So, earlier I was babbling on about levels of rules and trying to make some sense of things in my head. Laying a ground work for us to stand on as we turn our faces to the world, to see from the same perspective, if you will. (Metaphors mixed: 3?)
Now that we have a shared lens to see through, I want to tell you a secret. For I know why we think lawyers are scummy, why we look down on lobbyists and politicians (those who are not on our team, at least) as little more than criminals in suits, and why we find it so easy to demonize corporate heads etc. We think it is because they are immoral, take advantage of us little guys, or just generally do things wrong. The answer is quite different. The answer is:
They are playing the actual game, by the actual rules.
What the hell is everyone else doing then? We are playing a similar game, with the same pieces, same board, but we are ignoring many of the rules, while coming up with entirely different ones that are not in the book. To explain, allow me to use a parallel from gaming.
Let us consider poker (though almost all deep, competitive games have similar dynamics.) The rules are not too complicated, mostly about how you put in chips, when and how you get cards, and what the hands mean. Lots of people play with their friends, trying to get good hands, playing percentages and guessing what their buddies have. Maybe they read a little on tactics or strategy on the side, but nothing serious. These are the casual players, and they have fun with each other.
Then you have the professionals. These are the people who hardly look at their cards, but stare intently at their opponents. These are the folks who will fold 25 hands in a row just to see what others's behaviors are before actually sticking in for a hand. They study up a great deal, and can tell you percentages off the top of their heads, but will assure you the game isn't about the cards but the players. They play by all the rules, both the written rules of the game and the rules of the world that apply. And they have fun with each other.
Mixing the two types of players though, that is a recipe for trouble. Having one player in your casual game who is a pro means he walks away with the pot every night and everyone else wonders why they pay 50$ a week to sit around and drink but without any strippers. Likewise, one casual player sitting with a table of pros just becomes a chunk of meat for the other sharks to compete for the biggest bites of before he is shredded. Why? Because they are playing essentially different games.
Consider the casual fellow in the high stakes pro game. He goes in perhaps expecting to be beat, but to have fun on the terms he is used to. Instead, he gets smashed, completely unable to even grasp what he is doing wrong and how he can even adjust to improve. He doesn't feel happy with the game, as the feeling of complete impotence makes all of us deeply unhappy. He might not even learn much, as he doesn't even know where to start. He just goes home with a slight feeling of resentment.
Now imagine that he didn't realize he was going to a high stakes pro game, and just thought it was goof off and smoke cigars time with his buddies. He would be really angry, and likely suspecting he had been cheated.
Let's get back to the regular world. We, the general folks, we are all generally casual players of this game of life. We play largely by the broad brush social rules of "Don't Hurt People, and Don't Take Their Things." At least in the US, our sense of things is basically those rules with a rough sense of fairness and helping each other out when it isn't too inconvenient. We spend most of our lives (if we are lucky) ignoring the existence of nearly all of the Natural and Legislative Rules. We generally don't need to know much chemistry for example, and we believe that most legislation just doesn't apply to us. Who pays state sales taxes on eBay items?
In fact, this is so ingrained into our sense of how things work that when we see someone getting arrested for something we think is silly, our response is usually "Hey, he wasn't hurting anyone!"
But those are not all the rules. There are many thousands of pages of legislation and regulation that apply, never mind the Natural Rules. The average person may think they are following the rules in general (no one cares about speeding violations...) but in reality they don't even know what the rules are except in very narrow areas that affect them personally or professionally. The pros, that is the lawyers and politicians etc., those are the ones who really learn them, because they make a living knowing them better than other people. Even then, they specialize because they can't know them all, but the important point is that they are playing a different game than most; they are playing by the full rule book, not just the basic outline version we live with.
This has some very important implications.
1: More rules means more power for those who specialize in knowing rules. Every line of new regulation, every special cut out in the tax code, every random bit of legislation makes specializing in the rules more powerful. If you are unhappy that big corporations can pay nearly zero taxes, or that big farmers can make money by not producing food, or that cops can pull you over and harass you for being black due to a broken tail light, consider that the rules as set up allow for that, just as the rules for poker allow for bluffing.
2: More rules than anyone can keep track of might be a feature for those who exercise power than it is a bug. Those who don't know the rules as well are at a disadvantage compared to those who do, and so if you get to write the rules you want so many that no one knows what all of them are. It then becomes a competition to see who knows the most obscure rules, and the specialist wins that.
3: Discretionary rules allow for immense power for those who enforce them, especially when those they exercise power over do not know all of those rules, or those that protect them. Police very often behave as though they are absolute dictators of the area around them, because they know that most people are violating some minor regulation, and that most people don't know enough to push their rights when the cops assert they have to do something.
4: Fuzzy knowledge of the rules allows those that create and enforce them to be essentially above the rules. For example, many things the Federal Government does are quite outside the bounds set by the US constitution, but we as a citizenry are largely unaware, relying on legislators and the Supreme Court to tell us whether things are ok. In essence, we allow those who make the rules to tell us if they are following the rules they are supposed to be. As it turns out, the answer is generally "Yes. Yes we are."
We hate these pros because we feel they are cheating us, using fancy rules to screw us over. But really, we are hating the player when we should hate the game. These are rules we tacitly accepted by not voting out of office (or lynching) our elected officials when they passed them. We decided that it was ok to make these the rules of the game, and are quite happy to ignore them just so long as there is someone looking over things and making the little irritations against the law.
But every time we utter "there ought to be a law," every time we allow politicians to add to the ever increasing pile of legislation, we are divorcing our lives as we wish to live them farther and farther from the actual game of life. And when those who specialize in playing that game come along and win using strategies we didn't even know existed, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
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