Trust reduces the overwhelming complexity of the future to fit the present

Evidence

The problem of trust therefore consists in the fact that the future contains far more possibilities than could ever be realized in the present and thus be transferred into the past. The uncertainty about what will happen is simply a consequence of the very elementary fact that not all futures can become the present and hence become the past. The future places an excessive burden on a person’s ability to represent things to himself. People have to live in the present along with this everlastingly over-complex future. They must, therefore, prune the future so as to measure up with the present, that is, to reduce complexity. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 120

Categorization

• XREF: Directly grounds the reader’s core thesis: Luhmann’s ‘reduction of complexity’ through trust maps to Giddens’s ‘faceless commitments’ — Stevens delegates future-uncertainty to the system so he need not face it.
• DEFINE: Operationalizes the book’s central concept: trust as a mechanism of complexity reduction, not mere reliance.