The worst day I had while living in Nigeria was when our office building caught on fire. There were no alarms or smoke detectors, just a breathless woman who appeared at the door and shouted, “There’s a fire. Everyone get out!”
We had no reason not to believe her, so we all filed out the door and into the hallway, which was, in fact, filled with smoke. My co-workers and I made our way to the stairwell and began the orderly process of walking down five flights of steps.
Around the third floor, another stranger appeared. “The fire’s over,” he said. “You can go back upstairs.”
Everyone took this person at his word as well. We turned around, trudged back up the stairs and settled down in our plastic chairs while we waited for the lights to come back on in our windowless office.
Well almost everyone. There was one notable exception. One person who kept right on walking – down the steps, out the front door and up the street to a small café where she spent her bus fare on ice cream. She made no apologies for it either.
At the time, I considered myself the only person with common sense enough not to sit on the top floor of a burning building. In hindsight, I realize that I was actually the one not able to tell the difference between a deadly inferno and what was probably a burnt piece of toast.
Not long after the fire, I nearly lost a few fingers to a metal ceiling fan. I was putting on a t-shirt when it happened, following the standard protocol too: over the head, one hand up, through the sleeve and – oops – directly into the path of an oscillating deathtrap. Luckily, the fan was only running on medium at the time. Any higher and that might have turned out to be my worst day in Nigeria.
I didn’t feel too bad about that mistake though. It could have happened to anyone – anyone who isn’t in the habit of scanning the immediate area for light fixtures and small appliances when changing clothes. Anyone who isn’t accustomed to rooms wherein a standard ceiling fan is hung from a seven-foot ceiling. Anyone who isn’t used to living in a world without building regulations.
I’d like to think that I’ve gotten smarter in the ten years since I lived in Nigeria. That I’ve developed skills and instincts that make me better equipped to assess risk and self-protect. That I am no longer likely to lose a limb to a fan or get worked up over a wisp of smoke. But I haven’t. I proved that fairly recently, while visiting Madagascar.
I was traveling by car to a remote village where my US-based doctor had arranged for me to work in a maternity ward for two weeks. Along the way, the road became so dusty that I could scarcely breathe. Just as I was about to ask the driver to stop the car so that I could dig an asthma inhaler out of my suitcase, his niece, a girl of 13, produced a hunting knife from under the passenger seat. In a single motion, she skinned an orange of its rind then dropped the knife back on the floor of the car directly at the feet of her two-year old niece.
Under different circumstances, in another country halfway around the world, I might have scolded her – first for using a knife in a moving vehicle and then for leaving it within reach of a baby. But we were in Madagascar. Clearly, children were made of much different – much tougher – stuff that I. They would not be taken down by dusty roads or fruit slicers. They could handle a ceiling fan; they could spot a fire.
I call this phenomenon – the ability of otherwise intelligent, educated people to be felled by small appliances and crippled by the mere presence of dust – survival of the richest. It’s like Darwinism – but in reverse. Instead of evolving to improve our chances of survival, we now expect the world to be made safer on our account. We want to be protected through laws, regulations and explicit warnings. Problems should be prevented, issues detected, threats eliminated. Personal responsibility and judgment are mere afterthoughts.
Take a trip around the world and you’ll see I’m right. No one in Madagascar warned me that the coffee I ordered was hot. There are no signs posted telling people not to swim in the waterfalls in Morocco, no railings to keep you from falling over the edge of a scenic lookout in Indonesia, no fences to keep you out of construction sites in Nigeria. I never came across plastic placards in Ecuador that explained how wet floors can be slippery.
Instead there’s a basic understanding: if you can’t figure out how to make it across twenty feet of damp tile, then you can’t survive here.
Nothing makes the case for survival of the richest quite like Tesla.
By now I’m sure you’ve seen the news. The headlines all go something like this:
TESLA’S AUTOPILOT WAS INVOLVED IN ANOTHER DEADLY CAR CRASH
But was it though? Was the crash really the fault of autopilot?
Never mind. That’s beside the point.
The real question is: What are we going to do about the autopilot? Retest it? Restrict it? Remove it? How can we prevent this from happening again? How can we best protect Tesla drivers from themselves? We can’t expect these drivers, the richest among us, to take responsibility for their actions like they would in an ordinary car. We have to do more than offer visual warnings, a built-in alarm and a feature that brings the car to a stop when those alerts aren’t heeded. Let’s have an investigation, followed by a call for more regulation and more oversight. Let’s make the warning lights brighter and the alarms louder. Let’s equip each vehicle with a flare system to alert other drivers, the poor ones, to get out of the way.
That’s how survival of the richest works. It’s not a bad way to live – until you try to live somewhere else. And I have the scars to prove it.
I love this concept, Nova. And you’re right. It pretty much also assumes that 1)we are too stupid/lazy/ignorant to figure out what a shiny wet floor looks like, 2) anyone who slips and falls without being warned will probably being suing the pants off of the store for whiplash, and 3)we should have been told.
All that does, in the end, is make us far more apt to GET injured, because we no longer bother to pay attention to what’s going on around us. If there’s no sign, and we get hurt, it’s not our fault. No one told us to not go there.
Yes, if I had another 1000 words, I would have mentioned something about the court system. Nowhere else in the world are lawsuits threatened so freely than in America… even in Europe, arguably the most “civilised” part of the world, there’s a feeling of “tough luck” when someone has an accident. I guess that could be because their people are usually covered from a health insurance perspective and won’t have million dollar medical bills to come home to… they’re also unlikely to lose their job or their home too. I guess we made lawsuits a thing to protect ourselves from those problems. Personally, I’d rather we solve them the European way… maybe we’ll get to that after we sort out the Tesla thing!
So. There are a lot of reasons, but one of the most obvious reasons is that in the United States, if you bring a suit against someone and lose, you generally don’t have to pay the other side’s legal fees (unless there is a specific common-law basis for the other side to be awarded said legal fees). Whereas, in Europe, you have to pay those fees as well as your own.
Also, here in the States, juries make the determination as to facts (which affects the amount of awards), while in Europe, judges do. Juries are way more likely to give high awards (and also, more likely to not have any idea what constitutes a reasonable award, because they don’t do this for a living). Basically what that means is, it’s more likely (or at least it seems more likely) that if you bring a suit and win, you’ll get more dollars out of it.
Finally, in the States we tend to have less rules that are less tightly enforced than in other countries. In the States, for any given wrong, it’s less likely that we already have a rule about that. Rather, it’s left to citizens (and to corporate entities) to make the rules/create legal precedent for proper enforcement of the rules by suing and winning. My understanding is that in other countries, there are generally more rules and enforcement doesn’t depend as heavily on the existence of legal precedent via court involvement.
BTW, this is just my two cents based on being a litigator in the States. I’m in no way an expert on European law, nor have I done any kind of comparative analysis – but hopefully this sheds a little light on your questions.
:) Thanks, Mara. If I ever want to sue someone, I’ll be sure to do it in the US. Keep hangin! xx
I always think this when I travel elsewhere! I’m Canadian, and am always somewhat surprised when I can stop at a roadside attraction in Iceland (for example), and walk right up to the edge of a cliff, overhanging the freezing ocean (which would surely kill me, even if the fall itself didn’t manage it). And somehow whole countries get away without safety fences, and warning signs, and guards on duty to scold people for leaning too far over the railing.
Nova, I really enjoy your blog (I assume you don’t get sick of hearing this, haha). I’ve been following it for a couple years now (since before your big trip!), and recently reread the whole thing. I’m leaving on my own big trip in September, and a lot of your posts have been very comforting and motivating for me!
Anyway, hope Munich is treating you well! Tschüss!
Isn’t it funny, in a way, how reliant we’ve become on rules and signs to tell us what is and isn’t safe? Anyway, I wish you all the best on your upcoming trip – sounds exciting. Do you have a blog or Instagram? I’d like to follow along!
Oh, and no… I never get tired of hearing that someone enjoys something I wrote. I don’t think any writer would, especially those of us in the online world. Sometimes you post something and then have to wonder if anyone is even out there… it’s nice to hear that there is!
Best of luck this fall… give me a shout if you’re in Germany or Finland or anywhere in between!
I do have an Instagram! @abbynormal182 I’ve got a few nice pictures from Munich from a couple years ago too. Have you seen the surfers in the Englischer Gartens? They’re really something.
I’d started a blog a few years back, but fizzled out and eventually deleted it (you’re right, it’s hard to tell sometimes if you’re just throwing your writing out into the ether), but have been toying with the idea of trying again, or maybe just writing some essays. I thought it might be nice to have a project to work on, rather than just traveling around like a big vacation, to be honest.
Abby, I hope you do start another blog about your time over in Germany, so we can follow along with your trip. I recently moved to Quebec, Canada, and started a blog about my experiences. Well, some of them.
Yikes on the fan part!
:)
Westerners forget how managed and manicured their lives are compared to other countries. We forget how pampered we are and it’s to our own detriment, in the end.
I’ve long called this phenomenon the dumbing down of America, well before it became a common phrase. I guess I was ahead of my time.
Sadly, yes. You were ahead of your time. This past weekend, my boyfriend and I watched in horror as 20 heavily intoxicated college aged students walked across three sets of train tracks instead of using the underpass. I don’t think it was a coincidence that our train’s arrival (and several others) were all suddenly delayed by 15-30 minutes. Survival of the richest dictates that train dispatchers will stop traffic when people are crossing the tracks. God bless us all.