Co-Morbidities: The Horn Honker and the Face Diaperer

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Have you ever had another driver lay on his horn just because you dared to pass him? This is interesting behavior, worth some psychoanalysis as it bears on the seemingly unrelated phenomenon of people who wear “masks” getting up in arms over the sight of people who don’t.

Now, to lay out some predicates.

We will assume that all you did was pass the other car – that you didn’t ride his bumper first or obnoxiously swerve back in front of him. Assuming that – assuming all you did was make your way around him – why would he lay on the horn? Why would a psychologically balanced person become angry at being passed?

I myself certainly don’t mind, much less get angry. In fact, I will make every effort to assist the person attempting to pass by easing over to the right and even waving him by. I’d much rather have him pass than ride my ass and even if he didn’t – and good drivers don’t, as doing so is not only obnoxious, it will guarantee a bumper sandwich for which you’ll be liable if the car ahead brake checks you – it’s obnoxious to use your car as a pace car.

And that gets at part of the psychological deconstruction – the reason for the horn-honking. These people get angry when you pass because you are operating at a pace they disapprove of. You may be “speeding” – the gaslighting term used to characterize driving any faster than the secular totem pole worshipped by some people with the same religious deference given by savages to the mumblings of their tribal medicine man.

But not necessarily.

What triggers the horn-honker is your driving faster than they are driving – which is often below the speed limit.

This just happened to me, shortly before the video embedded with this article commences. I was driving “down the mountain” – as locals call heading into town from my rural county in SW Virginia – when I came upon a truck driving around 46 MPH on a road with a 55 MPH totem pole and most cars usually driving faster, at least a little bit. I saw no reason to spend the next 15 miles driving at the pace of this truck’s driver and so I broke left, into the opposing lane, accelerated to get past the truck and then eased back into the travel lane, leaving plenty of room between my car and his.

I didn’t ride his bumper or do anything obnoxious – to the sensibilities of a psychologically normal person.

Nonetheless, my passing, as such, was provocation enough to trigger the fist-pounding horn fusillade. Perhaps because it had been raining and this truck’s driver considered my driving faster than he deemed “safe” to be cause for horn censure. Probably that.

Mark that.

The horn-honkers consider their standard the universal standard. They cannot stand the assertion of someone else’s standard, even when it affects them not at all. Do you begin to see a psychological connection between the horn-honker and the face-effacer?

The common denominator or rather, common co-morbidity, is precisely the same. But the etiology of the horn-honker is the predicate for the face-effacer’s related pathology. The former believes one speed (his) fits all. Anyone who drives faster than he believes to be “safe” is obviously an idiot and a homicidal maniac whose actions must be castigated (as via the horn, often accompanied by the furious flashing of high beams) and – sometimes – actively thwarted, as by speeding up to prevent the overtaking car from successfully passing.

I once had a guy I was trying to pass who was doing about 32 MPH on the Blue Ridge Parkway – which has a speed limit of 45 MPH – kick it up to more than 70 in an effort to prevent me from passing (which I of course did, as a matter of principle). Sometimes, these people, after you’ve passed them, will increase their speed to as fast as you are are going – no matter how fast you go – proving that what really mattered to them wasn’t that you drove faster than they were driving but that you passed them.

How dare you!

Now consider the face-effaced variant of the same psychological type. Many of these quiver with anger when they see a not-effaced face. They are not content to simply efface their faces – and leave it at that.

At the height of face-effacing “mandates,” some of these deranged people would get in the faces of those not effaced and even accost them, physically.

They could not stand the idea that other people might have a different standard than their own. These are the same people who now demand that everyone roll up their sleeves. It is not enough that they have chosen to do so. Their choice must be everyone’s “choice.”

This is the real disease we’re fighting – and for once, the royal (and presumptive) “we” applies, as we really are all in this together. No individual will be safe to just live his life again until other people are once again willing to mind their own business, again.

Horn-honking, left-lane obstructors were a symptom of an underlying sickness of what’s now become a pandemic, though not one involving a “virus.”

And the cure for what ails isn’t a “vaccine.”

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