Dogs and Bones
13th January 2025
ZMan is delightfully dyspeptic today.
“A dog who will bring a bone will carry a bone” is an old-time expression that usually is meant to say that someone who will steal for you will steal from you. More generally it means that an immoral person on your side will eventually let you down or go over on the other side. The underlying assumption is that even in an adversarial environment, there are rules. The person who violates those rules can never be trusted, even when their rule breaking favors you.
This “lack of a code” lies at the heart of the traitor in wartime. The person who makes a deal with the enemy is harshly punished, usually executed, not because of the practical aspects of their crime. It is not that they gave the enemy an advantage or useful information. It is that they violated the code that holds everyone together in the fight. They have excluded themselves from the company of men who can be trusted to uphold the code when no one is looking.