Signal & Brus

🇸🇪 Svenska · 🇬🇧 English · 🇪🇸 Español

Alex Schulman writes in Dagens Nyheter about people who follow rules at any cost—and I know exactly what he means. Read his article here.

Rules are necessary. They create order, safety and fairness. But something goes wrong when the rule becomes more important than the purpose of the rule.

We have seen absurd examples. Children have been made to leave buses because of ticket problems and left to find their own way home. Two sisters, aged six and ten, had to walk home in darkness and cold. In another case, a ten-year-old was forced off a bus in the middle of the countryside because the driver considered her bus pass invalid beyond the municipal boundary.

I encounter the same phenomenon in a less dramatic form when collecting parcels. I am well known in the shop. The staff know who I am and have even fetched my parcel before I have given the reference number or so much as said hello. The parcel is standing in front of us. Yet I am not allowed to collect it if my driving licence cannot be scanned in the correct way.

The strange thing is not that I have to identify myself. That is reasonable, and PostNord has clear rules on accepted identification. The strange part begins when the procedure itself becomes more important than what it is supposed to verify.

The person behind the counter knows who I am—but the system does not. And then the system wins.

The question should more often be: Why does the rule exist?

If the purpose is to verify my identity, scanning is only one way of doing so. If the purpose of a ticket rule is to ensure that passengers pay, its purpose can hardly be to leave a child alone in the winter darkness.

I do not want a society without rules. But neither do I want a society in which rules replace human judgement.

Rules should help us make reasonable decisions. When the consequence becomes plainly unreasonable, someone must dare to use common sense.

This English translation was prepared with AI from the author’s Swedish article. The original featured image is a photograph by B T / Unsplash.