Delphic Maxim 139: Make promises to no one
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
139. Make promises to no one
Today’s maxim is, I suppose, the flip-side of maxim number 69: Flee A Pledge. All the way back then, I pointed out that pledges, whether made to you or by you, are often unreliable — they’re not locked in and can be easily broken, so you should avoid the commitment if you can. It’s a strategic thing. Today is really a call to head off the need to ‘flee’ a pledge by not making promises in the first place.
It sounds pretty awful — and you might read it as especially selfish. People like certainty and commitment from the people around them, and making a promise is a reassuring social act. That all sounds fine, but then contingency gets in the way. Things happen, events arise, accidents strike, we get busy. There are a whole suite of reasons that we can’t honour our obligations — or we feel guilty if we have to — and that’s when promises can become problems.
This isn’t to say they always are problems. You can get away with making promises, of course, but they’re a pretty binding commitment. They rope in an extra layer of trust and friendship which makes it difficult if they have to be broken.
This is actually the bind that politicians find themselves in when they make unrealistic promises, or claim to be able to do something that is highly dependent on things going just right. A promise is a promise, whether someone calls it a ‘core promise’ or not. Surely these things would be better framed as commitments, assuming that time and circumstance don’t cause problems. I don’t want people to get out of commitments free and easy, naturally, but promises tend to be so iron-clad (or at least they should be, until they are diminished by so many small broken promises). People make plans around promises — and if those promises can’t be honoured, then that knocks on in other ways.
I realise that this makes me sound like a bit of a horrible nark — that the only person I care about is myself and that everyone else should feel the same way too. That’s not at all the case. I think people still have social obligations and should support one another. But I’m also acutely aware that I both don’t like being bound by commitments, and I don’t want other people to be bound by commitments to me.
There’s a meme that kicks around the internet at the moment, basically acknowledging that whenever anyone cancels plans the person being cancelled on (if they’re over thirty) is secretly delighted. This is one hundred percent me. Maybe it’s an ageing thing, but the more time I have to myself to read, to think, to not be surrounded by people, the happier I am. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because we are now completely bombarded with communications — social media keeps us in touch with people constantly, thousands of people. Emails, text messages, phone calls and meetings ping us all the time on our phones and calendars. The news is relentless. So when I get a small window of quiet in that noisy, noisy world, I’m relieved. I am happy to have that promise broken.
So I think today’s maxim is not so much about ‘not helping others’, it’s definitely not that, but rather about keeping commitments flexible — don’t over-extend yourself, don’t expect that of others, and maybe just chill out a little bit. I’ve begun to write some ideas about how bureaucracy creates busywork (maybe I’ll add it to my PhD, maybe it’ll be something I develop later). These social structures get deep inside our brains in ways we don’t realise — and the feeling of obligation that promises imposes on us isn’t all that healthy.
Liberate yourself from the tyranny of the promise!
