally acceptable language.
The new social scam is simple:
Sincerity is offered as payment for obligation.
This scam works because sincerity is real.
People often do mean what they say at the moment they say it.
And yet sincerity is not a return.
It does not bind action across time.
It does not close loops.
It does not produce settlement.
It merely expresses current orientation.
This is why sincerity is the perfect substitute currency in a system that has lost binding: it preserves the actor’s moral self-image while allowing structural non-payment.
One can be sincere and still not deliver.
One can be sincere and still not show up.
One can be sincere and still not decide.
One can be sincere and still keep others suspended.
One can be sincere and still externalize cost.
This is the defining trick of modern trust breakdown: moral cleanliness combined with structural extraction.
In earlier social systems, sincerity did not need to function as payment because payment was demanded elsewhere:
- time had cost
- silence had consequence
- refusal was explicit
- commitment changed state
- institutions enforced closure
Now that enforcement is missing, people attempt to compensate with language.
But language cannot pay for what behavior must settle.
A brief typology sentence is useful here, in the Mertonian tradition:
In an anomic signaling regime, Conformists pay in effort, Innovators pay in over-structure, Ritualists pay in performative sincerity, Retreatists pay by disappearing, and Rebels profit from permanent deniability.
None of these roles are moral identities. They are adaptive strategies under mispriced coordination.
The “scam” is not that people are lying.
The scam is that the system treats sincerity as if it were settlement.
And so we see a new cultural style of non-payment:
- emotional speech replacing obligation
- expressive performance replacing delivery
- “I hear you” replacing repair
- “I’m trying” replacing change
- “I’m doing my best” replacing consequence
- “I didn’t mean it that way” replacing accountability
These utterances are often sincere.
They are also often worthless in coordination terms.
To name this is not cruelty.
It is diagnosis.
If signals dominate and returns decline, the downstream cultural outcome is predictable.
We get more communication.
And less coordination.
We get a society of continuous expression and chronic drift.
This outcome appears everywhere:
In politics
Leaders speak constantly. Messaging is relentless. The volume is unprecedented.
Yet very little settles.
We witness permanent campaigns, permanent outrage, permanent scandal, permanent debate, and almost no closure. Institutions perform attention management rather than decision.
Politics becomes signaling at national scale.
In medicine
Patients research obsessively. Doctors hedge. Institutions issue guidance and disclaimers. Everyone communicates.
But trust deteriorates because the binding mechanisms—authority, professional deference, shared standards—have been weakened. The system cannot close disputes because its legitimacy is contested.
Medicine becomes a negotiation rather than a settlement apparatus.
In education
Schools communicate endlessly: emails, portals, policies, updates, statements, learning objectives, and meetings.
Yet shared standards of competence and authority erode. Parents and students treat schooling as customizable, and teachers carry the burden of coordinating expectations without enforcement power.
Education becomes an interpretation marketplace.
In friendship and community
People maintain social contact through signals: reactions, comments, casual check-ins.
But returns—showing up, carrying burden, committing time—decline.
Communities appear large and feel thin. Networks expand and support shrinks. Everyone is “connected,” few are bound.
In work
Companies speak constantly about mission, alignment, values, belonging, and culture.
But returns—clear authority, stable expectations, enforceable standards—are often missing. Performance management is replaced by communication rituals. Accountability becomes ambiguous.
Work becomes bureaucratic signaling.