System trust resists individual disappointments, unlike personal trust.

Evidence

The shift to system trust seems to facilitate the learning of trust, to make inner guarantees largely dispensable, or rather to replace them with functioning interaction. But, on the other hand, it seems to make the control of trust more difficult. It makes trust diffuse and thereby resistant. It becomes almost immune to individual disappointments, which can always be explained away and passed off as a special case, while personal trust can be sabotaged by trivial treacheries. System trust does not always have to be learned anew from scratch. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 230

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to Giddens’s ‘faceless commitments’ — system trust is diffuse and resistant to personal betrayal, which is exactly how Stevens’s devotion survives Darlington’s individual failings.
• DEFINE: Here Luhmann distinguishes system trust (diffuse, disappointment-immunized) from personal trust (vulnerable to trivial treachery) — the conceptual core of the reader’s project.