In complex societies trust shifts from persons to functional systems and expertise

Evidence

In this, each individual must be able to presume that the orientation of the other is somehow related to truth. The amount of societal complexity which exists is overwhelmingly large. The individual can therefore make use of it only if it is presented to him in an already reduced, simplified, prearranged form. In other words, he has to be able to depend and to rely on the external processing of information. He knows who knows how the engine of his car works, how his gastritis can best be treated. He might distrust the newspapers but still assumes that their news is at least news. He relies on the fact that the representatives of his insurance firm give him factually correct information on insurance matters. In a highly complex environment this type of trust can no longer take the form of personal trust, although this form does still exist, for example when one’s doctor is also a family friend. Its typical form is trust in specialized and demonstrable abilities to process information, in functional authority, and, ultimately, in the ability of science to function as an action system. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 216

Categorization

• XREF: This is Luhmann’s systematic trust, which maps directly onto Giddens’s ‘faceless commitments’ — the reader’s core comparative thesis. Also connects to Stevens’s reliance on Lord Darlington’s expertise in Ishiguro.
• DEFINE: Explicitly defines how system trust in functional expertise replaces personal/face-to-face trust as complexity grows.
• ADDENDUM: The implicit contract behind any expert institution—relevant to the trust-expertise connection in the reader’s analysis of institutional deference.