Think
of one promise you have kept for a long time and one promise that was
broken. Why is it important to you to keep a promise? How did (or do)
you feel about a broken promise? (Serendipity Bible 10th
Anniversary Edition, page 1076).
Interrogation
by torture does not provide reliable results because people have
great incentive to say whatever their torturers want to hear. Some
promises are like that in a way. Our arms are being twisted
mercilessly and we give in by making a promise that we have no real
intention of keeping. This is a common experience in child-parent
relations in which the child insists and will not let the matter rest
until the parent gives in with a promise. The child seems to be
asking for a freely entered contract between parent and child when in
fact the parent has no choice other than to at least superficially
agree. So then the value of this “verbal contract” is dubious.
This can also be the case in business relationships. For resulting
performance can be either earnest and meticulous or lax. That is, if
I have contracted with a party to perform some work on my house but
during negotiations was childish and had no eye to fairness but was
irrationally selfish, then I should not be surprised if later job
performance suffers; for although my demands and expectations were
unreasonable and detached from realty, the performance must always
conform to it.
This
phenomenon repeatedly occurs in international affairs when agreements
lack genuine mutuality. The stark reality is that performance will be
based on reality regardless of ideological conceits. Later, no
amount of self-righteous tantrums and indignation on our part can
hide the fact that from the outset we made childish demands.
One
lasting promise that we should make is to keep negotiations real; that
our demands and expectations not be childish, but rather based upon
maturity and mutuality.
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