In a Hurry to be Nowhere: A Society’s relationship with the Law

By Harris Jamil Alam Khan

A motorcycle squeezes through a gap that barely exists. A car overtakes from the wrong side only to stop at the same red light fifty metres ahead. Someone jumps a queue, another blocks an intersection because he cannot bear to wait for the traffic ahead to clear, and a horn is answered not with an apology but with aggression. Everyone appears to be in an extraordinary hurry. The strange part is that most of us do not have an emergency or an urgent chore, yet the daredevil driving is on display everywhere.

Perhaps our roads deserve to be studied as more than a traffic problem. They may be telling us something about ourselves. The road is one of the few places where almost every section of society meets under the same basic rules. The SUV, the rickshaw, the motorcycle, the bus and the pedestrian eventually arrive at the same intersection. There is supposed to be an uncomplicated social contract between them: stay in your lane, stop when required, give way when another person has the right of way, do not endanger someone merely because you can and, most importantly, accept that occasionally you will have to wait. Increasingly, it is that last requirement that seems to have become unacceptable.

A few seconds of inconvenience can produce extraordinary reactions. A horn becomes an insult. A lane change becomes a challenge. A minor collision can become a physical confrontation. The issue ceases to be traffic and becomes ego. To dismiss this simply as bad driving is to miss something more important. What we may be watching is an erosion of tolerance for inconvenience, accompanied by an equally troubling erosion in the expectation of consequences. Law works partly because people fear punishment, but functioning societies do not survive on punishment alone. Most people stop at a red light not merely because there may be a policeman nearby, but because somewhere within them exists an acceptance that the rule serves a purpose. When enough people discover that the red light is optional, the helmet optional, the wrong side of the road available, the queue negotiable and aggression largely without consequence, something begins to change. The law remains in the statute book, but on the street it becomes a suggestion.

Plato confronted essentially the same question more than two thousand years ago through the story of the Ring of Gyges in The Republic. Glaucon asks what a person would do if he possessed a ring that made him invisible. If there were no possibility of being seen, caught or punished, would he still behave justly? That question remains remarkably relevant. The true test of a traffic law is not whether a driver stops when a warden is standing at the intersection. It is whether he stops at two in the morning when the road appears empty. It is not whether a motorcyclist wears a helmet because a checkpoint is ahead, but whether he values the rule when nobody is there to enforce it. A society cannot police every intersection, every lane and every decision.

Leave a safe distance between your car and the vehicle ahead and someone immediately occupies it. Wait patiently in a queue and vehicles begin passing you from both sides. Stop before an intersection to avoid blocking it and the cars behind start honking because you have failed to participate in the obstruction. Courtesy begins to look like weakness. Patience begins to feel like stupidity. Compliance begins carrying a cost. At that point, even otherwise reasonable people start adapting. They do not necessarily become reckless because they stopped believing in rules. They become reckless because they begin believing that everyone else has stopped believing in them.

This is where Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance becomes relevant, although in a broader social sense than he originally intended. Popper warned that unlimited tolerance could eventually allow intolerance to destroy the conditions that made tolerance possible. The same logic can be seen in everyday civic life. A society that endlessly tolerates antisocial behaviour can eventually make ordinary tolerance more difficult. The patient driver is repeatedly punished for being patient. The aggressive driver is repeatedly rewarded for being aggressive. Eventually the lesson teaches itself. Repeated illegality becomes habit, and habit begins to resemble culture.

There is another aspect of our road behaviour that should trouble us even more: the apparent weakening of the instinct for self-preservation. Motorcycles enter fast-moving traffic without looking. Families ride without helmets. Riders squeeze between buses and trucks. Cars accelerate towards intersections as lights change. Drivers use the wrong side of divided roads to save two minutes. The potential consequences are obvious, yet the risk is repeatedly taken. Perhaps repeated survival without consequence creates its own illusion. The wrong-side journey worked yesterday. The signal was broken without a ticket. The helmet appeared unnecessary because there was no accident. The aggressive confrontation ended because the other person backed away. Each successful violation becomes evidence, however falsely, that the violation was acceptable, until it isn’t. There is a strange contradiction in this. We appear increasingly unwilling to tolerate inconvenience while becoming remarkably tolerant of danger.

Government has a role here, but individual responsibility cannot disappear. Every driver chooses whether to behave recklessly. Every motorcyclist chooses whether to wear a helmet. A person who turns a minor incident into violence remains responsible for that violence. But government establishes the environment within which millions of these decisions are made. Its job is not only to enact rules. It is to make lawful behaviour normal and unlawful behaviour sufficiently consequential that the balance does not gradually reverse.

Two encounters with law-enforcement officers have stayed with me. In one, while discussing whether higher traffic fines might improve compliance, an officer was sceptical. He said people would lie, invoke influence and create disputes even over five hundred rupees, so what would happen if the challan rose to a thousand? His point was less about the amount than about how routinely resistance to enforcement had come to be expected. At the same intersection, I later watched an officer sift through challans to find one belonging to a man he immediately recognised as a regular. Despite repeated fines, he still would not wear a helmet. The law was being enforced, yet the behaviour remained unchanged. The challan had ceased to be a deterrent and had become simply another cost of continuing the same conduct.

This is where the familiar metaphor of “let them eat cake” becomes useful, not as a historical claim, but as shorthand for the distance that can develop between those governing and the everyday experience of those being governed. The modern version does not require an extravagant statement from anyone. Institutional distance is enough. Government may experience society through reports, meetings, statistics, presentations, files and protocol-driven drive-by, while the citizen experiences it through a traffic signal, a police station, an unsafe road, an encroached pavement, a hospital emergency, or the simple question of whether breaking a rule has any consequence. The two realities can slowly drift apart. It is not about cake. It is about distance. For any government, the danger begins when what appears to be a minor inconvenience from an office has become a daily source of anger on the street. When persistent disorder becomes background noise to those responsible for addressing it, the distance between administration and experience grows wider.

Because roads are not separate from society. They are society compressed into a few lanes. They show us how people respond to rules when nobody is watching, how they treat strangers with exactly the same claim to public space, whether strength gives entitlement, whether patience still has value and whether consequences remain believable. Plato asks what we do when we believe ourselves invisible. Durkheim asks what happens when enough people around us stop believing that the rule matters. Popper warns about what happens when destructive behaviour is tolerated until it begins undermining the very conditions that make coexistence possible. And the metaphor of “let them eat cake” captures the danger of institutions perceiving one reality while citizens are living another.

The solution is neither more aggression nor another slogan telling people to drive carefully. Consequences must become predictable. Enforcement must become ordinary rather than exceptional. The person following the law must stop feeling like the fool in the system. Most importantly, civic behaviour has to recover the idea that restraint is not weakness. A functioning society depends upon millions of small decisions in which people choose not to exercise every advantage available to them: the car that waits, the motorcycle that does not squeeze through, the driver who lets another vehicle merge, the person who absorbs an accidental horn without turning it into a question of honour. These are small acts, but civilisation is largely constructed from small acts.

Perhaps that is why our roads deserve more attention than we give them. They may be showing us the direction of travel long before our institutions recognise it. Everybody is accelerating. Everybody wants to get ahead. Everybody is fighting for the next ten feet of road. And increasingly, we seem to be in a hurry to be nowhere.