Trust in abstract systems is the condition of time-space distanciation and of the large areas of security in day-today life which modern institutions offer as compared to the traditional world. The routines which are integrated with abstract systems are central to ontological security in conditions of modernity. Yet this situation also creates novel forms of psychological vulnerability, and trust in abstract systems is not psychologically rewarding in the way in which trust in persons is. I shall concentrate on the second of these points here, returning to the first later. To begin, I want to advance the following theorems: that there is a direct (although dialectical) connection between the globalising tendencies of modernity and what I shall call the transformation of intimacy in contexts of day-today life; that the transformation of intimacy can be analysed in terms of the building of trust mechanisms; and that personal trust relations, in such circumstances, are closely bound up with a situation in which the construction of the self becomes a reflexive project.

DEFINE: Introduces Giddens' concepts of abstract systems, time-space distanciation, and ontological security in connection to trust mechanisms.

Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Moderni…, loc. 271