City by instalments (II)

I would like to say something about the long genealogy of my idea of founding a city. At some point of my life, I realised that I was trapped in the illusion of personal freedom and happiness. This illusion is socially constructed as an adaptive response that provides certain stability to the social system and allows us to behave as masters while we are just simple servants. In other words, I realised that I was a slave. The unexpected discovery that I was a slave, took me through a series of considerations that the only way out from my condition was to found a city.

Now, as I write, I realise that this weird idea is, somehow, the consequence of a previous conviction: the impossibility of revolution. The foundation of a city is the response to the impossibility of radical change from within or, at least, a new understanding of its political conditions. My disbelief in revolution can be synthesised by reference to three events. The first one is biographical: my experience in Bolivia during the revolutionary-constitutional process that took place between 2004-2007. The second one is intellectual: the reading of Hannah Arendt’s works on the nature politics and revolution. The third one is rather biological: the birth of Mauro, my first son, in 2008. The first two are clearly interconnected and related to political action, while fatherhood is actually the most relevant since it made me understand “tradition” under a new light: as the possibility of engaging in a political initiative that will require the participation of the coming generations.

The rejection of tradition, both in the sense of what we inherit from our predecessors and in the sense of what we will convey to our posterities, is significantly related to individualism: both shape the relationships that make our common world. Tradition connects the past with the future while the present is made of the political bonds that link us together. Our exacerbated individualism locks us within ourselves by cutting us from the past and from the future, and prevents us from keeping a meaningful present. The result is the disappearance of our common world. It does not matter how much information we have from outside, how much we travel or how much interconnected we are: our horizon is extremely short because we are alone with ourselves. Our limited capacity to understand the world is rooted, therefore, in our political loneliness, in our lack of memory and our incapability to see forwards. It is this incapability to perceive a common world what actually destroys it. From this perspective, individualism is the scape of the lonely slave and the illusion of personal freedom and happiness is her contentment. The foundation of a city is the reconstruction of a common world.