Beer and Sympathy

Rules

Since the very dawn of time, mankind (and indeed all life on earth) has been striving. At the time it seemed to make sense, although noone was ever really sure what it was that mankind was striving towards. When that very first Devonian fish decided to take the first tentative steps out of the water, it could little imagine that it was just one link in the long, twisted chain that would lead towards the creation of a society that would eventually invent the 12 hour “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” TV1 marathon.

So what was it then, that our pre-historic ancestors were driven by? For 200 years it has been generally accepted that over the millenia evolution was driven by competition. By the need to survive. People everywhere were led to believe that the reason for existence is simply to
propogate your DNA as far and wide as possible.

Technology then, has also followed a similar course to evolution. If we are to believe Darwin, and extend the metaphor a little bit, then technology is simply a means of spreading our seed even futher than ever before. This has been the popular theory for the last 200 years.

However, recent reaserach of mine has begun to uncover a startling trend. There seems to be some kind of sinister trend behind all this. First of all, the evolution of humans. Darwin would have us believe that we got to the top of the food chain by virtue of our opposable thumbs, superior brain power, and charming good looks. But there is one other thing that sets humans out from the rest. Rules.

Before man, there were no rules. Nature didn’t have speed limits, or tax collectors, or instructions on how to open a can of tomatoes. And if there is one thing that nature abhors more than a vacuum, it is anarchy.

The first celebrated rule-maker was Moses. Since he walked down from a mountain clutching a couple of bits of rock, man has been fascinated by rules. The Greeks developed rules of mathematics and democracy. The Romans developed road rules. The British developed rules about which fork to use for your entree.

Mankind’s greatest discoveries of the last couple of centuries - the steam engine, automobiles, fight - they all come with a staggeringly large number of rules. On a simple walk around the block I am confronted with all sorts of rules. Stop. No Parking. Dogs much be on a leash. No entry. Trespassers will be prosecuted. The list goes on.

Competitive sports are another great example. Everyone loves to know all the rules of as many sports as possible. Joe Armchair probably knows more about cricket’s mysterious and never-used Law 31 than any of the Australian team.

But why do we love rules? Why have we spent the past 10000 years developing new and more intricate handbooks of what we can and can’t do?

The answer is simple. Without rules, life is dull. What is the point of sneaking into a concert when everyone else just walks in the front door? Why bother streaking across an oval in front of a thousand people is no-one is going to chase after you and try to crash tackle you? How can you enjoy illicit drugs if they are available at Coles? You can’t.

Just to recap - people like rules. People like breaking rules. But there’s one thing we don’t like: people who try to enforce rules.

I’ve had my fair share of run-ins with the man. On one memorable occasion, as I was being escorted stark naked through the university, it struck me that people who like enforcing the rules are a little bit different from the rest of us. They don’t care about the rules. For them, there is no glory in trying to bend the rules as far as possible. All they want is power, and rules are a means of accessing that power.

Fortunately, these kinds of people are generally very stupid, so the security guard escorting me at the time kindly allowed me to climb onto a roof to retrieve my pants. I did not return.

I have a quick message for all members of the law-enforcement profession. Laws are just rules. Rules form part of a game. Stop trying to fuck up my game! In life, rules are just threads. The winner is the person who can take all these threads and knit them together to form a nice warm scarf.

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