The Persistence of Rules Nobody Wrote Down

Unwritten codes among the young are elaborate, strictly enforced and remarkably stable over time.

The rules that govern activity among the young are more elaborate than adults usually assume. There are conventions for claiming a turn, for pausing a game legitimately, for declaring an action invalid, for readmitting someone who has left, for the status of an outcome achieved by accident. These are enforced with considerable seriousness, and the seriousness is not a game within the game. It is genuine, because the alternative to agreed rules is a dispute that ends the activity, and ending the activity is the outcome everyone wants least. The rules are load bearing, and their elaborateness is proportional to the weight they carry.

They are also stable in a way that written rules often are not. Nobody administers them, nobody publishes amendments, and yet the same structures recur, with local variation, in places that have no contact with one another. The likeliest explanation is functional: the problems being solved are the same everywhere. Any group of people without an authority must find ways to allocate turns, resolve contested outcomes and manage entry and exit. There are only so many workable solutions to those problems, and the same solutions get reinvented, then transmitted, then reinvented again where transmission fails.

What is notable from an adult perspective is how much of this legal apparatus operates below the threshold of adult attention. An adult watching sees a group of young people doing something noisy and apparently disorganised. What is actually occurring is a continuous process of rule application, contest and amendment, conducted at speed by people who all know the code. The disorganisation is an artefact of the observer's ignorance. This is the ordinary condition of anyone observing a culture they do not belong to, and it applies here more completely than almost anywhere else.