My take on: The Rules of Behavior

*Note: This article is not intended to refer to criminal law, or any other type of law governing society. This article is about behavioral ethics only.

On the very top sheet of my teacher's easel paper pad, I remember my kindergarten list of rules as clearly as though they had been etched in colorful permanent markers across my brain. We all helped write them, we all knew them well and like the good little Daddy's girls and Mama's boys that we were, we followed them.

One and a half decades later, I see a clear line of comparison between the rules at that time in my life and the rules at this one. The difference is quantitative; at age 5 I knew of eight rules, total. One set. Of course, I followed them unquestioningly, for there simply was no available alternative method of behavior with which to adhere. For every situation, a single behavioral proscription was clearly correct, and thinking was made easy: I am mad at Brodie, but I will not hit Brodie in the nose. I will ask him politely what he did with my crayon. Case closed, solved, over. The same rule could be applied across the board - if I can't hit Brodie in the nose when I'm mad, then despite my observation that Butterfly Princess Barbie is absent at the most important ball of the year, my sister Sarah is also safe on this front (*Note: This is hypothetical, as my sister would energetically counter this statement using a host of lasting visual evidence.)

But things just get so damned complicated after kindergarten ends, and especially when high school ends, too. The question of which rules we follow must now be prefaced with an answer to the questions of what rules we even know, what kinds of orders we organize them into and which ones take precedence. We don't have a single-page code of reference; we have hundreds and thousands of contradictory pieces of advice pointing us in infinite directions. We have school policies, honor codes, family rules, the rules of love and friendship, religious codes, rules of competition/"the game," differing classroom rules, rules of thumb, club policies, criminal laws from state to state and socially inappropriate behaviors overlapping and crashing into one another in such a way that most of our behavior is just plain situational guesswork.

For every situation, take your pick, we have no reference because our understanding is already concrete. Rules are so pervasive into and exhaustive of everything that we do and possibly can do, that all social action is guaranteed to be in accordance with at least one set; one really can never be "wrong." We all work hard to avoid punishment, and rightly so, but is punishment a frequent enough reality to render by-the-books rule-adhesion unlike the behavior of Pavlovian dogs?

We on this campus are a controlled population, and no one need come in with beating sticks or tasers; yet each of us is a unique formulator of his or her own behavioral code, and these are quilted codes of mismatched patches that we tear up regularly just to re-sew. The rules of etiquette are ultimately questions of preference: What rules serve you best and when? We pick them up and drop them, we move them around and vote new daily favorites. We will lie to get out of commitments, help a friend cheat on a test, we will park where we want and appeal tickets we deserve, we will cut lines and we will defend those we care about even when the rules they followed are the ones we (currently) condemn. Every rule has an equally valid opposite, and as much as the codes and rules of behavior have shaped us, we shape them right back everyday through arbitrary implementation.

Self-governance takes place within the external and internal boundaries of every set of rules that the self has ever known, and under the supervision of these eventually inherent restrictions, preference becomes reliable. Rules are guidelines for those possessing a fundamental understanding of them, and strict adhesion blocks efforts at varied incorporation in a way that implies that this fundamental comprehension is absent. At our age, you can't reference the Almighty Easel, so just go ahead and follow your own contextual code of choice. You will never quite be wrong.