Rule 101: "All players must always abide by all the rules then in effect, ...

[packbat]

...in the form in which they are then in effect."

The above sentence is extracted from the first rule of Peter Suber's game of self-amendment, "Nomic". As some of you know, I am a fan of this game, to the point where I and a Livejournal friend of mine decided to set one up on Livejournal.¹

The reason why Rule 101 was placed in the ruleset is explained simply enough by the author:

Nomic even makes some rules explicit in order to make them amendable, when in most games they are implicit —rules to obey the rules, rules that players each start with zero points, and so on. No tacit understanding that one brings to most games simply qua games, let alone any explicit rule, is beyond the amendment power of Nomic. After Nomic was first published in Scientific American,² a German philosopher wrote to me insisting that Rule 101 (that players should obey the rules) should be omitted from the Initial Set and made part of a truly immutable shell. He missed an essential point of the game. Rule 101 is included precisely so that it can be amended; if players amend or repeal it, they deserve what they get.

This is, naturally, well and befitting Dr. Suber's purposes in analysing paradoxes of law. However, after playing the game, a second effect of this rule has occurred to me.

It makes it obvious that people can break the rules.

Thanks to bradhicks, I sit here knowing two more horrific tales of modern atrocities than I did when I awoke this morning. And no, that's not sarcasm - I am truly thankful to have heard these stories. One of them is the most eloquent condemnation of the U.S. health care system I have ever seen, but irrelevant to this post. The other regards a heartwarming tale of a United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agent enjoying the perks of his position. And yes, that is sarcasm - I am truly appalled by what this man did. It's ugly. Terrifically ugly.

And illegal. But people can break the rules.

Let me reiterate. People break rules. And unless those rules are structured and enforced in such a way that people can't or won't do wrong - unless the systems are in place that will make it possible (nay, likely!) that abuses and the like will be caught and their perpetrators punished (and punished severely enough to be a deterrent) - and furthermore, unless the social structures are in place to remove the desire to commit the crime - the fact that such-and-such is illegal isn't worth a bum nickel.

1. The friend is active_apathy, the game is nomicide. It's not the first, but it's the longest-lived so far. Slash advertisment. ^
2. Editor's note: the <em> tag that appears to have been erroneously applied to the magazine title has been appropriately replaced with an <i> tag. ^