Truth, money, love, and art each emerged as media from rising contingency

Evidence

This line of argument, moreover, has its parallels in other media areas and is supported by them. Only from a certain stage of development onwards does daily communication become so loaded with information that truth itself becomes a problem. Only from a certain stage of development does the stock of goods become so large that it becomes meaningful to keep it open to contingent intervention in situations of scarcity. It could further be said that love becomes necessary as a special communication code only when others’ emotions and images of the world are so strongly individualized – and that means, have become so contingent – that one can no longer be sure of them, and therefore, according to cultural standards, one has to love for its own sake. And even art, as a communication medium, depends on increased contingency, i.e. the contingency of works manifestly produced, but no longer sustained by the context of specific, lifeworld purposes. Designated in all of these are problematic areas of interaction, namely variants of the problem of selection transmission and, at the same time, stages in the evolution of the societal system. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 608

Categorization

• DEFINE: Generalizes the definition of symbolic media: truth, money, love, art and power all arise as responses to growing contingency in their respective domains.
• XREF: This unified media theory is the structural analogue to Giddens’s abstract systems — each medium is a mechanism for handling the ‘faceless’ contingency of late modernity.
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense, paradigm-level synthesis: power, truth, money, love, and art all share one evolutionary logic — arising as communication codes exactly when contingency makes natural congruence fail. This is the theoretical spine of the book and resists paraphrase.