2040's Ideas and Innovations Newsletter, Issue 67: Why Do We Follow Rules?

Issue 67: August 4, 2022

We have been making and obeying rules since early civilization.  Historical facts: The oldest written legal text is the Code of Ur-Nammu (around 2050 BC) and the most famous is the Code of Hammurabi (around 1780 BC, pictured above) both written in cuneiform. They are from ancient Sumeria in southern Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq.  These early codes were social contracts among people and governments, not unlike our laws today.  So, this begs the question: Why do people obey the rules considering the rules-bending culture we are living in? We wrote about why people lie, and the corollary to that may be why we obey the rules … or don’t.

Our society and our organizations exist based on rules. We may mask rules as processes, procedures, policies, regulations, laws, codes, plans, standards, guidelines or the like. Call them what you will, they guide us nearly every moment of every day.

In every instance, we seek to structure the environments we work and live in with w…