What Every 18 yr. Old Needs To Know

Going in we can see that if everyone doesn’t cooperate in our attempts to reach for a civilized society then we’re in for difficulties.  However, the more folks who follow the rules then the better our chances for reaching our goal.

But some folks don’t like our rules; they don’t ‘feel good’ about our rules, especially when those rules stop them from doing what they want to do. 

Certainly there will be rules that some won’t like.  There may be rules that no longer make sense.  There may be rules that should never have been written in the first place.  So included in our rules must be a definition for how to create new rules and how to eliminate those that no longer apply.

And indeed our rules include those definitions.  However, our ‘Founding Fathers’ purposely made that process laborious in order to try to ensure that the rules written along the way were not flippant seat-of-the-pants immediately gratifying but long-term detrimental.

Some folks don’t want to wait out the laborious process; some folks know that the rules they desire don’t have a rat’s chance of getting included into the rulebook; some folks want to keep their rules secret so that they can ‘get away with’ something without the watchful eyes of others.  Let’s not be shocked; it’s human nature; that’s the way that we human beings function.  Many among us will look for an edge.

So what will these folks do?

Some will simply ignore certain rules.  They’ll stay out from under the radar in their efforts to not get caught.  They’ll hide their shenanigans as best they can for as long as they can.  But eventually someone else who knows the rules will find out.  Then that person will be in the predicament of a few different options.  He could look the other way and allow the criminal to continue his crimes.  He could request from the criminal a piece of the action in payment for keeping his mouth shut.  He could receive from the criminal terrorizing threats, or worse.  Or he could throw caution to the wind and report the misdeeds to the authorities.

Eventually after time passes more and more folks will learn of the criminality and someone will indeed come forward and report the crimes.  And actually our civilized society depends on that eventually occurring; it depends on there being individuals who understand the necessity of playing by the rules.  Otherwise our civilized society is doomed to fail.

It is also crucial to punish those who don’t follow the rules not only to end the criminal activity of those criminals but also as a disincentive for others who might consider participating in their own criminal activity.

If too many people get away with criminal activity then we are reduced to living in an uncivilized society.  Can anyone think that we are civilized if some folks are allowed to break the rules with impunity?

But then it becomes all that much more important that our rules are the right rules, not just rules that are flippant seat-of-the-pants immediately gratifying but long-term detrimental.

Another option for those folks who don’t like the rules but don’t want to change them as they are supposed to be changed, nor do they want to experience the punishment for getting caught not following the rules, is to carefully connive, to be cleverly devious, and to set out to do ‘whatever it takes’ to manipulate the words in our rulebook to mean something that they were never intended to mean.

How might someone go about doing this?  Let’s count the ways: