The title of this post does not mean to pose a serious question. It is somewhat obvious that the primary reason why rules exist is so that society may function – without rules to place checks and controls on the vast majority of human behavior, we may live in a nightmarish Hobbesian world, or worse yet, not exist at all. But this explanation, like virtually all explanations, tells only part of the story.
Indeed, rules are often *not* followed. Rules are broken every day. And, one might argue, all kinds of rules are broken so frequently that rulebreaking occurs much more often than the average person may surmise.
Of course we know that rules are broken quite a bit – our civil and criminal justice systems are booming industries, and always have been. But what interests me is how many broken rules go unnoticed, or if they do get noticed, remain unaccountable. Referring back to my earlier discussion on dishonesty, clandestine dishonesty – of which much rulebreaking is a subcategory – creates imperfect markets of information. People who rely on rules to be followed and on rulebreakers to be held accountable will – more often than many believe – be working with imperfect or false information. An awareness of the fact that rules are secretly and unobservably broken leads to uncertainty that is likely to result in poor decision making.
And yet! People who notice rulebreaking often ignore it, or they willfully provide themselves with too little information so that they will not see rulebreaking when it occurs. This begs the question: Why does this occur? Why do so many people intentionally look the other way when rules are broken, or intentionally deprive themselves of the ability to see when rules are being broken? I have a few thoughts on why this is, but what I am trying to come to terms with is why – in an age of so much surveillance and oversight, and so many calls for accountability and high standards (like the one in which we currently live) – are some broken rules called to widespread attention, while others are so naturally swept under the rug? Perhaps this is one of the many secondary purposes of rules – to serve as a pretext to punish people who we do not like for other, unrelated reasons. Why else would rules and the punishments for rulebreaking be so selectively applied? Actually, there are a number of answers to this question, but I will leave those discussions for another time.
{For an interesting discussion on rules, see Stone, D. (2002). Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (revised edition). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.}
