The Power of Promise Keeping
“To breed an animal that is entitled to make promises—surely that is the essence of the paradoxical task nature has set itself where human beings are concerned? Isn’t that the real problem of human beings?”—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
It’s hard to be an exceptionally terrible person in Dostoevsky’s world, but Marmeladov pulls it off in Crime and Punishment (1866). What makes him especially loathsome is his self-awareness. He’s a disreputable drunk and he knows it. Indeed, he seems to delight in confessing his sins, at length, to complete strangers. He tells Raskolnikov that his teenage daughter, Sonya, has been forced to become a prostitute to support the family because he squanders all of his pay on vice. He feels bad about this but persists in his dissolute ways regardless.
Marmeladov is an insightful guy who doesn’t want for self-knowledge. But since he’s utterly devoid of willpower, he can’t seem to translate any of these insights and feelings into meaningful change. The gap that most of us experience between What-We-Do and What-We-Intend-To-Do has become an unbridgeable gulf in men like Marmeladov. He’s utterly incapable of keeping promises. He’s a slave to whim. And yet the libertine calls this freedom!
Promises aren’t made to be broken; they’re made because they can be broken. You don’t have to promise to eat next year. And I don’t have to promise you that the sun will come up tomorrow. Those things will take care of themselves. We promise to do things that won't take care of themselves. We promise because we know things might not work out. We promise to do something because we know we might not feel like doing it in the future. In so doing, we limit our own freedom to act on whim. But the willpower harnessed by this process endows us with an awesome godlike power, a freedom over fate and fortune, which has intoxicated the human mind at least as far back as Abraham.
Romanticism has taught us to revere the freedom of children: the freedom to be spontaneous, to live in the moment, to do what you feel. But I do not revere the freedom of children. Nor do I miss it. Is there a greater slavery than slavery to whim? To momentary fancy? Romanticism has taught us to revere the mighty river of being. But look around you! Look at the world of wonders around us! We’ve dammed up the river of being, like beavers, and harnessed its power. And it’s made us into what we are: glorious, strange, confused, beautiful question marks. What fascinating creatures we are: bare feet on the cool morning earth, heads in the clouds of distant stars. All these dreams of ours, they keep coming true.
—John Faithful Hamer, Love Is Not a Liquid Asset (2020)
