La-La-Land

A Home Everyone Loves

Can you please imagine that the quality of a new home construction is measured by the happiness and satisfaction the workers enjoyed as they built that home? Let's carry this imagination to the limit and be as idealistic as possible, since we are totally free to let our creativity go wild! Assessors visit the construction site while the house is being built to find out how everyone is feeling. The family who will live in the house comes by and helps with the work. They bring lunch for the workers! Everyone participates in the design and realization of the new home. When the family moves into the completed home they have a gathering and invite everyone to celebrate. The neighborhood is a magical place of love and tranquility.

I don't know how people can live happily in homes that were built by slaves. And nearly all homes in use today were built by slaves. Slavery is a condition in which people work but do not enjoy the fruit of their labor; most slaves cannot live in a house that they built because of the fundamental inequity of value in common human society. Inequity is often described as a consequence of competition, which seems to relegate ugly behavior to biology and render it morally unassailable. I can assail it.

Slavery can only exist in a society where people permit unfairness to continue, a mercenary society such as essentially all human societies on Earth today (with the exception of a few remaining primitive societies). People who have are the haves and the haves can change the world. That is a factoid.

The Way We Describe The World

I always wanted to work as an artist. Such a desire to focus too much on one endeavor shows the imbalance in the way I perceived the world. One day, I realized that we all describe the world in Newtonian terms such as velocity, momentum. We see our world increasingly as separate entities and evaluate all things numerically. We quantify everything. This way of describing the world is largely responsible for the lack of imagination shown in the way we organize society and build homes.

I've heard people criticize "concrete slab" architecture in the city. If everyone is in agreement that these buildings are ugly, then why are they built? An architect draws an intricate design and makes a model before the first hammer swings. There can be no doubt that this is going to be an ugly building.

I recently read a paper about the design of buildings which are more than one kilometer tall. One of the concerns mentioned by the architect was that such as structure requires a base of interior space which has no access to natural light; it feels like being buried and people don't like to stay in a space like that. But a lot of the space is too deep in the structure to receive light. I am glad that the architect is aware of that problem, but it never stops people from going ahead with the plans.

Inevitably, the people who occupy those buried spaces are like the slaves who build our homes. They live in a state of inequity, deprived of one of the fundamental needs of all life: sunshine.

Eco Villages & Vegetarian Communities

I explore these Utopian communities

Relativity

Bat flying around my head eating the mosquitoes prevent...