System trust operates above the level where deception is detected.

Evidence

While, in personal trust, one must penetrate such presentation, anticipate deception and arm oneself against it, the case of system trust relieves one of these requirements for trust. No one would want to term as deception the fact that the bank lends out more money than it possesses, that the state issues more commands than it can enforce by using the police, that more information is divulged in professional advice than could be backed up empirically or logically. Trust is in these cases, through generalization and indifference to questions of motive, placed above the level where deceptions are to be expected and are dangerous. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 232

Categorization

• XREF: This is the mechanism by which institutional deference becomes ethical abdication — Stevens cannot recognize Darlington’s moral failures as deceptions because the system’s generalization immunizes him, directly serving the reader’s thesis.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that institutional trust sits ‘above the level where deceptions are expected’ is dense enough to reframe the ethics of institutional allegiance — Luhmann showing it is not naivety but structural design that makes moral blind spots possible.