Yesterday I pulled into a major-brand service station to fill the tank in my car. (and yes, before anyone asks, I had remembered to arrange a mortgage first).
So there I was, standing beside the pump, doing what most of us now do in those awkward few minutes while liquid gold trickles into the tank, when a female voice suddenly boomed across the forecourt.
“Pump 10, please hang up your pump.”
It wasn’t quite Moses receiving instruction from the mountain, but it was loud enough to make half of the forecourt look up.
I hung up the pump, went inside, and asked the rather officious young woman behind the counter why she had ordered me to hang up. Her reply, given with the kind of certainty that only company policy can produce, was that looking at my cellphone while filling my tank was against the rules.
She had seen me on the cameras. I was using my cellphone while filling my tank. Company rules dictated that this was forbidden.
Now, most people will have seen the little symbol at service stations: a mobile phone with a line through it, sitting among the usual forest of warnings, instructions, prohibitions, icons, stickers and corporate wallpaper that now surrounds almost every public activity: No smoking. No flames. Turn off your engine. No phones. No praying. And don’t look at the pump in a sarcastic manner. (Ok I made the last two up – but give it time.
But why is there a cellphone ban in the first place? Well it rests on the idea that, because petrol vapour is flammable, a cellphone might somehow generate a spark and ignite it.
That’s the theory. It’s also nonsense.
Yes, petrol vapour is flammable. Yes, an actual ignition source can ignite it. Nobody is disputing the basic chemistry. But the question is whether an ordinary cellphone, used by an ordinary person, while filling a car at a service station, represents a real-world ignition risk.
And the answer is no.
This isn’t just my opinion. According to the US-based Petroleum Equipment Institute, which tracks refueling fires, there is not one credible incident of a fire caused by a cellular telephone, on a forecourt. Despite decades of cellphone use and billions upon billions of refueling events around the world, actual documented phone-caused petrol-station fires are non-existent. Not one has ever happened. Ever. The Institute has even attempted to simulate the conditions which might cause such a fire themselves – but have never achieved it.
The UK fuel industry has taken a similar line. Cellphones don’t – and can’t – cause forecourt fires.
But, not to be deterred, the Health and Safety wonks fall back on the claim that “phones are not intrinsically safe devices, so they should not be used right beside the pump or nozzle during refuelling.” – which sounds serious until you translate it into ordinary English. “We can’t show that this thing actually causes fires, but because we can imagine a theoretical chain of events where it might, we will treat it as if it does.”
By that logic, we should probably have a sign at the pump warning people not to think about their Nana’s birthday next week, just in case the mental distraction causes their fuel tank to overflow.
This is how nonsense gets promoted into policy.
Start with something true: petrol vapour is flammable.
Add something nonsensical: a cellphone might somehow spark in precisely the wrong way at precisely the wrong moment.
Print a sign.
Train staff to enforce it.
Then wait long enough for everyone to forget that the evidence was never there in the first place while a ridiculous theoretical possibility hardens into a rule and the rule becomes self-justifying.
“Why can’t I use my phone?”
“Because there’s a sign.”
“Why is there a sign?”
“Because it’s dangerous.”
“How do we know it’s dangerous?”
“Because there’s a sign.”
Yes, I understand that a private company has the right to set the rules on its own forecourt. If a service station wants to ban phones, red socks, whistling, or people named Brian, that is largely its own business (literally).
But that’s not really my point. The phone ban is really just a small, perfect example of something much bigger: we have become remarkably comfortable obeying rules without asking whether the rule itself actually makes any sense.
We defer to the existence of the rule rather than interrogating the basis for it and the fact that someone, somewhere, has said “you must not do this” becomes enough.
And once a rule is wrapped in the sacred language of health and safety, it becomes almost untouchable.
We saw a smaller version of this in New Zealand with road speed limits during the term of the last Labour Government. Roads where the speed limit that had long been 100 kilometres per hour (about 60 miles per hour for readers elsewhere) were dropped to 80 kilometres per hour.
What happened next was fascinating. Literally, the day the rules changed, defence of the new limit became widespread. One day, driving at 100 kilometres per hour was normal, legal, safe and unremarkable. The next day, driving at that same speed on that same road, in the same car, in the same conditions, was treated by some people as if you had decided to juggle chainsaws in a maternity ward.
The road had not changed. The cars had not changed. The laws of physics had not changed. The only thing that had changed was the number on the sign.
And for a surprisingly large section of society, that was enough. 80 good. 100 bad.
But road speeds, cellphones and petrol pumps are just examples.
The deeper issue is our willingness to outsource judgment to authority and then to call the result virtue.
There are many examples of this in ordinary life. Rules appear. People comply. Then, very quickly, a subset of the population begins to not merely comply, but to morally identify with the rule. They become emotionally invested in it. They police it. They scold those who question it. They treat scepticism as recklessness.
This is how societies become trained to comply. Not by tanks in the street – but by small acts of unquestioning compliance, repeated often enough that obedience begins to feel like morality. That’s mostly harmless when the rule is merely silly – but it becomes far more serious when the same instinct is applied to matters of consequence.
We saw that during Covid, when governments across the West went far beyond reasonable public-health measures and crossed into authoritarian control. People were told where they could go, whom they could see, how far they could travel, when they could open their businesses, whether they could attend funerals, whether they could visit dying relatives, whether they could work, whether they could leave their homes, and whether they could sit alone outdoors without being treated like a threat to civilisation.
This was not merely a case of governments making a few clumsy decisions in a crisis. It became a demonstration of how quickly a supposedly free society can be trained to accept controls that would have seemed unthinkable only months earlier.
Rules were imposed with extraordinary force, often on the basis of shonky science, shifting advice, inconsistent modelling and political panic dressed up as certainty. The state reached into family life, worship, business, movement, speech and conscience in ways that went well beyond what a decent society should ever have tolerated.
And again, the most disturbing part wasn’t just that governments imposed these rules. It was how quickly many people accepted this new dystopia – and how quickly they demanded that everyone else accept it too.
Neighbours dobbed in neighbours. Families were separated. Churches were closed. Businesses were crushed. Dissent was treated as dangerous. Questions were recast as selfishness. Compliance became virtue. Obedience became morality. And the population learned to confuse authority with truth.
The same pattern appears in the modern religion of climate change. Wherever you sit on the question of climate risk – and reasonable people can debate the scale, cause, timing and practical response – there is no serious defence for much of the alarmism that has been used to justify sweeping government intervention, economic distortion and a growing pile of rules imposed on ordinary people.
But yet again, the pattern repeats. A claim is made. A rule follows. The rule becomes a moral test. Obedience becomes proof of enlightenment. Questioning becomes proof of wickedness.
And before long, the original evidence matters less than the social pressure to comply.
Which brings us to the real issue. A society increasingly conditioned to obey first and think later is dangerous, because free societies are not destroyed only by bad rulers; they are also weakened by good citizens who stop asking obvious questions. A silly sign at a petrol pump may seem harmless enough, but the habit it represents is not. Once people accept that a rule is right simply because it exists, they have already surrendered the first and most important defence against nonsense, overreach and tyranny: the courage to ask, “Is this actually true?”
Ashley Church is former CEO of the Property Institute of New Zealand and is an active social commentator. This article was sourced HERE and originally published by ashleychurch.com
It wasn’t quite Moses receiving instruction from the mountain, but it was loud enough to make half of the forecourt look up.
I hung up the pump, went inside, and asked the rather officious young woman behind the counter why she had ordered me to hang up. Her reply, given with the kind of certainty that only company policy can produce, was that looking at my cellphone while filling my tank was against the rules.
She had seen me on the cameras. I was using my cellphone while filling my tank. Company rules dictated that this was forbidden.
Now, most people will have seen the little symbol at service stations: a mobile phone with a line through it, sitting among the usual forest of warnings, instructions, prohibitions, icons, stickers and corporate wallpaper that now surrounds almost every public activity: No smoking. No flames. Turn off your engine. No phones. No praying. And don’t look at the pump in a sarcastic manner. (Ok I made the last two up – but give it time.
But why is there a cellphone ban in the first place? Well it rests on the idea that, because petrol vapour is flammable, a cellphone might somehow generate a spark and ignite it.
That’s the theory. It’s also nonsense.
Yes, petrol vapour is flammable. Yes, an actual ignition source can ignite it. Nobody is disputing the basic chemistry. But the question is whether an ordinary cellphone, used by an ordinary person, while filling a car at a service station, represents a real-world ignition risk.
And the answer is no.
This isn’t just my opinion. According to the US-based Petroleum Equipment Institute, which tracks refueling fires, there is not one credible incident of a fire caused by a cellular telephone, on a forecourt. Despite decades of cellphone use and billions upon billions of refueling events around the world, actual documented phone-caused petrol-station fires are non-existent. Not one has ever happened. Ever. The Institute has even attempted to simulate the conditions which might cause such a fire themselves – but have never achieved it.
The UK fuel industry has taken a similar line. Cellphones don’t – and can’t – cause forecourt fires.
But, not to be deterred, the Health and Safety wonks fall back on the claim that “phones are not intrinsically safe devices, so they should not be used right beside the pump or nozzle during refuelling.” – which sounds serious until you translate it into ordinary English. “We can’t show that this thing actually causes fires, but because we can imagine a theoretical chain of events where it might, we will treat it as if it does.”
By that logic, we should probably have a sign at the pump warning people not to think about their Nana’s birthday next week, just in case the mental distraction causes their fuel tank to overflow.
This is how nonsense gets promoted into policy.
Start with something true: petrol vapour is flammable.
Add something nonsensical: a cellphone might somehow spark in precisely the wrong way at precisely the wrong moment.
Print a sign.
Train staff to enforce it.
Then wait long enough for everyone to forget that the evidence was never there in the first place while a ridiculous theoretical possibility hardens into a rule and the rule becomes self-justifying.
“Why can’t I use my phone?”
“Because there’s a sign.”
“Why is there a sign?”
“Because it’s dangerous.”
“How do we know it’s dangerous?”
“Because there’s a sign.”
Yes, I understand that a private company has the right to set the rules on its own forecourt. If a service station wants to ban phones, red socks, whistling, or people named Brian, that is largely its own business (literally).
But that’s not really my point. The phone ban is really just a small, perfect example of something much bigger: we have become remarkably comfortable obeying rules without asking whether the rule itself actually makes any sense.
We defer to the existence of the rule rather than interrogating the basis for it and the fact that someone, somewhere, has said “you must not do this” becomes enough.
And once a rule is wrapped in the sacred language of health and safety, it becomes almost untouchable.
We saw a smaller version of this in New Zealand with road speed limits during the term of the last Labour Government. Roads where the speed limit that had long been 100 kilometres per hour (about 60 miles per hour for readers elsewhere) were dropped to 80 kilometres per hour.
What happened next was fascinating. Literally, the day the rules changed, defence of the new limit became widespread. One day, driving at 100 kilometres per hour was normal, legal, safe and unremarkable. The next day, driving at that same speed on that same road, in the same car, in the same conditions, was treated by some people as if you had decided to juggle chainsaws in a maternity ward.
The road had not changed. The cars had not changed. The laws of physics had not changed. The only thing that had changed was the number on the sign.
And for a surprisingly large section of society, that was enough. 80 good. 100 bad.
But road speeds, cellphones and petrol pumps are just examples.
The deeper issue is our willingness to outsource judgment to authority and then to call the result virtue.
There are many examples of this in ordinary life. Rules appear. People comply. Then, very quickly, a subset of the population begins to not merely comply, but to morally identify with the rule. They become emotionally invested in it. They police it. They scold those who question it. They treat scepticism as recklessness.
This is how societies become trained to comply. Not by tanks in the street – but by small acts of unquestioning compliance, repeated often enough that obedience begins to feel like morality. That’s mostly harmless when the rule is merely silly – but it becomes far more serious when the same instinct is applied to matters of consequence.
We saw that during Covid, when governments across the West went far beyond reasonable public-health measures and crossed into authoritarian control. People were told where they could go, whom they could see, how far they could travel, when they could open their businesses, whether they could attend funerals, whether they could visit dying relatives, whether they could work, whether they could leave their homes, and whether they could sit alone outdoors without being treated like a threat to civilisation.
This was not merely a case of governments making a few clumsy decisions in a crisis. It became a demonstration of how quickly a supposedly free society can be trained to accept controls that would have seemed unthinkable only months earlier.
Rules were imposed with extraordinary force, often on the basis of shonky science, shifting advice, inconsistent modelling and political panic dressed up as certainty. The state reached into family life, worship, business, movement, speech and conscience in ways that went well beyond what a decent society should ever have tolerated.
And again, the most disturbing part wasn’t just that governments imposed these rules. It was how quickly many people accepted this new dystopia – and how quickly they demanded that everyone else accept it too.
Neighbours dobbed in neighbours. Families were separated. Churches were closed. Businesses were crushed. Dissent was treated as dangerous. Questions were recast as selfishness. Compliance became virtue. Obedience became morality. And the population learned to confuse authority with truth.
The same pattern appears in the modern religion of climate change. Wherever you sit on the question of climate risk – and reasonable people can debate the scale, cause, timing and practical response – there is no serious defence for much of the alarmism that has been used to justify sweeping government intervention, economic distortion and a growing pile of rules imposed on ordinary people.
But yet again, the pattern repeats. A claim is made. A rule follows. The rule becomes a moral test. Obedience becomes proof of enlightenment. Questioning becomes proof of wickedness.
And before long, the original evidence matters less than the social pressure to comply.
Which brings us to the real issue. A society increasingly conditioned to obey first and think later is dangerous, because free societies are not destroyed only by bad rulers; they are also weakened by good citizens who stop asking obvious questions. A silly sign at a petrol pump may seem harmless enough, but the habit it represents is not. Once people accept that a rule is right simply because it exists, they have already surrendered the first and most important defence against nonsense, overreach and tyranny: the courage to ask, “Is this actually true?”
Ashley Church is former CEO of the Property Institute of New Zealand and is an active social commentator. This article was sourced HERE and originally published by ashleychurch.com
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