Trust can only be secured and maintained in the present. Neither the uncertain future nor even the past can arouse trust, since what has been does not eliminate the possibility of the future discovery of another past. This present-relatedness and its implications for trust cannot be understood and elaborated if the present is conceived in terms of an event fixed to a point in time, as a moment, as the instant at which the event occurs. Rather, the basis of all trust is the present as an enduring continuum of changing events, as the totality of constancies where events can occur.

DEFINE: Reframes the present not as a point-in-time instant but as an enduring continuum of constancies where events occur — this reconception is what grounds trust.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, loc. 119