Hacker News Reader

Comment by pitaj | Hacker News Reader

Normalization play a huge role in creating this. There are far too many rules in our society at all levels that make no sense and exist seemingly to benefit the rich and powerful. Highly demanded goods and services are prohibited (drugs, gambling, prostitution). Bureaucratic nonsense at every turn. So much schoolwork that it's practically required to cheat to succeed. Testing with barely any resemblance of real-world conditions. Abstract methods that bore students to death.

View on HN

The role of bureaucracy is particularly relevant and interesting. Joseph Tainter argues in The Collapse of Complex Societies that the diminishing returns of increasing layers of bureaucracy are an important reason for the collapse of societies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter

Quoting from the book:

“Sociopolitical organizations constantly encounter problems that require increased investment merely to preserve the status quo. This investment comes in such forms as increasing size of bureaucracies, increasing specialization of bureaucracies, cumulative organizational solutions, increasing costs of legitimizing activities, and increasing costs of internal control and external defense. All of these must be borne by levying greater costs on the support population, often to no increased advantage. As the number and costliness of organizational investments increases, the proportion of a society's budget available for investment in future economic growth must decline.”

Bureaucracy means no individual is to blame... But you still have to have a way to blow the whistle or vote people out and shake things up.

I think cheating-culture requires more than just a lot of arbitrary rules. You need to also have friends who can help, role models you can see getting ahead while cheating and so-forth.

Those aren't reasons to act dishonestly and abuse other people. In fact, those are reasons to do the opposite - if you find the world so terrible, do something to make it better.

It's up to you and me. Nobody else is coming to save us.

When people are surrounded by rules that make no sense, many start to question all rules. It's not a justification for acting dishonestly, but it is the cause.

One way we can make the world better is by fixing the rules. Getting rid of ones that are unjust, and making the rest more consistent.

>"One way we can make the world better is by fixing the rules. Getting rid of ones that are unjust, and making the rest more consistent."

I once saw sign on a street: do not do something (do not remember what) and reference to a City Bylaw numbered as 37 thousand and something. That is just for one city. Good luck changing this sheer insanity.

I don't think the quantity of laws is really an issue as long as they are being applied fairly and (and this is the vague part) society views them as generally just.

>"I don't think the quantity of laws is really an issue"

And I think it is. At this quantity the quality will definitely suffer. Besides, I did read some bylaws at some point out of curiosity and without going into details many of them are outright unjust/deficient/etc (in my opinion of course)

"If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so."

The question of course is, peoples interpretations of which laws are just and unjust are subject to bias and individual incentives.

> "If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so."

Incidentally, while I recognize thr popularity of this quote, its fairly ridiculous taken literally for laws which are prohibitory rather than obligatory.

Viewing a prohibition as unjust does not obligate me to violate the prohibition; believing people should be free from government constraint to do something doesn’t require me to do that thing.

“Disregard” or “discount” in place of “disobey” would be more generally valid.

Laws which are inconsistent with promoting the extension of human life can be ruled to be unjust.

> Laws which are inconsistent with promoting the extension of human life can be ruled to be unjust.

So outlawing theft, rape, fraud, kidnapping, false imprisonment, etc. - that's all unjust?

Don’t those laws promote human life? And by life, we can definite it to be a “self-moving power”, as Plato defines it in his Laws.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com