I went for a surf this morning, vaguely aware of a notion that fibreglass boards shouldn’t be used at the north end of Bondi. In my mind it was less of a rule and more of a guideline. There are no signs announcing it and it seems to depend on the busyness of the beach and the size of the swell. I was wrong – it may as well have been dogma.
Australia, the sunburnt country, the land of the young and free, of the jumbuck-stealing swagman and the stagecoach-robbing Ned Kelly, is actually a country controlled by what I like to call rules-Nazis. They were out in force at Bondi, rushing in to attack me like white blood cells fighting off a virus.
Ironically, the only people who confronted me about it were those guilty of breaching courtesies which had a direct impact on their safety and mine. These self-righteous, self-appointed Gestapo had ignored real safety measures like surfing with a leash and not ‘dropping in’. The people policing me were more of a danger to others than I was!
Other countries do it differently. Italian culture treats hard and fast, rational, no-degree-of-doubt rules as guidelines. Having worked closely with this community, I can testify that in some instances, they’ve gone a step too far, but there are pros and cons to both the lenient and the stricter rule interpretations. A culture becomes unhealthy when people don’t continually test the validity and soundness of the rules, and start attacking the player, not the ball. Our habit of doing so may be influenced by our football codes. Rugby and AFL both allow you to attack the player while they are holding the ball. Italians prefer soccer (football) where any attack on the player is swiftly punished, regardless of possession. Again taking it a step too far, such countries profit immorally from artistic manipulation of the rules. On the other hand, there is something inherently healthy about a rule that only allows you to attack the ball not the player. We should approach the contest of ideas in the same way.
The British are an interesting edge case as their sporting preferences could even be distributed by classes; the upper class prefers rugby and the middle and lower classes favour soccer. The British prevalence to be indirect may stem from the influence of soccer, while we Aussies only show remorse when a player is attacked ‘head high’.
Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of upsides to the Rugby-inspired, Aussie way of doing things. Direct and easy to understand communication and less of a need for backstabbing (as we tend to do it head-on), along with a mostly well-functioning and law-abiding society means that our rules have generally been unreactive and thoroughly thought through. But following the rules to the letter of the law only works with good rules.
As our education standards continue to decline and our rules are made more reactively, our rule buckets will continue to spring holes. We will increasingly need checking mechanisms and patching devices, but our unchanging inclination is based on a non-adaptive all trusting model. Australian’s approach to rules will need to change if the quality of the rule-making continues to deteriorate.
Even with well-educated, uncorrupted, and minimally ideological rule makers, the problem with rules is that their creators generally haven’t considered all the variables at play. Human design inevitably isn’t ‘right first time‘, so the scientific and engineering methods were constructed to allow us to test our first guess and see where it comes up short. Typically, these methods continually question the original thesis after the ‘fact‘ (or most recent conclusion), revising it where needed. Thankfully, some rules, like those of Isaac Newton, have stood the test of time after continual testing. These eventually became laws, signifying that they are practical interpretations of objective truth. Nowadays, objective truth has become pariah, where some identify their ‘own truth‘ on things ranging from gender to gravity. Thankfully they aren’t designing bridges and space shuttles, yet.
The Australian approach doesn’t take rule-making inaccuracy or maintenance into account. Our approach is an unthinking fervent belief in the rule and a vehement desire to eradicate anything that broaches it, like a first settler mum with a snake in her wood hut, or a skinny, emotionally manipulative bearded man on a foamy at North Bondi. Most people’s natural response to such unthinking reactionaries is to do the opposite of what they want. But rebellion isn’t always the answer and anarchy is even worse.
In science and engineering, proportional integrative derivative (PID) controllers are used to adapt to situations where reality isn’t following the rules. They are based on numbers and thus, represent absolute objective truth. It’s like Australians need to fine-tune their PID control, increasing their proportional gain by considering that perhaps a fibreglass board on an empty beach might have less severe consequences than a company forcibly applying an untested product on the masses without liability. Reducing their integral gain by realising that times have changed and our rule makes are probably more poorly educated, corrupt, and ideological than those who made our country what it is, and greatly reducing their derivative gain by freaking out less over a change in circumstances and realising that not all problems can be solved by buying up the entire toilet paper isle of the supermarket.
Ill-fitting or badly though out rules are useless, or worse, dangerous. We need to take a two-pronged approach to improve them. First, improving our rule makers and, second, improving our rule followers.
We could improve our rule makers by educating them on the effects of certain ways of thought. Teaching school kids the fallacy of the Marx-derived ‘us and them’ ideologies and teaching them it’s all pervading influence of modern institutions. Bringing home this reality, perhaps when they are older, the syllabus could take them on a virtual tour of the Gulags, while writing essays on the murderous influence of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, seeing how the oversimplification of ‘us and them’ identity politics leads to absolute slaughter to the order of hundreds of millions.
We could teach the unbelievable steps the West took by incorporating Christian principles like putting God first, loving one another as we love ourselves, turning the other cheek, and dying to self before being resurrected. We could reduce rule-makers’ susceptibility to corruption and inject them with a backbone, reducing their dependence on securing a highly paid corporate board position after their political career by ensuring they will have the means to support their family even if they take a principled stand in politics.
Improving our rule-following happens naturally when we all realise that we are in fact rule-makers. By strength testing while obeying a rule, we shape it by helping it evolve into something that can handle the enormous complexity that it will be forced to confront. Paradoxically, and simultaneously, we become more aware that which we all intuitively know, culture comes down from the top and we are reliant on good leaders. Good leaders set good cultures which foster good followers. Good leaders create good rules which stand up to sustained testing, earning the right to be patrolled by followers.
Paul Batten is the founder of LifeMapp and is a former senior vehicle dynamics engineer at McLaren Automotive.
