Trust is one of the ways of bringing this about. The formation and consolidation of trust is therefore concerned with the future horizon of the actual present. It is an attempt to envisage the future but not to bring about future presents. Every kind of planning and advance calculation of future presents, all indirect, long-lasting and circuitously conceived orientations, remain problematical from the point of view of trust. They have to be referred back to the present, in which they have to be anchored. The growing complexity of such plans calls for satisfaction and decision-making to be increasingly deferred and thus cause their forward planning and fixed deadlines to lose their certainty. So with increased complexity there is a corresponding growth in the need for assurances about the present, for example, trust.

Builds on: "Trust rests only on the present as an enduring continuum."

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 122