If we make decisions, to our own detriment, purely to be in opposition, then I think that's irrational.
It's hard to give an example that won't immediately derail this conversation, precisely because every topic seems to be judged on what position the other side has, but its not hard to see this play out every day.
But I do think we socialize people to be obstinate, for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, some of which are:
1) How often has someone told you what to do, and been more right, versus times they’ve been more wrong, or missing something about your situation, or lying about their motivations and goals, such that what they were telling you wasn’t actually what you should do?
2) Totally makes sense to me that towns, etc, would have a history of the central authority showing up and saying “change like this”, and only awhile later finding out why that was bad for them.
3) AFAIK, most of the time the experience a town would have with a central authority is that authority showing up to take something the town doesn’t want to give.
So you put all that together, and it makes sense to me that people would resist something like centralized time keeping “just because”.
If you see life as a zero sum game, then you are primed to distrust everyone and everything. This mistrust is often well-placed. The inability to separate good suggestions from bad ones though is a flaw.
Some can be objectively good, perhaps more easily seen by a neutral outsider, and yet still be fought against. Because if we're not fighting then we're fools?
Resistance makes sense unless you have good reasons to trust the other party.
There are of course lots of zero-sum situations. Equally there are lots of mutually beneficial opportunities. Ironically those who can't see those opportunities ultimately end up losing, which reinforces the zero-sum world-view.
Government is, though, a solution to 'collective action' problems, which usually have prisoner's dilemma payoff matrices.
A problem could be solved if everyone acted. But individually, none of them have the incentive to act alone, so the default result is for nobody to act.
Government allows a group of people to agree that when there's a collective action benefit available, they'll take it, together.
That is explicitly not a zero sum outcome.