Rules are for people with no goals or morals.

For people with goals, rules are necessarily being broken because they’re innovating beyond the public’s current understanding or imagination. Those with goals are often either solving unusual problems or encountering challenges or situations not covered in our existing rules. In these cases, rules are being bent, reinterpreted, or rewritten.

Those who exist simply to know and enforce the rules usually come out of the woodwork in these situations because they can’t wait to apply the rules and do what they can to stop the person breaking them.

Rules are also for the immoral. There are simply people who don’t care. They don’t consider other people, and they don’t care how many people they effect – negatively or positively – in their selfish pursuits.

We need rules to put guardrails on these people. It helps us define when they’ve colored out of the lines. And we can tell who those people are because then they color out of the lines, the other side of the line is usually clearly having a negative effect on someone else.

The majority of rules we have in place are guidelines. Most of the time, common sense would yield the same result. But because there’s a rule, we can technically enforce it against someone who skirts it.

The rule says you can’t cross until the crosswalk light changes. But if there are no cars visible for a half mile in any direction, common sense would say cross. The rule exists to create order when multiple people with multiple agendas are present.

But when you’re all alone, the rule doesn’t necessarily apply.

Look for the person who insists the rule be followed, no matter the situation, and I’ll show you either a person from the Pacific Northwest or a liberal (which may be saying the same thing).