[brabel]

> I also experienced living in countries where everyone mostly blindly follow the rules, even if they happen to be nonsense.

The problem with that is that most people are not educated enough to judge what makes sense and what doesn’t, and the less educated you are, the more likely you are to believe you know what makes sense when you’re actually wrong. These are exactly the people that should be following the rules blindly, until they actually put in the effort to learn why those rules exist.

[EPendragon]

I believe there is a difference between education and critical thinking. One may not have a certain level of education, but could exercise a great degree of critical thinking. I think that education can help you understand the context of the problem better. But there are also plenty of people who are not asking the right questions or not asking questions - period - who have lots of education behind them. Ironically, sometimes education is the path that leads to blind trust and lack of challenging the status quo.

[0xEF]

> the less educated you are, the more likely you are to believe you know what makes sense

It actually frightens me how true this statement is.

To reinforce my initial position about how important the rules are for setting expectations, I usually use cyclists as an example. Many follow the proposed rules, understanding they are traffic, and right of way is not automagically granted based on the choice of vehicle, having more to do with direction and the flow of said traffic.

But there's always a bad apple, a cyclist who assumes themselves to be exempt from the rules and rides against the flow of traffic, then wonders why they got clipped because a right-turning driver wasn't expecting a vehicle to be coming from the direction traffic is not supposed to come from.

In the end, it's not really about what we drive or how we get around, but whether we are self-aware enough to understand that the rules apply to us, and collectively so. Setting the expectation of what each of our behaviors will be is precisely what creates the safety that comes with following them, and only the dummies seem to be the ones who think they are exempt.