11 January 2011

For the sake of loyalty

To be trustworthy is to be willing to forego some self-interested act for the sake of loyalty. Why would someone want to do that? Because loyalty is what you do for love. It belongs to the hormonal rather than the rational side of our decision-making. The metrics in such decision-making is what one is willing to gift, to divest of oneself. 
Gifting and trust and the hormonal is measured in negative terms, in terms of stopping the curse, of not taking the short term gain for the long term loss, of what is inalienable no matter what the price. Such decision-making is the stuff of covenant, of complementarity. 
Complementarity is what results from mutual gift-giving. Symbiosis says bad things will happen to me unless I can make good things happen for you. What motivates your actions is not that something good will happen to you so much as that nothing bad will happen to me. 

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