Disabling a government’s capacity for harmful action reduces distrust more than generating trust does

Evidence

Yet it would be wrong to say that Gorbachev actually succeeded in generating trust in government in the Soviet Union or its successor states. All he did was greatly diminish grounds for distrust in certain contexts, by both Soviet citizens and the West. He did so by disabling the Soviet government. It was the deliberately designed weakness of the early U.S. national government under the Constitution of 1787 that similarly disabled it from making policies that would have created massive distrust in that government (Hardin 1999d, chapter 6). Severe distrust might well have led to actions that would have undermined the government in its early years. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 754

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core project: Luhmann’s familiarity and the observability substrate — here, reduced distrust (not active trust) is the mechanism enabling order, paralleling how the wife’s sight removes grounds for distrust without manufacturing trust.
• QUESTION: Does diminished distrust actually function as a form of trust in Luhmann’s sense, or is it a distinct third category between trust and distrust worth naming?