Do rules keep us honest with ourselves?

What is the limit of what a rule can do?

I’ve been asking friends and family about their rules. It should be no surprise that the golden rule comes up often. When I hear it I reply with a question: what rule do you have to make sure you are following that rule? Which gives people pause.

Rules are easy to say and remember, but living up to them is a different problem. What good is a rule if you never follow it? Cognitive dissonance, how we can hold conflicting beliefs in our minds we are not aware of, is an important concept in rules.

While religion isn’t a central theme of this book, it is a great source for trying to understand beliefs about rules.

For example, I remember when I read Exodus from the Old Testament. One shock I had was that there were already people in the “promised land” (the Canaanites and Amalekites among others). What?!!? Why would someone promise something that someone else didn’t want to give up? And then spend significant time proclaiming “Love thy neighbor” as a commandment? Is there a commandment for hypocrisy?

Until then I’d imagined the promised land, a term referenced often in secular culture, as a peaceful place. Wouldn’t it have been easier for God to make some new, innocent, Eden inspired island, with abundant resources and great Wi-Fi, to solve this problem? Why make a promise that required any bloodshed or terror at all? And why give civilization a superficially noble story of suffering and conquest that European colonialism, including the creation of the U.S., would repeat for centuries?

In terms of rules, the story of the promised land meant that there were one set of rules for ME and another set of rules for YOU. The bible does have versions of the golden rule (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 7:12, etc.), which are conceptually upgrades, but in practice they did little to prevent, oh I don’t know, The Crusades, The Spanish Inquisition, WWI, WII, and on the list goes to the present day.

In Shlain’s Alphabet vs. The Godess, he suggests that monotheism is problematic because it is founded on the idea that some are chosen and some are not, which means there are always two sets of rules. I want to imagine polytheism was more tolerant since it diversified belief. Even if people were jerks, which they were, just figuring out who was on your team must have been exhausting, right? But that’s a question for another day.

Rules vs. Habits

To shift from trying to solve the (unsolvable) problems of religion to something far more in-line with this book project, it’s natural to point out that rules and habits are different things. A rule is an ideal, but a habit is what we actually do or don’t do. It’s fair to say that someone can both believe in the golden rule, and have terrible habits about honoring it (are any of us really self-aware?). Which raises cognitive dissonance again as a major challenge.

For example, 42% of Americans are obese, or seriously overweight. This has been a growing (pun alert) problem for decades and there are countless books, podcasts, courses and programs to help people change their habits. Yet the trend continues to get worse. Arguably there are systemic reasons that no individual can easily solve (healthy food is more expensive, convenience culture, car centric urban planning), but regardless of why, the gap between rules and habits is large and possibly growing.

We also live in peak habit advice culture. There has never been more affordable high quality advice on the psychology of habit formation. It is now one of the largest sub-genres of self-help, both for general advice and on specific kinds of habits.

But is there any evidence this has helped us have better habits? Or are we all just better informed about what we conceptually could have as habits, while in reality our habits have not changed much at all? I’d love to find some data about this.

I’m sure this leads to habit depression: feeling that habit failures are our own fault, since so much good advice exists yet we’re still struggling.

Do rules require sacrifice?

One obvious hypothesis is that we want rules for free. We want to believe in an ideal, but not pay any price for it. It makes sense that we’d want this: who wants to pay for things they don’t have to? Virtue signalling of our rules can earn social points, and the illusion of self-esteem, without actual commitment.

The optimistic part of our brains says “I want to believe I’m a good person.” But the pessimistic, or conservative part, the part that doesn’t want to take risks or waste resources, says “but can I have that belief without having to give up much?”
And in this conflict of goals we have the fuel for the gap between rules and actions.

For example, you might believe in the rule of being a good samaritan. But when you are late for work, and driving in the cold rain, and you see someone with a flat tire, do you stop to help them? How much sacrifice are you willing to pay? How convenient does it have to be for you to follow the rule vs. ignore it? How honest are you with yourself about this?

Which suggests there is a meta-rule to have for every actual rule: What is the set of criteria that decides when you follow the rule or not? And how do you measure it?

Let me know what you think of all this. Thanks.