Trust as mere incentive compatibility would make the concept otiose.

Evidence

One could assert a definition of trust that is nothing more than incentive compatibility or rational expectations of the behavior of the trusted. The word trust would be otiose in such a theory, however, because it would add nothing to the somewhat simpler assumption of compatible interests in explaining behavior. The massive literature on trust has not been stimulated by any such simplistic conception of trust. Much of that literature seems to suppose, for example, that there are important normative issues in the seeming fact of declining trust, and much of it supposes that trust is a complex and important matter in its own right. Indeed, Niklas Luhmann (1980, 22, 30) supposes that institutional devices that arrange for merely stable expectations have, of necessity, been substituted for relationships of trust in our complex modern times. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 73

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages Luhmann — who features in the reader’s stated purpose — establishing that institutional stable expectations replace trust in modern complexity, which is the exact baseline the blindness epidemic strips away.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Saramago’s blindness state represent what Luhmann means by pre-institutional society, and do stable expectations become impossible without observation?