Kristeligt Dagblad writes about something most can see, but few can explain. Nearly every town is hit by it - ugly buildings, grotesque towers, a public space we all own, but which almost none of us have influence over.
The editor-in-chief calls it a democratic problem, and he is absolutely right.
But it is much deeper than just a democratic problem.
Because the ugliness rising around us is only the symptom.
The real question is not why we are not asked. The real question is why what gets built looks like that. Why a civilisation that once raised cathedrals of stone and light for people who owned nothing, today raises grey boxes for people who have everything.
The answer is not architectural.
It is anthropological.
Beauty comes from within. A culture that teaches Man that he is Beautiful, Loved and Willed - that he lives in the midst of a Mystery that every single day before his eyes is filled with a Beauty and a Love barely comprehensible - such a culture produces beauty as its natural fruit. It cannot help it. The beauty seeps into everything it touches, from the cathedral to the door handle.
But a culture that has lost this basic orientation does not produce beauty. It emulates it at best. And when you press on a Man who has never received it as foundation, something else comes out.
For nearly eight decades the Western Man has been taught that he arose in a cosmos brought to life through the equation Meaninglessness times Randomness times Time. That he is a piece of meat with a thin layer of consciousness, whose actual trajectory is to rot through eighty years without meaning and without purpose.
It is rarely said as directly as I write it here, but it is the premise beneath everything - beneath the education, beneath the art, beneath the public conversation about what a Man is.
And basic premises are not free.
They work their way out into everything.
The Ancients described the consequences of this orientation as deadly sins. Modern psychology calls it something else and writes it in journals. But the cause is found in the same place - in a Man who has lost the connection to what carries him.
The same applies to the absence of Beauty in our cities. It is not an aesthetic error. It is an imprint. Because Beauty is not decoration Man can do without - it is the visible expression of a culture and of people living harmonised with reality, with truth and with themselves.
And when it disappears from what we build, it is because it first disappeared from what we believe. And therefore what we are.
Try to grasp this -
A culture ALWAYS builds what it believes about Man.
Did you grasp it?
❤️🔥🪽
