What does wasting seven seconds, pocketing a candy wrapper and good hygiene have in common? Answer: hinders damages, suffering and death. It prevents harm to the environment, our health and cognitive ability. All of the aforementioned is founded on one underlying principle, consideration for others.
Yield for just seven seconds; begs the stripes to the fuming horses as it prepares to embrace a child to guide safely across. That's a measly amount of your lifetime that can preserve someone else's, it followed. A child, a parent, a sibling, what if it was your own? It added to illicit empathy and impress upon the plea. And with bated breath as it intensely displays its bands of white, it submitted with finality: please pay attention to me and help me get'em home, safely.
Plastic waste, cigarette butts, drainage system clogging. Flooding, ocean polluting, marine habitat damaging. Homeless, foodless, lifeless. What goes around comes around.
To care is not to share; to cooperate is to isolate; be selfish, be distant, be safe. Cover when you wheeze of sneeze; wash hands to prevent transference; be mindful, be clean, beware. All within reason, all within our purview; so let's keep it together since it won't be forever.
Authority and control requires rules we must all abide by. Do this and that, don’t act this way or that way. It engages our basal ganglia, the punishment-reward (emotion)processing and habit forming part of our brain. Being told what is right or wrong, specially through the reward and punishment route reinforces this part of our brain.
No entity has the faculty of being right all the time
On the other hand, when we are taught how to discern right from wrong it engages our frontal lobe, the thinking part of the brain. This is why I think that rules-based instruction actually harm our cognitive development. The brain is lazy as it is and tends to cut corners. And this gets even more reinforced when we tell it that something is a box rather than train it to figure out what it is.
Thinking stops when we no longer probe deeper into the answers to our whys