Trust cannot be demanded but only offered through a risky advance

Evidence

It is not possible to demand the trust of others; trust can only be offered and accepted. It is for this reason that demands to trust cannot start trust relationships off. This can only be done by what we have called an advance. The initiator may confer trust, or perhaps utilize an opportunity arisen by chance, to show himself trustworthy (for instance by returning a lost object which he has found). The truster sees in his own vulnerability the instrument whereby a trust relationship may be created. Only his own original trust offers him the possibility of putting it forward as a norm that his trust is not to be disappointed, and thus bringing the other over to his side. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 197

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core mechanism behind Stevens’s total deference in Remains of the Day — he offers his trust to the institution, which cannot be demanded of him, and this vulnerable advance is what binds him. Connects directly to the reader’s stated thesis about Luhmann-facework-faceless commitments. — connects to: Superiority is only earned by risking oneself, never given — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 485; Genuine regard can only reward virtue that is not performed to win regard. — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 1009
• DEFINE: Establishes the central definitional move of this chapter: trust as an advance, a risky offering that precedes any normative claim.