“Yes, sir. A man gets around and he sees a heap; a heap of folks in a heap of situations. The trouble is, we done got into the habit of confusing the situations with the folks. Take yourself, now,” he said in that same kindly tone, chatty and easy; “you mean all right. You just went and got yourself all fogged up with rules and regulations. That’s our trouble. We done invented ourselves so many alphabets and rules and recipes that we can’t see anything else; if what we see can’t be fitted to an alphabet or a rule, we are lost. We have come to be like critters doctor folks might have created in laboratories, that have learned how to slip off their bones and guts and still live, still be kept alive indefinite and forever maybe even without even knowing the bones and the guts are gone. We have slipped our backbone; we have about decided a man don’t need a backbone any more; to have one is old-fashioned. But the groove where the backbone used to be is still there, and the backbone has been kept alive, too, and someday we’re going to slip back onto it. I don’t know just when nor just how much of a wrench it will take to teach us, but someday.”

From “The Tall Men” by William Faulkner

Rules and regulations continue to thrive in our society. Somehow every situation, every response, every deviation from the ‘NORM’ must be accounted for, controlled, adjusted to some standard.  William Faulkner criticized this intrusion into the individual’s freedom: “That’s our trouble. We done invented ourselves so many alphabets and rules and recipes that we can’t see anything else; if what we see can’t be fitted to an alphabet or a rule, we are lost.”  Isn’t he brilliant? What a terrific analogy— we behave like a snail that woke up without its shell.  The trouble is that we no longer know where to find it. We must abide by the rules, and if we depart from them, even though our act does not harm anyone, we will be subject to criticism, rejection, and possibly legal proceedings. I sometimes have the impression that the government and marketers know more about us than we do about ourselves.  Based on all the information hoarded over the years, they could probably predict how we are going to react to a situation better than we can.  If this trend continues, one of these days, we will be required to ask them how we should handle our lives.