One Way Garage

The parking garage at my office is a one way garage.  Traffic flows clockwise.  Unless two hummers were involved, the lanes are wide enough to fit two cars going two ways, although only barely, and it depends on how the rows are parked.   The garage is mostly empty most of the time as the building is not 100% leased.  I estimate that a full circuit around one level of the garage would take about 20 seconds going at 15 miles per hour.

Upon reaching the bottom level, if you were to hang a left – e.g., go the wrong way – you would be in the lane of spots closest to the exit of the garage (and therefore the office building itself), thereby saving yourself an extra 10 yards of walking twice a day.  Despite its small size, and perhaps because of its low density, I would estimate that the majority of monthly passholders flagrantly ignore the one-way signs and drive counter clockwise.

Last week, a head-on collision occured around a corner.  Someone in a BMW was going the wrong way in the garage at an estimated 25 miles per hour, which doesn’t sound like a lot but in a small parking garage it’s break-neck.  The other car, an early 90′s Civic hatchback, was totalled.  Ambulances were called, but fortunately nobody was injured.

Guess which driver is entirely at fault in this equation?  Guess who got the ticket (and from what I understand, 4 points)?  Guess whose insurance is paying the entire cost and will likely involve a hefty premium hike?

I’ll give you a hint.  It wasn’t the guy who was obyeying the one-way traffic sign.

I’m telling you this story because I want to illustrate a point here.  Following the garage convention of clockwise – and keeping it one way, as the signs directed – reduce the chances of an accident like the one that occurred last week to almost zero.  Ignoring the signs increase the risk of an accident like this by several orders of magnitude.  The exchange is risking yourself and another driver just so you can get the parking spots closest to the doors without having to spend an extra 10 seconds or less on your ass in your car driving around the garage.

So why do people do it?  Why do they take the risk?  These are white collar college-educated professionals.  The majority of the cars in this garage are luxury cars of some kind.  One of the reserved spots (also very close to the door) is routinely occupied by an Aston Martin.  If any segment of society should be able to weigh risk vs. reward, it’s this one.  By the way, the Aston Martin owner is a big shot in a wealth management company on the third floor.  He also disobeys the one way signs.

They take the risk to spare their own selves a tiny fraction of their daily time.  Remember, these people are on their way into work.  If there’s ever a time to dawdle, you would think entering the office would be one o those times.  I’m slightly more sympathetic to people peeling out of the garage at high speed when it’s the end of the day.  But only slightly.

This is the kind of behavior that a lot of people might excuse on the grounds that the risks, even when going the wrong way, are statistically insignificant.  Others might consider this insignifcant.  Others might champion it as anti-establishment (and therefore, in their minds, a good thing).  Others might condemn it but fail to recognize it as pattern behavior.

But it is pattern behavior.  I’m going to ask yourself to imagine what other traits the kind of person who would risk an accident, which costs thousands of dollars, many, many hours, and possibly bodily harm to themselves and others just to save themselves fifteen seconds each day might have.  Is this person likely to arrive at a party early or late?  Is this person likely to eat the food at a potluck but not bring any himself?  Is this person likely to consider his own interests above everyone else’s – especially when everyone else is amalgamated into some kind of faceless mass named “society”?  The answers are probably all yes.

If only one or two people ignored the rules and did what they wanted, this wouldn’t be remotely interesting.  But the majority of people in this office building ignore the one-way signs.  Are they all assholes?  No.  A lot of the people with whom I am friendly at work are also guilty of this crime.  Is it easy to forgive them at a personal level?  I guess.  I’m certainly not going to cold shoulder them because they break the parking garage rules.

However, I will say this.  Even though this may seem trivial and inconsequential, I believe the fact that the majority of people will put everyone else’s safety in jeopardy for even minute rewards like a slightly shorter walk to their cars twice a day indicates to me that the majority of people, despite what they say, are patently self-interested.

Why, then, would I expect any kind of collectivism to be in my own interests?  Why, then, would I expect anyone else to look out for me, when they aren’t even willing to protect me from driving into them head-on by doing so little as driving an extra loop around a very small building?  People, in general, are not interested in other people’s safety or wellness.  They are interested in their own.  That is why I believe 100% of the people who are interested in socialized medicine have a self-interested motive in mind.  That is why I believe the very concept of socialized medicine is a disingenous fraud.  But it’s an ingenius one.

Nobody wants to admit that they are self-interested.  That reflex, by the way, is itself self-interested.  I’ll illustrate with a simple example:

Alice is self-interested.  Bob is self-interested.  Clyde tells Alice that he cares about her well-being.  Clyde tells Bob that he doesn’t give a shit whether Bob lives or dies.  Alice, who is self-interested, likes Clyde because Clyde is looking out for her, and that is good for her.  Bob, who is self-interested, dislikes Clyde.  Bob’s own well-being is the most important thing to him, so anyone who does not see it that way is not his friend.

If a person were truly magnanimous, he wouldn’t be affected at all by people who aren’t, because he wouldn’t care about himself, he would only care about other people.  If Evan is magnanimous and Tim is self-interested, Evan doesn’t hate Tim for being selfish because Evan cares more about Tim’s well-being than his own, so he agrees with Tim that Tim’s well-being is more important than Evan’s.

See how that works?

So, the most self-interested people are the most likely to claim that they are not self-interested because they want other people to like them, as a means to further their own self-interests.

Socialized medicine is a patent expression of self-interested greed.  “I want health care for everyone.”  Of course, because you’re magnanimous, right?  You want it for everyone because everyone includes you, but if you said “I want healthcare for me (but I don’t want to pay for it)”, you’d be chalked up as greedy.

One of the fun questions I like to poke at pro-socialized medicine people is to ask them if they would be in favor of paying taxes to fund socialized medicine that they themselves, nor anyone they ever personally met, would be a recipient of those services.

Everybody says “yes.”  Everybody is lying.

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