Social Contracts

As regular readers know, I am a native son of Brooklyn, NY. While I no longer live in the borough where a tree grows, I still live within the NYC metro area, and barring my years away at college, always have. I am well-accustomed to driving in the big city, and mostly shake my head at the routine discourtesies I witness when behind the wheel of my large automobile. Yes, large - I’ve been driving Chevy Suburbans since 1997.

This morning, while on a Costco run (a six mile round trip), I saw three blatant examples of road discourtesy. They reminded me of my distillation of the fundamental rules of driving on public streets, written a dozen years ago and last shared here.

The TL;DR summation?

1. Get the [redacted] out of the way.

2. Wait your [redacted] turn.

Redacted expletives aside (it’s New York, after all), these reflect a basic “social contract” with all the other drivers each of us shares the road with. It’s born of the Golden Rule and our basic human survival instinct. When we are on a two-way road or street, we presume that oncoming cars will not suddenly swerve into our lane. Likewise, when we have a green light at an intersection, we presume that cars facing a red light will not run into us. Ditto for pedestrians. We we have common sense and the awareness that a person rarely wins an impact with a car, both of which exist even if we didn’t have rules about right-of-way.

For the most part.

There are drivers who don’t respect others’ equal right to use the roads, and there are pedestrians who have a very skewed sense of risk, born of an inflated sense of entitlement.

We’ve all encountered such folk.

It seems to me - and I acknowledge this as anecdotal - that I’m encountering bad road behavior more frequently. However, my anecdotal observation is supported by reports that road rage has risen significantly in recent years.

This points to a breakdown in a fundamental social contract - the aforementioned Golden Rule.

We see this not just on the road, but in a form of protest/activism that has become too common in the past couple decades.

I write of the “get in someone’s face and yell at/over them” aggressiveness that shuts down civil discourse and treats others as less than human. I write of the people who invade speaking events - events that many choose to attend so they can listen to a particular speaker - and chant or disrupt in order to deny both the speaker and the listeners what they desire. I write of people who wanted to prevent Charlie Kirk from engaging in civil dialogue with college students.

There is a concept of a “social contract,” first ideated during the Enlightenment, that consists of ceding of some individual rights to an authoritative structure (i.e. government) so that society can better function.

Naturally, some people expand this social contract to argue for unlimited government power... and unrestrained taxation/use of taxpayer money. They do this because they don’t see their fellow members of society as equals, though they will deny this to their last breath in most cases. It’s a corruption of the concept and underlying theory of the social contract intended as an equivocation and language trap. It’s no different from arguing that since police and other emergency services are “socialism,” therefore according-to-Hoyle socialism is a Good Thing.

These and other corruptions are born of a violation of the Golden Rule and of the premise that we are all equal in our rights. The core purpose of a social contract is so that we can each live our lives as we wish, to the greatest practical extent, among one another.

Treat others as you would have them treat you.

Accept that your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of someone else’s nose.

Understand that you have no claim to the fruit of another’s labor.

When we violate these basic premises, we unravel our society. We abet bad behaviors. We dehumanize our neighbors.

We find these violations at core of modern progressivism, a plague that has infected one of our major political parties and prompted a very problematic reaction in our other major party. This is how we have ended up with a political landscape so polarized that knocking down the other team takes priority over doing the right thing.

What’s the remedy? Be more civil to others, even when you vehemently disagree with their politics. Embrace the Golden Rule. This doesn’t mean letting them walk all over you, but it does mean not stooping to their level. Charlie Kirk gave a good example - engage rather than react in-kind. And, if you’re an audience member for a speaker that someone else is shouting down, announce that you are there to listen to the speaker, not the protestor, and that the protestor is violating your right of free association. Politely.

If we can get back to a Golden Rule-based social contract, many societal ills will be cured.