Strategies to minimize reliance on trust have been conflated with neglecting to understand it.

Evidence

What is at issue is not the importance of exploring in greater depth the causality of those forms of cooperation which are independent of trust, but the fact that economizing on trust is not as generalizable a strategy as might at first appear, and that, if it is risky to bank on trust, it is just as risky to fail to understand how it works, what forces other than successful cooperation bring it about, and how it relates to the conditions of cooperation. Considering the extremely limited literature on this crucial subject it seems that economizing on trust and economizing on understanding it have been unjustifiably conflated. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2830

Categorization

• QUESTION: Identifies a genuine theoretical gap — how trust relates to the conditions of cooperation remains under-theorized — worth chasing in Luhmann and Hardin.
• XREF: Bearings directly on the reader’s question of whether Saramago’s Hobbesian collapse indicts trust-reduction strategies or trust understanding failures.