Reflections at a Traffic Light in Amman

Like most of those who work for a private company in Jordan, 5:00 PM is my zero hour. I leave the office I work at, on the outskirts of Amman, and head back home, somewhere in the busiest district in all of Jordan. Endowed with a good geographical sense, the memory of an elephant when it comes to routs, and being clairvoyant enough to invest in the future by trail and error I can easily find less congested roads most of the times. But still, escaping certain points in the way back home is impossible, like this traffic light, within a walking distance from my home.

It is not uncommon for crossroads controlled by traffic lights in Amman to get jammed. Two years ago, many of these were marked with white lines all over and signs, which told the drivers not to drive into the marked area if jammed. It was a complete failure, as if that needs to be said. Even worst, if drivers could not drive through the traffic light while it was green, because of the jam, they will still cross it red and fight to do so as if that was their lawful right.

That does not surprise me at all. Most of our laws, on this planet, grant the common good of societies, in utopias only; it is naively assumed, when laws are made, that the denizens, subjected to them, are selfless people, and that the very few who are not, can be effectively dealt with by giving power to "selected" people, whose job is to maintain order, not considering the fact that those selected ones are nothing but human beings in positions that make them extra-prone to be corrupted by power they wield.

Selflessness is rare, yet it is assumed that we all think altruistically, and practically speaking, even if the majority were, the few who are not are capable of throwing the whole system into chaos, but we never come to acknowledge this in our laws. In the case of this traffic light I am talking about, following the laws would grant everybody getting to their destination in around the same time spent per a distance. But apparently people do not give a damn if others reached their homes or not as long as they can cut their journey time by few seconds and get away with it.

What I want to say here is that laws and preventive measures should not be assessed based on what they promise to deliver If followed, but rather on how robust they are when enforcement fails. Men of law should accept selfishness as endemic to nature, and not an anomaly. This does not mean changing the status of acts deemed criminal to normal, on the contrary. It is merely a new more enabling legal framework, even though I admit that the legalizing institutions themselves are not immune to any of the aforementioned human "flaws", let alone the many restrictions imposed on the whole legal system by the old and conservative ones making up the legislatures themselves.

Ever since I was a kid, I felt sympathy toward many of those fictional characters whom were straight in pursuing their goal of creating perfection or order but then gone awry in their methods, though not goals, not because I agree with them, but because of the feeling of agony they project into you. The one I like the most is called Sargeras, a titan that features in the lore of Warcraft. He was amongst the ones who created a universe and fought relentlessly against the "anomalous evil" that came to plague it. But no matter how hard he tried to eliminate this evil, it just kept crawling back from nowhere, even though it was no match for him, which pushed him to believe that malignancy was intrinsic to the universe they created, and so he sets to destroy everything, the good and the bad, and recreate it once again without any "flaws".

The moral of the story is that a normative approach can be the source of the perceived evil itself. We should instead prefer robustness over utopias. The only practical thing I came to learn from the highly theoretical in nature mathematical models, is that the more realistic the assumptions we build our models on, the better the results are, but the more resources it takes to build and run them. Robust laws will make our lives safer, but they need some creativity no doubt; a thing we pride ourselves on, as a species, even though we rarely exhibit.