Controlled Chaos: Will come the day when rules can be abolished safely?

[lordraleigh]

First part

It is an interesting idea arising in some european cities, that traffic rules actually go against their intention.

Controlled Chaos: European Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,448747,00.html

It may sound like chaos, but it's only the lesson drawn from one of the insights of traffic psychology: Drivers will force the accelerator down ruthlessly only in situations where everything has been fully regulated. Where the situation is unclear, they're forced to drive more carefully and cautiously...

And some people already discussed it...

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1741329/posts

My take on this: it would work differently according to the culture of the region where it was implemented. In some cities it would mean absolute chaos, it others it wouldn't.

Second Part

Now expanding the horizons, the existence of laws does not change personal moral and ethical values.

"I don't kill because it is forbidden and/or because I'll get killed/arrested for doing it" instead of  "I don't kill because it's wrong" or "I don't kill because mutual aid and cooperation is better than competition and brutality"

Although it may not seem, that statement is in many cases true. Law can limit the actions of someone, but change one's will of doing wrong things.

Of course there are exceptions to the statement "killing is wrong" like killing a serial killer that is rushing against you among other cases.

In my opinion it's quite simple:

The existence of rules is the first sign to identify what isn't an utopia

The less rules become necessary, more closer mankind will be to an ideal world and society.

Lastly a quotation from a certain book:

"The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked about the Rights of Man! We hate rights and we hate wrongs. We have abolished right and wrong."

[zanzibar]

If there were no rules, it would be impossible to hold people accountable for breaking them.

[/thread]

[Parallo]

Allow me to quote Steven Pinker speaking about a police strike in Montreal:

As a young teenager in proudly peacable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' arguments that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predicions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 12, 1969, when Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 A.M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most stores had closed because of the looting. Within a few more hours taxi drivers had burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport coustomers, a rooftop sniper killed a provisional police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters.

[Cherppow]

Hi,

In the paper sounds pretty nice. But I don't think it'll work as long as people are the selfish and imperfect things that we are. Maybe one day... in Heaven.

[zanzibar]

Maybe one day... in Heaven.

Only because you can't kill someone who's already dead.

[emeraldfool]

It may sound like chaos, but it's only the lesson drawn from one of the insights of traffic psychology: Drivers will force the accelerator down ruthlessly only in situations where everything has been fully regulated. Where the situation is unclear, they're forced to drive more carefully and cautiously...

My take on this: it would work differently according to the culture of the region where it was implemented. In some cities it would mean absolute chaos, it others it wouldn't.

I'm inclined to agree. You can always spot an American on a round-a-bout


In the broader sense, some social structures can cope better with unclear situations, just like individual people. There are several African tribes that have very strict rules regarding warfare that are usually always followed - for example, if you kill a member of an opposing tribe in a war, that tribe must pay the victim's tribe a certain amount of money.

They follow these rules because they all hold a deep and unflinching fear that the spirits will haunt them forever if they don't abide by them.

'Course that would never work in other places. Earth has an amazing variety of totally different cultures...