If you are an intelligent life form from outer space, what would you think if you discovered human cultures and societies were based on written contracts that have been finalized? Would you have a better understanding of our existence? Or would this make less sense to you than the complex but strangely beautiful cultural manifestations of the human race that include art, literature, philosophy and simple interaction?
In the simplest of terms, a fully executed purchase agreement is defined on earth as a contract (whether written, signed or implied) that has been completed. In other words, all parties have met their contractual agreement (the exchange of information for an agreed fee) with no loose ends after the transaction. Hal Harbor, author of the article “Understanding a Fully Executed Purchase Agreement”, states that “A sale or transaction that requires a legally binding agreement between two or more parties is said to be fully executed once both parties have signed it and fulfilled their obligations.”
If humans are dependent on exchange of information, what does this say to the extraterrestrial civilization about the way we do business? In such a society’s perfect world, human beings would contract one another in verbal agreements only – never written contracts. What if this civilization thought that by being less restrictive in how we interact with each other, we would go about our business in a more honorable way, relying on general human decency to honor our word?
If humans do not use some form of physical check and balance system to monitor our legal agreements with other human beings, how would our interactions be similar or even different to other earthly transactions (for example, an exchange of goods between two traders relying on trust)? Would we even understand that we are subject to an underlying ethical responsibility to fulfill a promise or obligation? Or would we just throw out the idea of interaction and rely on autonomy alone?
Forcing human beings to negotiate face-to-face without some sort of written and signed documentation to acknowledge the agreement would, ironically, delegitimize our interaction. After all, if we were to negotiate without the underlying truth that we are bound to an unspoken ‘contract’ of sorts (with penalties for non-fulfillment of our agreements), how many of us would ever get out of bed? It is, in fact, this social contract that forces us into a type of sub-conscious interaction that transcends cultural boundaries – one that might not ‘technically’ exist if we analyze the concept of ‘trust’ without emotional consideration.
Just as the type of non-verbal communication that alien civilizations might feel upon discovering earthlings might not make much sense to them when juxtaposed with the more rational means of human existence, so too would the concept of a fully executed purchase agreement be strange. When taken into context with exchange of goods and services, however, our legal agreements (which are the world to us on a daily basis) would likely just confuse the inhabitant of another galaxy.
As with any type of signatures, if inter-stellar beings were to witness the transaction (or the buying and selling of goods) would they begin to understand the contract-based system – or would they be tricked into thinking that we were part of some “alien” conspiracy to extract money from one another through bogus promises and transaction-based lies? Since we cannot communicate with these “aliens”, we can only guess how they would perceive the agreement and examine how it has made us who we are today.
In effect, the fully executed purchase agreements humans use to bind their transactions represent our weaknesses, strengths and social ethics. Instead of alien excursions to earth to study our unique systems, law firms like Caplan Law Group are paid to do this work on behalf of humans. Certainly, the human Gods created us in their likeness, but just as surely, so did the stars (the universe).