ABSTRACT
Considerations of trust widely recognize trust as indispensable for human concourse, communication, and commerce. This “general trust”—here understood as a pervasive assumption of the trustworthiness of Others as such—is both inseparable from yet irreducible to the plurality of trust networks, or institutions of trust, configuring the life-world. Trust in the world is spun from social, cultural, and institutional trusts along with the underpinning of such trust networks in the truthfulness/trustworthiness of Others as such. Over-trust has a way of inducing a critical blindness often coupled with the leveraging of fear. Over-trust trumps over its misplaced excess through the incitement of fear of losing what an empty trust promises but cannot in fact deliver.
