Society is a set of relationships. Many people. Far more relationships.

What are relationships? I’ll let you think about that. But I want to consider the practical side of relationships: agreements.

From the simple, informal, everyday agreements, to complex, contractual, slowly negotiated agreements, society is built out of agreements between its members. An agreement between people is specifically an agreement to do something. Each person—or party—to the agreement agrees to do something that benefits one or more of the other parties.

The simplest formal agreement is a sales transaction. One party agrees to provide a good or service. The other party agrees to provide money. They each benefit. One of them had time or inventory that they don’t need. The other has money that they can’t use except for trade. So the agree to a trade.

A simple trade—fixed price for specific items—happens more-or-less instantaneously. Although they can still turn out badly, if the items do not live up to some expectation. Suddenly, complication! For example, when one person buys a cable to connect electronics, takes it home, and finds it does not work. The agreement was broken! Was it by accident, or on purpose?

When two people agree to something, there is a lot going on under the surface. You only make agreements with those whom you trust. You don’t have to trust them comprehensively. But you have to trust their intentions and their competence.

When someone sells you a defective data cable, then they have violated trust. Were they incompetent? Or deceitful? Or, did you somehow damage the cable yourself? Are you competent to evaluate whether a data cable is defective? Or whether another person is trustworthy?

When someone is suspected of violating an agreement, it starts a dispute. If the two parties to a broken agreement cannot resolve it, then they may have to resort to a third party to help find a resolution. Often, this is the state, through the legal system, involving a judge, and maybe a jury. That means that judges (and juries) have to be trustworthy and reliable: better able to evaluate someone’s intentions than the typical actor in the marketplace.

Alternately, if the legal system is too slow, cumbersome or otherwise unreliable, the buyer may try other means to get satisfaction. Perhaps they have influence in the community, and can arrange a boycott which will hurt the seller’s business. Perhaps they can write a review, or persuade a journalist to write an exposé. Ultimately, the injured party—and their society—need to find a way to ensure that agreements will be honoured.

A society cannot function if its members lose confidence in their ability to make agreements.

How do we measure the general state of confidence? How does it vary demographically? I don’t know the answers, but these seem very important questions, if one values a cohesive and well-functioning society. When confidence is low, people will resort to different strategies to compensate, and some of them might be dangerous or destructive. Crime—theft, fraud—is an obvious one, but there are many more. The most basic is refusal to participate, leading to all sorts of social problems.

We all need to participate in agreements to have a rewarding and prosperous life. We are part of agreements all the time. Unless we fall out of society. We often call such people “homeless”, but there is much more to it than that.

In our society, almost every agreement is financial and transactional. If two people enter into a long-term agreement, or they have repeated agreements, then their relationship may grow beyond the simple transactional. But such personal ties seem to be increasingly at risk. Most of our financial and transactional relationships are with faceless corporations, often large monopolies. Maybe we get to know the employees, but these personal connections have virtually no bearing on their reliability or trustworthiness in agreements. The corporation decides whether and to what degree it will honour and respect its agreements. If it decides not to, then no matter how well you think you know a low-level employee, there won’t be much if anything they can do to ensure your satisfaction.

Of course, the opposite is also true. Many people feel entitled to enter into agreements with corporations with false intentions. Mostly because they know the corporations themselves are untrustworthy. Moreover, there is minimal guilt for mistreating a fictional legal entity. Especially one whose human counterpart is a far-removed, billionaire CEO. Or, more accurately, countless anonymous investors, often represented by equally inhuman financial institutions.

Most of the preceding describes problems when parties to agreements fail to be honourable. But agreements also fail when parties fail to be competent.

Competency is a difficult quality to evaluate. Most people cannot evaluate one another’s competency. Evaluation is itself a competency, and most of us don’t have it. That’s why we often rely on disinterested intermediaries. [Note: many people confuse “disinterested” with “uninterested”; they are not the same. If you’re not sure, please review their meanings.] The most common intermediaries are standards and licensing bodies. These might be run by government or trade organizations. It benefits the government and businesses to protect the reputations of their industry, to keep confidence high.

Unfortunately, many people dismiss these bodies as “red tape”, as though they exist solely to give narcissistic bureaucrats a way to feel important. This is mostly because people are cheap and complacent. When we have high standards for long enough, the public often forgets how they were achieved. They assume—for self-serving reasons—that it just happened auto-magically, and that most businesses are trustworthy and reliable. Only when standards are no longer enforced, and experts are no longer independently verified, do we ruefully remember why we required them in the first place.

Running and maintaining a complex society means ensuring high confidence in all our agreements—billions or trillions every year. That requires high confidence in one another, as we enter into those agreements. That means we can trust one another to honour our agreements, and to have the necessary skills, knowledge, and experience to perform the tasks specified.

How are we doing at the moment, do you think?