Trust and Society in Transition

In what follows, I will to draw your attention to the causes of the lower level trust in Chilean society. According to the sociological literature (from Simmel to Luhmann), this phenomenon is a product of the transition from the Gemeinschaft to the Gessellschaft or, in other words, from the traditional society (a society founded on the communitarian relations) to the modern society (a society erected on the contractual relations). In modern society, according to the sociology, trust is transferred from the persons to the organizations. In the case of the literature about social capital (v.gr. Putnam and Coleman) trust seems to be one of the causes of modernity instead of one of the consequences. In particular, literature on social capital suggests that there is an interplay between uniformity in the social experience and lack of trust in the social relations. This does not pretend the effacement of classical demarcations, but to foster within working teams inquiry processes that allow reviewing our frames of reference in order to avoid the risk of psychological reductionisms, social orthopedics, Eurocentric perspectives, etc. From these conceptual perspectives and methodological cautions, in this presentation some questions will be open regarding the problem of trust and its relationships with modalities of com-position and decom-position of affective, institutional and social bonds in the epoch subjectivities. In the case of psychoanalytical literature, trust is a consequence of a transference (v.gr. Freud) and, in Lacan's work, an expression of the debt that is underlying the subjectivity because life is not a progress of satisfaction, it is a progress from desire to desire. This is the destiny of the modernity.'