Why Do We Break The Rules?

 

What is it with humans and their; our, inability to follow rules?  Yesterday, at our community pool we had an incident that has me pondering this larger question. 

A group of guys came into the pool area with a cooler.  From the cooler they started pulling out beers in glass bottles, in addition to this they started lighting up cigarettes.  The pool rules state “No Glass Containers in the Pool Area”, “No Smoking”.   Why could they not self-police themselves and just obey the rules?  This is where society starts to breakdown.

What transpired later is not relevant to my question so I won’t elaborate further.  The simple question is why could they not just follow the rules?

You see it all the time, every day.  Speeding, tossing cigarette butts out windows (littering), using a cell phone while driving, letting kids drive golf carts, parking the wrong direction on the road, leaving a grocery cart in the middle of a parking lot, not cleaning up your dog’s shit, putting a tent up on the front section of a beach, 12 items in the 10 items max line and the list is endless.

Why are humans unable to just follow rules?  In short they aren’t.  Probably never have been.  I’m sure there was always that outlier caveperson.

When the first barrier to societal breakdown; self-policing, fails the second comes into play.  Peer pressure and community shaming to bring the outliers back in line with the expected behavior for all and provide the offenders the opportunity to self-police.  You rarely see this occur; someone who approaches the rule breaker and points out the expected behavior and rules.   Sure, some do it sometimes, you may do it sometimes but not all the time, every time…it’s exhausting.  There is not enough people who regularly witness the endless broken rules each day who step up and call out the offenders.  The failure of the majority of rule followers to not invoke this responsibility, this second barrier, continues to erode the foundation of a community. 

So little peer pressure and community shaming occurs that the outliers are emboldened to continue to thumb their noses at conformity.  Each incidence of rule breaking and each incidence of the community turning a blind eye only serves to drive a wedge further into the cracks developing in the bed stone of a stable society.  Leading eventually to a collection of individuals loosely associated only by proximity.  Just like a granite boulder being broken down into a pile of gravel.  It starts with one chip, then another until the mighty boulder can easily be sweep away.  

I didn’t pose this question rhetorically, I really don’t know.   Yes, I’ve made the personal decision in the past, and perhaps I will also in the future, to not self-police or not use my obligation to help others self-police.  I try my damnedest.  I need to try harder.  I encourage you to reflect, be aware, be emboldened to self-police and help others to self-police.   Otherwise I fear we may all find ourselves scattered and separated like gravel at the base of a mountain.