The very multitude of the ways of creating trust makes it fruitless to search for general formulae. Rather one is forced to recognize that it is just this multitude of possibilities which provides some safeguard against the breakdown of trust in society. Trust is created – one way or the other. And highly differentiated societies, which need more trust for the reduction of their complexity than simple societies, must perhaps also hold in readiness correspondingly more varied mechanisms for the creation and stabilization of trust. They must therefore make more demands on the readiness to trust inherent in their systems and at the same time ease the burdens placed on that readiness to trust to a greater extent than is the case in simple societies.

DEFINE: Contrasts trust as a set of varied mechanisms against the search for a single general formula.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 301