Our lives have rules for everything, everything we touch is regulated.
Which is what I described as "the opposite of the greater good".
We're robotic in obedience to rules. It's in our DNA.
Hardly, to the extent the trend exists it has as much to do with culture as DNA, and you exaggerate it. Expansion of rules normally has to be relatively slow because people are reluctant to accept new types of impositions against them. The old ones become the standard default because people are used to them, so they get obeyed more often with less protests, but still almost everyone exceeds the speed limit in their car, a huge number of people drink alcohol before they are 21, tens of millions take illegal narcotics, and in all sorts of other ways don't follow the law. If we where so law abiding we wouldn't have had the US in the first place, we'd be part of the UK. If people outside the US where so differential to rules and authority we wouldn't be seeing the uprising against dictators in the Middle East and before that in some other locations.
Its not so much that we are law abiding, as we are often afraid to rock the boat. If the enforcers of the rules are powerful, we don't go against them, at least where we think they can enforce the rules, unless we get real riled up. If the legal rules are backed by social custom, then the culture enforces rules without any need for exceptional deference being in the core of our DNA, if the culture doesn't back the rules, then the rules are hard to enforce (the rules can shift the culture over time, which can have a ratcheting effect toward more control, but if it was in our DNA to obey them so much we wouldn't need the ratcheting effect).
We have layer upon layer upon layer of government and laws...
"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. "
- Alexis de Tocqueville |
