How - Dov Seidman [26]
And then the World Trade Center towers fell, ushering in a series of global attacks against civilians—Madrid, London, Bali, and others—that, coupled with destabilizing regional wars, left much of the world uneasy. The needs and procedures of physical security suddenly intruded into the day-to-day lives of many who had long felt safe.
This was by no means the first time a confluence of events had rocked the three legs of the stool. World War II, the Vietnam era, Watergate, and the Mideast conflict and oil crisis of the 1970s, to name a few from just the previous half-century, all brought similar disruption and instability. Boom times, tough times, corruption, and fraud were by no means new to us, but the deeply dislocating difference this time around lay in our startling new ability to see it all in real time. Much of what happens around the world is now present in our daily lives. This flood of undigested and unprocessed information bombards us minute by minute, giving us little time to regain our footing. When our stools wobble, the Certainty Gap grows, and when that happens, we reach out for reassurance, for things that can stabilize us and give us confidence to go on. We look for something to fill the gap.
THE LIMITATIONS OF RULES
To pursue our endeavors and achieve our desired success, we need certainty, consistency, and predictability, a hard floor from which to take a leap. Basketball players can jump higher than beach volleyball players can because they play on a hard wooden floor. It is much more difficult to leap high with the sand shifting beneath your feet. The Certainty Gap describes not only our internal relationship to sureness, but also our relationship to the societies in which we live. In democratic societies, we look to rules—in the form of laws—to provide the certainty, consistency, and predictability we require. In the days of fortress capitalism, we got very good at writing rules, but as the century came to a close, we began to sense that rules were letting us down.
There are good reasons for this. For one, the way we write rules often makes them inefficient when governing human conduct. Rules, of course, don’t come out of thin air. Legislatures and organizations adopt them usually to proscribe unwanted behaviors but typically in reaction to events. They lower speed limits after automobile accidents become too frequent, regulate pit bulls after a series of dog bites, or institute new expense-tracking procedures after someone is caught trying to get reimbursed for their new iPod. Rules have been established for a reason, but most people are out of touch with the rationale and spirit of why. They don’t read legislative histories and so have a thin, superficial relationship to the rules. This, given the proper set of circumstances, leads people to explore ways around them, to find loopholes. Steve Adams, for instance, is an Alaskan postal clerk who wanted to express his individuality by showing up for work wearing ties decorated with the Three Stooges and Looney Tunes characters. That didn’t sit well with his bosses, who fought with him for months before finally ordering him to follow the rules specifying permissible neckwear. So he did. Then, he examined the rules thoroughly and discovered that they contained no special prohibitions about suspenders. Now he proudly wears suspenders with “Taz,” the Tasmanian Devil, on them.6 Rules fail because you cannot write a rule to contain every possible behavior in the vast spectrum of human conduct. There will always be gray areas, and therefore, given the right circumstances, opportunities, or outside pressures, some people might be motivated to circumvent them. When they do, our typical response is to