Listeners know that many of the government’s laws are unnecessary, but what about other kinds of rules? Is every kind of rule unnecessary or bad?

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Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Brittany: Hi, Ronni.

Ronni: Hey, Brittany.

Brittany: So, there are a lot of episodes and maybe even most episodes or we’ve been really critical of the government and its laws.

Ronni: Maybe most episodes.

Brittany: Probably most episodes. Even the historical ones sometimes we’re just like, oh, and they invented this because the law was bad. So, we’ve talked about even public schools, which is the government, how they have silly rules that are just making kids sit at desks for eight hours a day and ask to go to the bathroom. That one always gets me. You don’t learn to self-regulate because you have thought. When I was a teacher, it wasn’t public school, it was a private school, but I did not make my kids ask because I just thought it took time away from the class. So, just silly rules like that. But you might think that we hate all rules. We’re rule breakers and a little bit of rebel. I think that’s a little bit true. I like being a little bit of a rebel. It’s like our founding fathers were, and it’s true that we question a lot of laws. I think if you understand government, we just talked about bureaucracy in a couple of episodes ago, you understand how most laws need to be questioned. They don’t really make a lot of sense. And I mentioned when I was a teacher, I didn’t make my kids raise their hands and ask, to go to the bathroom. And again, that wasn’t government, but just talking about rules. I had a lot of my other rules. I had my kids question, they were free to question as long as they did it respectfully because power gets to your head even as a teacher. I learned that and it was really scary to learn that about myself because sometimes you’re just like, oh, it makes it easier if I make this rule. I don’t have to deal with this if I make this rule. But then you think, okay, how am I harming their freedom to grow as people and learn lessons if I’m making all these rules just because it’s easier on me? And so I loved it when they questioned my rules because I thought that that kept me in check too.

Ronni: See I always feel like at my heart, I actually am more of a rule follower often. But the thing is, is that I like having rules and guidelines to follow, but only when they make sense. So, I was always that kid who for the most part was followed all the rules and did it as opposed to until there was something that made no sense to me. And then I was the first person to be like, why is this a rule? And then I was a little bit, sometimes I was probably a little bit bratty about it. But yeah, so, I think rules and laws can be good as long as they make sense. Exactly. That’s what we’re going with this.

Brittany: Where we’re going. And we’re going to talk about different kinds of rules. I think the word rule is kind of a broad term, like a big term that could mean a lot of different things. And I think for our listeners, the thing that probably comes to mind first are laws, right or rules in classrooms. So going to break it down a little bit. Ronni, do you have rules in your home?

Ronni: Oh, of course. Yeah. I mean they sometimes change depending on what we need to make a rule on. There’s sometimes things that weren’t an issue before. Let’s say the house that we moved in where we lived before, we didn’t have stairs, and then we moved into this house and we have stairs. Suddenly we have to create a new rule about behavior on the stairs. So, sometimes you have to come up with new rules or change rules a little bit. But yeah, definitely we have rules.

Brittany: Well, and I love that you brought up the stair example because it’s not like you have these rules, I’m assuming It’s not that you have these rules because you want to punish your children and stop them from having fun. That’s probably not your Abe. I would hope so. At least you have these rules probably for a reason. So what was your reason for making rules about the stairs?

Ronni: Because you can get hurt on the stairs, and if you are not using stairs appropriately, or if you’re fighting or playing on stairs or the top of the staircase, you can really hurt yourself. And I don’t really want my kids to hurt themselves very badly.

Brittany: No, exactly. And different houses have different rules. And it’s also important to remember that Ronni is not the government. She’s allowed to make rules that are different. We say the government can’t make anything, any law that isn’t about life, liberty, or property. But a lot of that is because we think that that should be left up to individuals and their communities and their families. So, those are different. Now, I’m not saying every rule, I’m just speaking from my experience. There were some rules my mom made where I was just like, that doesn’t make any sense. But that was one reason I let my students question my rules because I felt like I couldn’t question a lot of rules. And respectfully remember, I don’t think, and I’m not encouraging you to go sass your parents and tell them that they’re wrong about everything. But you and I talked about when we were kids, I always liked the freedom to let people say, why is this rule here? What is that for? And I think with the stairs, your kids can probably think like, oh, that’s to keep us safe, even though they probably still want to slide down the banister. Or we did. I actually shouldn’t say this, I don’t want to give the kids any ideas. Stay safe on the stairs. The awesome thing I did with my cousins, and we got a lot of trouble for it. So, this actually kind of reminds me, I’m going to tie this back into John Locke and the principles of our constitution. We did an episode on John Locke many, many moons ago, so you’ll have to check that out. And he was a philosopher in England that helped or shaped a lot of our founding father’s ideas and led a lot to that. Among them was the idea of life that the government should only make rules that protect life, liberty, and property. And so that if laws are made to those ends, meaning if those are the goals, that those are just laws, and there are more radical people. We’ve talked about anarchical capitalism that might think that even that is too much, that the government shouldn’t make any rules that people should be in charge. We’re not debating that today. But basically what John Locke and the ergo capitalists say is just you have to follow. You have to protect what we call the non-aggression principle, which the Tuttle twins talk about in the golden rule. But that is you should not hurt anybody else, but if somebody aggresses upon you, you have the right to defend yourself. So, if a bully comes and pushes, you can’t do anything. You shouldn’t hit anybody or anything. But if a bully comes and pushes, you have the right to defend yourself, right? Public schools, I think don’t agree with that anymore. I think you’re taught not to protect yourself, which is a whole other topic that is so weird to me. So, even house rules might be different, but these life, liberty, and property laws, specific reasoning, you can follow the logical reasoning. Stealing theft is against the law because that’s taking someone’s property. Obviously, murder is against the law because you’re taking someone’s right to live. But there are other rules that are important too, and this is what I want to get into. So, those are basically laws or mini-laws, meaning they happen in your house. Those are rules where it’s like you have to do this, or there’s a consequence that follows Roddy, actually, what’s a consequence for your kids breaking a rule or I’m sure it changes with each rule right?

Ronni: It does actually. I feel as though I should be more consistent with the consequences. That’s something that as a parent I am working on right now. But it depends on the infraction. Sometimes it could be something like losing a toy or going to timeout, or if there’s something else we were going to be doing that day that they were looking forward to, they might lose that privilege of getting to do that. So, it often just depends on that moment at home, what the consequences are.

Brittany: And I think a lot of parents, I know me as a teacher, I’m not a parent, but also dealt with the not consistent. Sometimes you get in a mood too. We’re all human beings and it’s hard. It’s hard to be consistent all the time, especially if we’re in a bad mood or someone does something that bothers us so much or is a threat to their safety. Okay, so those are the rules. But there are other things in life that have rules that come with consequences. So, talk about, I talk about Jordan Peterson a lot, and the Tuttle twins just came out with a book based on his 12 Rules for Life, 12 Rules boot camp. Now, the word rules are in that, but they’re not rules like government laws or the rules that Ronni has in her home. There are rules you set for yourself. There are agreements you set for yourself, okay, I need to do this because I know that if I don’t do this, there is going to be a consequence of that. So, one of the rules is in Jordan Peterson’s book is always Tell the Truth. So don’t lie. And that’s just a rule you can set for yourself because one that makes you just a better person filled with more integrity, something you can be proud of yourself, you build good character because lying isn’t lying is a bad habit to get into. So that’s a rule you set for yourself. And sometimes just the consequences, you are not being your best self, right? It’s not even like, oh, you’re going to get in trouble, this and that. So, I think a really interesting one, that’s a rule that you set for yourself. Another one is what I’m trying to think of another good one. Oh, something like he says, don’t compare yourself to anybody else. Just compare yourself to who you were yesterday. And that’s just a good rule to live by because that helps you improve your own life. So, these are different than you need to do this rule, or you’re going to go to jail, or you’re going to get grounded, or you’re going to get privileges taken away. They have natural consequences. So, if you’re somebody who starts to lie a lot, people aren’t going to trust you. It’s going to be harder for you to be the best person you can be. So, rules are not always bad. We talk about laws being bad, but rules are not always bad because there’s different kinds of rules. They’re the rules that you set for yourself to be a better person or to make sure that, I don’t think your main goal should be making sure people like you, but you shouldn’t be somebody who has such a bad reputation for being a mean or a liar that your community is harder for you to fit into. So, things like that. Now, Ronni, I want to kick it to you because you’re my resident math, math, and science girl, not my strong suit. There are rules in that realm, and I’m going to put you on the spot. I didn’t give you time to plan for this, but if you can talk a little bit about those. They’re still called rules.

Ronni: Well, I immediately know what TOS talks about when we’re talking about math rules because that would be Order of operations, good old. Oh, that’s dos. So, for anyone who’s not familiar order of operations, or you may call it Pam Doss, please excuse my dear Aunt Sally to remember that.

Brittany: That’s right. That’s how I learned. Yeah.

Ronni: So, this is actually interesting because in math, there’s a lot of, I wouldn’t even call a lot of math rules per se, because a lot of math is just understanding patterns and understanding the underlying patterns of how numbers work, and then being able to just work with things that already exist. But with something like Order of Operations, Order of Operations is one of the few things in math that is, you could say it was manmade human created as a way to help us when we are organizing the computations or the operations that we’re doing when given several different operations at once. So, if you see a large expression or equation, what do you solve first? You can solve, actually, it would just be an expression, that equation. Sorry, I know no one cares about that Fine point, but I just wanted to clarify that. So, there’s definitely rules on that and it makes a big difference. So, sorry, I was about to go off on an order of operation stuff and I don’t need to.

Brittany: But that’s really interesting though. I think these are rules that just, they help you get to the truth, right? One thing I love about math, even though some woke people will disagree, is that math has objective truth, meaning there’s a clear truth and a clear not truth. And so the rules help you get to that truth. And so it’s almost like a guide map. So, your act is almost.

Ronni: Yeah, so that we’re speaking the same language with each other so that we know the ways in which we’re manipulating and playing with the numbers. So the rules are almost like a way of having the same language.

Brittany: Exactly. So, these rules aren’t, again like law. So, there are different kinds of rules. And so I wanted to make sure I point out, that I was reading the Tuttle Twins Bootcamp book yesterday or a couple of days ago, and that was one of the discussion questions in the end, or are all rules bad? Or excuse me, I can’t even speak today, these are all rules. It was hard to say bad or something. I may have gotten the wording wrong, but I thought that was a really interesting question to ponder because I think we think of people like us and people who listen to our podcast. We think of rules as being bad or problematic, but we don’t sit and think about why or we don’t think about the different kinds of rules that there are. So, there are a lot of different kinds of rules. Rules are not always bad. Some of them help us get to the truth, like we talked about. Some of them help us just become better. People like the 12 Rules Bootcamp. So, something to think about, and next time you think about rules being all bad to kind of say, okay, sometimes there are good reasons for this. Maybe my mom is trying to keep me safe, or things like that. So, we will wrap it up there. Please don’t forget to like and subscribe and share this podcast with your friends. We love new listeners. And until next time, Ronni, we’ll talk to you soon.

Ronni: All right, see you later.