This parallels an article that someone I follow wrote a couple of weeks ago. His way of describing this is the "second world effect". The article is better than I could write (link below). But basically, the "third world" is a low-trust society and everyone understands that and behaves in a defensive way. The "first world" is a high-trust society where things work. There is a discontinuous jump from third to first world once the culture has enough high-trust built in. But if the first world devolves back to low-trust, it doesn't go back to third world, it transitions to "second world" where things look like the first world, but nothing works any more because it's low-trust, but the society hasn't really recognized that.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-second-world