Imagine the scene: you are from another world and other realm of experience. You studied Earth from afar and chosen Earth as the focus for your studies. Earth has much to offer a learner of your means, so much that you have undertaken a shaman journey to immerse yourself in the goings-on of these earthlings.
You stumble across scenes of conflict about money. These earthlings appear to be sharing something called food and hosting something called lodging with each other, but not without conflict if you follow the stories they offer. There are exchanges of false ideas between the pairs of characters in many instances, as if they are being placed in a stock story both parties know but can’t negotiate their way out of as it doesn’t fit their often twisted imbalanced versions of reality.
Wars are fought, reconciliation sought peace. Rational accounting of what each is owed the other. A settlement is then made between them. It is then called a liquidation agreement and recorded in some vault called a court. Edification to an audience. Your audience. Your craft has taken you far beyond the other planets. Don’t you know? You’ve been there in another life, this time the life of a common Aussie lawyer having more than a passing interest in best practices in structured finance. Liquidation agreements have their own jargon. Humans are a superstitious lot. They even take on the linguistic convention of using the word ‘liquidation’, a bit like what happens when you wash out the empty can you’ve bitten into. Funny, but once you get behind the program, you see they mean an orderly wrapped up. It’s not about a fight. It’s not about being wronged, nor is it about the money. It is about closure, to move on in peace with a fresh start.
I can only wonder if aliens, upon engaging the humans in a conflict including contractual rights and obligations, would arrive at the same result. Simply put, liquidation agreements are a rather clever way to set aside conflict, make final adjustment of the accounts and best of all, use prescribed and defined language to form an understanding between the parties. Linguistic, in fact, just like agreement of non-agreement, which the learned so eloquently put. The net is that liquidations agreements are a thing, like learning is and exploration, you must give them due study as regimes of they are reflective in the passion of the individual. Earthlings have a long history of liquidity and are into the second oldest profession of contracts. Like the oldest profession being that of honesty, but in both cases, the mantra is integrated into the human psyche.
Humans require closure from loss and together they share the same moral principles regarding the honouring of obligations and the right to be freed of them, where wrong has occurred or injustice exists. Humans will not find closure if an adversary walks away scot-free; even if by taking the gain of the loss of another, as the saying goes, there will be no peace. What Earthlings seem not to see, is the influence of culture. Would an alien produce its own agenda from a web of Earthling ideas and thinking on the subject of money and personal or business relationships, as worded in their typical definitions of a ‘liquidation agreement’? What would an alien think if received a text full of words and the scenarios that the Earthlings would attach to that text? Or is there a communal lore about the things that humans do? Or is it treated like a business plan, neither here nor there, but fits together like peas and carrots?
Stripped down to the essentials, would the alien not simply ignore the language and make its own choice from its own learning? Probably yes, except for one compelling reason. Without natural law – that is, the universal ordering of cause and effect as natural in a set of scenarios for that scenario – it is difficult to reach a collective wisdom that can be shared among planets. The bottom line of the liquidated agreement is that it is a simple process. The effect of a liquidation agreement is that the parties enter into an assessment of the settlement of their dealings and thereafter all parties agree to put that loss behind them. You work it out with an Earthly person and you walk away knowing that the same treaty between the parties will endure and as earthling nature has it, also resonate with a whole stack of other life forms. Now here is the punch line. All parties agree to be bound by that decision.
For more information on the legal aspects of liquidation agreements, you can visit Wikipedia.