Personal trust becomes system trust under civilized conditions

Evidence

These considerations confirm our conjecture that, under the conditions set by civilized society, personal trust becomes a type of system trust in the ability of systems to maintain conditions or performances which are, within certain limits, identical. Other examples of system trust also show this characteristically reflex engagement with fictions that is functioning. For example, whether one is a member or outsider, one trusts large organized systems which process goods or data, although one knows that the objectives of these systems are not the goals of the people who work in them. Rather one knows that everyone concerned in them must be motivated by complex, prone-to-failure and not readily visible detours to produce four-fruit jam, insurance notices, or whatever. The purchasing power of money is trusted, although currency is known to rest on an overdraft, so to speak, and is not covered by a corresponding value in the institutions which issue the currency. It rests instead on the expectation, supported by experience, that not everyone wants to turn his money credits into real cash simultaneously. One relies on the fact that the state has the power to guarantee peace and make decisions about problems, although one knows that its power of coercion is not adequate to do these things, if a considerable percentage of the population were to rebel at the same time or refuse to recognize decisions. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 257

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallel to Giddens’s ‘faceless commitments’ — trust placed in expert/abstract systems (money, the state) rather than face-to-face persons. — connects to: Trust requires freedom be transferred from uncontrollable potency to institutionalized personal responsibility.; Social complexity forces the shift from personal to impersonal, system-governed trust.; Institutionalized money trust replaces countless individual acts of personal trust (+12 more)
• SEED: Frames Ishiguro’s Stevens perfectly: his trust attaches to the Darlington institution and its system-properties, not to persons — making the ethical abdication a system-trust failure.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 257

Broader Connections

• System trust rests on trusting that others also trust #expands (0.70) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 261
• Growing complexity forces trust to shift from interpersonal to performance-based system trust #corroborates (0.70) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 143
• Trust rests on structural system guarantees that relieve individuals of risk assessment #expands (0.65)
• System trust cannot supply the mutuality that personal trust provides #qualifies (0.60) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 272
• System trust underwrites ontological security but yields no psychological reward #expands (0.60) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 271