Trust stabilizes decision-making by pruning an over-complex future down to the present

Evidence

In Trust, and to a lesser extent in Power, Luhmann describes the way that social systems are able to solve a very specific problem for society – that of stabilizing communications over time. … Since trust can only be secured and maintained in the present, ‘the basis of all trust is an enduring continuum of changing events, as the totality of constancies where events can occur’. … If one distinguishes future present (the future that will become the present) from present future (the future as seen in the present), one can understand how the discrepancy between them – a discrepancy brought about by unanticipated future events which change the present future – needs to be resolved for decisions to be made and projects put in motion. … It does so by reducing complexity in a way that allows people to ‘prune the future so as to measure up to the present … [i]t is an attempt to envisage the future but not to bring about future presents’. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 23

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core Luhmann definitions: future present vs present future, and trust as complexity-reduction through future-pruning — exactly the conceptual anchors the reader needs to operationalize ‘system trust.’
• XREF: Connects to Giddens’s ‘faceless commitments’ — institutional trust as a way of handling an unmanageably contingent future without facework — and to Stevens’s hyper-deference as futurity foreclosed. — connects to: Future planning depends on the stability and predictability of the social environment — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 96
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘prune the future’ mechanism, distinguishing future-present from present-future, is genuinely dense and paradigm-shifting for understanding trust as a temporal technology.