Trust endures through absorptive credit until critical thresholds are crossed.

Evidence

The trusted person enjoys a certain credit which allows even unfavourable experiences to be effectively reinterpreted or absorbed. As we shall argue, particularly in differentiating between trust and distrust (Chapter 10), control is exercised by means of thresholds which may not be crossed without the withdrawal of trust. Controls through thresholds differ essentially in style, technique and flexibility from control by means of definite goals, norms or values. It is a simpler way of tolerating greater complexity but it does presuppose that the thresholds, or the modes of conduct which are critical for trust, can be recognized and defined with sufficient clarity. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 163

Categorization

• XREF: Stevens absorbs endless unfavourable experiences about Darlington through the credit of institutional trust; the threshold never being crossed is precisely the mechanism of his ethical collapse.
• SEED: The threshold model explains why morally grounded individuals continue to defend an institution long after evidence mounts against it — a pattern applicable to cults, corporations, and political loyalties.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that trusts are governed by thresholds rather than by goals or values is a genuinely paradigm-shifting distinction that reframes what institutional fidelity means.