Yeah so I almost got hit - or I should say bumped; the car wasn't going very fast - crossing an intersection.
The guy didn't see me until the very last second, which was strange because the crossing sign was on, a bright glowing symbol straight ahead. I was just to the right of him. All he had to do was check. But he was focused on a very limited space directly ahead of him. He wasn't even aware of the greater space.
That's sort of the kind of thing we devise laws for. It seems as though total cosmic awareness itself is something that is temporary: a burst of expanding energy that then proceeds to contract. What I mean is that the glowing awareness of the total, of all interconnecting things fades as a delimited system continues its operation. You have a multitude of interested actors within a certain system, individual human interests, which base their actions increasingly on their own limited locus of interest. Of course, we are talking about the paradigm of Western Civilization, and really the last 5,000 years of human civilization. Not sure how this applies to completely different states of affairs in other times, but anyways...
With community feeling, or even ecological feeling, one is aware of the interconnectedness of interests outside of oneself, so that in one's own interest, one bases ones actions within these limitations so as to sustain the total aggregate that benefits everyone. If everyone does this, everyone is benefited. It is the sort of thing illustrated by the tragedy of the commons and the prisoner's dilemma thought experiments.
But over time that sense of community fades. One increasingly bases one's actions not on the aggregate but on one's own ego, which naturally holds contradictory interests to other egos. So we put up laws to attempt to shape and direct these contradictions. One person has an immediate interest to cross the street by bike, the other has an immediate interest to intersect that path by car. You can't count on both interests taking stock of each other all the time, so you have laws - and the manifesting traffic lights - to separate those intersecting interests by time: one individual gets to go now, the other gets to go later, and everyone agrees by that. Otherwise you pay a ticket. If you don't pay the ticket, you get thrown in a cage and/or beat about the head by a club. Or you just have people crashing into each other all the time.
The problem with laws is that laws themselves are attempting to stand in for this loss of community feeling. The laws themselves require a mutual agreement on a greater regulatory system. Over time even the respect for laws fades away from consciousness. Who can blame this process? Terrible laws, discriminatory laws, unnecessary laws, laws as product of political corruption...these laws erode the faith in a greater regulatory body. The asymmetrical concentration of power distorts this process of community self-determination as greater swathes of the population are excluded from self-determination, apathy reigns and self interest takes over as a survival mechanism.
Bad and unjust laws are disrespected, which unfortunately generalizes over time to include the useful regulatory laws themselves. This process seems to happen of its own accord as power concentrates. Well, we shouldn't have power concentration, but then power concentration tends to develop within a dense mass; there are too many of us. And who is to say who else has the right to live and who doesn't? There are ideas, such as steady state economics and population control, but then there will be segments of the population with religious objections and other superstitions...ultimately a projection of the ego that is the problem in the first place. Or you have the poor who simply don't have the resources to effectively regulate their population, which is a problem closely related to the global concentration of power. It may be that nature takes care of this problem unfortunately, but who knows.
So as I crossed the street I thought to myself, "Blah this myopic man almost hit me, did he not see the crossing signal? " But then I realized that at that moment he wasn't even thinking about it, and there was a brief moment of hesitation where I was watching him and had doubts. I could have stopped and just let him go, but I felt I needed to cross. At the same time, perhaps he was thinking, "Blah stupid guy with headphones in his ears, not paying attention." And then perhaps he looks up to see the crossing symbol and realizes he wasn't paying attention himself, or perhaps he didn't notice at all. This is just a possibility.
Anyways, we engage in these rationalizations all the time, either using social conventions and laws to locate our own positions and to judge the justness of our interests and actions, or by simply projecting our ego with brute force. These things break down eventually, of course. Then you just let go and start fresh I guess. Easier said than done, but what else is there?
