A half century ago, a handshake was a contract. If two people made an agreement, it did not need a courtroom full of attorneys to make it legal. This was true in personal and in business matters. As World War II faded into the background and formal religions like Christianity exert less influence on society because of the focus on the separation of church and state, a new policy has emerged.
Somewhere in the late sixties and early seventies, the phrase moved from being "a man's word is his bond" to "if it isn't in writing, it wasn't said, and it didn't happen." This does not mean that there are no longer any trustworthy people in the world. In fact, there are many people who could still use the old maxim.
The reality is that there are probably about as many people who believe that if it was agreed to verbally, it should be the way it is. These good people have had to go into defensive mode to protect themselves. Society becomes more litigious every day. Greedy people believing that the shortest route to financial security is through a lawsuit have spoiled the easygoing ways of years ago.
The problem runs something like this. If nine out of ten people can be trusted, you may go for years without an incident without writing down and notarizing every agreement that you make. The odds being pretty long on getting burned by the bad guy. This is why many stores still accept paper checks. The store knows that nearly everyone that comes through the line is going to write a good check.
However, for the small business owner, the one out of 40 or 50 people who write bad checks can make a big enough dent in the profits to sink the business if it runs on a shoestring. To protect themselves from the rare bad check, the business is forced to convert to debit cards and those machines that void the check and process it like a debit. Those who would still like to just write the check and move on are all punished because of the lack of integrity found in a few.
Multiply these small numbers by the hundreds of millions of transactions, and it becomes obvious that this is a big problem in a nation of 300 million people where most of the people have hundreds of transactions during the course of a single year.
The same scenario plays out for nearly every facet of life. It might be an agreement about whether to cut down a tree on the property line between two neighbors. It could be a deal to sell an item at a certain price and learning that it might be worth more to someone else.
If it has not been written down, most people today do not see it as a commitment if it is to their advantage. A man's word is no longer his bond because we have opted for the security of the written word over the spoken word. If the tape is not running to record what we say, it is the norm today to assume that it was never said.
