5 The impact of living process on belonging

In 20th-century industrial society it seemed almost impossible for people to achieve belonging. People had too little control over their private worlds, and too little control over the public world. But this needed control can be reintroduced into society. As we shall see, the structures needed for our belonging — both private and public — can be generated almost without effort, autonomously, by any truly living process allowed to exist in society, and these are attainable today by modern means. What matters, above all, is that the people themselves are in control of their environment.

When a system of living processes acts in a human environment, two kinds of structures will appear within reach of every person.
First, new processes will give each person the ability to generate a unique and private world which has its own privacy, idiosyncrasy, adaptation — a place where each of us can be ourselves. Each of these private worlds is unique and, because unique in a realistic way, not arbitrary, it is capable of being loved and is likely to inspire love. Its size is almost irrelevant. It may be tiny or it may be enormous.
Second, in the presence of living processes, there will be generated a public world attached to each of these private worlds, which once again invites belonging. These public worlds, too, need not be large. […] But what is essential is that is has naturalness, that it belongs to the people who use it most, not to a faceless agency, not to someone distant, ever.
The capacity for everyone to enter either one from anywhere — to be able to reach both of these two “belonged-to” worlds at will, to have them both to hand — is the essence of the structure that living processes will generate in society.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/1 Belonging and not-belonging#