Strange Thoughts Always Occur to Me When I'm Driving Alone
I sometimes realize when I'm driving how precarious this form of transport is. We can all (I think) agree that most people are, as Liane likes to put it "bastard-coated bastards". We're selfish, pig-headed, and lose our cool easily. And yet, the bastards that we wouldn't trust to do our taxes or take care of our kids or even cut our lawns are the very same people who hold our life in the balance every time we go driving.
Think about travelling down a highway -- hundreds of tons of steel and concrete whizzing by you at a hundred kilometres an hour. I change lanes, and the only assurance I have that another car won't careen into me is a few painted lines, and maybe my use of a little blinking light. I've often been driving and thought "All I (or anyone else around me) have to do is jerk the wheel a few inches to the right or left, and everything would change." Every successful drive from point A to point B involves hundreds of strangers all agreeing to follow some arbitrary rules (green means go, red means stop, and so on) and no one screwing up.
While this way of thinking about driving is guaranteed to freak you out (it certainly gives me the chills when it occurs to me in the middle of the 401), it's also an oddly affirming thing. Because you see, I'm not dead yet. If people really were as screwed up as I sometimes think they are, I'd be dead by now, because I or one of the thousands of strangers I trusted my life to today would have made a mistake (just one, maybe) and I wouldn't be here. But no one made a mistake (some bad decisions maybe, but no, if you'll pardon the pun, fatal errors), and so instead I'm safe at home writing this post.
Life, it seems to me, is often like that. There's only one right way to do lots of things, and hundreds upon hundreds of wrong ways. I, against all reason and all odds, have managed to survive and flourish in this life. Occasionally I get flashes of how precarious my existence is, but rather than making me stop driving, it just makes me marvel all the more at how just managing to survive in this world is a feat of equal parts luck and heroism.
posted by bento at 9:13 PM
5 Comments:
This is what I've been saying ever since my own accident: that it doesn't matter how safe or conscientious you are, all it takes is some other jerk to screw up.
6:17 AM
It's interesting that the assumption was made that people are generally "bastard-coated bastards," yet you point out that there must be something good which encourage people to drive properly.
However, that just leads me to more head scratching as I ask about the real motivation for proper driving. Is the reason selfish (ie. keeping one's licence, avoiding injury, etc.) or is the reason altruistic?
8:42 PM
Try and get a bunch of monkies to drive on the highway. Believe me, the result will be a pile of steel and a lot of dead monkies. The fact is, in order for us to invent the automobile, we'd need the intelligence to cooperate on the road as well. Survival of the fittest ensures that at least a general order exists on the road. Beyond the obvious desire to get from point A to point B, people follow the rules of the road because they want to survive. Those that don't or screw up, end up as a splat on the side of someone else's car, and once again, providing and example of the survival of the fittest.
9:41 PM
On the other hand, while as much as people want to survive their commute, sometimes they are just acting like people (i.e. stupid) and that's when accidents happen.
I think that there is order on the road for the same reason that there is a heirarchy at work and social etiquette in public: we all crave rules or guidelines that keep society working.
It's like those Post Apocolyptic movies/books wherein everything has gone to hell in a handbasket and it's everybody for themselves but there is still "honour among thieves".
5:08 PM
There's been a recent move to call accidents "collisions" instead, since generally someone is at fault when things go wrong on the road. Of course, there are always innocent parties who get hurt --while some people survive because they are "the fittest", people do still get hurt through no fault of their own, just bad luck.
As for my assumption that people are "bastard-coated bastards", this ironically only reinforces my sense that there must be something good (desire for order, need for survival, altruism) which makes people drive well. I assume that people will do bad things, which is why I'm constantly amazed by how much of the time we manage to be good and kind to one another (optimism plus a dim view of humanity -- now that's philosophy!).
"There's nothing human that's not a broth of false and true" -- people drive well because they're hard-wired to follow rules, because they don't want to die, and because they don't want to hurt others. It's not an either/or, it's a both/and.
Thanks for the interesting discussion!
6:16 PM
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