I was watching an interview with two former Mafia members and arguing about it with a friend. Both men had eventually left the organization, but one of them talked quite openly about having broken his oath. I don't remember every detail well enough to make his particular case the point here, but the argument it started was simple enough.
My friend thought the man was wrong. He had joined knowingly. He took the oath. He knew the rules and understood that loyalty to the organization was supposed to come before almost everything else. These weren't casual promises, and the men in the interview were quite explicit about how much the oath could require.
My immediate response was that circumstances change.
Unfortunately, that wasn't a very good answer.
Of course circumstances change. People change. Priorities change. The people above you may stop behaving the way they did when you joined. But if a promise survives only while I still prefer the circumstances in which I made it, I haven't promised very much.
So I had to give my friend that part.
The question that started bothering me instead was what kind of change actually matters.
The bargain
It is easy from outside the Mafia to solve the whole problem by saying nobody should have joined in the first place. Fair enough, but that skips over why people did.
In the interview, the former members talked about young men growing up with very little and seeing mobsters with money, cars, status and power while their fathers struggled. Obviously plenty of kids saw the same thing and did not join the Mafia. But the attraction isn't incomprehensible merely because the bargain was criminal and dangerous. Some of these men were smart, capable people who saw access to a life that looked considerably better than the one available to them.
And it wasn't only money. Membership offered protection, status, belonging, connections, opportunity and a set of rules inside a world operating partly outside ordinary law. In return came obedience, silence, acceptance of hierarchy, loyalty and a considerable amount of risk.
The interview itself used the example of a dying mother to explain how serious that obligation was. If the organization calls, you leave your dying mother.
Well, that's awful.
But if that is what someone knowingly agreed to, a mother dying isn't evidence that the oath has failed. In a strange way, it proves my friend's point. The horrible circumstance may be exactly the kind of circumstance the oath was designed to survive.
A changed preference doesn't release someone from something they specifically agreed would outrank their future preference.
Hardship within the relationship is different from destruction of the relationship.
That felt much closer to what I was actually trying to say. Unfortunately, it created another problem: what counts as destruction?
What did I actually promise?
There is a strong version of loyalty that says my promise concerns my behavior, not yours.
I gave my word. If you become selfish or cowardly, if you treat me unfairly, perhaps even if you break your own rules, that tells us something about you. It doesn't necessarily alter what I said I would do.
I can see the appeal of that. It also keeps every disappointed person from turning into an attorney looking for the clause that gets him out of the contract.
But I can't quite get there.
An oath to an organization isn't made into empty space. There was an arrangement. I accepted extraordinary obligations because membership carried something in return. That doesn't mean the arrangement was equal. It doesn't mean leadership had the same risks as everyone below them, or that anybody promised to be nice. The hierarchy and the risks were part of the bargain.
What seems important to me is that the arrangement remain recognizably the arrangement I joined.
Suppose I had joined an organization with a hierarchy, dangers and rules I would now find appalling. Prison was always an accepted risk. I knew that. I agreed to keep quiet if arrested and not cooperate. I may even have understood that if somebody had to take the fall, the hierarchy wasn't designed to make sure risk landed equally.
Then prison isn't evidence that the bargain failed. Neither is unfairness necessarily evidence that it failed. Those things may have been part of what I knowingly accepted.
But suppose the people above me begin violating rules the organization itself treated as fundamental. Maybe someone cooperates secretly with law enforcement while demanding silence from everyone below him. Maybe leadership starts engaging in conduct the organization expressly prohibited because it exposed everybody to risks the rules were designed to contain. The particular violation matters less to my question than the structure of it: the authority is breaking the rules from which it still claims the right to command me.
Now I have a harder time saying nothing has changed.
Not because more risk landed on me. I may have explicitly agreed to carry more risk. The problem is that I am being told the rules remain absolutely binding in my direction by people who no longer consider those same rules binding in theirs.
That is where my friend's version of the oath and mine finally separate.
You think I swore loyalty to the organization itself. I think I swore loyalty to an organization whose right to command me depended, at least partly, on the rules that made it the organization I joined.
Every long relationship contains failures. People disappoint each other. Rules get bent. Promises get broken. If every breach releases everybody from every obligation, there isn't much point making serious promises in the first place.
So somewhere between “you annoyed me” and “you destroyed the relationship” there has to be a meaningful distinction.
I don't have a clean line for it.
I'm increasingly suspicious of clean lines anyway.
Three possibilities, none entirely comfortable
As I kept arguing, I could see at least three positions.
My friend's is the hardest: I promised my conduct. Your failure does not release me from my word.
The second is closer to mine: some promises are relational. If you fundamentally destroy the arrangement that gave you a claim on my loyalty, you can't keep invoking that arrangement to demand my obedience.
But there is a third possibility that makes the whole thing wobble again.
Maybe nobody breached the arrangement at all.
Maybe I changed.
Maybe I discovered something I can no longer tolerate, or my moral judgment changed, or another obligation became more important than the one I accepted years ago. I may eventually decide that keeping my oath would require me to do something I now believe I should not do.
Then perhaps I should break it.
But I don't think I get to say the oath disappeared.
The honorable act may actually be disloyal.
I like that idea considerably less than a world in which all the virtues politely agree with each other, but I think it may be closer to reality.
Sometimes telling the truth betrays a confidence. Sometimes loyalty to an institution requires opposing the person running it. Sometimes conscience requires disobedience. We don't get to redefine all the words afterward so whichever choice we made turns out to have been loyal, honest, obedient and honorable at the same time.
Sometimes we chose one claim over another.
And choosing cost something.
That was when the argument changed again for me. Maybe the important question wasn't simply how strong the oath was.
Maybe it was what the oath was actually to.
When loyalties stop cooperating
A soldier can be loyal to a commander, fellow soldiers, the military, the Constitution and the country at the same time. Usually there is no reason to decide which one comes first.
Until there is.
Stories use this conflict constantly because we understand it almost immediately. A Few Good Men works because military loyalty makes sense. So do duty, law, truth and loyalty to fellow Marines. The pressure comes when those obligations stop pointing in the same direction.
And then Brutus wandered into my thinking, which seems almost unfair because there may be no more famous example of competing loyalty.
Whatever we think about the historical Brutus, the story that survived isn't powerful because Caesar was merely a political obstacle. Caesar was friend, benefactor and leader. Brutus claimed another loyalty—to Rome and the Republic—above the personal one.
That doesn't make the betrayal disappear.
The betrayal is what gives the choice its cost.
Conflict discovers hierarchy.
We can say we value family, country, friendship, law, conscience, loyalty, truth, faith, liberty and any number of other things. Most of the time they are considerate enough not to demand opposite things from us at exactly the same moment.
When they do, we find out whether our list had an order.
Promises and future me
There is another part of this I hadn't really thought about before.
I value agency rather highly. I don't like someone else deciding which choices are mine to make. Yet a serious promise is an exercise of agency that deliberately removes some future choices.
Present Me is telling Future Me that she doesn't get to reconsider this merely because reconsidering becomes attractive.
That's part of what gives the promise value.
Marriage vows are an obvious example. Longevity itself provides something valuable: continuity, trust, shared history, stability, a life built over time. A marriage that could be abandoned whenever one person became difficult, sick, disappointing or inconvenient wouldn't provide much of what makes the long promise worth having.
That doesn't mean every marriage should continue under every imaginable circumstance. Nor does leaving automatically produce a safer or easier life. The alternatives outside a relationship carry their own risks and costs, and those change too.
What matters for this argument is something simpler. When I voluntarily restrict my future choices, I am not necessarily giving those choices away into a void. I am placing them inside a relationship that I expect, however imperfectly, to remain recognizably the thing I committed myself to.
Not perfect.
Not painless.
Not without serious sacrifice.
Recognizable.
I think that's the word I kept reaching for.
Power isn't quite enough
This entire argument started with the Mafia, so power is rather difficult to miss.
By then I had become less interested in deciding whether that particular man's choice was justified than in the problem his explanation had exposed. What, exactly, had the oath entitled the organization to demand from him—and what happened to that claim if the organization itself stopped honoring the rules that gave it authority?
The organization can reward loyalty and punish betrayal. It can provide money, protection and status. It can also make leaving extraordinarily dangerous.
Power explains a great deal about why people comply.
But it doesn't quite explain what interested me about the oath.
If I obey only because you will hurt me if I refuse, we're mostly talking about coercion. The more interesting question is why I believe you have a legitimate claim on me even when you aren't standing there forcing me to comply.
Why do I think I should obey?
Because I gave my word? Because you kept yours? Because I belong to the group? Because its rules give you authority? Because keeping promises is itself one of my principles?
And what happens when something else I believe I owe suddenly points the other way?
That question gets large rather quickly. Kings and constitutions. Commanders and armies. Political parties and principles. Parents and adult children. Friends and confidences. Citizens and countries.
History is full of people obeying when resistance was possible and resisting when obedience would have been safer.
Power tells us a great deal about what people can be made to do.
It doesn't always tell us what they believe they ought to do.
The highest claim
I started out thinking that if circumstances changed enough, an oath might no longer obligate me.
I still think that's possible. I just no longer think “circumstances changed” tells me nearly enough.
Changed circumstances are often exactly why we make promises. A serious oath should survive changed preference, hardship and some very unpleasant consequences. Otherwise it isn't doing much work.
What I can't accept is the opposite extreme: that making a promise gives the other side unlimited permission to make the relationship unrecognizable while continuing to demand every sacrifice contained in my original bargain.
And between those positions sits judgment, which is annoying because judgment gives us plenty of room to fool ourselves.
Maybe the other side really did destroy the relationship that supported the obligation. Maybe it didn't, but something else acquired a higher claim and I knowingly broke my word. Maybe I simply wanted out and found myself a very attractive argument.
I should at least be honest about which claim I'm making.
So now I find myself asking different questions. What did I actually promise? Which risks did I knowingly accept? What did the arrangement give in return? What changed—and did it make the bargain harder or make it a different bargain?
And if the bargain is still recognizably intact but I choose something else anyway, can I admit that I broke my word and still believe I made the right choice?
That seems harder than deciding whether “an oath is an oath.”
But it also seems more useful.
Because perhaps we don't really know what has the highest claim on us while all our loyalties are cooperating.
Conflict is when we find out.