Familiarity precedes both trust and distrust as their shared precondition

Evidence

Familiarity in this sense makes it possible to entertain relatively reliable expectations and, as a consequence, to absorb the remaining elements of risk as well. In itself, however, familiarity denotes neither favourable nor unfavourable expectations, but the conditions under which both are rendered possible. Familiarity is the precondition for trust as well as distrust, i.e. for every sort of commitment to a particular attitude towards the future. Hazardous as well as propitious outlooks require a certain familiarity, a socially constructed typicality, so as to make it possible to accommodate oneself to the future in a trustful or distrustful manner. This alternative reference to a favourable or unfavourable future does not yet possess anticipatory ordering, which develops only in relation to action intentions or system interests. Familiarity structures existence, not action. And it applies to the world, whereas trust and distrust only ever apply to selected aspects of the world, giving shape to relatively tiny sectors of possible meaning. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 136

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharp conceptual distinction: familiarity structures existence and applies to the whole world, while trust/distrust structure action and apply only to selected sectors — the load-bearing definitional claim of the chapter.
• XREF: Distinction between existence-framing familiarity and action-framing trust maps onto Giddens’s backdrop of ontological security versus specific ‘faceless commitments’; also positions why Stevens’s trust in the hierarchical system is a ‘tiny sector’ against his world-wide familiarity. — connects to: Flimsy group affiliation conjures presumptive filiation and presumed familiarity — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 70
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 136