DAY 22, MEDICINE, TECH, LAW, WAR & NARRATIVES, book 4, building

At twenty minutes past five in the morning, Emine got the message that the lawsuits had been withdrawn without a comment, and a paper wrote: Can someone press pause on the town project? Yesterday, the town team did nine speeches in three locations. Each intriguing, all published on their Hub Campaign Square. We understand why the they keep pushing, but we wonder whether they won’t lose the public due to sheer overload. So those of you, who can’t or won’t watch eighteen hours worth of speeches and interactions with the audiences, here some highlights. Once again, the former nurse, Skye Mattis, delivered a fierce and pointed speech, complemented by the softly spoken John Bergman, a business expert, who substantiated every claim with numbers from the project’s research. Their main takeaway was: ‘The only thing you can win by intertwining medicine with business is to incur higher costs and more misery, eventually resulting in the collapse of the health system. The way out is to end this destructive marriage and make healing as well as prevention the sole focus of medicine.’ John Bergman then impressively explained that the town project will test whether it can’t finance their medical sector via tourism, and whether the project’s pharmaceutical company breathe and the project’s other medical companies can’t change the costs for medical care while at the same time further investigating what it is that makes us humans sick, and how sickness can be prevented in the first place.’ At a different location, the team’s tech expert Hayley Sniper, and their education expert, the renowned Robin Hassan, delivered a masterclass in how education and tech can go hand in hand without becoming ubiquitous in people’s lives. While the town project has top-notch tech and tech experts, it takes the view that life without tech is fantastic, and that tech is far too hyped, which becomes clear if we look at the damage it has already caused. Both speakers made it clear that the aim of the town was a tech balance with the focus on human welfare. Alice Adler, the head of the town project, and the lawyer Emine Hamdi, who has already made a name for herself beyond the project, engaged with the audience from the start, asking them to name laws the audience would like to have questioned. It was hilarious to see these two minds reimagine laws with a playfulness that made me understand the power of playing with ideas, of not getting stuck, of not just repeating what we learned. ‘Playing with an idea is like stretching your muscles,’ Alice Adler said, ‘and as you keep stretching, you extend the range of your motions.’ And that’s something this project seems to do. It’s not afraid to question what is, not even what could be. And what makes this team maybe most remarkable is their humanity and their obvious believe that we human are not as bad as some would have us believe. At eight in the morning, the Q & As at the Front House Theatre and at Jellybridge started, and at ten, both locations hosted press conferences which focused on the announcement that: ‘The Hub’s application room for prospective towners will open at midnight on April the first. Details regarding the criteria for the selection process has been published on our website and on the Hub this morning. We hope that everyone understands that the composition of the towners with respect to professions, age, gender, life choices and interests is part of the experiment.’ Meanwhile another day full of campaign events was already well underway in twenty-one UK cities. This evening, Kahu and her friends celebrated the premiere of their first play: THE END OF ALL WARS on an open air stage at the Compound’s sport fields. The play was one of the highlights of today’s NARRATIVES CAMPAIGN which focused on the stupidest invention of humankind: waging wars. The campaign team took three main questions to the streets, to universities, to schools, on trains, to town halls, to workplaces: ‘What is the record of this narrative? Does this narrative serve us? Is there a more beneficial narrative?’  And they used these questions to scrutinise every narrative that related to war and to ending all wars. Many sets of questions and answers echoed far and wide. The most shared set was “Question: ‘What is the record of waging a war?’ Answer: ‘Destruction, Loss, Traumata.’ Question: ‘Does war serve us?’ Answer: ‘Poets might find some inspiration in devastations and grief.’ Question: ‘Is there something that is more beneficial than war?’ Answer: ‘Everything.’” The second most shared set was this: “Question: ‘What is the record of owning a gun?’ Answer: ‘Gun violence.’ Question: ‘Does owning a gun serve us?’ Answer: ‘No, since it incites gun violence.’ Question: ‘Is there a better alternative to owning a gun?’ Answer: ‘Rethinking our world.’” The third most shared set was this: “Question: ‘What is the record of dominance?’ Answer: ‘Lost potentials. Lost prosperity. Lost opportunities. Frustration. Upheavals.’ Question: ‘Does dominance serve us?’ ‘No. There might be a temporary sense of less anxiety for the dominating, but generally dominance stresses the dominating, and frustrates and holds back the dominated.’ ‘Is there a more beneficial narrative than dominance?’ Answer: ‘Several. Among them balance, collaboration, exploration, creating together, giving voice, unearthing the talents and potentials.’ This night, after the play, Kahu and Alice sat on the roof of the Back House for a break. ‘It’s a shame you missed the play,’ Kahu remarked, handing Alice a glass of red wine. Alice smiled. ‘I saw the audience leaving. Every one of them moved to the core, it seemed to me. And Bülent said, he wants to work with your team to make plays of all the other universe stories, you and your friends created, about how they ended the wars on their planets.’ Kahu smiled and clinked glasses with Alice, saying: ‘We need a lot more stories out there. I tried to find a movie to watch last night, and all I saw were reiterations of the old narratives, of the big evils and the great saviours. I think those stories are partly responsible for our planet’s troubles. And I fear we’ll need to break through the crust of these stories with thousand if not millions of new stories which paint a world where we use our minds, where we decide to create, to build, to nurture, where we have discovered ways to deal with the damages we carry and with those we inflicted.’ Alice smiled broadly. ‘Anything you need to make that happen, just tell me.’ 

© Charlie Alice Raya, book 4, building, 2025