Time is constituted as extreme complexity that constancies reduce to experienceable proportions.

Evidence

The constitution of objective time, the interpretation of the subjectively experienced opposition between duration and change through the objective opposition between identical constancies and identical events, serves to open up an area of variance. From the perspective of events, constancies are moved on as the present moves on. From the perspective of constancies, events are moved on as the future and the past move on. Both perspectives are thus opened up to alternative possibilities. The variability incorporates everything that is, without exception. The duality of the mutually exclusive perspectives guarantees this completeness and saves people from the unimaginable idea that everything could vary simultaneously with everything else. In other words, time is constituted as unlimited yet reducible complexity. … The constancies which form part of the actual present are the means by which this extreme complexity can be grasped and reduced, by which the undefinable can be defined or – in the traditional, time-excluding language of metaphysics – matter can be given form. By interpreting, structuring and thereby simplifying the world, they allow events to adopt an informative value and blend with human action in a process of selective choice. In functioning as an aid to reduction in this way, the constancies of experience create assurance about the present. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 126

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines constancies and events as the two mutually exclusive interpretive lenses that constitute time itself.
• XREF: Constancies reducing complexity into ‘assurance about the present’ is the structural antecendent of trust as complexity-reduction, which applies to how Stevens’s role-as-butler functions as a constancy.