Rule Idolatry

Rule idolatry is the pattern where a rule is treated as more real than the people, goals, and circumstances it was meant to serve. 23.飞马牌汽车：安全是第一位的！ adds the concept through 《飞马牌汽车》: the public bus cannot open its doors because it has not reached a stop, so every emergency becomes secondary to preserving the form of compliance.

The concept differs from ordinary rule-following. Rules can protect against arbitrary power and prevent real accidents. Idolatry begins when the system loses the ability to interpret purpose, weigh harms, or create accountable exceptions.

《资治通鉴·秦纪》112-2｜秦始皇也是他的书迷？ adds a classical parable version through 郑人买履. The person who trusts an old shoe measurement more than his own foot is not obeying a bureaucracy, but the cognitive structure is similar: the representation becomes more authoritative than the reality it was meant to serve.

Key Claims

• A rule becomes idolatrous when its original safety or order purpose can no longer be questioned.
• Rule idolatry often lets officials avoid responsibility by claiming they merely obeyed procedure.
• A measurement can become idolatrous when it replaces direct contact with the object being measured.
• The pattern can coexist with heavy activity: meetings, measurements, seals, associations, and devices may grow around the rule without resolving the underlying contradiction.
• In literature, rule idolatry makes bureaucracy funny and frightening at the same time because the local action can be rational while the whole system becomes absurd.

Connections

• 《飞马牌汽车》 and 《训兔记》 - source examples around rule obedience.
• Safety As Control - safety-specific version.
• Arbitrary Authority Procedure - related pattern where authority borrows procedural form.
• Administrative Opacity As Control, Bureaucratic Risk Avoidance, and Institutional Overcompliance - institutional branches that sustain rule idolatry.
• Absurd Rationality - literary frame for coherent local reasoning inside absurd premises.
• 郑人买履, 韩非, and 法家君术 - Qinji 112-2 parable and practical-judgment extension.