Trust’s chief benefit is neutralizing danger into indifference, not mastering outcomes

Evidence

In both the examples mentioned, co-operative action and co-ordinated individual action open up trust, by reducing complexity, so revealing possibilities for action which would have remained improbable and unattractive without trust – which would not, in other words, have been pursued. For this reason, the benefit and the rationale for action on the basis of trust are to be found – as is shown in particular in the examples of the ‘Prisoners’ Dilemma’ and driving in traffic – less in the definite mastery of longer chains of action or more extended causal connections (although this can also be a result of trust) than, and above all, in a boost towards indifference. By introducing trust, certain possibilities of development can be excluded from consideration. Certain dangers which cannot be removed but which should not disrupt action are neutralized. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 148

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s Luhmann-to-Ishiguro reading: Stevens’s trust in Downton-style service is precisely an indifference-boost, excluding dangerous possibilities from consideration rather than mastering them.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the sacrifice/deference theme in ‘On Sacrifice’: trust granted in advance as a kind of suspension of judgment resembles sacrificial commitment.