The Social Contract

A few weeks ago I (this is a sentence I never thought I would say) bought a car off Facebook Marketplace.

All of my previous car-buying experiences had been from family members or (exactly once) from a used-car dealer, so this was a new experience, and only after it was over did I fully appreciate how very odd it was. The seller took the chance that me and my father-in-law (who came with me for moral support and greater car knowledge) were who we said we were; we took the same chance on him. We met at his house, I test-drove the car, we went over to the bank and handled the financials and signed the title, and now I am driving this car that the seller drove for fifteen years.

There are all sorts of ways this could have gone wrong (and, as I understand about Marketplace, often does.) Yet an incredible amount of trust was extended on both sides, and nothing did.

I thought about that trust during a week where trust seemed to be in short supply. I know that so many folks I know would say that my experience showed the problems with modern society; we are not supposed to buy cars from people we never met before in places we’ve never been, but in our own web of local relationships, where we would know the context and could build trust on a firmer foundation. There’s a C. S. Lewis quote (a real one, from a letter he wrote to Bede Griffiths in 1946) that’s been making the rounds, and starts like this:

It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know.)

I also know that I may want an ideal world, but I live in this one. And in this broken time when so much is rent asunder, it felt radical to trust, but also somehow necessary. Like making one small building block in a bridge that we will be a long time building.

PS. As part of building bridges and deepening roots, I’ve started a Substack, with a very different focus from this blog but a similar commitment to human community. Check it out.

Photo by Erik Odiin on Unsplash