I am not, nor have I ever been an anarchist.  I'm not particularly fond of anarchists, either, if you want to know the truth.   You don't meet very many these days, it's true, but when you do it's hard to take them too seriously.  Like socialists in western democracies, their brethren at the other end of the spectrum, they usually have no practical experience of what they preach.  I'm a pretty open-minded guy, but I understand the advantages of order.  You can overdo it, sure — political history is a record of order's excesses — but sometimes, especially on the roadways, it's definitely preferable to chaos.

That's the thing about anarchy.  It's good fun until you have someplace to go.  Then all the sudden your average anarchist turns all fascist on your ass. 

One thing's for sure:  man in his Hobbesian state of nature ain't pretty.  He's always at odds with his fellow man, always at war.  I don't know anyone for whom "nasty, brutish, and short" is the idea of The Good Life.  So it puzzles me why anyone, if they stopped to think about it, would prefer lawlessness to a system of just laws, or even just laws that make sense.  And what if that system were as simple, as it is on the Charles River Bike Path, as painted arrows on pavement?  What if that were all — really, all — that were needed to keep the peace between men? 

And so it is that traffic along the Charles River Bike Path presents a conundrum.  The portion of the path I use, between The Larz Anderson and Harvard Bridges, on the Boston side mostly, is traversed by people who have overwhelmingly, by the looks of them, benefited from a system of just laws, and would definitely not benefit from a return to a state of nature.  If you were to take a survey I think you would find that the majority are college-educated, many live in Allston, Cambridge, and the Back Bay.  They favor late-model bikes and jazzy sports gear. 

And yet, I'd say a full thirty to forty percent of them pay little if any attention to the clearly marked path, divided down the center by a dotted white line and periodic arrows (as pictured above) directing traffic in both directions to the right.  I refuse to believe that ignorance of signs and symbols is the issue here.  Like most things, it is surely something more sinister. 

My friend Christian rides along the Charles, too.  He says it seems to get worse as the summer progresses.  He has had tangles with some joggers who insist on jogging down the center of the path or to the left of the dotted line, some all the way to the far left of the path.  He says he understands when they "look retarded," but when they "look normal," he finds it harder to pity them.

"I almost hit a guy coming around the bend under the BU Bridge the other day," Chris told me.  "I naturally veered to my right to avoid him, but he veered to his left, and there was this little dance, except I was on a bike and he was on foot."

Chris says he wondered if the guy had just beamed down from outer space.

"Well, they are among us," I assured him.

"Why is it so hard for some people to apply the right-left thing we use on the road to a busy bike path?" he wondered.  "Why are some people so resistant to that?"

"If I knew that, my friend, I would be Dictator Of The World."

Christian is convinced it's not an IQ issue in most cases, but an ego issue, and, because Christian is a Buddhist (not as ironic as you might think), he sees it as a spiritual matter as well.

"Some people just can't catch the meme.  They really don't get it, or don't think it applies to them," he said.  "Other people it's a 'nobody tells me what to do' kind of attitude.  These are the same kind of people you find at Central Square, where crossing the street is this big ego trip.  People like that must get off on being in constant conflict.  Maybe they got kicked in the head a lot as kids."

"So what happened next?" I asked him.

"He forced me to the left, but I ended up elbowing him in the shoulder pretty hard as I swerved off."

He said this gave him an idea.  How many elbows would it take before you got the message that staying to your right just makes better sense for everyone?

He said the only downside was that the guy's sweat spattered all over his arm, and that kind of skeezed him out. 

"And you have to be careful not to clip them upside the head or something."

I asked him if that was the nonviolentest approach he could come up with. 

"A certain degree of mental and physical pain is inevitable and allowed in achieving a satisfactory goal for the welfare of everyone in society at large, according to Theravada Buddhism." Chris tells me, assuring me he never jabs.  "Just a thud or a thwack would do."

"It's not to cause bodily injury," he says.  "It's to remind them that what they're doing is rooted in ego, causes social discord, and puts them and others in physical danger."

But aren't you just asking for trouble?

"Dude, you're on a bicycle.  You're gone down the path before they can elbow you back.  It's almost totally nonviolent."

I had to admit that if skillfully and responsibly applied by a qualified Buddhist it might just work.