Broken Promises

"After 5 consecutive non-critical hits, your chance to critically hit is increased to 100% for 3 seconds." That's the special stat for the "Ring of Broken Promises," a legendary ring you can equip on your character in the action role-playing game Diablo 3.

It's a useless ring though. The chance that your character performs 5 consecutive non-critical hits is almost zero, because "critical hit chance" is one of the first stats you'll want to maximize on almost all builds, and you'll aim for an absolute minimum of 30-40% critical hit chance. The Ring of Broken Promises is useless in the game, as are broken promises in real life. In real life and in business you'll want to surround yourself with people who keep their promises, and because those people will have the same expectation, you'll want to aim to keep your promises as well.

A promise is a valuable thing and should be treated as such. We all make promises all the time. "I'll be there, you can count on me!" "Yes, I'll take out the garbage after dinner." We make small and big promises in all meaningful relationships we have with others, and we also make promises to ourselves. In fact, a promise to someone else is a promise to ourselves to see it through. And each time we break a promise, it creates a tiny fissure in our relationships. Not keeping our promises communicates to the other (and ourselves) that we don't value them, that we've prioritized something or someone else over them. Too much broken promises will break a relationship, or at the very least demote the source of those broken promises in the hierarchy of our relationships. Trust is at the very foundation of those relationships and too many broken promises will render that trust null and void.

In business this trust is formalized in written promises, backed by law. There are entire law-firms who specialize in contract law. But even laws in general are a formalization of the trust we grant and expect from each other. We must be able to trust others to not steal our stuff, and to not randomly shoot us or our children. When a society experiences sees these basic promises being broken often enough, it's a sure sign it's falling apart. And when the leading figures, the prominent individuals in that society fail to keep their word time after time again, there's no chance whatsoever of rebuilding the trust lost. Right now it's getting worse; we keep putting our trust in people and institutions we know to be untrustworthy. We've become desensitized to the lack of promises kept by our peers and our leaders.

As it happens, the world's richest man, the "real life Iron Man" Elon Musk, is a telling example of of this phenomenon. He's the quintessential master of overpromising and underdelivering. He never invented anything. He's never started a business on his own. He didn't found Tesla. He doesn't design space ships. He has no clue what he's talking about when discussing Neuralink's brain-chip. And he keeps breaking his promises. I've never caught him keeping a single one of his wild promises. Now, I love science and science fiction, and I'd like to believe Musk's promises of self-driving cars, brain-chips that will cure all kinds of mental illnesses and grant us x-ray vision, colonizing Mars in our lifetime and so on, but they're just promises made to maintain an image. Musk's only job is to maintain that image in order to pump up the stock-price and to keep investors and taxpayers pouring money into his kingdom of broken promises.

You might think that I'm just saying all this, that Elon Musk is in fact the wonder-child he's painted as in the media. If so, I'd like to invite you to watch the video series "Debunking Elon Musk" that's linked below. It's quite long, but that's only because the list of untruths and broken promises about and from this man is extensive. He's a figurehead in a society that's falling apart at its seams. He shows us that braking promises, that being untrustworthy isn't punished but rewarded. He's the last role-model any functional society needs. "But why not make an example out of politicians?" That's a good question; we all know that they are also masters of broken promises. I pick Elon Musk because he is a role-model for many people, unlike our politicians. Musk represents something many people aspire to one day become, unlike our politicians. And people like Musk have far more influence on us than our politicians, because politicians work for him, not for us. We despise politicians for their lies, Musk's lies we adore; both are signs that we live in a society of broken promises.

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