Do We Need More and More Rules Because People Are Getting Dumber and Dumber?
Sometimes I ask myself why in our society everything has to be regulated down to the smallest detail. But then I meet stupid people, and I understand it.
A few weeks ago, some friends invited me to a barbecue. A neighbor was also a guest. I got into a conversation with him in the course of the evening. It turned out that he offers sport boat driving license training.
At some point, he looked at me and said: “You know, I have the impression that people have become increasingly stupid in recent years.
“Why is that?” I asked, interested because I have had the same impression for a long time.
“Well,” he replied. “The other day, I had one who got all the nautical calculations wrong. I gave him zero points for these tasks, of course. When he saw that, he was eager to discuss it with me. He might not have the right solutions, but his calculations were partially correct. For this, he then demanded points. Then I explained that it is only right or wrong in marine science and nothing in between. If you calculate a ship’s course through a coral reef correctly, you will get through, and if you do it wrong, the ship will sink. No one from the crew and passengers will praise you afterward for using an almost correct calculation method. They will hold you responsible for the disaster, and rightly so.”
I had to laugh when he told me this story. “That must be a crass exception, isn’t it?” I asked him.
But he shook his head in frustration. “No, unfortunately not. People want to discuss everything. If they learn that they are not allowed to dump waste oil overboard, they ask whether this also applies if the ship sinks, and they want to get rid of the ballast. When I then explain that in this case, you simply have to do what is necessary, the question arises as to why this is not precisely regulated. The students think that there must be a clear rule for everything because otherwise, they wouldn’t know what they are allowed to do and what not.
“Seriously?” I asked. “They want more rules, not less?”
The coach explained, “They don’t just want these rules. They think they need them. And the worst thing is that they think they don’t have to bother with rules if they seem unclear or wrong. Sometimes we spend half of the classroom time on completely pointless discussions.”
This story made me think even days later. If you cannot move within a rough set of rules because you cannot answer the special cases that are not explicitly regulated with common sense, society has a problem.
But in my opinion, the problem goes much deeper today. Because people refuse to think through and understand norms and rules logically, more and more people refuse any rules.
It seems to be too exhausting to integrate into a rule-based society. To avoid this effort, people set up their own rules or insist on always being an exception themselves.
Each of us knows a thousand examples from everyday life:
I am not allowed to park here? But I am only a minute in the supermarket.
Why should I pay taxes? I do not want the state to buy XYZ with my money.
The government says we should wear masks to protect our fellow human beings? I will not let myself be forbidden to breathe freely.
These examples come from very different areas, but they all reveal the same spirit. I reject something that I do not understand, and I do not understand it because I do not make an effort to understand it.
It is precisely now in the global crisis that the danger of this attitude becomes apparent. Most governments rely on the sense of responsibility of their citizens. They trust that commandments and prohibitions will be accepted. In Germany, there have been hardly any controls for a long time to ensure that hygiene regulations are observed.
The result is another lockdown. Because a part of the population has taken the right to decide which measures are useful and which are not, the entire community is now suffering.
Now that politicians have recognized this, controls in public spaces have been massively expanded in recent days. Now penalties are also threatening. The people who have caused this new crisis through their egoism are now screaming loudest again. Suddenly there is talk of the surveillance state. Some are even whining that we are in a dictatorship.
So it really looks to me like the reason for more and more and stricter rules in many areas is the population’s progressive stupidity. This stupidity manifests itself in egoism, know-it-all, defiance, and stubbornness.
Indifference towards society leads to laziness of thought, and this leads to stupidity.
Probably for a long time, we were perhaps too well off to realize that freedom is not granted. It is based on the participation of all. Whoever withdraws from social responsibility and pays attention only to himself, creates exactly the world he is afraid of.
René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.
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