In city after city, the same small tableau appears: bicycles and scooters arranged in public space with near-mathematical regularity, as though urban life had been briefly handed over to a draftsman. The advantages are real. Clear lanes remain clear. Pedestrians move more safely. Municipal management becomes easier. A basic ethic of shared space is made visible. Yet the virtues of order can sour when order ceases to be a practical goal and becomes a kind of moral theater. At that point, neatness is no longer simply a civic habit; it becomes a collective anxiety dressed up as virtue. This tendency — call it an obsession with legibility — is not a psychiatric claim but a social observation: a condition in which a community grows so attached to control and visual tidiness that minor irregularities are treated as ethical failures. Parking a vehicle is transformed from a practical act into a character test. Compliance is not enough. Citizens are invited to surveil, to correct, to shame. A crooked wheel, a brief stop outside the painted line, an improvised accommodation for circumstance — each becomes evidence of moral laxity rather than ordinary human variation. The cost of this sensibility is that form begins to outrank function. If the scene appears orderly, it is judged successful, regardless of whether it serves actual users. The elderly moving slowly through crowded streets, delivery workers under punishing time pressure, parents making quick pickups, people with temporary injuries navigating limited options — all expose the same vulnerability: systems designed for visual coherence often collapse under the weight of real life. Governance risks becoming self-referential, managing the image of order rather than the substance of public welfare. None of this is an argument against rules. Shared environments depend on them, and civic trust requires that they be observed. The question is what rules are for. A mature public culture does not confuse uniformity with solidarity, or tidiness with justice. It upholds standards while allowing for proportion, discretion, and reasonable exception. It can distinguish between harm and mere deviation, and can prefer coordination without demanding choreography. Neatness is a civic good, but it is not the highest one. When a society tolerates only perfect alignment, the deeper disorder may lie elsewhere: in a diminished capacity for empathy, in discomfort with difference, and in a public imagination too rigid to accommodate the ordinary asymmetries of human life.