- Yes.
- And if a company makes you a promise, you expect it to be honored. But you don't hold the individual directors responsible. Why not?
- Because they don't have complete control.
- And if you make a promise to someone who doesn't have complete control, do you have to honor your promise?
- Why not?
- Do you have an interest in obeying a rule, in doing always what you say?
- Isn't that what we are talking about?
- We are talking about what we expect and want from making promises.
- Why do we keep promises if we don't do it out of the pride of being consistent?
- The promise to meet has a purpose outside itself. We meet to talk. We talk because we like to talk, and to see what we can discover.
- So if I was meeting at ten o'clock not you, but a corporate official, who is not individually responsible, I wouldn't have much to expect from the meeting. If talking depends on being responsible for oneself.
- The corporate official is not responsible for keeping his promise, and you are not responsible for keeping yours either.
- As is fair.
- Do you think we all intuitively understand promises in this way?
- Maybe, once we get past the idea of honor, consistency for its own sake.
- We don't expects individuals in groups to honor their obligations, in short, to pay. And we as individuals don't feel responsible to pay groups. Individuals in groups don't have to pay. And individuals singly don't have to pay groups.
- Only groups have to pay?
- They don't do anything an individual can count on, groups can't establish in individuals an obligation.
- If groups can't establish an obligation from individuals, how do they do it with other groups?
- By making temporary alliances, conditional periods where it is profitable to keep promises.
- So they are not promises at all. No one keeps promises.
- We left out individuals with individuals. You say you'll be here at ten, and I expect you to be.
- You promise me to come too, but I know you want to come. We assume our friends want to do what they say. When they don't, we let them off.
- Because if we made a demand they do what they don't want to do, we are ordering them to act against themselves, against their own sense of responsibility for themselves. We'd be exerting the pressure of a group, which really means strongly suggesting the expediency of forming a temporary alliance.
- When we know members of a group can't be expected keep their promises.
- The only people we demand keep their promises are members of a group, when they are acting for the group, but they as individuals we don't really expect to keep their promises and we don't feel responsible for keeping our own promises to.
- That's about it.
* * *
- Let's say we are a group of anarchists meeting to plot out our strategy. We aren't all intimate friends. What are we to each other? What do we owe each other, what can we promise each other?
- Consensus is reached by groups among the anarchists in temporary alliance.
- The different interest groups make a promise to each other that the individuals who make up the groups wouldn't for a second want to keep.
- That's right.
- It won't work!
- A credit card bill comes in the mail. Do you pay it?
- Me personally?
- You pay, but you don't want to. It's expedient.
- So each member of the groups demanding agreement from each other goes along with the consensus reached because it's expedient. Isn't there another way?
- A politics that would be more honorable? I thought we decided a period of alliance between groups was the only time honor had any meaning.
- More beautiful.
- It is beautiful when it works. Or so I've been told.
