Trustworthiness arises from many small open stages rather than single sovereign strokes

Evidence

This process is made trustworthy because it is reached by many small stages and is open to information at all of them, so that, although the process is carried out centrally in order to guarantee the unanimity of the decision, sovereignty cannot be exercised at one stroke, i.e. arbitrarily. It would seem that even the social system learns that it is best to offer trust in small doses which individually do not put too much at risk. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 223

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Contrast crystallizes Stevens’s failure: Darlington’s politics are exactly the ‘sovereign at one stroke’ model, not the small-step information-processing that makes trust legitimate.

Related

• Trusting makes every small event symptomatically significant and trust fragile (similarity 0.84)
• Trust requires some prior information and cannot arise from nothing (similarity 0.83)
• Trust thresholds are historically contingent, not natural or objective (similarity 0.82)
• System trust is so inevitable it escapes conscious reflection and debate. (similarity 0.81)
• Trust requires freedom be transferred from uncontrollable potency to institutionalized personal responsibility. (similarity 0.81)
• Trust arises not from powerlessness but from lack of full information about others. (similarity 0.81)
• Trust increases experiential possibilities by reducing system complexity (similarity 0.80)
• Stable open government with countervailing institutions is needed to stimulate trustworthiness (similarity 0.80)
• Emotional trust inertia simplifies reactions but blocks mature engagement with its terms (similarity 0.80)
• System trust resists individual disappointments, unlike personal trust. (similarity 0.80)
• Trust grows in discontinuous stages, not steady increments (similarity 0.80)
• Trust exceeds available information and remains irreducible risk (similarity 0.79)
• Distrust needs less information than trust to form. (similarity 0.79)
• Trust’s interconnected structure makes it fragile across whole systems (similarity 0.79)
• Trust anchors future uncertainty back into the present (similarity 0.79)