The relationship between rules, frustration, and violence.
By: Eranga Pilimatalawwe
Tags: Justice, Violence, Harassment, Rules, Social

One of the things I've noticed of late is a drastic increase in violence, and one of the things that these drastic increases have in common seems the number of oppressive rules.

Photo Credits : Alex Mccarthy

The thing is we all know how much each and every one of us are annoyed by certain rules, what if those rules became too much, what if they oppress our freedom to choose. How long can a person tolerate this?

The other day I was in discussion with a friend of mine, and we were talking about how social media networks with fewer rules see less aggression from members, and I took some time to think on it more, it's actually a two-part problem.

Part One: People like to break rules, be it for the thrill of it or due to frustration, because in the end we may think we want to be told what to do because it makes life easier, but that's not what we want, we want direction and guidance, and have the choices be made by us as an individual. Rules take this away from us because we no longer have a choice.

Take a simple social example, I live in a country where it is socially unacceptable for educated people to do menial tasks, this may not be a rule of law, but its a social rule, therefore even if broken, would only get some judgemental looks from your social circle, yet, people would rather beg, borrow and steal than do a job like that due to this fact. I recently even heard a story of a young girl being murdered because the father of the boyfriend thought she didn't match their social circle and the boy refused to break it off.

Part Two: Justice Seekers and Patriots, yes I said patriots, the ones who stand up for the weak, the act alone may not be a bad thing, but it adds to the unrest in a system. They perpetuate the cycle, let us take social media for a moment, nowadays expressing one’s point could be classified as hate speech, which is bad, but as I recall a famous discussion about free speech vs hate speech, you have the freedom to say you don't like or don't support a person or a group of people, but what you don't have the right to do it ask others to dislike or not support them with you. Based on this saying something like “I dislike astronauts” is an expression of opinion, but due to the rule against hate speech, the justice seekers and patriots will react to the statement, since on most social media platforms action can be taken for hate speech.

This not only creates a major confrontation but also helps spread those words more, and may frustrate some of the people reading it since we know the more activity on a post the more it seems to be displayed, and this post won't be removed easily since in reality it's not hate speech.

So, in turn, this creates more unrest perpetuating more people to lash out, and maybe post their own opinions in their profiles having people in their personal group react creating more unrest, and the cycle goes on endlessly even after the original ignition point is long gone.

In reality, rules create anarchy. It's counter-intuitive I know, but with careful study that seems to be the fact.

Let us take the scenario where extremely restrictive rules didn't exist.

Mind you I'm not saying the lack of rules will eliminate harassment, but it will reduce the scenarios that it happens in.

To begin with, people will be less oppressed, people with more freedom tend to be less prone to harassing others. What if harassment happens you say? There are only so many times a person will attempt to harass another and not get a response. Since its rare justice seekers and patriots would intervene since no real action can be taken. Also, it's about mental attitudes, we look at certain things as harassment because they have been deemed so socially. So if we don't respond to the people attempting to harass most of them will soon give up and move on because they cannot get a response. There are many techniques that don't require confrontation to actually deter them, I won't be discussing them here but I've seen quite a few.

Basic rules are needed, but oppressive and unfair ones create anarchy which in turn perpetuates the cycle of unrest.