Delphic Maxim: 69: Flee a pledge
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
69. Flee a pledge
Well what the hell am I supposed to make of this? ‘Flee a pledge’ is possibly one of the most difficult maxims I’ve come across, not only because the language is a little clunky, but also because the practice that it seems to encourage runs counter to what we would regard as appropriate today! I’m sure this is a ‘lot in translation’ and ‘Pat doesn’t understand it enough’ situation. There’s obviously a particular connotation that might have been attached to the concept of a ‘pledge’ at the time which changes the meaning here.
The first question I would ask is who is doing the pledging? If someone has made a pledge to you, are you fleeing that? This might be a tactical choice, in the sense that pledges are promises that you may depend on — and relying on other people isn’t always the smartest move. Pledges, in a sense, are cheap talk: they don’t mean anything until someone has put some skin in the game, laid down some actual hard cash. So a pledge made to us might encourage us to act rashly, or to act as though we are in a more secure position than we are.
What if we’re the ones making a pledge? It might be that we’ve made a pledge to a lost cause, or we come to regret it down the track. While a site like Kickstarter prevents us from losing money we’ve pledged if a project doesn’t get over the line, we are still banking on the goodwill and capability of the people to whom we’ve pledged money. Perhaps in this sense it’s safer to flee a pledge, or to not pledge at all, because pledging, like pre-ordering, involves an untested risk. And really, the risk of failure or disappointment may not be worth the reward (the reward being, in most cases, getting something before anybody else, or at least as early as possible).
Some progress then: a pledge can involve exposure to risk, and if there is a concept that we’ve seen come through a number of these maxims, it’s to be strategic and careful. Avoiding pledges helps us to avoid risk, and unless there is a huge upside, then it probably makes sense that the risk isn’t worth it. I’m simplifying an argument Nassim Taleb runs in his books Antifragile and The Black Swan: a smart risk strategy involves minimising exposure to downside, but maximising exposure to positive black swans (seems obvious, but much more complicated in practice).
A pledge made by another might be made within the ‘veil of ignorance’ — either on our part or the pledger. We can’t be sure of motivation, intention and capability. We can’t necessarily be fully aware of the risks. Without perfect information, which isn’t really possible, we need to look at probabilities and payoffs (and you can balance exposure to risk over a range of pledges, though this is probably getting beyond the scope of everyday life).
Of course the other mode of ‘pledge’ is a ‘pledge of allegiance’, which I haven’t really left myself much time to discuss. I guess it’s kind of in the same category: what does it mean to lock yourself into something? There’s an extent to which a pledge does ‘identity-work’ for you: it shapes who you are in ways that aren’t fully defined by yourself. That can be a dangerous and tricky situation to be in, so it makes sense to dial down our exposure to ‘pledges’ here.
I don’t know that I’ll always agree with the delphic maxims. We live in a risk society today, one that strongly rewards risk, and yet we are also paradoxically more and more risk-averse. Our psychology is rigged for risk-aversion (and it probably was two thousand years ago as well), so a maxim like ‘flee a pledge’, read in the sense of ‘pledge as risk’ makes sense. But risk has its rewards too — but only if we know a little bit more about the pledge and its circumstances.
