From an Age of Losses to an Age of Wealth Accumulation: Collective Memory and Rational Distrust among Russians in the Financial Market

The article offers a philosophical reconstruction of household trust in investment under conditions shaped by the historical memory of financial losses. It relocates the discussion of distrust in the capital market from a moral-psychological plane to the framework of social epistemology and the philosophy of finance. Its point of departure is a critical analysis of the public narrative of the “age of losses”, understood not as a mere description of events but as a form of organizing collective experience that establishes a durable presumption of distrust and disciplines expectations about the future. Trust is construed as an epistemic relation to financial testimony and to the procedures that make such testimony a suitable ground for action, whereas trustworthiness is understood as a property of the institutional order that secures verifiable reporting, enforceable rights, and a distinction between market risk and procedural risk. On this basis, the article introduces the concept of a “distrust premium” as an expression of institutional-procedural uncertainty that shortens the investment horizon and undermines the willingness to engage in long-term capital accumulation. The question of trust is thereby shifted from psychological dispositions to the conditions of institutional trustworthiness and public verifiability. Particular attention is devoted to testimonial knowledge, the collective memory of losses, the narrative mechanisms through which distrust is reproduced, and the self-reinforcing circle of its entrenchment. The article distinguishes between two modes of such reproduction: a reflexive equilibrium sustained by current defects of commitment, and an inertial equilibrium preserved by narrative memory and cognitive inertia within a partially transformed institutional environment. It concludes that broad-based capital accumulation becomes possible only where there are publicly observable grounds for regarding financial testimony and financial rights as reproducibly reliable.