Trust functions by treating the uncertain future as if it were certain.

Evidence

It needs no more than a cursory inspection to show that the theme of trust involves a problematic relationship with time. To show trust is to anticipate the future. It is to behave as though the future were certain. One might say that through trust time is superseded or at least differences in time are. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 108

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is Luhmann’s core operational definition of trust: anticipating the future, behaving as though the future were certain.
• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s stated purpose — this is the mechanism by which Stevens’s trust in the butler system/estate hierarchy reduces temporal complexity. Also parallels Giddens’s ‘faceless commitments’ that bracket future uncertainty. — connects to: A freely-made promise transforms uncertainty into fact by willing a future into being — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1035