Saturday, September 22, 2018
Delray Beach, FL – In his book In Pursuit of Elegance, Matthew E. May tells a story about Drachten, a Dutch village that had a serious problem with traffic at its main intersection. The village hired an expert, Hans Monderman, to help them reduce congestion and accidents.
The conventional way to do this is to implement various measures to get cars to slow down. Unfortunately, such measures – including stoplights, radar-controlled equipment, and a beefed-up police force – are expensive. Since Drachten had a small budget, Monderman was forced to do something different.
He realized that this was an opportunity for him to test a theory he had been developing about human behavior: that the more controls you impose on people, the less self-control they are likely to exhibit. In his words, “Treat people like zombies and they’ll behave like zombies. But treat them as intelligent, and they’ll respond intelligently.”
So instead of increasing traffic controls in the middle of town, he reduced them to a startling degree. Instead of adding regulations, he suggested repealing most of them. No speed bumps, no speed limits, no signs, no mandates about right of way.
What happened was not the chaos that many had predicted. To the surprise of nearly everyone, the solution worked. With no rules to guide them, drivers approaching the intersection were very aware of each other. They slowed down and moved cautiously, doing their best to get through the intersection safely. Traffic flowed naturally. There was no congestion, even at rush hour. And no long delays for anyone. No waiting at a red light when there was no one else on the road.
As May points out in his book, what Monderman had done was replace traffic code with social code.
To demonstrate how safe his innovative intersection design was, Monderman liked to stand at the curb, talking to reporters – and, while talking, walk backward into traffic.
May sees this experiment as an example of his thesis: that sometimes the best solutions are simple ones that involve doing less, not more. He calls these solutions elegant, but you might just as well call them relaxed.
The typical traffic planner, fearful of creating a system with “flaws,” designs one that regulates against every conceivable mishap. But no sooner is the system put into place then some unanticipated accident occurs. The planner’s response? Add another regulation.
This is the thought process of most people. Chaos is risky. Chaos is dangerous. The only way to reduce chaos (and thus reduce risk and danger) is to create regulations. And if those regulations fail to avert disaster, create more regulations and/or enforce them with severer penalties.
We do this with almost every aspect of our lives – from traffic to medicine to work safety to food to how we treat our family and our neighbors. The list does not end because the potential for chaos does not end.
This fear of chaos resides in the self-conscious mind. And the conventional solutions (laws and regulations) come from the self-conscious mind. They sometimes work, but sometimes fail terribly. However, since the self-conscious mind cannot relax, it has no other way to respond.
To put it differently, the primary purpose of the self-conscious mind is to preserve itself. Chaos is frightening because the self-conscious mind cannot exist in it. So it is natural for the self-conscious mind to regulate chaos out of existence. To do otherwise would be to accept the inevitability of death.
The relaxed mind accepts death as inevitable and so it can imagine solutions that are simpler and unforced. It can imagine life continuing with less regulation. And, in fact, it does.
One of the advantages of cultivating a relaxed consciousness is that the fear of chaos subsides. We are then able to let go of the idea that force and regulation is the only way to resolve a problem. And more often than not, we find that the problem then resolves itself.
* In this series of essays, which hopes to become a book, I’m exploring an idea I’ve been thinking about for a long time — that our knowledge of the universe and our experience of living can be understood by the metaphor of pulsation – of contraction and relaxation – and that such an understanding might helpful in succeeding in life and accepting death.
