Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Become a Motivational Speaker

Here is a list of sure fire ways to become an inspiration and launch your career as a motivational speaker. Get Fat Get Addicted to Drugs or Booze Kill Some One Take Advantage of People I've noticed this as a popular trend over the years.  If you can manage to make a complete wreck of your life, then correct and clean up this mess you've created, you will earn the right to tell other people the secrets and methods of how not to do what you did, or correct their own mess, which can lead to a very enriching career as a motivational speaker.   Their is no shortage of examples out there. The Formula to Motivational Speaking get fat, have surgery to loose weight, become inspiration do drugs, become drug addict, almost die, get clean, become an inspiration have one drink, drink more, do something stupid, self profess being alcoholic, stop drinking, become inspiration kill someone, go to prison, come out, tell people killing is bad, become inspiration build company from scratch, rob ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Goals Are For Losers. Happy New Year

I've got some doodles, but been really busy, gave my scanning printer to my wife who has her office on another floor of the house.  So it hasn't been convenient to get anything scanned in to up load.  I did these scans and forgot to do them at gray scale rather than b/w.  So they are a bit sketchy, but I just don't have the motivation to go re-scan them. If you are older than 40 most likely you've seen the Bugs Bunny cartoons with the martian that keeps trying to blow up Earth, then you get this reference. If you've ever read Scott Adams', Dilbert creator and cartoonist, book "How To Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big" then you will get this reference about goals are for losers. I'm toying around with giving Earl a different nose.  The thought came to me because I have a greeting card for sale on  Boon Greeting Cards , that is a top seller during Valentine's Day season where the guy looks similar to Earl but has a different nose.  Thou...
Post a Comment
Read more

Departure

My mother reached down, straightened my tie and told me to go on outside and wait by the car. My sister soon joined me, dressed in a typical 1970’s plaid dress, knee socks and black buckle shoes. The sun had just started to rise on this late summer day in the suburbs of Washington, DC.  Me being all of six years old and my four year old sister, dressed to the nines standing in the driveway next to the family’s light blue Volkswagen Beetle must have been a sight of curiosity for the neighbor out walking his dog before leaving for work.  He must have known, although we were in our Sunday best, church was not our destination. Soon our mother appeared dressed in the latest seasonal fashion and in keeping with mine and my sister’s attire.  She pushed the storm door open and stepped to the side of the small concrete stoop to hold the door open for our father to emerge.  He was in a brownish suit with a perfectly coordinated tie that was classic seventies, ironing boa...
Post a Comment
Read more