A Nation of Criminals

Tell me, how does it feel to be a criminal? To be a citizen in a "nation of laws" and yet flout the law on a daily basis?

I'm talking about speeding. How many times a day do you break speed limit laws? Five times? Ten times? Every single time traffic permits?

Is this a trivial subject? I wonder. Does a nation of criminals have any moral basis from which to judge the individual criminal? Can a thief sit in judgment of a murderer? Can a child molester judge a thief? Can a murderer condemn a child molester?

Okay, you say, but there are different classes of crime, right? Raping kids can't be compared with doing 60 in a 55 zone. (Let's dispense with the 5mph margin of grace, shall we? If your speedometer says you're doing 56, you're breaking the law. Agreed?)

True, one crime may be, by various measures, worse than another, and so we "let the punishment fit the crime." But there's some compelling reason why we legislate limits on driving speed, clearly. Why should our driving speed need to be limited? (Let's dispense with the argument that the 55mph limit was designed to save gas during the 70s. If it helps, focus instead on a 30mph residential zone. No gas-conservation issues there.)

Sure, driving speed needs to be controlled, you say. For safety's sake. But since people tend to drive 5-10mph over the speed limit, the speed limit is set 5-10mph lower than the safe speed. Then when we break the law and drive 5-10mph over the speed limit, we're merely driving safely.

So in order to accomplish the goal of safe roads, we enact legislation that turns safe drivers into criminals?!

Well, you say, nobody has to break the law. Nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to drive as fast as safety allows - 5-10mph over the speed limit - are they?

Have you ever tried driving the speed limit? Try it sometime.

Try it for a day, and see if you're late to work, if your lunch break is shorter, if your errands take longer. Try it for a few days so you can mentally adjust to the slower pace and get used to allowing yourself more travel time. Try it for a week, and see, after the mental and habitual factors have been mostly removed from the experiment, if there isn't a surprisingly powerful force driving your foot down onto the gas pedal: social pressure.

Driving is an unusual social behavior, in that it requires that masses of people behave uniformly. (No doubt sociologists have studied this and related phenomena - subways, etc. - and I just haven't read much about it.) How often do we curse the rogue driver who causes a wreck which delays us all? Some complain that the law-abiding driver causes similar problems and poses similar dangers as the reckless one.

Certainly, you reply. His non-uniform driving disturbs the smooth flow of traffic, and his slower speed delays the rest of us as we work our way around him. On the highway, "we're all in this together," so we need to follow the "rules of the road" and "go with the flow."

You have a point. But isn't something amiss when a law presents such an impediment to good social behavior that we must engage in criminal behavior in order to avoid obstructing our fellow citizens' progress? When the cost of one person's obedience to the law is so burdensome on the rest of us that we will impose sanctions (tailgating, "the finger", etc.) on him for non-conformity? When the social pressure to commit a crime is so widespread and oppressive that we'll risk legal punishment in order to avoid those sanctions?