If it is thus highly improbable that man might be a success story in the cosmic sway of evolution, it is principally because he might be too late in grasping bodily and mentally the substantial oneness of himself and the universe that contains and sustains him.
The mind of the city is composed of thousands of peripatetic particles all operating from individual brains. In addition to this multiplicity of wills posturing themselves in collective veneers oriented toward the light (see the vegetal kingdom), there will be a centralized brain of non-biological character (unless technology allies itself to biology and medicine and brings the computer “science” back to the ancestral father: the organic). This brain center will only direct the servosystems of the city.
We have the whole thickness of the earth to handle and exploit. We have only the thin unstable skin of topsoil, and the seas, to procure for us the biological energies indispensable for life.
It is the rediscovery of congruence between the part and the whole. It is the reconnection of the speck to the enormity of the cosmos.
As an illustration, perhaps it is of some use to go to the limit and consider an urban system forced to exist in the harshest of all environments, the non-environment of space, a city asteroid, an asteromo.
If what we see tells us unequivocally, beyond any existential ambiguity, that in this earthly cosmos the displaying of time and history has caused some of the mineral stuff, which in gaseous and consequently liquid and solid state had been the only component of a reality, dumb, insensible, corpuscular, blind, unconscious, entropic, that is to say proto-alive, if it has caused some of this stuff to metamorphose into consciousness, then there is where we see that a vectoriality is establishing itself unequivocally and unambiguously. It is the asentropy for which entropy and pollution are one and the same.
One has to be blind to facts not to recognize that we, as all living creatures, are specifically, rigorously, unavoidably, beautifully, miraculously, concretely miniaturized universes.
How else can we, life, create God? (I am literal, not euphemistic.)
We will not kill the logistical inertia and the paralysis overcoming traffic at its peaks and everywhere in between by killing space through the mirage of velocity, but by killing distance, period.
The most fantastic example of this is naturally any biological organism in which analogy the city one day will be conceived.
To take for granted the nail and the tanker, the spatula and the skyscraper, is part of the general failing of opulence.
If for nothing more than for human self-preservation, the time has come for a choice between unqualified corporate profit and becoming.
First priority is the ethicalization of free enterprise, that is to say, the freeing of “free enterprise” from greed, hypocrisy, bigotry, fanaticism, intolerance. This is a task worth undertaking, to understate the case, and its challenge is far outdoing any other a corporate tycoon might accept.
We, the software of reality.
Real man knows that man cannot do his own things for the elementary reason that his own things are everybody’s things, that the private and the public or collective are totally enmeshed and inextricably bound by a common destiny.