Eating Dirt
A Guide to Commuting and Road Rage
“Humans do not desire the good, the good is whatever they desire” – John Gray
To most people commuting is a nuisance and a necessary evil. It is a thing that almost every adult of working age does - every day. Commuting is one of the truly universal ‘political’ categories, because it is an activity shared by doctors and lawyers, baristas and roofers, and it just so happens that this activity occurs in one of the last public spaces still resistant to privatization and corporate appropriation, the road. It is a nuisance, because there are better ways to spend one’s time than waiting in traffic. It is a necessary evil, because while it gets workers where they need to be, in modern society where time equals money, commuting wastes inordinate and unreasonable amounts of time. That wasting of time is thus a representation of the primordial fear of death, sickness and being poor, which is expressed through road rage.
Before I started work from home I used to drive 35-45 miles to work each way. No longer having to commute was one of the most liberating experiences of my adult life. Ten or more hours per week were suddenly freed up and this made me question what all those hours were for? Not the company I worked for – I wasn’t there when I was commuting - and not for me either, I didn’t get paid for those hours. Every hour I was in the car I was effectively losing money. In reality I was paying for the privilege of having a job (almost $4000 per year at California gas prices). And on top of this I was losing precious time of my life that I will never get back.
I could be wrong, but I believe that road rage is an American export. When the first Model Ts rolled off the assembly line and spilled onto American dirt roads in the early 20th century, road rage was also born. To understand what I mean go watch some old Laurel and Hardy episodes. While road rage might be an American export, it is not solely an American product. This particular American social experience found itself becoming the baseline for much of the industrialized and mobilized world where roads, traffic laws, and commuting exist.
Like commuting, road rage is a universal and universalizing experience. It is predicated on the subjective experience of the driver being thrown into a kind of Hobbesian war of all against all. Out there on the roads all of the particular identities get obliterated into a mass. Out of this mass bursts of rage appear suddenly, out of nowhere and without warning. Victims become perpetrators and perpetrators become victims in a fluid exchange of subjectivity.
It is impossible to understand where road rage comes from, in the same way it is impossible to understand the human condition. Road rage is personal, universal, political and anti-political. It is the expression and symptom of a deeply atomized and disconnected society. In some ways road rage bleeds into political notions of civil disobedience and personal vendettas against other drivers and against the police state.
Beyond politics, there is a kind of righteous apocalypticism nestled within road rage. Hollywood films like Falling Down and Unhinged portray road ragers as angry white men, depressed, tormented, and spiritually dispossessed, archetypes of white privilege. But this dumbed down image couldn’t be more misleading. Road rage isn’t this selective. It affects everyone regardless of race, nationality, class, gender or sexual orientation.
Out on the open roads the Wild West still exists. The Mad Max films aren’t necessarily just visions of a dystopian future, they’re allegories of the lives lived by millions of commuters. They are vividly exaggerated descriptions of the kind of encounters one is likely to have given enough time out on the open roads - chaos and mayhem caused by fellow humans, freak weather and accidents, the police, biker gangs, mobsters with their flashy Ferraris and Lamborghinis bought with stolen money, convoys of Black Ops vehicles with Federal agents controlling traffic near Gary, Indiana, drunk drivers, drug peddlers, car jackers, creepy hitch hikers, among the many other potential weird, eerie and dangerous ones.
I thought about road rage all the time while commuting. It was easy to have a day ruined by some minor infraction or slight by other drivers, so instead of falling into their trap I attempted to psychoanalyze the other commuters, for fun and sanity, a do it using the triad of everyone’s favorite weird uncle, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek.
Psychotics
Psychosis
1. A severe mental condition in which though and emotions are so affected that contact is lost with external reality.
A psychotic is in the popular imaginary simply an asshole. The psychotic has no regard for others on the road and is willing to take matters and the law into their own hands, always going to the absolute end of the moral imperative, ‘what is good for the individual, is good for the collective’. Common behaviors of the psychotic are tailgating, fast and reckless driving, weaving between lanes, cutting in line, overtaking in dangerous ways, often using the shoulder. The psychotic uses intimidation, manipulation, and brute force to get what they want, all in the service of gaining power over others.
Other drivers on the road are for the psychotic just obstacles to overcome. Typical but more subtle psychotic behavior includes immediately blowing the horn at the driver in front of them at a red light when it turns green. The psychotic never gives a chance to the driver in front to respond to the changing light. To the psychotic, other drivers cannot exercise free will, because it is at odd with their own. As a result even this small event must be under the psychotic’s total control. The psychotic never allows for behavior that does not comport to their personal understanding of the unwritten laws of the road. Actual traffic laws are simply a hindrance to the psychotic. It is through the implied unwritten rules that the psychotic assumes a position of enforcer, in essence a cop. Serving their particular brand of justice on the road is what the psychotic does best. They will tailgate, foaming at the mouth with rage at the car in front of them, because it is ‘only’ going the speed limit. When they overtake it is always as a show of brute strength. After overtaking the psychotic often slows down to the speed of the car they just passed, in yet another show of power, because the psychotic just made that driver in to a follower. The psychotic always has to be that one car length ahead. If there is a gap at the front of the line or the ‘zipper’ where two lanes merge into one, the psychotic will squeeze themselves into it in a game of chicken with the other drivers.
On the road psychotics are compelled by delusions of grandeur and driven by their own self-created and self-enforced moral code. This moral code’s only coherence is its circular logic and self-referential structure. To the psychotic, their behavior on the road is good because it is in their best interest and it is in their best interest because it is good. There exists no shared experience in the mind of the psychotic, only their personal fulfillment, getting ‘there’ faster, in the least amount of time via the shortest possible distance.
Neurotics
Neurosis
1. A tendency toward anxiety, depression, self-doubt and other negative feelings
On the open road, neurotics respond to the environment with a combination of fear and anxiety. It is a response that can be best described as an undue burden of the superego, the higher self. A neurotic driver operates out of a total dependence on the symbolic order, the laws that govern morality and behavior, especially those that are unspoken and believed to be collectively determined and will act as though the ‘law giver’ is always watching. They have not internalized any sense of personal responsibility or accountability and their neuroses are something like an auto-immune response to the demands of the superego. The neurotic is driven by an impulse to do what is morally and ethically good, but the superego, the primordial ‘father’ figure that operates deep within the unconscious, counters this impulse with increasingly greater ethical demands, thus producing within the neurotic the opposite response based in doubt and fear. This back and forth happens continually and simultaneously until a thoroughly confused subject is produced.
One tends to always end up behind a neurotic. The neurotic will never appear behind us. In my commutes the neurotic was, and still is, ever present. The neurotic will always do a full stop at a stop sign, even when no other cars are present at an intersection. They will wait for pedestrians to fully cross all the way to the sidewalk before moving on. When not driving at the speed limit, a neurotic will drive slower and never move out of the way of faster drivers. The neurotic will never pass another driver even in areas where passing is allowed. The ‘big other’ prevents the neurotic from acting out of free will. In other words, the sense that there are higher laws in place combined with their fear of falling afoul of actual law, combined with an acute fear of death, paralyze the neurotic in ways that make it impossible for them to become effective and confident drivers, but also produce within them a sense of moral and ethical superiority arising out of their neuroses. The neurotic acts not out of self-interest, but out of the collective interest of the big other, the symbolic law giver. Nothing incenses the neurotic more than seeing others willfully neglect the written laws and regulations of the road. Neurotics will stand in a line of cars at a red light, blocking traffic even when next to them is a perfectly empty lane waiting to be filled, for no other reason than to follow the unwritten rule of the road that orders every driver where they OUGHT to be. While this may seem perfectly reasonable given that many commuters often act on what follows next, a turn, a merging lane, or something similar, the result is more headache for the other commuters. In their quest to make traffic flow better, the unintended consequence of their behavior is more traffic congestion. Using the empty lane and not staying in the ‘correct’ lane signifies to the neurotic a breakdown of social norms. To them the empty lane is for people who cut in line, cut corners, ignore rules, bypass functioning social structures, ushering in nothing short of a societal collapse, in other words, that lane is for psychotics.
Unlike psychotics, neurotics are not enforcers, but they are still ‘cops’, Freddie DeBoer’s euphemism for hyperactive busybodies and apparatchiks.
Hysterics
Hysteria
1. Exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion of excitement
2. An old-fashioned term for a disorder characterized by neurological symptoms often accompanied by exaggeratedly or inappropriately emotional behavior, originally attributed to disease or injury of the nervous system and later thought to be functional or psychological in origin.
Not too long ago, but not too recently either, during my commuter days, I was driving through Montecito, a town of the rich and famous who like to ‘get away from it all’, especially from LA. Oprah has a home here, as do Ellen, John Cleese and Megan and Harry of British royalty fame. This combination of celebrity, wealth and desire for privacy are what makes Montecito into such a hotspot for weird road encounters.
On this particular day I was making my way into one of the newly built roundabouts that straddles no less than 6 different exits and entryways. At peak traffic hours this area is so congested one would think Los Angeles is outsourcing its drivers here. This is because this part of Montecito is used by many drivers to bypass the much worse congestion on the 101 freeway which runs parallel and is just a few dozen feet away from downtown. As I made my way into the roundabout I saw a woman in her car gesticulating wildly as if she was the proverbial ‘wtf emoji’. She was looking me directly in the eyes as I passed by, screaming obscenities. I knew she wasn’t screaming at me in particular. She was under the impression that roundabouts work in the way that SHE wants them to work, in other words, she expected the cars going round and round to yield to her, to stop and let her in, in fact the opposite of how roundabouts actually work. And this was indeed how this intersection worked before the roundabout was built. This hysterical outburst of this one driver brought home a few things. One, we almost never know what other drivers think or believe the rules to be, two, we never know what they will do given the opportunity to act on their assumptions and three, we have to be ready for the impact on us if they decide to actually act on their impulses.
Among the archetypes, the hysterics are the least common, though to be fair everyone can and will at some point experience an episode, just like everyone on the road will at some point experience neurosis or a psychotic episode. All it takes is the right moment and the right place. The edge between each is razor thin given the right circumstances. The line between a neurotic and hysteric is really found at the level of the psychoanalytic triad of id (inner desire), ego and superego. The neurotic acts out of the need to satisfy the superego, the higher self and big other. The psychotic acts out the id, the motivating sexual force of desire to satisfy the most basic bodily functions as well as the emotional self that produces feelings of personal satisfaction. The hysteric however acts out of the primal need to satisfy the ego. As a result the hysteric takes everything that happens on the road extremely personally. They do not see the world outside of themselves in a way that the neurotic or even the psychotic does. Psychotics see others simply as objects that stand in the way of their goal, but they still exist as those objects, as others. Neurotics may see others and themselves as subjects, but these subjects exist to serve a higher purpose, often other than their own. These subjects are not free agents in a world of really existing free will, so their freedom must be attenuated and managed, ideally by a Hobbesian Leviathan-like socio-political structure. The hysteric on the other hand acts on the belief that the ultimate purpose of the road and the laws that govern it serve the interest of the self. Modern hysteria is the perfect supplement to today’s attention economy, but on the roads it is somewhat rare to encounter. The hysteric’s recognition of others is solely as an ego boost, a moment of total recognition of their self by everyone else.