The 'rules' in existance are societal, individual, religious, group, political, law, etc. They often clash, and rarely coincide. The chances are, that if yeu're following one rule, yeu're breaking another.
The "system" doesn't reward anyone for such, but rather, rewards people for correctly picking the right rule to follow in any given situation.
If yeu live in a low end neighbourhood, controlled by gangs on a daily basis, then following the rules of the law will get yeu killed more likely than anything else; going with whichever gang's in power at the time is political ruling on a group scale. Yeu may totally disagree with their rules, they may be impractical, or dangerous, or foolhardy, but going with the rules in order of precedence, set by the context of the situation, will reward yeu.
Those who can identify which ruleset is most valid at any given time, and make use of such, while being careful to minimize the damage when interacting with conflicting rulesets, will be rewarded. Those who just follow 'the rules' of a single aspect of things, ignoring all others, will be cut down without mercy by every group they offend in the process. Which will be pretty much everyone.
As we are interactive beings, dealing with situations as they come, this isn't really all that surprising. It also explains how people can bargain with their conscience at times, as if they have to go against their personal rules to follow someone else's rules in order to survive or get ahead... so be it much of the time. Those who insist on blindly following only their own rules, ignoring all others, gets the same fate as those listed above, and the same fate as those who follow only the law (selling out friends, making enemies with those in illegal practices, etc), or those who follow only society's rules, etc.
Yeu can't live by a single ruleset and hope to do well, let alone survive for any length of time. The sooner people realize this, the sooner they'll be able to take hold of their lives.