Treated Like Children
by Tibor R. Machan
As I was surfing the channels to find some entertainment that would help me relax a bit, I saw this brief scene in which a bunch of motorcyclists were just getting on their bikes to hit the road. Once they mounted they reached for their helmets and put them on.
Okay, so what is the point here? Well, it occurred to me that day in and out thousands of bikers do just this everywhere in America. Certainly they do it in my neighborhood, especially on weekends when groups of them gather at Cooks Corner restaurant and in Silverado and other canyon communities. And the scene is repeated all over California and the rest of the country.
However, because it is now one of the rules of the roads nearly everywhere that safety helmets must be worn, no one knows whether the bikers put on their helmets because they are smart and prudent or simply because they don't want to get a ticket from the cops enforcing these rules. "But," one might figure, "who cares?" The point is safety, not whether the people who are safe intended to be safe or to avoid being ticketed, right?
Well, not really. Safety, when it is mindless, tends to be short-lived. Safety when it is merely the byproduct of compliance with a bunch of rules doesn't establish lasting habits about safety as such, even if it may train bikers to reach seemingly automatically for their helmets. In other areas of their lives this isn't going to issue in care and good judgment since the practice isn't the result of care and good judgment in the first instance.
It is part of human nature that good conduct and habits that flow from seeing good examples and from coming to reflect on and to understand them are going to settle in, whereas desirable behavior that is coerced extends only within the sphere of activity that is being coerced. In fact, given that a good many adolescents are at the point of their lives when they actually strongly resent being ordered about, treated like children, it's a good bet that as soon as the threat of sanctions is removed, their behavior will become rebellious. So, once the bikers, many of them young or youthful in attitude, go off road and no one tells them to wear helmets, they will very likely toss safety to the wind and do what on public roads is forbidden. That is because instead of coming to care about safety from their own understanding and experiences, they were coerced merely to behave, not to act, carefully.
There is more that shows the short-lived impact of coerced virtue even in this narrow region of human conduct. I have in the past attended numerous conferences focusing on the issue of human individual liberty. At most of these there are tables set up by various organizations with their special interests in liberty - including bikers who resent being ordered by the government to wear safety gear.
What has always struck me about many members of these special groups, whether bikers, hemlock society members, suicide assistance groups and so on, is their limited care about the principle of individual liberty. In most cases the bikers care only about their own particular, special desire to be free of government road regulations. They want to bike according to their own lights, not that of the Highway Patrol's and whoever gave them their marching orders.
Of course, rules of the road would exist even if the government didn't have a monopoly on road ownership and management. That is clear enough from the few examples of private roads, including auto-racing, which isn't bound by the government's rules of the road. So, in a sense the bikers are not entirely realistic in their desires. But they do have a point when it comes to being dictated to by just one authority, the government. After all, if one doesn't want to eat Mexican food, one can go to an Italian or German or French restaurant instead - the cuisine varies plenty. But with roads the cook is always the government and alternatives are very costly to find, if even possible. So, the bikers are mainly upset with not being able to choose the kind of rules they would consent to, although they sometimes misunderstand this as a matter of "no rules versus rules."
What I noticed about so many of those who joined these conferences exploring individual liberty is that they didn't often enough think in terms of principles, only in terms of limits places on them as, say, bikers or doctors or internet users. It seemed to me that so little were they being trusted by the government about how to conduct themselves, treated like children are by rather rigid parents or nannies, that even in their protest they weren't used to thinking clearly and prudently.
But that is just what one would expect, given human nature. Those who are preoccupied with protesting impositions on them often don't see the bigger picture, namely, that tyrannical policies toward anyone are unjust and ought to be abolished. It is time that not only do the impositions of one-size-fits-all rules of the road tend to numb people as far as thinking for themselves is concerned, but they become less apt to think about politics in general, being so preoccupied with how they in particular are being treated.
Or is that perhaps something the tyrants are counting on?
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