I’m very interested at the moment in what is happening with the various social contracts that hold our civilisation together; those explicit and implicit agreements that govern what society is and how it functions.
This topic of “social contracts” covers everything from the agreement states have with their citizens to provide services and protection for their electorates in exchange for those self-same citizens submitting to rules that curtail their freedoms for the greater good; right through to the arrangements employers have with their employees. Similar to the citizen-state relationship, the employee-employer relationship depends on the protector curtailing some of their subordinate’s fiscal and physical freedoms, in exchange for fiscal and physical security. This trade-off is accepted as long as the subordinate values the promised security more highly than the lost freedom the agreement requires. Furthermore, in our nominally free, democratic, capitalist societies, these relationships are (at least in principle, if not in practice) voluntary. There are exit clauses for all parties. If the state violates its terms of service, the electorate can vote it out; if citizens violate their terms, the state can imprison them. If employers do not provide a safe and satisfactory working environment, employees can quit; if employees do not pull the weight agreed in their contracts, the employer can (albeit with some difficulty) fire the employee. (The same principles, of course apply to the institution of marriage, another core social contact that our fragile society is based on; at any point, any one party to a marriage contract can exit by simply filling for divorce.)
The point of all of this is to make explicit just how much of our society’s functioning is dependant on the will of the participants (that is, us) to, well, participate. The only reasons any of these relationships work is because the participants choose to stay and exercise loyalty rather than exercising their always available option to simply exit.
Exit, be it in the form of emigration, resignation, or retrenchment is always an option, and it’s an option that is becoming more popular. For example, the term “career cushioning” is trending in management circles. This refers to employees constantly updating CVs and being permanently on the look out for alternative employment. Of course, it is their right to do so, everyone knows if you get hit by a bus today, your boss will have someone in your seat picking ups your tasks by close of business tomorrow; but the trend of permanent base-case disloyalty is not without consequences for growth and resilience. (Similar to this is the more personal trend of “monkey bar” dating, which is accelerating alongside the ubiquity of dating apps. With “monkey bar” dating, people line up a new partner before letting go of their current one. As with career cushioning, monkey bar daters are never fully committed, and always on the lookout for the next best thing. Cheat before you get cheated on is the mantra.)
Now, the more people chose exit over loyalty, as is want to happen when the social contracts they have agreed to are violated by their counter parties (be that because of service delivery failure, encroachments of work demands into private lives, or extramarital affairs) the more precious our social ties become. Loosened social ties are synonymous with broken trust and uncertainty. This is very important indeed because social trust (at a micro and a macro level) is a key indicator of human flourishing. High trust societies cope better with crisis and have better economic outcomes. Low trust society’s, however, must suffer the dead weight loss of zero sum games; like coercive in-home staff surveillance to combat on-the-clock cheating; or rule by law rather than rule of law public policy, or the insurance policy tax of expensive lawyers rather than simple honour based hand-shake deals. In other words, sooner or later, exercising all that freedom to leave is going to come at the cost of growth and security.
This article was first commissioned for Brainstorm magazine.