Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to
Bob Dylan
Recently I watched yet another disturbing video in the inexhaustible (and exhausting) internet subgenre of someone-bullying-a-public-servant-over-rules-they-don’t-like. The story starts with a man and his daughter trying to enter a library only to be stopped by a librarian for not wearing a mask as required by public health policies. The video, taken by the man, shows the exchange between the librarian, who is a tiny, gray-haired woman with a spine of steel, and the man, who appears much taller given the downward angle of his camera. We never see this valiant videographer or his kid.
Whatever your feelings on the issue of Covid restrictions, this encounter seems needlessly performative. Despite his childish churlishness, though, the man is not entirely wrong. In fact, his main argument is intriguing: that the mask rule is only a rule so long as this librarian is “making the personal choice” to follow it. I have heard variations on this logic in other videos of the subgenre, but the way he frames it is distinctive in its clarity and sincerity. “This is your choice to do this,” he insists while demanding that she acknowledge her say in the matter, which we never hear her do.
His logic is sound. Rules only remain rules so long as we follow them. If everyone ignores the STOP sign on your corner, you might as well take it down for all the good it is doing. It’ll make a cool coffee table or a striking wall decoration behind the bar in your rumpus room. In the past several years we have seen a steady erosion of adherence to rules as leaders and others flaunt norms, tradition, expectations, subpoenas, laws, and even the authority of the courts. Each act of defiance, disobedience, and lawlessness that goes unchecked further undermines our social compact and weakens the coherence of society, which is a fact that seems to escape too many pundits and politicians. It is like lighting a bonfire in the middle of a frozen lake so you can bask in the warm glow.
Mmmmm. Toasty. Kerplunk!
To be sure, sometimes challenging and subverting the rules can be a force for positive change. An obvious example occurred during the Civil Rights Era when protestors staged acts of civil disobedience against unjust laws that discriminated against people for something as fundamental (and Constitutionally protected) as skin color. Certainly though, library man’s performance and others of the ilk bear little resemblance to lunch counter sit-ins, and the issue of public health mandates is undoubtedly of a different category altogether.
I rehearse all this to emphasize a point, our friend in the library’s point in fact. He is really onto something. Rules remain rules only so far as we follow and/or enforce them.
Not long ago I wrote about Bureaucratic Compulsive Disorder or BCD, the tendency of some bureaucracies (not all!) to create and adhere to arbitrary rules without regard to their logic or even the consequences.
But BCD would be nothing without its mindless enforcers: the rules fools.
Rules fools are those who impose and execute rules for their own sake. As with BCD, their accompanying mantra is something along the lines of “But this is our policy!” The sturdy librarian (who is barely audible in the video) uses a similar argument, which the man exploits. She would have done better just to tell him to leave and then repeat that until he did. By gently offering the explanation, “that is our policy,” she opens herself up to his hectoring. The fact that this particular rule exists for a plausible reason — whether you like that reason or not — becomes irrelevant once you get into an argument about its very actuality.
The librarian, though, is certainly not a rules fool — at least not in this instance. She appears to genuinely support the library’s policy as serving the public interest no matter what the man feels. Unfortunately, though, libraries can be breeding grounds for rules fools. When I was in graduate school at a large university, there was a sort of book-theft ring operating. To solve this caper, some genius decided that every bag should be searched upon departure even though there were detectors at the doors to prevent book theft. Because this was a massive library belonging to a massive university, the resulting backup at the exit could be considerable, particularly around lunch and other crunch times.
I often had library books in my bag, which I had legitimately checked out. Absurdly, when the inspectors would see the books in my bag, they would just let me pass without a word or further scrutiny, and it wasn’t because I appeared so trustworthy. (I looked like I had just come off the mountain after ten years in a cave.) In fact, they stopped no one, with library books or not, because the automated detectors were quite effective at catching any would-be thieves. Simply put, the human inspections were redundant and irrelevant. When asked why they were doing such a silly job, the bag inspectors would always reply without irony that this was the rule. Eventually they figured out that the stolen books absconded by another portal altogether, lower-floor windows probably. The rules fools, though, continued to jam up the exits for weeks before someone finally wised up and locked the windows, thus thwarting the Great Library Book Heist of 1995.
A variation on the rules fool mantra, “but that’s our policy,” is the phrase, “but it’ll set a precedent.” When I started as a vice president at one college, I found this phrase was at the ready on many tongues from the president on down. From time to time we would have a situation that seemed to warrant a waving of the rules. It could be drastic — such as a student missing a deadline due to an emergency hospitalization — or banal — a student taking the wrong class due to an advising error. These things would occasionally land on my desk for final arbitration. Whenever I made the call to waive the rule, invariably someone would call me up to warn me that we were “setting a precedent.” I had to explain — much along the lines of the man in the library — that we were only setting a precedent so long as we decided it was a precedent, that there is nothing inalienable about precedent. Precedent sounds very legalistic and threatening in a courtroom proceeding, less so when it merely means “but we don’t want to make a reasonable exception.”
BCD does not just affect bureaucracies, but it infects individuals as well, transmogrifying them into rules fools who seem to exist only to hinder progress. You may work with some of these folks — the HR office that requires you to fax documents rather than emailing or submitting them in person, the boss who insists on holding the weekly meeting even when there is no business and half of you are on vacation anyway, the business office that demands that you rent a car to travel even though it will sit at the airport for a week. Resist these fools when you can and be sure to self assess. When you are enforcing a rule, any rule, stop and ask yourself why. What is its purpose? If the answer is “because that is the rule,” then you need to recognize that you may have already joined the ranks of the rules fools. Resist.
Do you have to cope with rules foolery in your daily work? Do you find yourself enforcing rules that defy logic and explanation?
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Rules Fools