I believe that I have just visited Never-Never Land or a fairly close facsimile. Never-Never Land is the place where nobody ever matures, nobody evers provides continuity or stability to life.
In the land I visited, people on bicycles happily wave their thanks to motor vehicle drivers who actually stop at stop signs. The bikers themselves, just as in the real world, never stop at stop signs. But sometimes the drivers stop where there is no sign, and sometimes they stop where the bicycles have a stop sign. And sometimes they don't, of course.
And so in Never-Ever Land every intersection requires a negotiation.
I don't want to live where nobody ever grows up. Childhood is great -- for children who are growing up. What makes childhood great, what makes childhood safe, what even makes such a childhood possible are the traditions, rules, and social structure which are provided by adults.
Every intersection is new to a child, but not to an adult. People ought to reach pre-agreement on some things; not everything which happens -- not every intersection of life -- should require full attention to negotiate. We've done that; we've figured out a system that works, at least fairly well; we agree to follow the system; we are adults.
I suppose that the custom of negotiating the right of way irrespective of any overtly stated rights is a sort of agreement among the people of Never-Ever Land. It's an agreement to void adult responsibility and to reinvent their rights at every meeting. There's a certain amount of protocol in that agreement, but it turns every meeting into a meeting of children, children who have to explore their mutual responsibilities all over again.
In actual reality we are not children. We were only pretending to be children, only acting like children.
In actual reality we are adults. We are capable of creating Constitutions and lesser laws, of ordering life sufficiently that we do not need to focus all our attention on renegotiating minutia of daily life. We are capable of redirecting our mental abilities from negotiating the right of way at every intersection to developing the rights of life -- food, shelter, health, opportunity.
Why do we choose to create a Never-Ever Land of walking in circles over and over again?