Defensive driving? How about compassionate driving
The word “love” appears exactly once in the WA
state driver’s guide:
In 2004, a young woman was critically injured on I-405 in Renton when an entertainment center fell from the back of a trailer being pulled by a vehicle in front of her. A 2-by-6-foot piece of particle board flew through her windshield, hitting her in the face. […] Washington passed “Maria’s Law” in 2005, which made failing to properly secure a load a crime in Washington State. […] Secure your load as if everyone you love is driving in the car behind you.An unexpectedly empathetic approach to safe driving! Follow the rules not because it is the law, nor because you will get into trouble if you don’t, nor because it is your social obligation because everyone else is also trying to keep you safe—just drive as if you felt a deep love towards everyone in the cars around you. Brother, why honk when you could sing? Sister, why race when you could embrace?
Universal Love, Transcendent Joy!!
Reminded me of this other passage from UNSONG (by Scott Alexander):
“Universal love,” said the cactus person.
“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.
“Fuck you,” said I.
I saw the big green bat bat a green big eye. Suddenly I knew I had gone too far. The big green bat started to turn around what was neither its x, y, or z axis, slowly rotating to reveal what was undoubtedly the biggest, greenest bat that I had ever seen, a bat bigger and greener than which it was impossible to conceive. And the bat said to me:
“Sir. Imagine you are in the driver’s seat of a car. You have been sitting there so long that you have forgotten that it is the seat of a car, forgotten how to get out of the seat, forgotten the existence of your own legs, indeed forgotten that you are a being at all separate from the car. You control the car with skill and precision, driving it wherever you wish to go, manipulating the headlights and the windshield wipers and the stereo and the air conditioning, and you pronounce yourself a great master. But there are paths you cannot travel, because there are no roads to them, and you long to run through the forest, or swim in the river, or climb the high mountains. A line of prophets who have come before you tell you that the secret to these forbidden mysteries is an ancient and terrible skill called GETTING OUT OF THE CAR, and you resolve to learn this skill. You try every button on the dashboard, but none of them is the button for GETTING OUT OF THE CAR. You drive all of the highways and byways of the earth, but you cannot reach GETTING OUT OF THE CAR, for it is not a place on a highway. The prophets tell you GETTING OUT OF THE CAR is something fundamentally different than anything you have done thus far, but to you this means ever sillier extremities: driving backwards, driving with the headlights on in the glare of noon, driving into ditches on purpose, but none of these reveal the secret of GETTING OUT OF THE CAR. The prophets tell you it is easy; indeed, it is the easiest thing you have ever done. You have traveled the Pan-American Highway from the boreal pole to the Darien Gap, you have crossed Route 66 in the dead heat of summer, you have outrun cop cars at 160 mph and survived, and GETTING OUT OF THE CAR is easier than any of them, the easiest thing you can imagine, closer to you than the veins in your head, but still the secret is obscure to you.”
A herd of bison came into listen, and voles and squirrels and ermine and great tusked deer gathered round to hear as the bat continued his sermon.
“And finally you drive to the top of the highest peak and you find a sage, and you ask him what series of buttons on the dashboard you have to press to get out of the car. And he tells you that it’s not about pressing buttons on the dashboard and you just need to GET OUT OF THE CAR. And you say okay, fine, but what series of buttons will lead to you getting out of the car, and he says no, really, you need to stop thinking about dashboard buttons and GET OUT OF THE CAR. And you tell him maybe if the sage helps you change your oil or rotates your tires or something then it will improve your driving to the point where getting out of the car will be a cinch after that, and he tells you it has nothing to do with how rotated your tires are and you just need to GET OUT OF THE CAR, and so you call him a moron and drive away.”
“Universal love,” said the cactus person.
“So that metaphor is totally unfair,” I said, “and a better metaphor would be if every time someone got out of the car, five minutes later they found themselves back in the car, and I ask the sage for driving directions to a laboratory where they are studying that problem, and…”
“You only believe that because it’s written on the windshield,” said the big green bat. “And you think the windshield is identical to reality because you won’t GET OUT OF THE CAR.”
And surprisingly, a car metaphor is to be found also in Gödel, Escher, Bach (by Douglas Hofstadter):
[This observation] shows one difference between people and machines. […] Even if a person is not very bright, he still cannot help making some observations about what he is doing, and these observations give him good insight into the task—insight that the computer program, as we have described it, lacks. […] [T]o take a silly example, a car will never pick up the idea, no matter how much or how well it is driven, that it is supposed to avoid other cars and obstacles on the road; and it will never learn even the most frequently traveled routes of its owner. The difference, then, is that it is possible for a machine to act unobservant; it is impossible for a human to act unobservant.
[…] It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of the task which it is performing, and survey what it has done; it is always looking for, and often finding, patterns. Now I said that an intelligence can jump out of it task, but that doesn’t mean it always will. However, a little prompting will often suffice. […] Of course, there are cases where only a rare individual will have the vision to perceive a system which governs many people’s lives, a system which had never before even been recognized as a system; then such people often devote their lives to convincing other people that the system really is there, and that it ought to be exited from!
A master was asked the question, “What is the Way?” by a curious monk.
― “It is right before your eyes,” said the master.
― “Why do I not see it for myself?”
― “Because you are thinking of yourself.”
― “What about you: do you see it?”
― “So long as you see double, saying ‘I don’t’, and ‘you do’, and so on, your eyes are clouded,” said the master.
― “When there is neither ‘I’ nor ‘You’, can one see it?”
― “When there is neither ‘I’ nor ‘You’, who is the one that wants to see it?”