Trust only becomes a problem when familiarity no longer suffices

Evidence

The overall, anonymously generated, familiarity of the lifeworld, including nature and human relationships, which is constructed in generalized terms, is and will continue to be the self-evident ground of being, the practical basis for all intentional approaches to specific objectives. People live from day to day in this intermediate zone without specific problems of trust or distrust. Intersubjective constitution is the prerequisite for trust and distrust, but people do not see them as having this basis, nor do they perceive it as a problem unless they are in the position of having to turn this familiarity with the objective world into trust in the process of its intersubjective constitution. They dwell in the cave of shadows described by Plato and have to be content with forms already reduced for them, unless they put themselves into a position in which the full complexity of the world can be encountered with more effective ways of reducing it. It is not a question, therefore, of their withstanding the evidence of ideas which are more illuminating than the power of their vision, but more a question of creating stable systems out of processes of intersubjective communication – systems which better encompass and reduce the complexity of the world – and of putting their trust in the functioning of these systems. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 142

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Giddens’s move from face-to-face trust relations to trust in abstract systems: the lifeworld familiarity here is what Giddens calls ‘facework,’ and system trust is the cave-of-shadows reduction described here.
• DEFINE: Defines the boundary condition of trust: it emerges only where generalized lifeworld familiarity fails.