Anarchy in the Streets

by Butler Shaffer
by Butler Shaffer
Recently by Butler Shaffer: The Costs of Human Action

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

~ Henry Adams

How often do discussions on the prospects of a stateless society produce the response that, without government, there would be "anarchy in the streets"? To many people, the streets are symbolic of society, and with good reason: they are the most visible networks through which we interact with one another. They are much like the major arteries (we even use that word to describe streets), veins, and capillaries that transport blood throughout our bodies. Each can be thought of as the carrier of both food and waste to and from individual cells.

The thought that city streets – upon which we depend for daily functioning – could ever become disorderly, leads most people to accept a governmental policing function of such avenues without much question. We imagine that without speed limits, traffic lights at busy intersections, and all of the varied warnings plastered on tens of thousands of signs that encumber streets in our cities, driving would become a turbulent and destructive undertaking.

For a number of years now, a number of cities in Europe have been experimenting with the removal of all traffic signs – including traffic lights, stop signs, speed limit directives – and with surprising results. Various towns in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, New Zealand – even the UK! – have joined in the experiment. Contrary to the expectations of those who might expect multi-car pileups throughout the cities, traffic accidents have been dramatically reduced (in one town, dropping from about eight per year to fewer than two). Part of the reason for the increased safety relates to the fact that, without the worry of offending traffic sign mandates, or watching for police speed-traps, or checking the rear-view mirror for police motorcycles, drivers have more time to pay attention to other cars and pedestrians.

The architect of this experiment, the late Hans Monderman, attributed its success to the fact that "it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want." "Unsafe is safe" was the title of a conference held on this practice. Monderman added that this effort "shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk, to the driver being responsible for his or her own risk." Equally significant, drivers now focus more of their attention on other motorists – taking visual cues from one another, informally negotiating for space, turning into an intersection, etc. – instead of mechanistically responding to signs and electronic machines. Monderman stated: "When you don’t know exactly who has right of way, you tend to seek eye contact with other road users. You automatically reduce your speed, you have contact with other people and you take greater care." He added: "The many rules strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We’re losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior." In words so applicable to the rest of our politically-structured lives, he declared: "The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people’s sense of personal responsibility dwindles." Monderman expressed the matter more succinctly in saying: "When you treat people like idiots, they’ll behave like idiots."

Formal rules divide us from one another; the more rules that are imposed upon our conduct, the greater the distances among us. Of course, this is the logic upon which the state always acts: to insinuate itself into our relationships with others, substituting its coercively-enforced edicts for our interpersonal bargaining. We become conditioned to look upon strangers as threats, and to regard political intervention as our only means of looking after our own interests.

One sees this mindset of social impotence expressed throughout our lives. I am fond of asking my students why they do not negotiate with retailers for groceries, clothing, and other consumer items. They look at me as though I had suggested they attend movies in the nude. "You can’t do that," they instinctively respond. I then offer examples of persons I have known who make a habit of such bargaining, managing to save themselves hundreds or more dollars each year. Incredulity still prevails. On one occasion, a student raised his hand to inform the class that he had been an assistant manager of a major retail store in Los Angeles, adding "we did this all the time."

How easily we give up on our own social skills, and at what costs. These experiments with traffic-sign abandonment remind us how much we rely upon informal methods of negotiating with other drivers, and the socially-harmonious benefits of our doing so. My own freeway driving experiences provide an example: if another driver signals to move into my lane, or I signal to move into his, more than a simple lane-change takes place. From that point on, there is nothing this other motorist can do – short of intentionally crashing into my car – that will cause me to feel anger toward him. He’s "my guy," and I will feel a sense of neighborliness to him that will generate feelings of protectiveness toward him. "Neighborliness" is a good word to use here: how many of us could honk our horn or make angry hand-gestures at another driver we recognized to be someone that we know?

This is one of the unintended consequences of taking the state out of the business of directing our traffic: we regain our sense of society with others; strangers lose their abstractness, and become more like neighbors to us. If you doubt the pragmatic and social benefits of these experiments, try recalling those occasions in which a traffic light goes out at a major intersection. Motorists immediately – and without any external direction – begin a "round-robin" system of taking turns proceeding through the intersection. One of my seminar students related her experience in this connection. She was parked at the curb, waiting to pick up her mother. She noted that traffic was flowing quite smoothly, and without any significant delays. Then a police officer showed up to direct the traffic, with gridlock quickly ensuing.

A number of years ago, someone wrote an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles newspaper, reporting on a major Beverly Hills intersection where some six lanes of traffic converge. There were no traffic lights governing the situation, with motorists relying on the informal methods of negotiating with one another. The writer – who lives in the area – commented upon the resulting orderliness, going so far as to check police records to confirm just how free of accidents this intersection was.

How counter-intuitive so much of this is to those who have become conditioned to think that the state is the creator of order in our lives. In much the same way that people are discovering how widespread gun ownership reduces violent crime in society, putting power back into the hands of individuals is the most effective way of fostering both the responsible and harmonious relationships we have so childishly expected to arise from our dependence upon, and obedience to, external authorities.

What if the idea of living without coercively imposed rules was to spread from the streets into all phases of our lives? What if we abandoned our habits of looking to others to civilize us and bring us to order, and understood that obedience to others makes us irresponsible? As government people-pushers continue their efforts to micro-manage the details of our lives – what foods and drugs we may ingest; how we are to raise and educate our children; the kinds of cars we may drive and light bulbs we may use; the health-care we are to receive; our optimal weight levels; how we are to provide for our retirement; ad nauseam – might we summon the courage to end our neurotic fixations on "security?"

Might the quality of our lives be greatly enhanced by the transformation in thinking implicit in these traffic experiments? Might they offer flashes of insight into how the individual liberty to assess our own risks and freely act upon the choices we make provide the necessary basis for a life that is both materially and spiritually meaningful? As our institutionalized subservience and dependency continues to destroy us, can we learn that what we and our neighbors have in common is our need to negotiate with and to support one another as autonomous and changing people in a changing and uncertain world?

(Those interested in reading more about this experiment, can google "european cities remove traffic signs," and find links to many articles on the subject.)

April 7, 2010

Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938 and of Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival. His latest book is Boundaries of Order.

Butler Shaffer Archives

so i bowed to the empire and signed up for reader (yet another google thing), while balancing that with basically leaving blogger and — however brief our association — feedburner (an unnecessary product if ever one, from my hack perspective). had never used google reader. it’s far better than the dormant bloglines.

google continues to emerge from its embryo form; embryo of baby skynet. voluntarists, watch your asses with these sanctimonious clowns. damned if i sign up for gmail.

I received a sad call this Xmas Eve morning, from a friend informing me of the passing of Radio & TV Icon George Michael.Lots of people know him primarily from his syndicated and ahead-of-its-time “Sports Machine” tv show or for his decades of work in the Washington DC market as sports anchor of WRC-TV, and his shows with Redskins coaches and QB’s.

Lots more people know him as “King” George Michael, from WFIL/Philadelphia or WABC/New York. [...]

see also mike wise, another radio dude with taste.

i can write LRC articles in my sleep. i may be the only person to have been accepted into the LRC-writers stable twice; after leaving LRC, i reentered cloaked as an attractive persian woman, complete with picture (the woman in the picture graciously gave her permission for the ruse). with nearly every LRC article you write comes an avalanche of laudatory bullshit. put the same thing on a forum though — without the usual cutesy contrivances of the authoritative-columnist-voice and the tightassed avoidance of contractions — you’re a wanker, not a “writer”.

great perspective exercise: any store with racks of packaged trinkets, check the price on something, then imagine that thing thrown casually aside in someone’s house; instant devaluation, much of it from the absent packaging.

everything you need to know on this subject:

lunatic crotch/psychosis-driven comment vandal who obviously has more on her mind than the intellect of this site, and who i suspect might share a computer with someone who’d be interested in a clue or two: better look into an IP proxy service. doubt you have one, and if you’re the person i think you are, you’re probably too stupid to find/use one. i’ll enjoy the SNAFU this’ll add to your intoxicating life, less-than-worthless skeeve.

bye!

[update: removed.]

still i would see her nearly every week for a while. she’d drop by to hang out with her friend who took lessons at the store. have a vague recollection that they both visited my recording studio once together and hung out, maybe while recording a local band josie loved. however it happened, she was a pretty good casual friend under the circumstances, and i don’t think she ever much begrudged me telling her to stop taking lessons. her parents were cool too.

i’m thinking about her right now because i was going through some old box of doodads or whatever and found a bookmark she’d bought for me. said on the back,

To Charley,
with love
Josie

kinda like this:

this was a sweet kid, typical teenage angst and frustration, but josie was also more open and bitter about things — probably why we got along pretty well. i liked that she didn’t have a big insulating safety layer of BS surrounding her. she was passionate about Jane’s Addiction, which led me to not hating them so much, then in the mid 90s taping one of their SNL appearances, and earlier this year transferring it to YouTube, where thousands of people enjoyed watching it until, despite the intentional absence of any giveaway tags on the vid, NBC got wind and had it removed. those thousands watched it, favorited it, and argued about it because of her minor influence on my life almost 20 years ago.

shortly after giving me that bookmark, josie died in a car crash. just gone. somebody told me about it, and in 15 seconds josie had stopped aging. i wanted to call her parents, but what do you say? i didn’t know them that well. i didn’t even know their daughter that well. it was just that josie seemed like such a great fit at the music store, giving people crap, laughing… showing a greater passion for listening to music than most people did playing it. i know that’s not highly unusual with teenagers, especially some girls, but it never gets tiring to see.

does it make sense that when i think of josie she’s stuck back there in 1989? why can i not make her older, give her boyfriends, then a husband and kids? concerts. though i rarely think of her, i’ve retained this guilt about a responsibility to keep her existing somehow, like i never… well how do you say goodbye to someone nobody knows is leaving?

then i’d think about her parents, and there’s another burden, as though i owe them something. some communicated participation in their grief. i don’t know. the bookmark that i can’t discard, so every few years i look at it and remember josie, angry about all that work she put in — learning about life, adjusting to things that bothered her, worrying about what to do after high school. “cow pie high”, i think is what she called her school, since it was a tech deal where some of the students learned to farm.

and though i can instantly place myself back in that practice room, laughing and jiving, seeing and hearing, i can’t remember her last name. that passionate girl with the funny dad and friendly mom.

please continue to call me salty or whatever. or you can call me dr. paul and send me some protection money, because <SuperHugeTypeface>the hope of the republic is in my hands, children o’ the state!</SuperHugeTypeface>

when i was growing up in virginia we’d hang out regularly with a family down the street. i’d babysit their kids, they had weekly volleyball parties, the father taught me to drive a manual transmission, they gave my brother and me our first car (i bought out his half) — a used VW rabbit… blah blah blah. after they moved to the philly suburbs, we’d sometimes vacation with them in vermont and new york. they had a son named jamie… or at least he used to be jamie. he did something like i did midway through childhood (changing my name from kevin to charley — middle to first), and announced one day that he was no longer jamie; he wanted to be called chris. the funny part was that chris wasn’t one of his birth names. anyway, he was about 15 at the time of our last vacation together, and very annoying with his know-it-all tone and general bullish stupidity (simply because of the age; he was otherwise a good guy).

the following winter chris was in philadelphia with a friend to do some christmas shopping. they were approached by a rastafarian with a strange story — complete with mystical malarkey, as i recall — of how he was being chased by something or someone, and he showed the boys a big wad of money (probably paper with a real bill on the top). they went into a restaurant to sit and talk, and he asked if they’d hold on to the money for a little bit until things smoothed over. they said they would, but then he voiced misgiving about being able to trust them. perhaps it would be better, he surmised, if they gave him their x-mas gifts as collateral. they gave him all their stuff and he said he’d return in about half an hour. when about to leave, he asked if they had a “tick-tock”. chris assumed he meant a watch, and said what i say on the tape (with a rube mindset if not a rube accent). rasta said he would take that as well, and poor chris gave it to him. shocker finish: rasta man had given them a worthless bundle. they didn’t see him again.

knowing i had a recording studio and liked making gag tapes, chris’s father asked if i’d put together some shtick with reggae music in the background or whatever to make fun of the situation.

here’s the result (.MP3, 5 MB).

not so hilarious if you don’t know the guy, but i had fun doing the voices and background “music” .

[outro is jimmy cliff.]