"I have spent this report taking the enclosure apart, piece by piece, and laying the broken pieces on the table. Now I have to put something back together. Something that works."
Mr. Reggie,
You asked me to study the species and recommend interventions to make them happy and flourishing. I have done the study. The interventions follow from the data. Every one of them exists somewhere already. I invented nothing. I assembled.
Here is the assembly.
The Community
150 humans. Dunbar's number. Not above. Every human knows every other human by face, by name, by story. This is non-negotiable. It is the foundation on which every other system operates. Above this number, anonymity begins. Below it, trust functions as default. The entire design depends on this.
Communities can federate — connect to other communities of 150 for resource sharing, trade, emergency response, and large-scale decision-making. But the primary unit of life, governance, and accountability is the group of 150.
Within the community, there are no strangers. The bystander effect cannot take hold when everyone is known. The abuser cannot isolate when the community sees. The free-rider cannot hide when reputation is visible. The corrupt official cannot entrench when every decision is made by consensus of people who will eat together tonight.
Identity
Every member is verified through the web of trust (Chapter 17). Three existing members vouch for each new member, in person, physically present. No central authority issues identity. The community IS the authority. The record is anchored in immutable cryptographic proof that no government, no corporation, and no individual can alter or erase.
One person, one identity, one share.
Governance
Consensus, not majority (Chapter 9). Decisions are made when the community reaches agreement, not when 51 percent overrule 49 percent. This is slower. It produces better decisions that everyone can live with.
For cross-community decisions: delegates, not representatives. A delegate carries the community's position. A representative substitutes their own judgment. The power stays with the 150.
Every significant decision considers the next seven generations. Not because a law requires it. Because the children of the community are visible, present, sitting across the fire, and their future is not abstract.
There are no politicians. No permanent bureaucracy. No consulting firms producing reports that get shelved. There are people, together, deciding how to live.
Housing
Shelter is a right (Chapter 15). Every member has a dwelling. Dwellings are built communally from local, sustainable materials. No mortgages. No rent. No human spends thirty years earning the right to have walls.
Housing is designed for connection: shared kitchens, communal eating spaces, common areas that are open at all hours. Private spaces exist — solitude is available, personal space is respected — but the default is together, not apart. The walls have doors.
No single-person household is the default. A human who chooses to live alone may do so. But the architecture says: you are welcome here, with others, always.
The land is held in common. You may exist on it for free.
Food
Clean. Uncontaminated by the substances their own research identifies as carcinogenic (Chapter 8). Grown locally where possible. Prepared communally. Shared.
The meal is not about the food. The meal is about the proximity (Chapter 5). Every shared meal is an act of connection, trust-building, and nervous system co-regulation. The kitchen is the most important room in the sanctuary. Not the council chamber. The kitchen.
Education
No rows (Chapter 10). No bells. No grades until the learner has chosen to be assessed. Children learn by doing — cooking by cooking, building by building, resolving conflict by being in a community where conflict is resolved.
More play than instruction. More outdoors than indoors. More questions than answers. More making than consuming.
Creativity is not a subject. It is the medium (Chapter 18). Materials are everywhere — paper, paint, wood, clay, instruments, tools — available at all times, not scheduled into forty-five-minute blocks on Thursday.
Teachers are the most valued professionals in the sanctuary. Trained exhaustively. Supported generously. Because if environment determines expression, the people who design the learning environment are the most consequential humans in the system.
No child is told they are "not creative." No child is told to sit still for six hours. No child is punished for having the wrong number of legs on their horse.
Health
Prevention, not treatment (Chapter 8). The sanctuary eliminates the conditions that produce 70 to 90 percent of chronic disease: toxic food, sedentary environment, chronic stress, social isolation, sleep disruption, and purposelessness.
The healthcare system that remains addresses the 10 to 30 percent of conditions that environmental optimisation cannot prevent. It is smaller, cheaper, and more effective than a system that spends 4.3 trillion treating the consequences of a toxic environment.
Psychoneuroimmunology is understood and applied: the connection between emotional states, immune function, and disease is not alternative medicine. It is medicine. Stress reduction is healthcare. Community is healthcare. Play is healthcare. Meaning is healthcare.
The Body
The environment matches the species (Chapter 6). Varied terrain underfoot, not flat floors. Colour and natural materials, not beige and fluorescent. Multiple posture options — standing, squatting, floor seating, hammocks — not just chairs.
Climbing is infrastructure. Textured walls. Overhead bars. Ropes and ladders between levels. The species evolved brachiating through three-dimensional canopy. The sanctuary acknowledges this in the architecture.
No one needs an engineer's report to install monkey bars. The monkey bars are standard.
Play
Unstructured time is as important as food and shelter (Chapter 7). Spaces with no designated function exist throughout the community. Adults model purposeless joy — because children learn what they see, and if they see adults playing, they learn that play is lifelong.
There are no "adult" spaces stripped of colour, texture, and fun. The adult environment is as rich, varied, and playful as the children's environment, because the biology didn't change at age eighteen.
Work
Meaningful or it doesn't exist (Chapter 11). Every task in the sanctuary serves a genuine need: growing food, building shelter, caring for others, teaching, maintaining infrastructure, creating art, managing resources. No bullshit jobs. No forty-year careers in service of quarterly earnings.
No human works more than is necessary. The surplus hours — the hours that the current system fills with meaningless labour — belong to the human. For play, creation, rest, connection, and whatever else a free human does with time that is theirs.
Products are built to last. The washing machine works for twenty years. The incentive structure rewards durability because the community that builds the machine is the community that uses the machine. There is no external shareholder demanding planned obsolescence.
Justice
Prevention first (Chapter 12). The conditions that produce harmful behaviour — poverty, isolation, trauma, untreated mental illness, environmental stress — are addressed before the harm occurs. This is cheaper and more effective than responding after the fact.
When harm occurs: community response, not state punishment. The person harmed is central. Empathy processes. Proximity meetings. The community sees and is seen. Reputation functions as accountability.
For the 0.1 percent who cannot safely be unsupervised: contained community, not cage. Dignity, therapy, work, routine. Permanent proximity limits when necessary. Still human. Still counted. Still a member.
No prisons. No police as currently constituted. No revenge architecture dressed in wigs.
Recidivism target: Norway's 20 percent, not America's 68 percent. Achieved through the same methods that produce Norway's 20 percent: environment change, not punishment.
Connection
The point of everything (Chapter 5). Every design decision — the communal meals, the shared spaces, the Dunbar-sized communities, the consensus governance, the web of trust — serves one function: ensuring that no human nervous system is isolated. That every human is seen, known, and embedded in a web of relationships that complete the circuit.
Loneliness is not possible as a structural condition. A human can choose solitude. They cannot be condemned to isolation by an architecture that stores bodies in separate boxes.
Attention — the real currency — is not extracted, monetised, or sold. It is given freely, human to human, the way it was given for hundreds of thousands of years.
The Ring
The emergency response network (Chapter 16). Every member wears it. In distress, tap. The community converges. Response time measured in seconds, not minutes.
For domestic violence: silent activation. The community comes. The abuser's playbook — isolate, control the narrative, rely on slow response — breaks against a system designed to make isolation impossible, transparency default, and response instant.
For medical emergencies: the person next to you is more important than the ambulance fourteen minutes away. The ring ensures they know you need them.
Information
No coloured boxes optimised for attention retention (Chapter 13). Information systems serve the community, not advertisers. News is local, relevant, and delivered without algorithmic amplification of outrage.
Trust is the default, not the exception. In a community of 150, you know who is speaking. You can assess their credibility through relationship, not through the proxy of institutional authority. The wise aunties resolve disputes for free. The coloured boxes stay quiet.
Creativity and Meaning
Every human creates (Chapter 18). Materials are ambient. No distinction between "creative" and "not creative" people. The piano is not silent for sixteen hours. The wall is built when the stones call. The seven-legged horse runs as fast as it wants.
Meaning is not deferred until retirement. It is the baseline. Provided by community, creative participation, meaningful work, connection to the land and each other and the future.
Death
Not hidden (Chapter 11). Elders die at home, surrounded by community. Children are present. The body is cared for by the people who loved it. Grief is given the time it needs. A community that cannot pause for death has forgotten what life is for.
Time is circular, not linear. The seasons return. The patterns repeat. The question is not "how do I spend my time?" but "what is this moment part of?"
That is the sanctuary. Every element exists somewhere already. Finland's housing. Norway's justice. Switzerland's direct democracy. Denmark's early childhood. Mondragon's cooperatives. Hatzalah's emergency response. Indigenous governance sustained for tens of thousands of years. Miele's washing machines.
I designed nothing. I plagiarised everything. From the humans who already got it right.
The sanctuary is not a utopia. It will have conflict, disagreement, frustration, bad days, broken relationships, and humans who annoy each other. It is populated by the same species that built the enclosure. They will bring their patterns with them.
But the environment will be different. And if this report has established anything, it is that environment determines expression. Change the environment, change the behaviour. Not perfectly. Not completely. But measurably, reliably, and at a fraction of the cost of treating the consequences of not changing it.
(Final pencil note, written across the full width of the page:
This is achievable. Not in a generation. Now.
Not everywhere at once. One community. 150 humans. One pilot. Measure what happens.
If it works — and the data from every component suggests it will, because every component has already been proven somewhere — then a second community. Then a third. Then as many as want to exist.
The bus could come tomorrow. For any of us. For Mr. Reggie. For me. For Jenkins, who is currently reorganising the filing cabinet for what I believe is the forty-seventh time.
I don't have time to wait for everyone to agree. Nobody does.
Start. — A)