The problem with rules, even in mathematics, is that once they are created, exceptions are created at the same time. This is perhaps the most difficult task you have to manage. Care demands dedication.
It is a sort of marathon, with only a beginning. The process is without end because when you get tired and stop being diligent, what you care for dwindles, fades, and is lost.
Usually, after some unforeseeable and costly events that affect us both individually or as a society, we try to make laws, rules and procedures that will create a sense of justice in the first place, or palliate our consciences on the grounds that everyone knows their limits.
The rules remove the excuse for saying: ‘But I didn’t know’, or ‘but everyone does it that way’, or ‘I haven’t seen it written down’.
But as soon as we make rules, we irrationally try to become the exception to them. We want the rules to apply to others, but not strictly to ourselves. There is no religion, culture or game that does not have its rules or guidelines – just as there is no religion, culture or game that does not break its rules or guidelines.
So what is the purpose of rules, laws, procedures?
If we do not follow them, all of the above are but segments of thought or intention. We can imagine rules as dots on a blank piece of paper. Looked at from a distance, it’s a paper with dots, random, disconnected, useless. Most likely it will be crumpled up and thrown away, torn up or burned, or recycled.
But when we start connecting the dots, a pattern, an image, a message emerges. That’s diligence. It involves all of us and is the most tedious process we have to go through. It is easily sacrificed. No one cries about care except the one harmed by the lack of it.
It could be a flower we didn’t water, a pet we got bored with and left on the street, a child we didn’t care for as it grew up, didn’t listen to or be there for, an elderly parent becoming a burden, a relationship left to fizzle out, a body whose health we neglected, a mind we didn’t exercise for sharpness.
What happens to society and the companies we work for is a reflection of the care we show to ourselves and our personalities. The lack of respect for human life, the brute fact of violence and crime, bullying in society and at work, we cannot help but tolerate. We live within the environment we accept to live in, otherwise we would have changed it.
The toleration of lawlessness and antisocial behaviour, gives us the image of perpetrator rather than shield for the victim. It’s a mosaic whose pieces we can, at least, move in the right direction.