Man & machine
“Public housing,” whether privately or publicly owned, is at the heart of urban life today, and increasingly of rural life, and human life in general. It is the destruction of the former art of living, and its replacement by mass economic principles. Perhaps I should mention that I am thinking of buildings and tenements that house hundreds of apartments, like the one in which the High Doganate is located, but any rental facility that combines accommodation for more than one family, and makes them behave under another person’s management and rules, is essentially unjust. It forms, if you will, a pocket of socialism, and tyranny, in which self-government is at least partially eliminated, and in which nature’s agricultural economies are collapsed.
This is why the word “community” has been taken over by the Left, and is a means by which the Left takes over the Right. If, or when, community advances, freedom retreats. Beauty, too, retreats from social arrangements, and becomes progressively illegal, for beauty is the product of nature and nature’s God; not of human planning. The idea of rental housing is, in the worst sense, feudal. It is aesthetically feudal, permitting only such charm as reinforces feudalism. The citizen must be shown his place — “a place for everyone and everyone in his place” in a different sense than the mediaeval — rather than being allowed to participate creatively, to learn and to suffer. He must have guidelines, and these must be assigned by agents who do not have his interests to protect, but instead a “profit motive” in money or some more evil currency.
The myth of modern planning, which is planning “for the masses,” is the myth of communism. It holds that two can do anything better than one, and then concludes, that a million people can do it better than two. Industrialization, in this case even of living arrangements, follows from this myth. As the communist Le Corbusier put it, a house should be “a machine for living”; the inhabitants are made to serve the machine.