Living in the core really drives it home constantly.
Your coworkers' amicable attitudes towards policies and laws designed to ruin people is 'acceptable', whereas treating those policies with open contempt is not.
Something about the civility of language and all that.
It's something a guy named Cockburne used to ask his interns. A way of gauging if they had fire inside them, if they thought of the world as something awful and broken that could and should be mended.