We've been asking this question with renewed interest since the intensified struggles around debt and austerity, as the social contract was renegotiated after the 2008 financial crisis. After the fictitious wealth bubble evaporated, society had to be restructured both around changing material realities, such as the restructuring of the global economy, and the gradual contraction of the real economy through energy degradation, health issues, environmental damage, etc. and symbolic social realities, maintained through propaganda and the inertia of a large social body.
This is a great way to generate resent, as the privileged - who enjoy the power to maintain their privileges, and possess the instinct to maintain those privileges - have predictably done everything they can to crush the vulnerable underneath them, so as to maintain their lifestyles. Various classes, identity blocs, and interest groups turned against each other, with the tension and conflict reinforcing itself. One demands one's rights in the face of an encroaching and exploitative power, and the power, upon encountering hostility and resistance, feels justified in exploiting and encroaching ever more. A trap.
The legal contract - and the historical genesis of this legal form bears the past imprint of previous struggles around these matters, not to mention the painful memories of such struggles. Each party is bound by law - by threat of punishment - to uphold their end of the contract. Some sort of exchange is assumed in the contract, in which bonds are weak and easily formed and broken again, so as to maintain the body of social trust required for complex human societies.
A simple scenario can illustrate the larger, more systematic problems implied in the development of such legal mechanics. What is the most likely first impulse arising in one passing someone drowning in a lake? Certainly many would jump right in to help. Smaller groupings of communities do indeed reconstitute themselves very quickly when stressed. Our society on the other hand constantly needs to shed and then renew itself. We pass homeless people piled on the floor, or sigh with despair upon reading about some vulnerable community under siege. What else is to be done? Some do much, though the effects of their efforts may be more diffuse and remote in the face of such mass, while many simply go on with their lives and harden themselves to the suffering. Meanwhile we shed at accelerating rates, and the voices of the dispossessed increasingly bellow: we are owed!
In contrast, one sees a very different dynamic within a small farming community in which profit is not an end, but a means to subsistence, which itself could be considered a virtuous activity in the classical sense: the work activity is enjoyable, clean, and honest. Perhaps not perfectly so, but more so than in many workplaces within this society.
This lowers the tension between peer members. One wishes to help, even in the face of fear of exploitation, like one wants to help a struggling fellow in a lake. When you see someone doing whatever you view as worthwhile, or you love that person as part of your community, you pitch up with what you have as a matter of course. You are not negotiating wages, or demanding vacation days, which is something you do with institutions that you already expect are attempting to exploit you. As such, the bodily, or community trust is a valuable resource in itself.
