Quicksketch: Contract Mindset

 I recently watched "The Crying Game" a movie possibly now forgotten in time and one I associate mostly with Mayor Quimby of Springfield.

Forrest Whittaker makes some interesting choices with his accent, but the film...I don't know it works, without my necessarily understanding it. It does feature prominently the story of the scorpion and the frog and may be where Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y know the fable from. 

The fable is ostensibly an argument for jailing people with Anti-social personality disorders, or just psychology 101 - the best predictor of future behaviour is past relevant behaviour.

This is an emphasized point though, because the scorpion doesn't just kill the frog but itself in the fable, indicating the strength of a persons nature.

I keep coming back to trying to understand "what are people?" as the essential question of sociology. Certainly they are no one thing, and here's something non-ubiquitous that I've noticed.

Some people have what I'll tentatively call a "contract mindset" but perhaps, because I'm not good at grammar, perhaps it could simply be called "contractism" which is elevating a contract to some magical status.

Predating the modern concept of contracts, we can look at oaths and swearing. People giving testimony in modern legal systems often are sworn in on a bible or other religious text, you will be familiar with the cliche "may I remind you you are under oath." 

If someone is an atheist, well I'm told back in the day, they couldn't serve on a jury because they couldn't be sworn in. I assume these days, they take the oath and you just remove the religious paraphenalia.

Why? Well, because swearing to tell the truth is not a magical process. People who place their palm on a holy book are still physically capable of lying. In another early 90s cinematic darling "Fried Green Tomatoes" Reverend Scroggins provides false testimony in a murder trial that alibis two murderers. The reverend later reveals he was able to do so because the bible he provided was actually a copy of Moby Dick, so no problem with perjury then...YES it's still perjury, because entering a contract with the court isn't based on magic, the (only good) commandment is "Thou shalt not bare false witness" it's not conditional on whether the book is used or not.

The old system of the 18th century or earlier was based on belief in belief. The new system has rendered holy books redundant because it is based on negative reinforcement - if they catch you in a lie you're in big trouble. It relies on risk aversion.

I'm not an expert on how people get scammed and defrauded, but I suspect a big part of it is an excess of faith in contracts. 

People who heard someone promise, on their childrens lives, no less that they were good for it. When their integrity was questioned, they got upset, their feelings hurt. People witnessed them promise. Everybody heard. 

How could somebody possibly, just not deliver on what was promised?

I'm not talking about escape clauses and loopholes in the fine print. I'm talking about people thinking that some performance of sincerity can attain an exception to someone's propensity to lie, misrepresent and renege. 

Most commonly is probably the election cycle, where people vote on non-information that they perceive as information despite often a literal lifetime telling them this is not the case.

Another common area are forecasts, which people can treat like contrasts despite nobody claiming they are. Probability statements treated as promises with no scrutiny as to how that probability was determined.

There is a misattribution or paraphrasing of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov most often expressed as "without God, everything is permitted." and not to be too on-the-nose atheist, what you will find is that whether it is the Buddhist cycle of rebirth and Buddhist hells or Christ dying for the sins of man, Dostoevsky is exactly wrong - generally under religious notions of existence everything is permitted in the moral sense.

Without god, yes, your only constraint is reality so you may find yourself capable of lying, stealing, raping and murder. Not everyone is, though they may appear physically capable. While yes, people can, and do, do these things regardless of their religious convictions, there's only so much they can do before running into consequences.

So from here we can move into the conclusion: Yes the only crimes people can persist in doing are the ones they can get away with. People can probably steal as many paperclips as they like from the workplace stationary cupboard. Some people can get away with murder for years, but they cannot for example just keep murdering every relative they stand to inherit money from. The most "successful" serial killers in terms of amassing victims without being convicted tended to have to target people they had little or no connection to at all and had to go to extraordinary lengths to render those crimes unsolvable. 

In the same way, contracts don't work via magic, which is why there's a difference between a written and signed contract that both you and your attorney have copies of, and a verbal promise made in front of yourself and your friend. 

Society enforces contracts, and it requires you being able to persuade a stranger that the contract exists in the first place. Furthermore, there are going to be a bunch of contracts where the cost of enforcing them exceeds the value of the contract in the first place.

A lot of the population however, remain vulnerable due to a naïve belief that making promises that one doesn't intend to, or cannot know they, can keep.