Facts, Rules, and the Opinion Society
Constraints in a world focused on self-actualization
The fastest way to succeed is to look as if you’re playing by someone else’s rules, while quietly playing by your own.
— Michael Korda
(Chapter from Do What Works)
I ATTENDED A TALK RECENTLY THAT SOME COLLEAGUES were giving to new employees. It was two people co-presenting, and they were talking about how to be effective at trying new things.
At one point one of the presenters, when talking about dealing with constraints, stated, “Rules are just someone else’s opinion.”
I waited, but that was it. There was no follow up.
She went on with her presentation leaving the impression that rules were always just someone else’s opinion, and that each of us can have our own opinions, and thus make our own rules. I reflected on that for quite a while afterward and became more concerned about the implications of that thinking, especially to younger employees. While it’s certainly true that many rules, if not all, started as an opinion, I really think she missed a great opportunity to offer suggestions to these young people about how to operate within the rules, opinions, and just plain facts of everyday life.
See, before we can talk about how to make decisions that work for each of us, we must understand that there are constraints on all of us.
The ability to make individually beneficial decisions does not imply that we can do that at the expense of others. That would be anarchy, and I think history has shown us that anarchy, while sometimes necessary in extreme circumstances, is not a long-term way to live that works. If we want to operate our lives in a way that works us as individuals, we should not be under any assumption that we can operate entirely independently and ignore some very real constraints that, in fact, support everyone’s collective ability to live a life that works for them.
So, thinking back to my colleague and her talk, let me try my take on what I think she missed. First some definitions on a few foundational concepts: opinions, facts, and rules.
Opinion
Bing defines opinion as:
a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge
An opinion is a judgment, and at the risk of stating the obvious, it’s a judgement formed by a person. While many people can hold the same opinion, they are individual judgements, and it’s important to note that the assessment doesn’t have to be based on any fact or prior knowledge. That makes it difficult or impossible to suggest that an opinion is binding beyond the individual who holds it.
Fact
For this one I think the Merriam-Webster definition provides good clarity. A fact is:
a piece of information presented as having objective reality
This is notable on a couple fronts. First is the idea of objective reality. If something is fact, it’s not considered subject to much interpretation, and it’s expected that anyone who comes in contact with the same information will end up with the same conclusion.
But the second crucial bit in this definition is the word presented. It’s often the case that information is presented as being objective fact when in reality it’s just a rule, or worse, an opinion. I’ll deal with all these nuances below.
Rule
I’ll use the Bing definition here as well. It defines rule as:
one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere
That works for our purposes. There are a few things to call out here.
First, a rule consists of regulations or principles. There are many regulations and principles that start as an individual or group opinion, but not all regulations are opinion. More on that later.
Second, rules govern conduct. It’s important to think about how rules do that. Unless you are a prisoner or otherwise incapable of self-determination, most of us choose to follow whatever regulations or principles we subscribe to. That does not mean we like or even agree with them, but unless we are being coerced, we are choosing to follow them. This will be important, as you will see shortly.
Finally, rules operate within a particular activity or sphere, meaning that one rule usually does not apply universally to all activities.
No matter what our individual situation is, we all must live within certain constraints whether they are legal, physical, societal, familial, corporate or any combination of these.
In fact, if you look closely, much of the debate we engage in (or watch others engage in), related to politics, environment, religion, work, relationships, or really just about anything, is an attempt to separate the differences between what is opinion and fact, and what rules we create as groups based on the two.
This is where it gets interesting. Some of the rules are implicit and some are externally applied.
Smoking, a case study on opinion, facts and societal rules
Before the 1940s most people didn’t know (though some suspected) that cigarette smoking could cause lung cancer. Between the time the first reports of a possible link started appearing in the 1930s and when the US Surgeon General issued his report linking smoking and lung cancer in 1964, there was widespread debate and public opinion campaigns on both sides.
The opinions
Prior to 1964 the notion of smoking causing cancer was considered an opinion that was hotly debated. Individuals or groups made judgements, sometimes based on the medical facts discovered through research, but often based on other motivations, such as the individual desire to keep smoking or the corporate desire to keep selling cigarettes.
The fact
In the years leading up to 1964 more and more people, when presented with the data, chose to believe those data and decided smoking posed serious health risks. The Surgeon General’s report on smoking is where that conclusion reached its real tipping point, and the cancer risk became fact.
Remember that fact is considered objectively real, so those who accepted the conclusion of the Surgeon General were saying that anyone confronted with the same data would come to the same conclusion.
Of course, in the years after 1964 and even up to today, there are those who refuse to believe the data and even actively try to disprove it, but most of us are comfortable saying that the link between cigarette smoking and cancer is a fact.
Of course, cigarettes always caused cancer, but we didn’t treat it as fact until society said it was so.
The societal rules
Often when society agrees on a fact, particularly facts related to health, safety, and fairness, there are rules that follow. Societal rules come in the form of laws, codes of conduct, or even unwritten “understandings” that govern behavior and modes of interaction with others.
In our smoking example, the physical rule is that a person can’t smoke every day and live a long healthy life. Since it’s not physically possible (yes, there are exceptions that prove the rule) you have to pick one.
That was true even before we understood the fact that cigarettes cause health problems, but once we understood that link we could make better decisions about what we should do as individuals and society if we value health and long life.
So, in the decades since the public opinion about cigarettes became public fact, societies all over the world have instituted rules that govern the activity. In the United States we have rules for how cigarettes are packaged, how they are sold, who can buy them, and where they can be used.
Even though we know smoking can cause cancer and understand that it can cause many other health problems to both the smoker and others that come in regular contact with the smoke, society still allows the individual to choose to do it.
Yes, there are lots of rules that govern the smoking activity, but the individual still has the freedom to smoke within those rules. For most people, the debate now is not about whether there should be some societal rules around what we know is a life-threatening activity, but around how many rules there should be and why.
Are these rules just someone’s opinion?
They may have started out that way, but the very process of becoming a rule means that society has adopted that opinion as a standard of behavior, and they should be followed or the person who breaks them risks consequences. That’s life.
These rules can certainly be broken, but most of us choose to follow the rules most of the time because we understand that rules both allow us to live together in a civil society and in many cases serve to as an easy way to protect us or those around us.
It would be unfeasible for each person in a society to become an expert in the details of lung cancer, do our own research on cigarette smoking, and debate the impact of smoking every time we encounter it.
So, we rely on experts and create rules as shortcuts to protect us.
That doesn’t mean that the experts always agree and that we get the rules right in every case, but it’s usually better than the alternative. Rules can be applied nationally (or internationally in some cases) regionally, locally or be limited to companies, organizations or families.
I imagine if you pause here to think about the rules you live with, you can pretty easily identify which ones are physical and which ones are societal.
The road less traveled
So, let’s get back to my colleague and her message to our fellow employees. Based on the talk she was giving, I think her intent was to encourage new employees to be bold, take risks and not be afraid to try new things.
Part of that is avoiding the traps that can often occur in big corporations such as excessive beauracracy, over-reliance on process, desire to please bosses, etc.
But she should have sent a more nuanced message that focused on how to determine what rules are there because they help the company to function and which ones are just someone’s opinion gone haywire.
I think my colleague should have said: “Rules should be questioned. Learn to ask why when faced with someone’s idea on how things should be done. Often their idea might come from experience or expertise and be perfectly valid and necessary. But just as often it could merely be an opinion, and one that might not work for you.”
Living in a way that works for you is not a proposition that is free of constraints.
What it is though, is a way to live with an understanding of which are real constraints and which are self-inflicted constraints that limit your impact and happiness. You can’t do what you want all the time or do just what feels good all the time or how to be a rebel just for the hell of it (though that’s good to do once in a while!). But you can think about the ways you operate your everyday life and evaluate whether you’re following some established rule based on fact, or just an opinion that may need to be changed or ignored.
