Some thinkers, like Blaise Pascal, described custom as a “second nature,” a habit that eventually becomes law. In Antananarivo, traffic jams have imposed themselves on our daily landscape, monopolizing a large part of our days. While this phenomenon is more than familiar, we still struggle to get used to it. We experience them almost seven days a week; even though they have become ordinary, adapting to them still seems impossible. Perhaps this is because these moments of great frustration are among the greatest torments we are forced to endure. Throughout these painful journeys, the path is paved with trials that push human limits to the breaking point.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “Hell is other people.” In the play from which this famous phrase originates, enduring the judgmental gaze of others is an unbearable torture. The jungle of urban traffic is thus populated by observers who may see me as an obstacle. My own gaze, possessed by all the bitterness that further pollutes an already tainted atmosphere, returns the same verdict to them. It is a deleterious environment, a powder keg that can explode at any moment when certain road users impose their own law, or rather, their anarchy. Anomie, which is the absence or loss of authority of norms, only accentuates the disorder.
In this chaotic environment, the road seems to embody the state of nature conceived by Thomas Hobbes, where generalized insecurity prevails due to the lack of a common authority. It is indeed in the heart of traffic jams that the abbreviated formula of a verse by the Latin comic author Plautus seems to take shape: “Homo homini lupus est” (“Man is a wolf to man”). Relationships between road users often turn into confrontations, while the most aggressive are covered by an umbrella of impunity. In this harsh climate, appeasement must come through the establishment of laws powerful enough to counter this form of “war of all against all.”
The same Thomas Hobbes, like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau later on, theorized the necessity of the “social contract.” To curb this reign of perpetual violence and to affirm what Rousseau calls the “general will,” one must accept renouncing certain freedoms so that a greater, collective freedom can be established, where everyone’s security is much better ensured. Such a pact must be considered if we want the road, which is currently a battlefield, to finally become a common space again.
Captured & Published at: 2026-08-31 05:39:10 (Madagascar Local Time EAT)
Original Source: https://www.lexpress.mg/2026/08/guerre-immobile.html