Emotional attachment reduces complexity by stabilizing expectations toward one object.
Evidence
One of the most elementary mechanisms of complexity reduction is the stabilization of feelings towards particular objects or people. The principle of the generalization of expectations in such relationships lies precisely in the individuality of their object. Familiarity with the object regulates and secures the formation of expectations. Feelings embrace in principle all aspects of their object – however different they may be and whenever they may reveal themselves and change. They motivate an input of energy for situations which are as yet undetermined, and presuppose a corresponding reserve of energy which is not determined elsewhere. Feelings are, to use the vocabulary of Parsonian pattern variables, attitudes orientated ‘particularistically’, ‘qualitatively’, ‘diffusely’. They exclude all other objects or relegate them to a position of comparative unimportance, even if in particular respects they produce equal, or better, results. Thus they attach a very far-reaching temporal indifference to circumstance and time, an insensitivity to other things, which remains astonishing for all witnesses, if they do not share that feeling. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 287
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘particularistic/diffuse’ pattern variables are Parsons; this connects to the reader’s broader institutional-analysis corpus (Barber, Coleman on trust). — connects to: Happiness is only attainable through fetishized attachment to objects — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 148
- DEFINE: Defines how feelings work as a complexity-reduction medium, situating them as a precursor analog to trust.