How - Dov Seidman [44]
Rules are rules, but unlike our desire to connect with others and our tendency toward value-based thinking, our brains are not hardwired for rules. They are a social phenomenon.
We grow up as children in a world of external rules—“Don’t touch the stove” or “Don’t run into the street”—determined and administered by their parents and accepted, for the most part, on faith. As we get a little older, we begin to incorporate rule formation into our imaginative play. At first, those rules are in our complete self-interest. “Okay, the rule is you can’t tag me!” We form rules much as we experience them, as expressions of limits imposed by others—in other words, what mommy and daddy want. Pretty soon, though, we begin to realize that our friends don’t like rules imposed on them any more than we do, and so, in the interest of getting along, the rules become more neutral. We learn to “play fair.” Still later in life, most of us begin to find some joy and challenge in playing within the rules. Checkers becomes fun because pieces can only do certain things at certain times, card games add more complexity, games like chess and Go add nearly infinitely more, and sports add specific parameters to physical activity. The relationship to rules that we individually hold by the time we become adults is deeply informed by these early experiences with rule formation and group play.
Civilization itself developed along similarly organic lines, as adults developed ever more complex rules in response to the pressures of living together. We began in small tribes and, as our tribes grew in size and interrelationships became more complex, they began to invent rules to guide, manage, and sometimes control each other. Rules became codified in the form of laws, like the tax code, designed by a cadre of leaders and held up as the structure of civil society. To this day rules, in one way or another, govern the spaces between us, and as we discussed earlier, serve us well in many areas. However, as we begin to consider in depth the new thinking needed to succeed in a world of HOW, we need to examine more deeply our relationship to rules, how our thinking about them helps us and, sometimes, holds us back.
RULES AS PROXIES
Why do we employ rules as proxies? Because rules seem efficient, and modern society (and industrial age capitalism) was built on the foundations of efficiency. Most democratic societies, for example, confer the right to vote based on age. In the United States it is 18, in Japan it is 20, and in many other countries it is 21.3 (The right to vote at 21 also originates in long-forgotten feudal habits—it was the English age for knighthood.) Age, however, does not necessarily correlate to a person’s intelligence, maturity, or sense of civic duty, qualities that arguably comprise a much better standard by which to judge a person’s qualification to vote. If you want to hold an election that will produce the best possible outcome for society, as judged by its ability to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people, you would allow only mature, civically responsible citizens to vote. Instead, we choose a proxy—age—as an objective, easily quantifiable substitute for intelligence and civic-mindedness, and hope that this somewhat arbitrary marker includes enough quality voters to get a good representative government. There are, however, many 25-year-old voters who have little idea of what comprises good government and lots of 15-year-olds with a highly developed sense of civic responsibility. By relying on a proxy rather than