[]{#teslad label=“teslad”}

I have always been interested in how drivers make decisions on the road. Like any unfamiliar activity, driving seems simple. You need to calculate speed and inertia, have good reflexes, know the traffic rules. Don’t drink. And, seemingly, that’s it. However, if you watch drivers for a while, it becomes clear that this is not the case.

For example, you are riding along as a passenger, and someone cuts you off. In one case, your driver reacts nervously; in another, he stays perfectly calm. If you ask why, you can learn a lot of interesting things. For instance, in the second case, the person who cut you off may have simply had no way out—that was just how the situation on the road developed. Meanwhile, for you, as a passenger, it was not particularly different from the first case.

The same goes for overtaking, and for almost any other maneuver. In one case, you slowly crawl behind some rattletrap; in another, you overtake on the oncoming lane through a turn. And if you ask the driver why he acts this way, he will have reasons. Significantly, he will often have to think hard before he can explain a decision he made in fractions of a second. In such cases, he will usually refer to experience.

For a driver to get from A to B, he needs to take into account a huge amount of information: road conditions, weather, the state of his car, quick reflexes, the ability to calculate speed and inertia, and so on. But just as importantly—if not more so—is the ability to understand other drivers, to know what to expect from them. Traffic is not just metal boxes moving at different speeds; it is a social process in which many people interact with each other in rather extreme conditions. Moreover, they interact not only at the level of direct contact between drivers, when they flash their headlights and parking lights at each other, give hand signals, and so forth. Interaction occurs in a very complex and very often barely conscious way, and very often decisions are based on experience, not just on data analysis. The road is one example of Hayekian “complex orders”—of coordination and interaction among people with different goals. If you think carefully about traffic while observing it from a car window, you should be surprised not that accidents happen, but that they happen so rarely and that movement is possible at all.

The common view portrays drivers as absolute egoists striving for their goals, held back from chaos only by traffic rules and the police monitoring their compliance. In reality, however, drivers much more often yield to each other and take into account the interests of others—rather than being rude and showing off—despite all sorts of rules or the presence of traffic police lurking in the nearby bushes. Therefore, road capacity and safety directly depend on culture and the place of negotiability with strangers in that culture. If traffic in Cairo is practically impossible, in European capitals it is much easier—yet traffic rules and traffic police exist in both places.

However, this column is not about driving culture, but about the fact that decisions within the framework of so-called “technological progress” often ignore the real problem they are supposed to solve. Everyone has already seen the Tesla D announcement and read about Google’s automotive explorations. In both cases, there is some kind of autopilot capable not only of parking the car in the garage, but also of driving it on the road. It seems to me that in the second case, problems will inevitably arise—especially in urban traffic—because, I repeat, driving is not a task about speed, inertia, and reaction (although that is also important), but a social task, a task of understanding other road users.

Let’s remember who drivers hate the most. Not reckless drivers and speedsters, and not even blondes. They hate noobs. Because they are unpredictable and dangerous even when driving 60 km/h in the right lane. And the point is not so much that they have not yet mastered driving skills well, but that they do not understand what other people on the road are doing and why. An autopilot is an eternal noob. It is a driver with good reflexes and impeccable knowledge of traffic rules, but one who does not understand other drivers. That is, it is a constant source of accidents. Worse, no autopilot will ever be able to learn social skills. Therefore, excesses are inevitable. New government regulation is also inevitable, which they will definitely try to “solve the problem” with. In general, there is a lot of interesting stuff ahead for us.

Ecology of Society, or Don’t Stick Your Nose into What You’ll Never Understand

There is a simple analogy that helps explain why you cannot demolish MAFs (small kiosks) and generally stick your dirty hands into the economy and the social process as a whole. This analogy is called “ecosystem.” Over many years, ecologists have worn out the hides of progressive society, explaining that everything in nature is interconnected—that if the midges die, the birds will die too. Progressive society now considers “ecological consciousness” an important part of its religion and actively fights and thunders in the struggle for and against.

But this religion does not extend to society. In society, you can exterminate populations, reverse rivers, drain swamps, and pollute the air. And this activity is considered not only useful but the only possible one.

Well, meanwhile, it is obvious that human society is much more complex than any ecosystem. Take a laptop, for example. To make it, dozens—if not hundreds of thousands—of people must work, spending millions of hours on their activities. Moreover, “the factory that makes laptops” occupies a negligibly small part of all this enterprise. To make a laptop, you must be able to mine ore and smelt steel, know organic chemistry and be able to produce plastics—not to mention binary code and the very idea of computation. A laptop is all of this, not just a little box with a screen and a keyboard. If by some evil magic you managed to destroy some of its components, laptop production would become impossible. Moreover, it is clear that not only laptops would suffer, but also many other things into which the destroyed element was incorporated.

That is, what we see in the form of certain objects, conceptual abstractions, and social phenomena is only a part of huge chains of diverse elements of human activity. An entrepreneur or inventor does not invent some completely new entities, as we are told in school, but rather connects together existing chains of human activity, finds new combinations of them—and if such a connection turns out to be needed by other people, they get their profit.

One can say that no goods, no activity simply exists outside of “the system as a whole.” Therefore, any aggression toward a separate element leads to negative consequences for the entire system. Arbitrary aggressive intervention in ecosystems and in society leads to identical consequences and operates by similar mechanisms.

Note that the analogy of society and ecosystems ends at the complexity of connections and the interdependence of elements. Society differs from ecosystems not just by the quantity and quality of connections; these differences are much more significant.

It is obvious, for example, that an ecosystem maintains balance, while society develops. A kiosk is not just “occupying a place in the biocenoses chains” of human society. A kiosk is a means for its owner. If things go well, the kiosk “evolves” into a store, and a new kiosk will take its place. A store, in turn, can “evolve” into a club or a workshop or something else, since it is a means for an acting person. An oak tree cannot “evolve” into a birch or a wolf during its lifetime (I understand the conditionality of the analogy)—it is always an oak. The mechanism of competition differs greatly, if not directly oppositely, from the mechanism of “interspecies struggle,” and so on. Let us not dwell on these issues now, just note the fact of their existence.

But the main difference is that in natural ecosystems there is no element that would try to and be able to regulate the ecosystem as a whole for its own purposes. The “reason,” which itself is a product of cultural evolution caused by attempts to survive through group interaction, plays a cruel joke on a person. It believes that society can be “organized on rational grounds,” not noticing that it is already very complexly organized—and that this organization is the very essence of society. Here many interesting moments arise, but I want to simply note one thing: if you understand the harmfulness of intervention in the ecosystem, you must draw the same conclusions regarding human society, which just as much is an extremely complex self-organizing system, violent intervention into which gives rise to horrifying consequences.

What is “Intervention,” or So What, Are We Supposed to Do Nothing?

In the previous column, we talked about how human society resembles an ecosystem and that the harmfulness of intervention in the natural orders of society can be illustrated with examples from ecology. Of course, in this analogy, one must consider that society is significantly more complex, and that unlike ecosystems, which maintain balance, the social system maintains development.

Here many people have a question that sounds something like: “So what now—do nothing?” If intervention causes harm, then it turns out that a person should do nothing, and it would be better for him to become a Buddhist right away and just observe how things are here and what is happening.

To answer this question, one needs to figure out what is meant by the word “intervention” in our topic. Being outside the system—that is, having the ability to intervene—means possessing the ability to bypass its limitations. A wolf population depends on the rabbit population and other prey; this is a natural limitation on its growth. Both populations are connected to each other and are elements of the system. A person with his guns and chemicals is not subject to these limitations; he can intervene in this system and destroy, let us say, the predator population, disrupting the balance. True, ecological consequences will still catch up with the person, but within a larger system—rather, one whose limitations he cannot bypass.

For the “social ecosystem,” the limitation is the prohibition of aggression (more precisely, its regulation). A society in which aggression is not regulated simply cannot exist. Where aggression is arbitrary, not suppressed, and not regulated, the uncertainty of the future is too high; a person can only adapt to the surrounding world—that is, be an animal, not a human.

Society regulates aggression by raising its price (here, first of all, morality and ethics work). All of us—evil or good, predators or victims—are limited by the scarcity of resources and the need to choose goals and means. Moreover, we make choices not in a vacuum, but in favor of certain patterns of behavior—those “practices,” those “paths,” that were “worn” by many people before us. All these paths are interconnected and exist because they allow people to achieve fantastic results that they would never have achieved alone or in a small group. Aggression, in this sense, is a departure from the paths and an attempt to crash through the underbrush. This “underbrush” consists of various components—from moral judgments of good and bad to the possibility of immediately getting beaten up. Of course, aggression sometimes brings success. But it does not have the regularity and predictability of actions “along the paths” and therefore always remains a rather marginal method of activity. The state (relative to private persons and their associations, of course) has practically no such limitations. It does not need to weigh profits and costs each time when it uses aggression, because for it aggression is institutionalized. You are forbidden to resist “the sovereign’s people” and you are obligated to carry out their orders. That is, for the state, aggression is a kind of “path”—the same as for you some peaceful practice.

Thus, the state has stepped outside the boundaries of the natural “social ecosystem” and therefore can intervene in it. This is the person from our example, with guns and chemicals, who can with impunity violate the balance of the system by shooting predators. Worse, in this case, the inevitable negative consequences that must occur do not hit such a person on the head, but only lead to an increase in his capabilities.

Usually, the “social” and the “governmental” are closely intertwined in the world that we consider “reality”; special efforts must be made to show where is what. But there are several historical situations in which this difference within our topic is clearly visible. For example, the story of the “Riot Act.” British common law is a product of the natural development of society. Therefore, a judge will consider murder both a domestic knife fight and the actions of a “representative of authority,” let us say, a soldier who shot someone during the dispersal of a rally. The British state, while it was weaker than British law, was forced over many years to pass a special “Riot Act” every year, which gave “representatives of authority” immunity from legal prosecution in case of a “riot.” That is, we see here the state outside the legal system of society, see the privilege it gives itself, which allows it to intervene in the legal system and the natural course of things.

And last. A very common mistake of people trying to critique a stateless society is the idea that in such a society there should be some ideal people who do not practice aggression. In reality, this society is for real people, including aggressors. It simply has no characters for whom aggression is always impunity (i.e., no state). Essentially, the libertarian program in a few words sounds like this: “return the regulation of aggression to society.” Well, returning to the question “So what now—do nothing?” with which we began this column, let us answer: why not do anything? Do. Burn down MAFs, fight against outdoor advertising. Just in a free society, you will get adequate change, and you will not have a piece of paper to cover your barbarism in the form of a “law” or some other nonsense.