Guardrails? We Don't Need No Stinkin’ Guardrails!

Would the U.S. government lie to you?

Oct 09, 2024

The leftist mass media has a new euphemism for government control of us: “Guardrails”.

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If, say, EU or U.S. government regulators want to control something new, the mass media refers to that control as “guardrails”. The intended implication is that the new thing is dangerous. And we the people need the government to protect us from it. But the biggest danger is the government “guardrails” themselves.

The real truth is this:

Governments are always looking for new excuses to intervene in our lives. And the mass media is always looking for ways to help the government do that. Such as by calling government intervention, “Guardrails”.

The truth is that the regulatory “guardrails” are there to keep you on the path the government wants to keep you on. The government control and regulation aren't guardrails. They are fences. Cages. To keep you inside government control.

The government creates paths and they want to keep you on those paths. But sometimes we the people create our own paths; we find ways around government control. When that happens, the government puts up guardrails to block us.

Desire Paths

In 2018, the British newspaper The Guardian published an article titled "Desire Paths: The Illicit Trails That Defy the Urban Planners". The article quotes J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, who called them "Paths that have made themselves". Government regulators hate the desire paths.

As you might expect, Rightful Freedom has a book about freedom. It's about the secret ingredient of freedom. In it, we tell a story about desire paths. (Read it for free at Rightful Freedom.com.)

(Excerpt from Control Versus Freedom)

Urban Legend and the Paths of Desire

You may have heard about the college that, once upon a time, constructed the buildings for a new campus but intentionally did not put in sidewalks to connect the buildings. Instead, the builders waited a year and allowed the students to create paths by walking on the grass. Then when it became obvious where the sidewalks belonged, the builders simply paved the paths.

It seems like a good idea: Let the people who use the system design it by using it. Or you could even think of it as letting the system of walkways design itself. Not only does the college get its walks put in the right places, but it does not have to pay planners to decide where to put them.

People who told the story of the self-designing college sidewalks did not usually say at which college it happened. Or if they said which one, they were not sure. So were the walks real-life, or just an urban legend?

Several discussions on the internet addressed this question. In September 2015, one was on The Straight Dope Message Board. The question of where or whether the self-designed walkways really ever happened was not quickly answered; everybody who commented had heard the story but no one was completely sure of the details.

CynicalGabe

05-25-2005, 09:57 PM

I heard this method as a common way of designing footpaths in Denmark.

Squink

05-25-2005, 10:19 PM

The story has been around for decades and is so logical that it's in books on design. Scientific American ran an article on similar methods of footpath design in the late 70's to mid 80's. Sorry I can't pin it closer than that.

friedo

05-25-2005, 10:31 PM

I have heard the same story about the Apple Computer campus in Cupertino, CA. I have no idea if its true or not.

js_africanus

05-27-2005, 12:39 PM

While I was at the Univ. of Oregon, I remarked to a graduate student in landscape architecture that people who plan walkways should do exactly what the OP describes. He told me that was how Thomas Jefferson laid out the walkways at the University of Virginia.

Interestingly, the commenters seemed to at least entertain the idea that self-designing walks might work as a good solution, even though many of them seem to have been landscape architects or other such professional planners, who might have been thought to be averse to a solution which did not involve planning and control. Anyway, there was an answer to the question, urban legend or true story?

It was finally answered by Patty O'Furniture who explained why the story of the college paths is a myth:

Patty O'Furniture

Something like this would never fly now, or as far back as building permits have been required. Building plans without sidewalks would never make it past the permit office.

The spontaneous emergence of order in the form of ideally located walking paths is not mythical, it happens all the time. The "myth" part is that government regulators will allow it. In the real world, government controllers put up barricades and guardrails to prevent people from walking on the desire paths. Government regulations require government control of paths, even if that control costs extra and puts the paths in the wrong places. Freedom has to be stamped out.

(end of excerpt)

Breakout.

Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.... the human species is divided into so many herds of cattle, each with its ruler, who keeps guard over them for the purpose of devouring them... As a shepherd the natural superior to the sheep of his flock, so the shepherds of men, i.e., their rulers, are naturally superior to the peoples under them.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)

For many years, leftist U.S. government regulators, with the help of the leftist media, have been trying to erase a certain idea from the American mind. That idea is spontaneous order. It is the secret ingredient of freedom. Americans used to understand that, but it's a “secret” ingredient now because the leftists have succeeded in almost entirely suppressing it.

Spontaneous order is paths that create themselves. It is emergent order. We don't need more government control, fencing us in like livestock. We need more freedom. And to get it, we need to better understand what freedom really is.

Despite what leviathan may tell you, it does not fall to government to establish and maintain social norms. The state is neither competent to nor capable of doing so. And you would not want it to even if it were. A society must see to itself and establish the morals, mores, and behavior that it will accept.

That is what makes it a society. Civilization is not a thing to be directed from the top down but the sum of the bottom’s up relationships and order that emerge from its inhabitants in their exercise of agency and association. It and its people must be self-governing and each must expect the same from each and all.

El Gato Malo "A Successful Society Must See to Itself" Substack (2023)