An irreversible visible act can lock in a commitment without legal enforcement

Evidence

The fictional Ukifune lives in eleventh-century Japan in the twilight of the world of the shining Prince Genji. She has left her worldly existence at court by having her head shaved, taking vows, and entering a nunnery, as a result of which she can never go back to her previous world. Cutting off hair that has taken her a lifetime to grow to many feet long is, in her society, a step that is visually, symbolically irreversible (Murasaki 1976 [ca. 1000], 1083). Ukifune therefore has little choice but to live up to her sudden commitment to her religious vows into the distant future, although that means a personally and culturally impoverished life compared with life at court. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 241

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates Hardin’s concept of a ‘convention’ as a social constraint that binds without law—the shaving makes defection practically unthinkable.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s three published articles: shaving hair as a self-binding ritual parallels the voluntary body-modification dynamics in ‘On Sacrifice’ and the irreversibility themes of the trees-as-infrastructure piece. — connects to: Sunset provisions can function as hidden self-entrenchment duplicating irrepealability — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 380; Even unenforceable vice laws retained real deterrent bite through selective enforcement — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3360
• SHARE: The Tale of Genji’s Ukifune as a pre-modern case study in commitment devices—worth sending to anyone working on sunk-cost and self-binding theory.