662. If You’re Not Cheating, You’re Not Trying

There are a lot of explanations going around for why our political moment feels more chaotic than many of us have ever experienced. Let me offer up one more explanation. It has to do with rules. My belief is that many people in many different circumstances have come to think that the rules we live by are stupid. So stupid that the only sensible thing to do is break them. And if you get away with it, then you've got the confidence to just keep going. And now you've got different people playing the game of life by totally different rules. How do we think that's going to work out? All this got me thinking about one place where rules are still followed for the most part at least, and that's what we're going to talk about today. Can I take you on a really weird digression? I would love a weird digression. K. Down a rabbit hole? Sure. Have you read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? Not in approximately forty five years, but yeah. I read it when I was a sophomore in college. I was one of those annoyingly good students who took notes in the margins, and I wrote all my papers on time. Anyway, so my daughter was five or six. I picked up the book again, and I started reading it to her. This is Louisa Thomas. She writes the sporting scene column for the New Yorker magazine, and she happens to be married to a former NFL player. Okay. Back to Alice in Wonderland. I picked up the same copy I had in college. It was filled with these meticulous notes. All the words were defined. The logic puzzles were solved. Discussions in the back pages about the Victorian era and the creation of leisure and, like, the category of childhood. Then I started reading to her, and I realized I'd completely missed the point of this book. In this book, Alice is just always too small or too big. She was just like my five year old daughter. You know? She's caught between infancy and adulthood. The way in which she experiences this is that the rules of this wonderland are completely arbitrary. And they change. Exactly. They're subject to the whims of the authority figure. But what she's doing over the course of the book is developing a moral sensibility, which is not the same as moralizing. There's actually a character, the duchess, who does all the moralizing, and she's a buffoon. Basically, it's a story about a person growing up and gaining confidence to question the irrationality of these orders and rules that don't make any sense and are changing all the time. And where does this come to a head? It comes to a head in a croquet game. There are no rules in this croquet game. It's completely lawless. The queen is going off with her head. It's horrible. And that's where Alice just loses her mind. But she's learning …