The Social Contract – Who Broke It?

“Never do business with someone who has nothing to lose.”
Wiard B. Ebeling – Country Gentleman, Wise Sage, and My Dad

I am going to tell you from the outset, this is not going to be another “I’m outraged – I’m MORE outraged than the other politicians” thing. I AM outraged at the events that have taken place, but I want to be a little more incisive than just screaming about the injustice, the murder of George Floyd. For several days last week, it just seemed that the looting and arson were going on unabated. People were asking: Why isn’t law enforcement doing something? People were enraged over these behaviors – some it seems, almost as much as the murder. And of course, when something bad happens we immediately need to blame someone. Over the weekend in some of the press conferences there was talk about this failure to keep order as being a “numbers game”. Governor Walz said that we just did not have the number of law enforcement personnel in place to deal with the number of demonstrators that they were confronting. Thus, mutual aid was summoned from other police agencies throughout the state and the National Guard was mobilized.

In watching the coverage of the horrors of the last week I heard several reporters and commentators talk about the “social contract”. I am not sure if the social contract is written anyplace but there is a tacit, maybe even explicit understanding of what it means. I heard Pat Kessler from our local WCCO television station invoke that phrase and I also heard a riveting commentary by Trevor Noah discussing the contract. (Thanks to Jon Hohenstein for pointing me to that.) The reason that we don’t have five thousand police on duty (or however many there were beginning on Saturday) is that we don’t expect this. We RELY on people not looting and not committing arson. How many cops would it take if all three million of us in the metro area decided that we were going to break into Target and every other store? You could not HAVE enough police for that. Most people abide by the contract – and one of those things in the contract is that we don’t go around looting and burning stores. AHA – so those demonstrators – those BLACK demonstrators – are not holding up their end of the contract then. Why is that?

I have often talked about what was expected of us as we grew up. We were never to think more of ourselves than we should. But we were ALWAYS expected to do right. When I was eighteen years old, I was rightfully convicted of unlawful assembly. A group of us assembled unlawfully to tap a beer keg. About twenty-five uninvited police guests came and that sort of ruined the party. Here is my point – when my day in court came, we knew in advance that the fine would be $32. I did not have $32. If the fine were not paid, we would be (at least temporarily) put in jail. This episode broke my mother’s heart, but my Pop was a little more steely about it. We were expected to DO RIGHT, to abide by the contract, and since I had failed, he had no intention of giving me money for that failure. And he did NOT. I walked out of that courtroom (the court of Hanging Hank Fauskee) only because some buddies had more money than their fine and loaned it to me.

But there was the other side to the contract. We were expected to abide by society’s norms but in exchange for that we had unlimited opportunities. I went to college on partial scholarships for my first two years at community college. When I was a junior at the University after my first quarter, a professor stopped me in the hall one day, told me to fill out an application form, and I never paid another penny of tuition to the University again. I qualified for and received National Defense Student Loans in addition and with all those combined with what I earned working part time I had virtually no debt when I graduated. But my privilege went a lot further than that. I grew up in a stable home. There was no domestic violence (other than when we threw the basketball through the window one cold Saturday night). We had plenty to eat. We had adequate clothing and our house was warm. But even more importantly we were privileged to learn how to WORK, how to run a business, how to engage with other people. Does this NOT sound like privilege? Well these things are SOOOOO far away, so absolutely unattainable for so many of our people, particularly so many black and brown people.

My point is, it was and IS easy for me to abide by the contract. Oh, I have had a few ups and downs, but life has been good to me. I have accumulated a LOT to lose. Yes, there are the material blessings – a house, a car, and some savings, but more than that I live in a nice, quiet neighborhood, in the middle of suburban affluence. We have very, very few murders, arson, or other crime. I have a LOT to lose if the societal contract breaks down. And even at that, our material blessings by the standards of MANY in our society are paltry. Think of how much Jeff Bezos “has to lose” or all of the other “Captains of Industry”. Do not misinterpret this – I am in no way condoning the violence and mayhem that I saw last week. But I think the looters and arsonists that I saw were VOIDING the contract because they have NOTHING to lose. And according to my Pop, when people have nothing to lose, they do things that we don’t expect, they do things that don’t seem reasonable to us. Or as Trevor Noah said, while they were gaining nothing from setting a Target on fire, neither were they losing anything. If they get caught it is not like they are going to pay a huge fine draining the thousands of dollars they have saved. For years many of these “have-nots” as they are called, have unilaterally kept the contract. But when they see people who look like them, too many people, murdered or beaten simply because of the color of their skin, they look around and see that they have NOTHING and that they probably never will have much. They believe that their possibilities are systematically minimized. Their pursuit of happiness, promised to them in our constitution, is hamstrung. They conclude that THE OTHER SIDE has broken the contract. They have nothing to lose, and as my Dad said, that is NOT a good place to be.

So, do I have a solution? I have told you before I only write this blog so that I can spout off. I don’t want to do the hard work that is going to be necessary to restore the contract. But MAYBE part of that restoration involves somehow making sure that both parties to the social contract have some skin in the game. How can our minorities feel like they have something to lose? Well for starters, maybe if they had gainful employment that paid a living wage. I am not saying that every minority person is going to be a rocket scientist. But we could at least allow them to have the dignity to receive a wage that can put food on their tables, a wage that does not require them to seek hand-outs to survive. But there needs to be more than just providing a minimum wage to every American. Every American needs to BELIEVE that they have a CHANCE to live the good life, to believe that if they work hard, study hard, do the right things – keep the contract – that they can make it. WAY too many Americans no longer believe this. We have got to find a way to restore that hope and belief, and we need to be systematic about it. Yes, this may involve a government program. And of course, well-intentioned government programs can fail. But we have GOT to try. Our society can not survive unless we as members of the society believe in the contract and abide by the contract. We will never have peace and prosperity as long as we have this significant segment of the population who is opting out.