Trust must find a form immune to suspicion of manipulation to survive

Evidence

The forward thrust of instrumental orientations at the expense of the present is a condition for an increase in performance through rationality. But this leads (and this may be seen in industrial sociology studies generally) to the present being emptied of meaning and thus increasing the pressure of a need for expressive variables. … But all people live and grow old together in a common and ever-present constancy. Whoever wishes to manipulate the present of others must be able to escape from it into another time. The impossibility of this means that all manipulation runs the risk, evident also within its own present, of itself becoming open to expression and thereby betraying its goal. This can, of course, be obviated to a very large extent through social differentiation, role separation, barriers to communication and control of information – in short, by social organization. But the effect of this will simply be to arouse universal suspicion of manipulation, regardless of whether individual cases provide confirmation or not. Trust, therefore, can be maintained only if it finds a form which allows it to live with such suspicion and become immune to it. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 124

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s stated goal: Stevens’s institutional devotion is exactly the ‘form which allows trust to live with suspicion and become immune to it’ — the organization substitutes for personal judgment, which is Luhmann’s account of how Lord Darlington’s moral corruption goes undetected.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that all manipulation of present-time human beings is doomed because no one can escape time, so organization must substitute — and this triggers universal suspicion — is a dense causal chain with deep implications for why institutional trust requires moral grounding.