Trust is only possible in a familiar world; it needs history as a reliable background. One cannot confer trust without this essential basis and without all previous experiences. But rather than being just an inference from the past, trust goes beyond the information it derives from the past and takes the risk of defining the future. The complexity of the future world is reduced by the act of trust. In trusting, one engages in action as though there were only certain possibilities in the future. One fixes one's present future to a future present. In this way one offers other people a determinate future, a common future, which is not readily apparent from the past.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 138