Some thinkers, like Blaise Pascal, have described custom as a "second nature," a habit that eventually became law. In Antananarivo, traffic jams have imposed themselves on our daily landscape, monopolizing much of our time. Yet while this phenomenon is more than familiar, we still struggle to accept it. We experience it almost seven days a week; though it has become ordinary, adapting to it still seems impossible. Perhaps it is because these moments of great frustration rank among the greatest torments we must endure. Throughout these painful journeys, the path is paved with trials that push human limits to their breaking point.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: "Hell is other people." In the play from which this famous phrase comes, enduring the judgmental gaze of others is an unbearable torture. The jungle of urban traffic is thus populated by observers who may see me as an obstacle. My gaze, too, possessed by all the bitterness that further taints the already polluted atmosphere, returns the same verdict to them. A deleterious atmosphere, a powder keg that can explode at any moment when certain users impose their law, or rather, their anarchy. Anomie, the absence or loss of authority of norms, only accentuates the disorder.
In this chaotic environment, the road seems to embody the state of nature envisioned by Thomas Hobbes, one where generalized insecurity prevails due to the lack of common authority. It is indeed in the heart of traffic jams that the abbreviated formula of a verse by Latin comic author Plautus takes shape: "Homo homini lupus est" ("Man is a wolf to man"). Relations between road users often turn into confrontation, while the most aggressive are shielded by an umbrella of impunity. In this harsh climate, appeasement must thus come through the establishment of laws powerful enough to counter this form of "war of all against all."
Thomas Hobbes, like later John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, theorized the necessity of the "social contract." To curb this reign of perpetual violence and for what Rousseau calls the "general will" to assert itself, we must accept renouncing certain freedoms so that a greater collective freedom is established, where the security of all is much better assured. Such a pact must be considered if we want the road, currently a battlefield, to finally become a shared space again.
Fenitra Ratefiarivony