Distrust strategies can become autonomous habitual routines

Evidence

These negative strategies give rise to distrust of an emotionally tense and often frantic character which distinguishes it from trust. Its repertoire extends from the definition of the role-partner as an enemy who must be fought, through a boundless accumulation of personal reserves for cases of emergency, up to the renunciation of all needs which can be written off. Strategies of combat, of the mobilizing of reserves, or of renunciation, make possible a conduct of existence based on distrust and define its situation in a way which makes it possible to act rationally within the circumscribed area. The consciousness of distrust is thus often lost and the strategies of reduction demarcated by it become autonomous, become a habitual outlook on life, a routine. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 264

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The routinization of distrust strategies parallels how Giddens describes habitualized trust in abstract systems — a mirror-image for Stevens.

Related

• Distrust is a self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling social dynamic. (similarity 0.85)
• Distrust becomes socially visible through distrustful behavior (similarity 0.85)
• Withholding trust feeds a self-reinforcing spiral of lost rational capacity. (similarity 0.84)
• Distrust is self-fulfilling and cannot be invalidated by experience (similarity 0.83)
• Social systems need mechanisms that neutralize distrust without eliminating it. (similarity 0.83)
• In simple societies distrust is itself punished as a breach of law. (similarity 0.82)
• Being distrusted relieves a person of moral obligation and breeds reciprocal distrust. (similarity 0.82)
• Misplaced trust costs far more than forgone trust, making distrust come more quickly (similarity 0.82)
• Distrust arises from inconsistency or symbolic discrediting of trust (similarity 0.82)
• Organized systems program distrust responses in advance, guarding against excess (similarity 0.82)
• Distrust restricts information so the distruster never learns to distrust less (similarity 0.81)
• Systems that need distrust must also neutralize it to survive. (similarity 0.81)
• Generalized distrust in a benign society costs more than misplaced risks (similarity 0.81)
• Distrust functions as an equivalent alternative to trust (similarity 0.81)
• Optimism about others’ trustworthiness is self-reinforcing through gained experience (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Distrust is a self-reinforcing, self-fulfilling social dynamic. #expands (0.55) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 273