Trust reduces future complexity by committing to a determinate future

Evidence

As against this, there is the future orientation of trust. Trust is only possible in a familiar world; it needs history as a reliable background. One cannot confer trust without this essential basis and without all previous experiences. But rather than being just an inference from the past, trust goes beyond the information it derives from the past and takes the risk of defining the future. The complexity of the future world is reduced by the act of trust. In trusting, one engages in action as though there were only certain possibilities in the future. One fixes one’s present future to a future present. In this way one offers other people a determinate future, a common future, which is not readily apparent from the past. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 138

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core mechanism: trust as ‘fixing one’s present future to a future present’ — the precise operationalization the reader needs for the Stevens/facework argument.
• XREF: Directly maps onto Giddens’s ‘faceless commitments’ — trust placed in systems as a way of bracketing future uncertainty. The ‘offering a determinate future’ move parallels Stevens conferring a stable future on Darlington Hall. — connects to: Trust reduces the truster’s complexity while transferring that burden onto the trusted — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 245; Seen-through trust reduces complexity less efficiently than spontaneous trust — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 256; Trust reduces social complexity by replacing missing information with guaranteed security (+19 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘fixing one’s present future to a future present’ formulation is a strikingly dense encapsulation of temporality in trust — genuinely paradigm-level for the reader’s thesis.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 138

Broader Connections

• Trust reduces complexity by substituting inner certainty for external certainty #expands (0.75) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 154
• Trust requires controlling one’s own readiness to accept risk #qualifies (0.50) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 161