On Structures

When I lived in London, my flat was at the corner of a generally quiet intersection. However, a couple of times per day, traffic would spill over from the nearby road, and the intersection would get so busy that dozens of cars would become stuck, struggling to move forwards or back. This happened because of how parking spaces had been placed — the street had way too many parking spaces on either side, forcing the normally two-way street to become one-way to accommodate the parked cars.

When this happened, motorists would often get quite angry. There was loud and annoyed honking. And sometimes people would get out of their cars to shout insults at each other or threaten each other, blaming each other for the situation they now found themselves in. For the drivers, this felt like a terrible and unusual injustice. To be fair, it must have been a frustrating experience. They blamed each other, and were shocked and angered by the purported stupidity of the driver who was supposed to have caused the problem.

Here’s the thing, though. Because I lived on that corner, I knew that this happened every day. And thanks to the view from my window, I could see that it was quite clearly caused by the unfortunately placed parking spaces, and that to blame any particular driver would be to miss the real problem. The drivers thought it was an individual issue, but it was actually a structural issue.

What does this mean? Here’s an approximate definition. A problem is individual if swapping out some of the participants in a particular situation would usually fix the problem. A problem is structural if, generally speaking, it’s resistant to any changes to the participants.

Clearly, this problem is not individual, because it seems that we can assume that the participants in the traffic jam were more or less different people every day, and the problem still happened regularly. And the matter of the parking spaces gives us a plausible explanation for the problem that is resilient to changes in the participants as well.

What are structures, then? We can approximate a definition by saying that structures are networks of social relationships that motivate us to act in certain ways. Traffic rules form a structure, so do relationships of authority, the norms of full-time in-office work, and so on.

This all made me wonder: what other everyday situations do we find ourselves in, where we’re quick to blame someone else, or to blame ourselves, but we’re wrong to do so because the cause of the problem is actually structural? How silly it would be of me to get very upset with someone for a problem that is neither of our faults.