An excellent example of people not following the rules and feeling no remorse about not following the rules goes back to when the GST was brought in during Brian Mulroney's second term.Not sure how to interpret the framing of the question.
I follow rules if they pass the sniff test and if they're easy to follow. If I have to jump through hoops to abide by a decree, I'm less inclined to consider that decree valid. And rules are kind of bogus if they entail someone dying or having their life forever ruined if they follow them.
I don't think following rules is inherently a virtue, nor do I think breaking them is inherently arrogance. Motivation and context matters. Someone breaking rules simply because they don't care or want to cause harm/chaos is a bit of a knob. Someone breaking rules because their family is starving is valuable context. They still broke a rule, but a reason for breaking a rule can change the punishment (if one exists).
I do think if someone is capable they should critically think about the rules they live with. "It's a rule because it's a rule." isn't compelling for me, and I like knowing that the order of things has a reason for it and isn't just arbitrary or built off of some weird pro-suffering slant.
Most Canadians were used to provincial sales taxes, but to put a country-wide one on top of it was unheard-of. The rules were hard to fathom sometimes, as in if I bought a carton of white milk at a grocery store, there was no tax. But if I ordered a glass of white milk at a restaurant, it was taxed. It's only fairly recently that the GST was taken off of feminine hygiene products, because in the minds of the male politicians, those are "luxury goods" and therefore taxable. It took years of lobbying to make them understand that this stuff isn't a luxury, it's a necessity.
What the GST did was strongly encourage an underground economy, so people could do an end run around this tax. According to some of the politicians, it wouldn't matter who was selling a good or service, they should remit the GST they were supposed to collect to Revenue Canada. In their minds, that included teenage babysitters, and people holding garage sales... and of course these people said, "No way."
I found out the rules regarding this were that if you made $30,000/year, you were required to register and get a GST number. You were expected to collect and remit the tax. So I heaved a sigh of relief that the local SCA branch wouldn't need to worry about GST on top of regular feast ticket costs (although we did have to pay the tax on non-exempt items). A friend taking accounting at the local college jumped on this bandwagon and told me that I should register my craft business (at that time I was selling at several stores around town, at a couple of annual craft fairs, and doing custom orders). I told her I didn't make enough per year to bother... and I'd lose customers if I told them that the $2 item at a craft fair had another 14 cents tacked on (back then the GST was 7%).
There was an upswing in the barter economy, and so there's a lot of buying and selling going on that doesn't see any taxes being remitted. The reason is that some people simply don't consider this to be a tax they're willing to pay. Yes, a whole generation has grown up with it and to them it's just a fact of life. But people like me and the generations older do remember when the amount on the price tag was what you paid, and no extra calculations and extra were on top of it.
That said, earlier this year when I had a problem with one of my Skip the Dishes orders (the solution is always a refund), I had to continue to fight with the customer service agent for a refund not only for the food portion, but also the GST I'd paid. Yes, it wasn't that much - less than $2, but it's the principle of the thing.
It's common sense (or at least it used to be considered common sense) not to leave the enemy in a position to come back and repeat the behavior that makes them your enemy. Besides, they would have killed some of the people who would otherwise have repaired the damage caused by the war, and their labor would be needed.If they came to conquer you and lost, then why not just send them home? Why are the only choices for the defeated in this scenario slavery or death? I would say any society that only gives those two options to a defeated enemy probably deserved to be attacked in the first place.
On the occasions when I decide not to follow a rule, I'm reminded of a line in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: "The word is 'no.' I am therefore going anyway." This is what Kirk says to his crew when Starfleet denies him permission to return to the Genesis planet to retrieve Spock's body. I just modify this slightly: "The word is 'no'. I am therefore doing it anyway."
I don't apply this most of the time, just the times when following the rules would be detrimental to me in some way, or if following the rules is something I'm not able to do easily at that particular time. An example of this goes back to jaywalking. I don't have a lot of energy sometimes, and some of our city blocks are insanely long. So there are times when I jaywalk because where I want to go is across the street, but I don't have the energy to go the the end of the block, cross the street, and make my way back to the middle of the block. I simply make sure the traffic isn't going to be a problem, and jaywalk. And if the cops are around... well, I've seen them jaywalk, too, and not because they were chasing someone. They did it for their own convenience.