Modern society still depends on personal trust despite system complexity

Evidence

Questions of how far personal trust is still needed today, in which social systems, and in which functions, would make a subject for extensive empirical research. Such research would, I suppose, indicate very quickly that the need to orientate oneself to other people’s individual characteristics is as strong now as ever it was in all areas of social life where repeated contact takes place, and that the myth of mass society has its origins in some kind of optical illusion. On the other hand there is no doubt that modern differentiated social orders are much too complex for the social trust essential to ordinary living to be created solely by this type of orientation towards persons. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 205

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘myth of mass society’ claim directly bears on the reader’s Stevens analysis: even a society of faceless systems retains strong personal-trust needs. — connects to: Widespread civility and flourishing civil society reduce to shared personal trust