Complete absence of trust is impossible and would paralyze human action

Evidence

Trust, in the broadest sense of confidence (Zutrauen) in one’s expectations, is a basic fact of social life. In many situations, of course, a person can choose in certain respects whether or not to bestow trust. But a complete absence of trust would prevent him or her from even getting up in the morning. He would be prey to a vague sense of dread, to paralyzing fears. He would not even be capable of formulating definite distrust and making that a basis for precautionary measures, since this would presuppose that he trusts in other ways. Anything and everything would be possible. Such abrupt confrontation with the complexity of the world at its most extreme is beyond human endurance. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 92

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Luhmann’s foundational sense of trust as confidence in one’s expectations and grounds it in the impossibility of total distrust.
• XREF: This is the core Luhmann claim the reader wants to link to Giddens’s ‘faceless commitments’ and Ishiguro’s Stevens — trust as precondition for all action, even for formulating distrust itself.