Trust shifts from persons to the media of money, truth, and power themselves

Evidence

Money, truth and power are generalized media of communication, which serve as transmitters of reduced complexity. They offer, each in its own way, a capacity for the reduction of complexity for the communications in their area – and this is expressed in the concept of ‘medium’. The reduction of complexity assumes trust on the part of those who are expecting such reduction and of those who are supposed to accept it once it is accomplished. In both respects, in the style of complexity reduction, and in the kind of trust assumed, the media are affected and changed by the process of the development of civilization leading in the direction of greater social differentiation and greater social complexity. This development illustrates and sharpens the extent to which all human interaction is contingent. Differentiated communications media cannot therefore just be left with the slender hope that ‘everything will turn out fine’, but presuppose a processing of the selectivity of the experience and actions of others in the form of a media-specific trust. At the same time one becomes aware of the reduction and of the transfer of reduced complexity as an organizational need for systems of human communicative behaviour. So the trust which is focused specifically on the money one has in in one’s hand, on the person who provides information or on the blood relationship with those in power, no longer suffices as a basis for trust. The systems of reduction themselves demand trust and sustain it. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 225

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘medium’ as a transmitter of reduced complexity and pins the key causal move: as society differentiates, trust relocates from persons to the media systems themselves.
• XREF: Directly parallels Giddens on ‘faceless commitments’ to abstract expert systems replacing face-to-face trust in persons. — connects to: Citizens United redefines influence as following the money and super PACS as independent speech — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 345