The shift to system trust seems to facilitate the learning of trust, to make inner guarantees largely dispensable, or rather to replace them with functioning interaction. But, on the other hand, it seems to make the control of trust more difficult. It makes trust diffuse and thereby resistant. It becomes almost immune to individual disappointments, which can always be explained away and passed off as a special case, while personal trust can be sabotaged by trivial treacheries. System trust does not always have to be learned anew from scratch.

XREF: Connects to discussions of institutional resilience and why people maintain faith in systems despite obvious failures.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 230