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Originally Posted by JinnKai
Now see that isn't the message that your analogy shows me. It shows me that the boy was smart to break the arbitrary rule. He saw that there was no "spirit" behind the rule but to contain them to a smaller part of the field. In breaking it, his peers also noticed that the law was unnecesary and quickly modified their behavior. He was not punished for breaking the rule, and he shouldn't have. If no one broke rules, we wouldn't have women or black people voting. Rules and laws are meant to be challenged -- if they can be defended and justified, they are a binding social contract. Otherwise, they are worthless "because I said so" rules.
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Well, I never did say how they ended up dealing with the breaking of the rule or even that the child who broke the rule thought it was needlessly restricting. The point is that there are ways to challenge a rule but wantonly breaking them is not the way to do it.
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Here is another analogy in which I will draw more clear parallels. You are a parent with a son, who you instruct to never play ball in the front yard (under the reasoning that he could stray into the road and be smashed flat). One day the road is blocked off from both ends for sewer maintenance and the little boy, deciding that the rule makes no sense now, decides to go and play ball in the front yard.
The child is of course correct that the danger is removed and the rule pointless. However, it is not his place to simply disregard the rule without consulting with you the parent. The parallel here is that the parent is the government, and the child the citizen.
When you let a citizen decide which rules they are going to follow and which they will ignore, they in essence have no rules at all. If everyone reacted this way there would be no point of a government because everyone would be doing whatever they darn well pleased anyway. If you decided not to punish that child for breaking your rule he would most likely never change from the anarchist little snot that seems to be running rampant in the world today.
The point is that
it is not your place to make up your own rules as you go along. Think for a moment about how your philosophy would utterly destroy society and civilization, and get back to me.