The Parable of Automobile

The Parable of Automobile is a NAMBLA essay written by Encephalon about a society in which driving automobiles is illegal. It appeared in the NAMBLA Bulletin, 21.2 2000.

Extract of the essay

Rewind to a time when automobiles were very new and few people had much experience operating them. Let’s suppose you are a legislator or a magistrate, and the officers of the watch presented reports that four people had been found driving under the influence of alcohol and had caused damage to property and injury to people.

Now you don’t own an automobile and have never driven one. You may have never even seen one. But the ones you see have been remarkable — great fast-moving machines with noisy motors and horns that scared your horse and frightened the chickens. And they roared down the street in front of a huge cloud of foul-smelling exhaust. You call the injured parties before your court and take their statements. They’re clearly traumatized. In fact, they’ve had problems before with these couple of motorists and have organized their friends into a sort of campaign.

This campaign has done a pretty good job of reaching those citizens who haven’t yet encountered an automobile and has thoroughly frightened them about the dangers of those machines. And they have photographs of the damage caused by the few ill-behaved motorists, and recount their lurid horror stories at public events.

Well, in your district there is an automobile club with about 45 members. They generally keep to themselves, and they’ve drawn up a sort of code of conduct for the safe operation of their automobiles. They know about the small handful of renegades. They sometimes attend the meetings and are polite, but they believe their automobiles are their property and if they want to race them down the county streets that’s their business.

The majority of motorists in the club are very nice people. They are regular members of the community. They generally stay away from the roads where there is a lot of foot or horse traffic. In fact, they’ve even considered building their own roads. They use their automobiles to pull out stuck wagons and to give rides to some people who don’t have any means of transportation.

But the vociferous minority of those injured parties and their friends is not impressed. After all, they have evidence that automobiles are dangerous. And so you decided to put the matter to a vote: should your county allow automobiles? The automobile club tries to tell their side of the story, but the injured people have been there first. When a member of the club shows up to someone’s door and introduces himself as a motorist, he’s called a thrill-seeking monster and indifferent and insensitive to the dangers of what he’s doing. In some cases the motorists are even physically assaulted.

The majority of the vote is cast against the motorists and automobiles are outlawed in the county. Those possessing automobiles are viewed with extreme distrust. The public fears they will be operating their vehicles anyway. Perhaps at night, or away from the center of town. That scares you, because you “know” that automobiles are dangerous, and their owners are reckless fools.

Privately a group of (former) motorists come to you and say, “We believe you haven’t seen the whole story.”

“I’ve seen enough,” you say. “I’ve seen the damage caused by these four people, and I’ve heard the testimony of the people who were hurt. Do you think I’m going to allow that sort of thing in my district?”

“But those four people are isolated cases.” [...]

Continue reading at the link below.

External link

• nambla.org/auto.html