Lately I have been reflecting quite a bit about rules. I was asked to become an admin of an FB humour group—if you find that funny, so did I...hehe...but that's because I am perhaps at my most serious and intense on this blog—but to get to the point...as the admin one of the things one has to do is accept or reject members into the group. Those requesting membership have to fill a few fields including check a box agreeing to the group rules. The rules are standard stuff like being respectful and all that. Now it turns out that a lot of membership requestors were not ticking this check box; the reason is unknown. About 7-8 of us admins and moderators had a discussion about this and almost everyone felt that people who didn't tick this box about the group rules should not be given access to the group.

I was the only one who felt differently and this made me delve into my head a bit more. It's not that I am in favour of people breaking the rules or being disrespectful or some such, obviously not, quite the contrary. However, given that this checkbox wasn't something like an official contract, breaking which you would be liable to be penalised, my logic was this: 1. When it comes to humour, tastes differ. So, even if a person agrees to abide by the rules and to not post something disrespectful or offensive, they still could if their tastes were different. 2. Since agreeing to the rules and then breaking them didn't come with a penalty, there was no reason they wouldn't still do it if they were the type of people who generally did. 3. If people didn't tick the checkbox because they intentionally wanted to reject the rules, that would show they were people with too much integrity to actually break basic rules like respect! In this sense I would consider not ticking the box an oversight rather than deliberate. 4. How many people read the rules before ticking the box to join an FB group, especially a humour group? So what does ticking even mean really in this scheme of things? Given these many reasons, and I could think of more, it was quite surprising to me that people thought it was better to reject members than accept them just because they didn't tick the box. Of course, one could ask why mention the rules at all at the time of joining then but I think it is quite alright to mention them to show we hold these values or expect them to be abided by but whether people abide by them or not should best be evaluated in their actions rather than as part of a tick box exercise.

I guess we are so used to living in the tyranny of rules that agreeing to the rules—no matter what the context—has become a rule above all. It seems something of a blasphemy to us that someone does not agree and we are not able to think beyond the crime of rule-breaking for the sake of it, not able to reason beyond the rule, not able to ask ourselves whether the rule itself serves a purpose or not able to take the entirety of the situation into account. We seem to hold the rule above the individual...and in this sense the group above the individual though the identity of the group itself is reduced to nothing but rule following.