More planning expands future possibilities and creates new insecurity

Evidence

The indeterminate complexity of possible events is, in other words, not simply a consequence of deficient forward planning, but is in other senses a consequence of the extent of instrumental planning. Future possibilities in fact do not contract but rather expand with planning projections, which incorporate long and complicated chains of cause and effect involving many parameters and the many actions by different people. Moreover, as far as the individual is concerned, it is precisely this planned complexity which gives rise to a new form of insecurity. Furthermore, such planning contains a high proportion of technically significant indeterminacy. It makes sense to postpone decisions until more events have occurred in the course of time and there has been further reduction of complexity. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 129

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Giddens on risk and expert systems, and to the reader’s thesis that Stevens’s total planning/servility generates rather than resolves uncertainty about his moral position. — connects to: Trust reduces future complexity by committing to a determinate future — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 138; Imagining alternative futures can help bring them into being — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 365; Failed predictions merely trigger appeals to yet another new future. — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 682 (+7 more)
• SEED: Angle: ‘paralysis by planning’ — how ever-more instrumental projection creates new uncertainty that planning itself cannot absorb, echoing Ishiguro’s Stevens who prepares endlessly while the meaning of his service slips away.
• QUESTION: Does Luhmann’s ‘postponing decisions’ mechanism echo his later point that money/power permit deferral — and is this the same function trust performs? Worth pinning down.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 129

Broader Connections

• Trust reduces future complexity by committing to a determinate future #contradicts (0.70) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 138
• Trust functions by pruning the over-complex future to fit the present #contradicts (0.70)
• Corporate optimization creates both new species and new precarities #corroborates (0.65) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 2370
• Failed predictions merely trigger appeals to yet another new future. #expands (0.60) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 682
• Exhaustive bureaucratic planning can create false psychological closure about danger #expands (0.60) — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 49
• Imagining a future gain can destroy present wealth #corroborates (0.60) — , A Year of World Stories, 5595
• Growing social complexity increases the need for trust in the present #contradicts (0.60)
• Imagining alternative futures can help bring them into being #complicates (0.50) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 365
• Theoretical progress means gaining new problems, not resolving old ones #corroborates (0.50) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 268