Project Structured Cities from A personal perspective
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How important is our society to us? Is it just something nice to have? Could we even do without it? Let’s think about what proportion of the quality of life of a person depends on his own efforts and what part is due to his belonging to a society. At first sight it seems that nearly all is due to his own efforts. But if we imagine how we would live without the knowledge and the material things accumulated by the society in which we live, we would realize that we would live without electricity and water, because we have not invented the generation and use of electricity nor build water works. Previous members of our society have done this. There would be no tools, machines, and no books. All this has been created by previous generations; not by ourselves. We could not even make tools, for instance a pair of pliers; there would be no iron (released from the ore), nor tools or machines to work the iron with. Probably the greatest advantage for the IS, member of a society is having access to its accumulated knowledge. Since the life span of a society is so much greater than the life span of an individual IS, this accumulation is considerable. Another advantage is the possibility of cooperation, the division of labor. Each member learns only part of the accumulated knowledge. So he (or she) has to learn during less time and so can be productive for a greater portion of his life span. He works using the part of the total existing knowledge he has learned, and supplies the other members with the results of his work. The society facilitates this exchange by standardizing measures of time, weight, length, and so on, and issuing money. This allows each member to
reach its objectives much easier than without a society; it permits to have a better standard of living. For instance most of us do not have the knowledge of an architect or the machines of a construction company. So we let them build our house instead of building it ourselves. While there continues to be discussion over what actually defines a community, for many people it is a sense of cohesiveness among a group of people. For generations, an individual’s community served a vital role in terms of offering camaraderie and acting as a support system. With our society moving at a faster and more detached manner due to technology, busy schedules and the frequency at which we change jobs, homes and locations, it makes it harder and harder to feel any sense of community. It is too easy to become isolated in our homes and yet isolation tends to beget a sense of loneliness and depression not to mention the breakdown that can occur in communities due to a detachment from others—increased violence, substance abuse, mental illness and so forth. Since man is always among people who have no connection to the work on the path of truth, but to the contrary, always resist those who walk on the path of truth, and since people’s thoughts mingle, the views of those who oppose the path of truth permeate those with some desire to walk on the path of truth. Hence, there is no other counsel but to establish a separate society for themselves, to be their framework, meaning a separate community that does not mingle with other people whose views differ from that society. And they should constantly evoke in themselves the issue of the purpose of society, so they will not follow the
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