Trusting makes every small event symptomatically significant and trust fragile

Evidence

Finally, the precarious nature of trust is evident in the manner in which it is projected back onto the environment. The persons and social arrangements in which one puts trust become a complex of symbols, which is especially sensitive to disturbance and which, as it were, registers every event in terms of the issue of trust. Everything that takes place within the boundary of this issue of trust consequently takes on symptomatic relevance. As in the case of random tests, single events assume overriding significance for the whole. One falsehood can entirely upset trust and, by their symbolic value, quite small mistakes and misrepresentations can unmask the ‘true character’ of somebody or something, often with unrelenting rigour. The compulsive character of generalization, the tension arising from the inevitability of a simplified image of the environment, finds expression in the fragility of trust. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 159

Categorization

• XREF: The fragility and symptomatic reading of trusted symbols is exactly what keeps Stevens unable to register Lord Darlington’s moral failings — and the same mechanism Giddens describes as the risk profile of faceless commitments that forces ‘re-embedding’ through facework.
• DEEPTHINKING: The whole chapter culminates here: trust’s complexity-reduction comes at the price of a compulsive, simplifying generalization where one falsehood unmask-s the whole — the cost-benefit of system trust rendered in one dense, durable formulation.