Jack Reacher's Rules

INTRODUCTION

If you’ve been paying attention long enough, you know one thing for sure: the defining human characteristic is tribalism. We all slice and dice the world’s population into ever smaller fragments until we find a group where we feel comfortable, where we feel we truly belong.

And having arrived there, we make rules governing that group’s behavior. We want a reliable guide to how to act, we want to build bulwarks against outsiders, we want to provide a secure mechanism for belonging, we want to reassure ourselves that continuing membership is guaranteed if only we conform.

Some rules are official. We form clubs and societies and associations and give them procedures and bylaws more complex than those of government bodies.

Some rules are only semiofficial. Hit on your friend’s best girl? No way. Rat out an accomplice? Not going to happen. Break a strike? You’d rather die.

Some rules are just slogans, consoling and emboldening. Maybe as a kid, your gang—part of your street in part of your city in your country in the big, bewildering world—was, like kids are, told by your parents and teachers to be scared of strangers. No, you said. Strangers should be told to be scared of us.

Jack Reacher has always followed his own rules. He grew up in a fractured way, six months here, three months there, always moving, never stable, never belonging. Then he was a soldier, but too wise to buy into all the nonsense. He obeyed only the rules that made sense to him. Then he was cut loose and became a true outsider, profoundly comfortable with solitude. Does he have a tribe? You bet. He’s human. But in his case he kept on slicing and dicing until he got all the way down to a tribe with just one member—himself. But that tribe still needs rules, to guide, and embolden, and simplify, and reassure.

What follows are some of them.

LEE CHILD