Random Thoughts 19

Life really is all about contracts. In everything we humans do, it involves a contract of some sort, implied, verbal or written.

We have social contracts, business contracts, financial contracts, purchase contracts, sale contracts, partnership contracts, corporate contracts, marriage contracts, contracts on every aspect of human life. Unfortunately, most people forget that the world is made up of such contracts.

Just as unfortunately, people tend to forget that the role of government, and about its only legitimate role, is the enforcement of all these contracts, should someone fail in their obligation to meet one of the contracts’ particulars.

It matters not whether a contract is written down or merely implied, it remains an obligation of each individual to uphold his or her end of the bargain. We agree to certain laws and rules governing our social structure. These are not necessarily written down but by custom and tradition they are just as valid as any business contract.

Courtesy is part of our civil contract, unfortunately as aspect that it all too often ignored in modern society.

When parents bring a child into the world, they have, without their explicit endorsement, agreed with the society in which they live to raise the child with the values and mores necessary for the child to be prepared to be a member of that community and social structure. A baptismal is sort of a formal ceremony to recognize this responsibility with the church acting as the agent of enforcement.

Do good, the church says, then you will go to heaven and that is your contract. Do bad, and you will not go to heaven or paradise or whatever afterlife the religion observes. Again, a contract.

You go to the grocer to buy a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk and you exchange whatever currency is the medium of exchange in your community and that too is the result of a contract.

Even social relations basically are contracts. When you enter into any relationship, you are offering your expectations, to be satisfied by another, while you are agreeing to try to satisfy the expectations of your partner. It is a simple but again just as valid contract. It may sound cynical but it is true just the same.

Today, in the U.S., we are seeing a crisis of confidence in the national institutions with the failure of many of those institutions to meet the expectations of individuals who literally failed to read the fine print, or as in the case of many in the large financial institutions, of individuals seeking to avoid personal responsibility for their own mistakes in judgment and efforts to make a game out of reality. Unfortunately, in such situations, the fallout hurts other people.

In the U.S., however, over the last century, it has become socially acceptable to protect people from their own foibles and failures, much less mistakes, and expect the government, as some neutral third party to provide the protection.

Again, unfortunately the problem is, that most people fail to realize, that government is not a disinterested benign third party. First it is a creation of society and second the same type of fallible human beings that the government is trying to protect from mistakes and failures makes its decisions.