The indeterminate complexity of possible events is, in other words, not simply a consequence of deficient forward planning, but is in other senses a consequence of the extent of instrumental planning. Future possibilities in fact do not contract but rather expand with planning projections, which incorporate long and complicated chains of cause and effect involving many parameters and the many actions by different people. Moreover, as far as the individual is concerned, it is precisely this planned complexity which gives rise to a new form of insecurity. Furthermore, such planning contains a high proportion of technically significant indeterminacy. It makes sense to postpone decisions until more events have occurred in the course of time and there has been further reduction of complexity. Money, power and truth (to which we shall be returning in detail) are social mechanisms which permit decisions to be postponed and yet guarantee assurance in the face of a future of greater uncertainty and complexity of events. The stabilization of these and other mechanisms in the present presupposes trust.

DEFINE: Introduces the notion that future possibilities expand, not contract, with planning—a counterintuitive reframing of planning's relationship to uncertainty.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 129