Hell is other people

I was talking with my parents the other day and we got to talking about the way that people behave in city centres. We started with the difficulties of multiple queues (more later perhaps) and then onto the more free-flowing vexation which is trying to walk somewhere in a crowd of people who are all intent on shopping and sauntering with friends or hurrying their kids along, or holding an over-loud conversation remotely via their mobile phone, or avoiding the Big Issue seller or the chuggers ...

Now before I go of on the one that I'm intending to write up shortly, a couple or three things to say. The first is that I'm considering a new label for posts on this topic: "hell-is-others" but I do think that it should be taken along with this article which puts a positive side to the phenomena of human sociality.

Another thing to say is about human sociality is the observation that we humans manage to be fairly hyper social without reducing our individual members to the status of mere organelles in a superorganism (cf ants, termites or social bees). If you compare us with the great apes, like chimpanzees, our ability to co-operate without agression and violence is quite remarkable. Chimpanzees rarely manage to sustain groups of more than about 20 and even those groups have horrific levels of violence in them. By comparison we can manage to sustain high density living for millions with relatively low levels of violence.

And the other thing to say is that I quite often find myself in a city centre at a peak crowd time and realise that I do just the same things that I find challenging about other people in crowds, so in what I'm about to say there is a degree of 'You are the man' reflected back on me.

Anyhow the fact is that I find myself every so often repeating in my mind Sartre's most famous quotation, l'enfer, c'est les autres ('Hell is other people')". The reason is usually something like this: I'm walking along at my usual pace. My usual pace is, admittedly, quite quick: most people have a little trouble keeping up; I'm long-legged and not afraid to use it! However, this means that it is challenging for me to avoid people who unlookingly change course or suddenly stop and it is irritatingly demanding to maintain a steady pace and course. The scene is set for a degree of frustration as I have to change, pace, direction, or even stop suddenly for people who seem to have forgotten that they are NOT the only people using the space. My irritation finds expression in the 'Hell is other people' phrase (though I'll often also say to myself in French too).

Of course there are two main types of offenders: the heedless and the arrogant. The heedless are those who simply are intent on other things and forget or don't notice that their sudden course change or stop is likely to create and obstacle for others. It's a good thing that the max speed being achieved is around 4 kph or there could be some serious collisions: it's almost as if we've evolved a walking speed and reaction times to match each other (!!). The heedless (of whom I am dispiritingly often one) merely fail to assign attention to their surroundings, probably because we tend to assume that most of us are going the same way and that the general lack of collisions means that we can continue much as we always do. I remind myself that most people's heedfulness quotient is not constructed with the high speed walker such as myself in view.

But then we have the seemingly arrogant: these are the people who seem to think that others should move for them and be mindful of them but not the other way round. These seem to include certain young men, often in groups for whom territorial display seems to be the name of the game, and some people using wheeled aids to travel -I say some; there are a good many thoughtful people out there too. However, there are some who seem to think that their mobility issues entitle them to be careless of others, and they often get away with it because others, not wanting to suffer injury or insult, co-operate by getting out of the way. This category of people can include some motability scooter-users, some wheelchair users and some pushchair pushers.

My appeal is for us all to try to recall in public, crowded spaces that it may be well to look around whenever we change course or speed to make sure that we are not about to bump someone else, and if we fail to do so to apologise.

On that latter point: a few times lately I have found myself uttering that automatic British "sorry" on nearly bumping into someone and then my analysis of what has happened kicks in: actually it wasn't my fault; it's not me who should be saying sorry. If the other person has said 'sorry', all well and good. If they have not: well, that's annoying; that they have not had their selfish or heedless behaviour challenged but may have been confirmed in their sense of entitlement to un-co-operative pedestrian behaviour.

No Exit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
I think that this article on the idea (referred to above) is definitely worth reading.