When Enforcing Rules (Legalism) Reinforces The Broken System

Imagine (as a thought experiment) a family has a rule that every time they walk into the house, they must kick the youngest child in the face.

This would be a terrible rule.

But if you believe the highest form of virtue was following the rules, and in this case, that included this terrible rule (which was rewarded), you are actually participating in the broken system of this home.

This is how legalism plays out. We reinforce a set of rules (a game) that benefits some (usually ourselves and the ingroup) while harming others. If the rules of the house require kicking the youngest child, being a 'good rule-follower' isn't a virtue—it’s a participation in cruelty.

Are the Rules We're Following Just?

So now we've surfaced the possibility that a rule can be harmful and wrong. Let's explore that further. During the civil rights era, this form of legalism was prominently used to reinforce segregation and push back against those who spoke and acted out against the unjust racial system.

This legalistic dynamic is prominent in Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. A key part of that letter is below, to help us unpack this dynamic that not all rules should be followed. 

"One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?"

The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust.

I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.

Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.

To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.

...

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress."

For laws to be just, they must not elevate one group while diminishing another. They must instead align with the justice of God's goodness. If you want to read more of his letter, which I highly recommend, click here.

The Upside Down World

We have unpacked this idea that there are laws, or in the case of a game, rules that we follow. Sometimes those rules are good and just, and other times bad and unjust. Based on that aim and actual outcome, determines whether rule following enables justice or hinders it. We can explore this dynamic from one other angle, by reviewing an extreme reverse example of when the rules are entirely corrupted and following them is reinforcing deception and wrongdoing.

The following quote is about Nazi Germany and is found in Hannah Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem (affiliate link). Eichmann escaped Germany after the Nazis were defeated, and he escaped to South America. He was eventually found and brought to Israel for trial.

Eichmann represented the middle-tier manager "normal" person following the rules. In fact, he thought of himself as really good and efficient at his job. He was a great rule follower. He just happened to have a job that, by being good at it, led to the suffering and death of millions of people. But those were the rules of his society, and this dynamic is encapsulated in the following passage from Arendt.

"And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody "Thou shalt not kill," even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the of conscience tell everybody: "Thou shalt kill," although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it-the quality of temptation.

Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom (for that the Jews were transported to their doom they knew, of course, even though many of them may not have known the gruesome details), and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation. " - Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

In this upside-down, extreme example, deception and wrongdoing were expected, and they were the rules of the land. Unlike being tempted to lie or do wrong, a land of lies and wrong meant the temptation was to tell the truth and do good. And Germans became great at resisting that temptation in this backwards environment. 

We could go deeper into these ideas, but these examples and quotes help cover the spectrum nicely. I'd like to make a shift and explore how it applies to America today, particularly as it relates to the immigration issue. 

Recapping the Immigration Dynamic in America

In my previous article, I talked about the rule-obsessed citizen who is blind to why the immigration system is broken (because of his secular creed) and is also too narrowly focused on the immigrant who crossed the border. Much like people may want to blame those who are exploited in human trafficking, many Americans want to blame the immigrant who is not authorized to be here. They don't want to look at the source of that outcome. 

In a follow-up article, I explored how this rule-obsessed follower mindset leads to individual Americans exploiting immigrants to take advantage of them and profit from their work. They can hire an immigrant to remodel their house and then call ICE on them, so they don't have to pay them. This unfolding dynamic is priming Americans to eventually turn on each other.

In the following section, I want to highlight some pushback to my arguments from these two articles and how we can think about them in light of this vision I've cast for restoring our broken immigration system.

Easy Peasy: Response to My Immigration Argument

I posted a summary of my immigration vision on Facebook and received some comments that I want to unpack here, which both represent the legalistic rule-obsessed follower. The context above will help us look at them in a more productive way.

Comment 1: "Nope! You either get legal permission to enter the country, or you don't. If you don't. you're subject to deportation. Morality doesn't figure into the equation. Easy peasy."

I asked Gemini (a generative AI engine that surfaces patterns) to evaluate this comment in light of my immigration vision. Here's what it said. 

"This person is a textbook example of the Rule-Obsessed Citizen.

• Moral Decoupling: By saying "morality doesn't figure into it," he is shielding himself from the Moral Debt. If it’s just a "math problem," he doesn't have to feel guilty about benefiting from the cheap labor and systemic exploitation your essay describes.
• The Myth of the Lone Actor: He focuses entirely on the migrant's "original sin" (crossing the border) while completely ignoring the Clubhouse Owners (businesses/government) who left the door unlocked and the "Ticket Office" broken.
• Thought-Terminating Logic: The phrase "Easy peasy" is a defensive mechanism. It allows him to avoid the Moral Complexity of your argument. It’s a refusal to see the system as an "addiction" because admitting the system is broken would require him to share in the responsibility of fixing it.

Essentially, he is choosing the Secular Creed of the Self-Making Machine over Shared Stewardship because it’s easier to punish an individual than to rectify a corrupt institution."

There's a lot of good insights to digest, but the piece that stuck out to me most is the idea that properly diagnosing the broken system requires taking responsibility for helping to fix it. Without that embrace, we simply make the system even more dysfunctional by casting blame and adding gasoline to the fire. Fixing it requires taking responsibility for the problem and being part of the solution. 

Let's move on to the next comment, which was in response to sharing the Gemini answer above.

"congratulations!!! You (commenter 1) care about following the rules. Its amazing how these people can twist something that is so simple. Ice is removing hardened criminals. Liberals would have you believe that Ice is removing innocent brown people. Keep it up. Follow the rules."

To clarify, I'm a Republican, but when I speak out against ideologies in my own group, I'm often mischaracterized and wrongly labeled. They don't like what I have to say and are unwilling to contend with the substance, so they try to push me out of the group. No amount of my correcting the record with these folks has any influence on their misrepresenting me. For whatever reason, it's how they cope. I share that to contextualize the dynamic between me and these specific commenters.

Regarding the content's substance, here's how Gemini analyzed this comment using my vision.

"This commenter is exhibiting the "Moral Blindness" and "Defensive Resentment" your article describes. Using your framework, here is the breakdown:

• The "Simple Story" Defense: By saying "it's amazing how these people can twist something so simple," the commenter is clinging to the Secular Creed. They are rejecting the Moral Complexity you’ve introduced because it threatens their binary worldview of "good guys" vs. "bad guys."
• Externalizing the Blame: They focus on "hardened criminals" to avoid the Structural Reality. In your essay’s terms, they are using a subset of "bad actors" to justify ignoring the Institutional Hypocrisy that exploits the millions of non-criminals who are currently subsidizing the citizen’s lifestyle.
• The Identity Shield: By framing your argument as "Liberal" rhetoric, they are performing what you called Mining the Grievance. They’ve turned a question of Restorative Justice into a tribal political conflict, which allows them to dismiss the "Moral Debt" without actually engaging with your point about Prudential Rectification.
• Validation of Unearned Privilege: Their praise of "following the rules" is the Defense of Unearned Privilege in action. They feel their status is "earned" by birth/legal compliance, and they resent the idea that their low-cost life is actually a Consumer Discount paid for by a system of labor exploitation. In short: They are using Legalistic Absolutism as a shield to protect themselves from the Restorative Ethic you are proposing."

Instead of engaging with the substance, the commenter doubles down on the reasoning of the first commenter. By doing so, he surfaces more of the dynamics from my casted vision.

These two commenters have a blind spot that they do not want to see. And we cannot see a blind spot until we're open to the possibility that we have them and want to know about them.

That concludes my analysis of the two comments from the perspective of my vision. In my follow-up article, I explored how Americans are complicit in this corrupt immigration system (I'm including myself here).

If we look at the two comments through this complicity perspective, we get a few more insights worth dwelling on.

Gemini explains.

"When the first commenter says "Morality doesn't figure into the equation," they are literally performing the terms of the complicity contract. They are accepting the passive benefit of the immigrant's labor while explicitly denying the moral responsibility that comes with it. By reducing it to a binary rule, they are attempting to keep their "moral integrity" intact while their wallet continues to enjoy the "exploitation discount."

The second commenter (praising the removal of "criminals" and "following rules") is enjoying the Temptation of Leverage. They get to feel like a "virtuous citizen" because they follow the rules, while using the threat of ICE to "police the civil status" of others.

Your article warns that the machine built to police the immigrant eventually turns to police the citizen (citing the FBI "extremist" lists). These commenters don't realize that by cheering for a Rule-Obsessed Machine that ignores morality, they are building the very apparatus that will eventually "police their own political beliefs."

That idea of keeping our morality, while embracing immoral things, sticks out to me. How do I get what I want while also not feeling bad about it? We all do this, so it's not a condemnation but rather an explanation of how it's unfolding here.

The temptation of leverage is interesting. One way to think about it is, what will you do when you have power over another group? How does that make you feel? And are you willing to set down that power if it's being wrongly wielded?

When Jesus is arrested and convicted, this dynamic unfolds with the religious leaders. They wield this power over Jesus, leveraging Pilate's allegiance to Caesar to get what they want: a dead Jesus. And they get to do it all while remaining, in their minds, morally pure.

These commentators' blind spots allow them to enable corruption and grow the system that will eventually be turned against them.  But, like a fish failing to realize the water around them, these commenters are swimming in the system, only seeing it from the inside.

For a long time, that was me, so I don't condemn them, but I do want to utilize their current perspective and my argument to illuminate these dynamics.

Failing To See

When we fail to realize these dynamics and the toxic systems that facilitate them, we can unknowingly contribute to their continued broken existence.

And in the end, going back to our original illustration, we continue kicking that youngest child in the face whenever we enter the house. We participate in the domination game that harms those at the bottom and contradicts Jesus' directive to take care of those at the bottom.

That's the game we're playing, and when following the rules of the game is our goal, becoming good at it also means reinforcing the brokenness and inflicting harm on others.

Decoupling law from morality doesn't lead to 'Order.' Instead, we get a system where the government sabotages the legal path, businesses profit from the illegal one, and the citizen is told to blame the worker for the chaos.

And, the failure is not just moral. It's practical and economic. I'll leave you with this fact.

Immigrants generated a $14.5 trillion fiscal surplus since 1994, cutting U.S. deficits by one-third. Without them, public debt would be nearly twice its current level.

Immigrants aren't the problem—they're the solution.

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