# 5. The rules of the system The rules of the system **define its scope, its boundaries, its degrees of freedom**. Thou shalt not kill. Everyone has the right of free speech. Contracts are to be honored. The President serves four-year terms and cannot serve more than two of them. Nine people on a team, you have to touch every base, three strikes and you're out. If you get caught robbing a bank, you go to jail.
Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR, opened information flows (glasnost), changed the economic rules (perestroika), and look what happened.
Constitutions are strong social rules. Physical Laws such as the second law of thermodynamics are absolute rules, whether we understand them or not, or like them or not. Laws, punishments, Incentives, and informal social agreements are progressively weaker rules.
To demonstrate the power of rules. I like to ask my students to **imagine different ones** for a college. Suppose the students graded the teachers, or each other. Suppose there were no degrees: you come to college when you want to learn something, and you leave when you have learned it. Suppose tenure were awarded to professors according to their ability to solve real-world problems, rather than publishing academic papers. Suppose a class was graded as a group, instead of as individuals.
As we try to imagine restructured rules like these and what our behavior would be under them, we come to understand the power of rules. They are high leverage points. **Power over the rules is real power.** That's why lobbyists congregate when Congress writes laws, and why the Supreme Court, which interprets and delineates the Constitution--the rules for writing the rules has even more power than Congress. **If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules, and to who has power over them.**
That's why my system intuition was sending off alarm bells while the new world trade system was explained to me. It is a system with **rules designed by corporations**, run by corporations, for the benefit of corporations. Its **rules exclude almost any feedback** from any other sector of society. Most of its meetings are **closed even to the press** (no information flow, no feedback). It forces nations into positive loops "racing to the bottom," competing with each other to weaken environmental and social safeguards in order to attract investment and trade. It's a recipe for unleashing "success to the successful" loops, until they generate enormous accumulations of power and huge centralized planning systems that **will destroy themselves**, just as the Soviet Union destroyed itself, and for similar systemic reasons.