“Vagueness is the kingdom of the devil and it is as such on purpose.” – On Vagueness”
― Lamine Pearlheart

Today’s handshake does not ensure tomorrow’s actions.

Giving someone something up front without ensuring your own return compensation is charity not a contract. While charity is good. Disguising it as a contract is unethical.

Accepting a promise in place of payment is called an ‘IOU’.

These are things we understand but we also hear what’s implied and our hopes can override our wisdom. (Myself included)

A politician promises that if elected they will do ‘_____’ if they get our vote. They get elected. They don’t do what they promised. There is no voter recourse or accountability built into the USA system outside of not voting for them again in the future. Voters listen to promises and purported ideals taking them as an obligation that the politician is bound to uphold. All politicians should come with a warning label that they are sold ‘as is’ with no warranty. It’s as if the used cars on the lot could talk themselves up and make promises on their future reliability and costs. I am pretty sure cars would say anything just to get off the lot.

Maybe if the cars could talk they might well be believed. But then again, can a car look us in the eye and let us see their sincerity? Would we trust our intuition, our feelings, as much with non-humans that can speak? Chatbots and other AI excursions into the realm of replicating human interactions seem to show us that yes we would trust a speaking car more than we would trust a car salesman. The car salesman has an agenda. They’re there to make money and sell cars. They can’t know the car as well as the car would know itself. We might feel like we could trust the car because we could tell if we liked it or not.

It appears that our trust in our own feelings is stronger than our trust in another person’s intuition and/or experience. Unless, we feel we can use our intuition to verify that the other person is trustworthy we would rather trust ourselves. When we shake hands and feel as though we like someone we are willing to trust them within limits. Those limits are determined by how much we are willing to risk for a perceived gain. Only once that limit, whether large or small, reaches a certain point, determined by our own level of risk aversion, do we start concerning ourselves with accountability. It’s easy to risk something that we perceive as low value. Many citizens consider their vote as nearly meaningless in the USA and they treat it accordingly. They shake hands with a candidate and if they like what they hear and feel, they will probably vote for that candidate. They view it as a low risk exchange with no need to hold anyone accountable.

As the personal cost increases of supplying what someone requests, without guarantees of compensation, we begin to replace requiring action with the idea of mutual values until we reach another threshold of discomfort. We either find the risks too high and cease our support or we create a new line in the sand. This new boundary can be much foggier because we begin to rely more heavily upon our feelings about someone’s character rather than their actions or experience. We begin to practice charity while calling it investing in the future. The future we’re investing in is only a possible future. We start to support the person and their promises without requiring anything other than their continued presence as the return on our investment.

We take their “Thank you”s and “I will remember you stood up for me”s as fair compensation for our time and monies. All previous promises are included under an ever-enlarging umbrella of continuing the struggle and refusing to quit. The IOU’s pile higher with each round of “We can’t give up now” because “We’re almost there”. This turns the previous risk aversion on its head where the risk now becomes not giving up, no matter the cost, instead of the old risk valuation of self protection. Where we began by trading what we thought of as low value for something that required no obligation we have now begun to trade things of high value for something of low value.

There’s a large amount of talk about thinking critically and research but quite a few of us don’t trust our minds as much as we trust our gut. Intuition is valuable. It’s valuable as a component of decision making. It is vulnerable to sabotage. When we rely solely on our gut feelings we cannot take into account those who use words to mislead our internal systems. We may be good at winnowing out the players but eventually we will meet one who is better at the game than we are at spotting them. Which is probably why the most wily and nefarious ones make it to the top. So how do we think critically and do the research while trusting our gut?

We start by valuing ourselves. Not just our intuition but also our choices. Our choices matter, even the seemingly meaningless ones. Would the politician court votes if they didn’t need them? Along that same line, why would anyone tell someone that their choice didn’t have any value? Devaluing meaningful things has long been the way to get them for cheap. The start of nearly every bargaining session begins with understanding the base value of the items being exchanged. The experienced buyer will attempt to get the most value for the least cost while the seller will work to get the highest value above their cost from the buyer. It’s up to us to know the value of our choice and how we spend it.

Once we know our value the next step is to pay more attention to actions over words.

“Red: You’re gonna fit right in. Everyone in here is innocent, you know that?” – The Shawshank Redemption

Anyone can claim to be someone they’re not and make promises they don’t intend to keep. The dishonest don’t have a special look, or a certain style of clothing. The most effective liar speaks mostly the truth. We can trust actions more than words. There is no rush when it comes to extending trust.

Finally, we need to understand and coherently define our boundaries. When someone attempts to shift our boundaries they don’t start with leaps, they begin with a small step here and a shuffle there. This is where trusting our gut can really be helpful. We need to trust our discomfort more than our manners. They might say something uncomfortable about someone else as if it’s a joke. If they can get us to laugh along, even if we are just being polite, that opens up further encroachments of our boundaries under the guise of humor or peer group approval. Once we allow someone to move our boundaries for us there is no incentive for them to stop. The bad actors will take full advantage of the opening and continue moving the goalposts to their advantage.