We Had an Agreement

There is a special kind of person who arrives at a four-way stop before you, clearly has the right of way, and then waves you through.

I know they think they are being nice.

I have, on more than one occasion, shaken my fist like a deeply inconvenienced old man and yelled, “WE HAD AN AGREEMENT!”

Not with you, specifically.

With traffic.

You go. Then I go. Neither of us has to know the other person, trust the other person, assess their moral character, or determine who seems most deserving of forward motion. Four strangers can arrive at an intersection, follow a tiny set of rules, and leave without forming a committee.

That is an achievement.

Then you wave me through.

Now we have a meeting that could’ve been a telepathic email.

I have to decide whether you really mean it, whether you’re going to change your mind halfway through, whether the person to your left has been informed of our new arrangement, and whether the person behind me thinks I’ve suffered some kind of neurological event.

Ten seconds ago we had a system. Now I’m negotiating with a Subaru.

This is what fascinates me about these little acts of courtesy. The person waving me through is trying to make the interaction easier for me, but by abandoning the rule, they have actually given me more work.

A decent coordination system lets strangers cooperate without requiring much personal trust. I don’t need to know whether you’re generous, whether you had a good childhood, or whether you consider yourself the kind of person who lets others go first. I just need reasonable confidence that when it is your turn, you will go.

The rule carries the social load so we don’t have to.

Humans, naturally, cannot leave this alone.

Give us a functional system and eventually we will construct a second, unofficial system around it made of favors, exceptions, customs, loopholes, and the occasional person who thinks the rules would work better with a little more of their personality in them.

Sometimes that improves things. Formal systems can be rigid, stupid, or plainly unjust. There are plenty of rules that deserve to be challenged, rewritten, or fired directly into the sun.

But sometimes the rule is just quietly doing its job.

Take a line. Everybody knows where they stand until someone decides to let their friend cut because “it’s only one person.” A workplace has a process until somebody important needs something quickly, at which point everyone discovers the real policy was apparently unless Steve asks. A manager makes a harmless little exception and six months later nobody understands whether the rule exists, when it applies, or how attractive your calendar invite needs to be before you become exempt from it.

The written system remains. The actual system becomes vibes.

And this is where good intentions get more credit than they deserve.

We tend to evaluate generosity from the perspective of the two people directly involved. You gave something up; I received a benefit; therefore something nice occurred.

Maybe.

But shared systems have more people in them.

If you surrender your turn at the stop sign, I gain something. I also inherit your decision. The other drivers now have to predict what I’ll do with it, and everyone waits while we perform a silent little ceremony neither of us needed.

Congratulations. Your kindness has created an administrative burden.

That doesn’t make courtesy bad. It means courtesy is not automatically useful simply because the intention behind it was good.

In systems built for coordination, predictability may sometimes be the kinder behavior.

The four-way stop works precisely because it does not need us to be especially virtuous. It asks something much less ambitious: be predictable for about seven seconds.

There is something almost comforting about that.

Good systems do not require strangers to understand one another deeply. They reduce the number of things strangers need to understand about one another at all.

So maybe the question is not simply whether an exception is kind, generous, or well-intentioned.

Maybe it is:

What happens to everyone else who was relying on the rule?

Anyway.

If you get to the stop sign first, please just go.

We had an agreement.