Trust does not solve complexity but merely reshapes it as risk

Evidence

Functional propositions, according to the model ‘A has a function for B’, may look like findings and can easily mislead analytical study into stopping there. Nothing could be more dangerous. The value of the proposition for understanding comes mainly from its relationship to other, similarly constructed propositions. Thus it appears on closer inspection that the notion of trust is by no means a statement offering a ready-made solution to a problem, requiring only to be put into effect to rid the world of the problem. It is more a matter of a substitute formulation for the original problem of complexity. Trust is and still remains a problem. Complexity is an unavoidable risk. In view of the inevitability of risk, the form it takes will be decisive. In the majority of cases, systems can absorb it more easily as the risk inherent in trust. But the question remains – under what conditions, and with what further, follow-up, problems? — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 166

Categorization

• XREF: Cautions against the very reading the reader is building: trust as technology of complexity reduction still leaves residual risk, which matters for Stevens’s case where the institution’s moral grounding fails. — connects to: Securing a good means protecting it, not maximizing its likelihood — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 372
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that trust ‘is a substitute formulation for the original problem of complexity’ — trust does not eliminate risk, it re-forms it — is a dense, paradigm-level point about the permanent incompleteness of all trust-based solutions.