I talked about how a principle is better than a rule, but that any sufficiently developed society also needs rules. Why?
The easiest way to convince your inner libertarian that some rules are needed (and yes, I know libertarians believe in some rules) is to do a thought experiment.
Let’s say you and 1,000 of your friends (to get enough genetic variety) decide to move to a large desert island chain and start a new civilization from scratch. Being the no-rules type you start out with no rules. Each family sets up their own farm and all is well.
Until one person murders another and takes his land. Hmm..that’s not good. But how do you stop it from happening again? I mean, it already happened, so relying on people’s conscience didn’t work so well the first time. So you create a rule — call it a law — that says no murdering.
Too extreme? OK, let’s say a fellow putting up his barn dies when his roof collapses. His neighbors see he tried to skimp on the design, and he did it dangerously, and thus died. Then another woman does the same with her barn roof, and also dies. Then another dies.
After a while the survivors get the idea that this roof shortcut ain’t such a great idea. So they say, don’t do that shortcut any more, make safe roofs. But who are you to tell them what to do? Unless you can enforce a rule (police, OSHA, whatever you decide), a rule by itself is not sufficient. You have to have a way to enforce the rule or else people who don’t follow rules won’t.
If you are a principled person, you can scoff all you want about not needing rules, and truly you don’t need those rules in your own life, but can you honestly say that every other person on Earth is as principled as you?
If not, then we had better have a rule that says you can only drive one direction on the highway, and not put poison in each other’s orange juice, and so on. Rules are how civilization becomes, uh, civilized instead of staying in the Wild West stage of development.
It’s a choice we make as civilized people. And yes, sometimes rules go too far and have to be trimmed from being insanely annoying, but every rule began when someone had a roof fall on her head, and someone else said, hey maybe that wasn’t so smart.
So we live with rules, but as I will continue to write, rules are the base level of behavior. We can live on a higher level.