Seen in this way, the CITY is an instrument for accelerating change. It creates an environment in which dense concentrations of people of varying background can come into contact every day. The product of these contacts is ACCELERATED cultural and social change.
Creativity is a state of mind, and it is most widely expressed by very young children, because their confrontation with their environment is constantly made up of original discoveries and inventions. In time, through social pressures to conform and the repetition of experience, most of them lose their sense of wonder and become less and less creative, trapped in a complete mold not of their own making.
Poet, take up thy lyre; No more shall warlike fire Inflame the earth and sea; Cease from your martial strain, Sing songs of peace again, Sing of a WORLD set FREE. No more sing fear and hate While armies devastate; Nor boast of foes withstood; Let MERCY be your theme, Renew the old, fair DREAM Of HUMAN BROTHERHOOD. No more the trumpet blast Shall call to conflict fast, The fLame of war grows pale; Sing, Poet, God-inspired, Till all the world is fired With LOVE that shall not fail.
Only one thing matters, that wherever we go, and however we go, we hear the MUSIC of life.
As for civilization, from which we are at last about to escape, so far from being the social destiny of man, it is only a transient stage - a state of temporary evil with which globes are afflicted during the first ages of their careers; it is for the human race a disease of infancy, like teething; but it is a disease which has been prolonged in our globe at least twenty centuries beyond its natural term.
Cvilization has made the human heart the receptacle of all vice. What is needed to correct this is not a heap of volumes and precepts, but a mechanism conceived in opposition to this civilization which establishes man in a state of war with all his fellows and makes each family the secret enemy of every other family.
If the immensity of our desire is compared with the limited means that we have of satisfying them, it would seem that God behaved inconsiderately giving us passions so avid of pleasure, passions created to harass us by exciting a thousand longings of which only one one-tenth can be satisfied in the present social order.
Certain passions are called distributives and tend toward a social domestic arrangement to civilization, although known to primitive society. This is the secret of lost happiness that must be recovered.
The new social order would make up a huge 'orchestra' of the human passions, in several senses playing harmoniously and without constraint.
On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. Though a by-product of freedom, greater equality is not an accident. A FREE SOCIETY RELEASES the ENERGIES and ABILITIES of PEOPLE to PURSUE their own OBJECTIVES. It prevents some people from arbitrarily suppressing others. It does not prevent some people from achieving positions of privilege, but so long as FREEDOM is maintained, it prevents those positions of privilege from becoming institutionalized; they are subject to continued attack by other able, ambitious people. FREEDOM MEANS DIVERSITY but also MOBILITY. It preserves the opportunity for today's disadvantaged to become tomorrow's privileged and, in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life.