Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
by framersqool:
“A sincere intention to be fair, open, and honest, regardless of the outcome of the interaction”
Here's a quiz: where does the above quote come from?
Is it some kind of Boy Scouts pledge? A Sunday school lesson for preschoolers? A line from the credoes of a cult, or secret society?
Give up?
I copied the text from Wikipedia's entry on the topic of Good Faith.
And here's a challenge: go ahead and try it, for a week, and then get back to me.
You can describe to me, in good faith, what has been lost or damaged or compromised or denied or withheld or ridiculed or maligned or outmaneuvered or destroyed in your life, by exercising good faith in all your interactions.
My first introduction to the idea came, of all places, from the real estate trade.
During my Yuppie Decade of more or less 1985-95, a period when I had found myself increasingly selling off pieces of my soul in order to get the things I thought I wanted, the things I thought everyone else wanted and I had grown tired of swimming against that current and never seeming to get anywhere, I had occasion to put a condominium on the market. I was told by the realtor I sought the good offices of that I would be required to order a formal appraisal by an agent licensed by the State to perform such services, but that I could first begin to advertise the property with what he called a 'good faith estimate' of its market value.
In my macro-economics course in community college recently I'd been told that a thing is worth whatever someone ends up being willing to pay for it. 'Supply and demand', I think it was called, an immutable law of the economic universe which held more or less that people sell things because they have them to sell and want to, and they buy things because they want to and can pay the agreed price. The price on each exchange was to be determined by some complex formulation of how many of something there were to sell, and how many people out there might want and have means to buy them.
If only....
While you're exercising good faith in all things next week, try selling some real estate, and see how that works out for you. Or if you're feeling particularly confident and want to up the stakes on your little experiment, try retaining legal counsel to represent your interests in a divorce case, or canvassing for a political candidate, or applying for a government grant, or filing a tax form with every line filled in truthfully, or clicking on every 'I Agree' button online you encounter without reading the Terms and Conditions first, or maybe asking some pleasant-seeming stranger to use your PIN and bring you some cash from the ATM....
Let me know how well your own good faith serves you, and how much in others you have encountered.
The problem with good faith is that it is a unilateral position to take, one which asks nothing of the other party other than that they follow the example, which they may or may not. To assume that they will, involves another one-sided proposition, that of trusting them to.
Which of course is where it all comes unraveled, this apparently hopelessly naive idea that anyone can be trusted, ever, to be acting purely in good faith.
No saint myself, I do have some experience with those little daily breaches of good faith we have all committed, because it is expected of us, if we know what's good for us. A life lived in good faith, apparently, isn't.
I should know. I have tried, silly me.
But, me being me, I intend to continue trying to live in good faith.
At this stage of my life, the losses I have undergone by means of extending good faith to others and having this mostly regarded as a strategic weakness, giving the other party the advantage, are too many and too painful to recount here in all their splendor.
The (cold?) comfort I take from these losses is that, on each occasion, I had been doing my utmost not to violate my own pact with myself, of exercising good faith whenever and however possible. Any other means of getting what I had been seeking always felt to me like it would devalue the having of it.
Others, I gather, don't mind paying that little moral surcharge on their acquisitions of position or advantage or status or opportunity or amenity. Or power over others.
My New Year's Resolution for 2023 is more or less the same as it is every year: to be what I am, and not to allow various forces and factions to hold power over me, and require me to be anything less.
If any of you is familiar with former generations of Saturday Night Live schticks, you can go ahead and have a laugh on me if you must, while I recite the Stuart Smalley Affirmation:
I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.
Which is, as it turns out at the dawn of 2023, amid the Century of Stupid while the whole of humanity continues to wallow in the results of pretty much all its interactions having been undertaken in bad faith for as long as anyone can remember, still as true about myself as it ever was.
Having lost: my sense of belonging to anything one might call a family, my own children, my career, my credit rating, many people who were good to me but I have long since lost contact with... I also have some things: a roof over my head which belongs entirely to me because I decided, in good faith with all parties, to provide this for myself, along with some good neighbors I have known for years who are not necessarily close friends but on whom I can rely not to seek my destruction (which is nice, given my record); I have food in the pantry and a fire in the woodstove with enough wood to get through till spring, a seven-hundred dollar mountain bike I rescued from the scrapyard and spent less than two making roadworthy so I can get around without selling my soul to an automotive way of life ever again, and as of last week a fixed income to live on from the very thieves who had stolen it from my pocket (because, in bad faith, I had relented on giving them permission to) years ago.
I can work with that. The grief and anger and sense of betrayal from the losses, I just live with. I can't say I'm okay with them, but that I'm (well, mostly...) okay with how I behaved as each loss was administered upon me.
I have retained my determination to always act in good faith. That others didn't, that's on them.
After my Yuppie Decade I remembered, accompanied by no lack of moral trauma and much more to come, what I always knew: that to sell one's soul, irrespective of any supply-and-demand considerations making it easier to reassure oneself in the short term of coming out ahead in the deal, really isn't worth the price.
It isn't much of a life, by the apparently requisite standards of the lives lived around me and in my purview. I have more than some, less than many, but it's mine and no one has any angle to play trying to take it away from me, at long last. At the end of each day I can look around in the only true home I ever had, and recount the day's mostly boring and predictable events, and know that I had exercised no bad faith toward anyone else, and none had aimed it at me.
At long last.
Happy New Year!
framersqool
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.