What’s the difference between a rule that describes the world and one that governs it? Leigh, Jen, and Bob start with a complaint about Robert’s Rules of Order and end up in the deep end: the categorical imperative, the social contract, the rule of law, and what it would mean to live without any rules at all.

In this episode, we reference the following thinkers, texts, ideas, etc:

• Robert’s Rules of Order
• Aristotle
• Plato
• Utilitarianism and the hedonic calculus
• Immanuel Kant
• Kant’s categorical imperative (and our Season 11, Episode 165: “Kant’s Categorical Imperative”)
• Ludwig Wittgenstein and the private language argument
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
• Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
• Social contract theory
• Thomas Hobbes and the state of nature
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• John Rawls and the original position
• Emma Goldman on anarchism and human nature
• William Golding, Lord of the Flies — and the 2026 BBC/Netflix miniseries
• G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right 
• Karl Marx 
• Rule of law
• Corporate personhood and the distinction between legal and moral persons
• Jennifer Kling’s “Minibar” episode on “Uncivil Obedience”
• The Greensboro sit-ins 
• Ethan Coen, The Drunken Driver Has the Right of Way (poems)