Test repository for familiarity with Git and GitHub Now is the time for all thinking persons to contemplate the sort of world they want to live in, and leave for others.
A world where the strong coerce the weak?
Or perhaps a world where people live in exclusively voluntary relationships with one another?
Now, of course, for richer human relations, it could be the case that persons may want to make binding arrangements with one another. Relationships that, for example, bind their future activities by some agreement made in the past.
In Moby Dick, we see Captain Ahab did this when, with an injured and gangrenous leg, he asked his crew to do in the future what he was binding himself to in the present. He wanted his leg amputated above the infected tissue, and to be held down to the table/mast by strong men while it was done, despite what he might be inclined to tell them in the moment as he expereinced the great pain of cutting sans anesthesia.
In other words, Captain Ahab wanted to bind his future self to a future decision that was voluntarily made and committed to by his present self .
This sort of binding arrangement is called "contract." I submit that we will find a more meaningful life where the rules of the game or institutions, broadly considered, allow the making of such binding commitments to one another than we would in a world where we do not.