A short story to get #Localism — Just hold the handlebar!! —
— We were cycling on a narrow road crossing the Atacama desert from Antofagasta to San Pedro the Atacama because we love desert and we loved cycling! — my wife was telling my two sons (8 and 6 year old) during a pause on their first street ride to go visit their grandma.
One of them was constantly looking backwards searching for cars with fear of getting hit. This is dangerous because rookies tend to move shoulder and direction when looking back (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS1LSz23Cy4). It is an essential skill need to be learned. But the main point to stop was not the technique, but the reason to look back.
Our culture keep trying to build in us a false sense of control. If you study hard you will get a good job (false meritocracy), if you are a good person, good things will happen to you (false sense of security) and so on. So almost every urban cyclist rookie i’ve ever teach, think that if they see the coming cars, somehow they can control or prevent an accident. These misleading reasoning is the cause why so many people choose to go against traffic which is a very bad idea! You increase the total speed in a potential accident, for drivers it is much more harder to perceive you position and speed this way, you get stress all the ride, etc.
So my wife started telling them a story about an expedition we made on 2005 to Atacama Desert in Chile in which we had to ride next to this monster trucks that transport very heavy mining trucks. The point was that when these trucks passed next to us, we literally just had enough space to stay inside the road and they produced a big vacuum effects that scuck the bike in a very dangerous way.
So she told my kids that it was a very scary situation in which she knew she had absolutely no control… — the only thing I had control over was on holding the handlebar — she told them.
In that moment it hit me… this is #Localism! In general we live in a very complex world that we do not understand in which there are no universal patterns or rules, so no prediction capacity. We may enjoy a safety island for some time, but at any moment a f**king monster truck (i.e. Climate Change) will pass next to us. As it is both useless and even dangerous looking back for that car that may hit you, it is also dangerous and mostly useless jump in to the save the world minivan.
Most likely you can only hold tight to your handlebar -> take care of yourself and your family, may be help with your tribe or community. I really believe that is really enough, because on one hand it keeps the focus on real things as buy food from your local productors or taking care of you products quality because its your family, friends and neighbors the ones who will consume… etc. On the other hand, as happens with agent models, global patterns emerges from very simple local rules, so #localism does not stay local, it self-organize and allow the emergence of higher scale changes.
The “save the world” minivan is a ride to naive interventionism as in “don’t eat meat, save the planet” for example giving a s**t about your neighbor farmer who has some cattle, treat them well, produce good safe meat, etc. For the minivan passengers, he is not an individual is only part of an abstract category needs to disappear.
So don’t get anxious and depressed about overwhelming abstract dangers, — Just hold the handlebar!! —
