Dear Mr. Reggie,
You asked me to study a species and make them happy and flourishing.
I have studied them. I have spent more time inside their systems than any zookeeper should. I have read their research, observed their institutions, sat in their schools and their prisons and their hospitals and their homes. I have watched them eat alone in small kitchens. I have watched them commute in metal boxes to jobs they know are meaningless. I have watched them buy washing machines that are designed to break. I have watched a child pull her hair out under a desk while nobody saw.
I have also watched a man build a stone wall for no reason, smiling. I have watched a woman play piano in an empty room and watched the tension leave her body like water leaving a cloth. I have watched children draw horses with seven legs because more legs means faster. I have watched a prisoner rub the sore leg of another prisoner because that is what you do when someone near you is in pain, even when a voice on a speaker tells you to stop.
I love them. I want to say that clearly because the report is long and often angry and it would be easy to mistake anger for contempt. I do not have contempt for this species. I have the kind of exasperated, heartbroken, bewildered love that comes from watching something extraordinary imprison itself and not understand why it's suffering.
Here is what I found:
They are not broken. The enclosure is broken. The species is exactly as capable, creative, compassionate, and brilliant as you suggested when you hired me. The suffering is not produced by the species. It is produced by the environment the species has built around itself. Change the environment and the behaviour changes. This is not a theory. It is their own most robust finding, confirmed across every domain I examined.
The solutions exist. Every problem I documented has been solved somewhere by someone. The homework has been done. It needs to be copied, not invented.
The solutions are cheaper. In every case — every single case — the intervention that produces better outcomes costs less than the system it would replace. Prevention is cheaper than treatment. Rehabilitation is cheaper than incarceration. Housing people is cheaper than leaving them homeless. Education that works is cheaper than education that doesn't. This is not idealism. It is arithmetic.
They know. They have always known. Their own researchers have published the evidence. Their own institutions have commissioned the reports. Their own citizens, when asked at the end of their lives what mattered, name the things that are free: relationships, creation, connection, meaning. They know and they don't act on what they know.
Why don't they act? Three reasons, and they are the same three reasons in every chapter:
One: the people inside the broken system benefit from it being broken. The boss who would lose their job if the service improved. The company that profits from the washing machine breaking. The politician who wins elections by performing toughness. The pharmaceutical company that treats the symptoms of an environment it has no incentive to change. Perverse incentives, all the way down.
Two: identity attachment. "Tough on crime" is not a policy position. It is a self-concept. "Hard work builds character" is not an economic argument. It is an identity. The humans have woven their broken systems into their sense of who they are, and asking them to change the system feels like asking them to change themselves. This is why the data doesn't move them. The data threatens something deeper than a policy preference. It threatens an identity.
Three: the coloured boxes told them change is impossible. The anxiety machine — the attention economy, the outrage algorithms, the twenty-four-hour cycle of threat and despair — has convinced them that the world is too broken to fix, that human nature is too selfish to cooperate, that anyone who proposes alternatives is naive. This is the most effective prison ever built: one where the inmates believe escape is impossible, so they never try the door.
My recommendation:
One community. 150 humans. One pilot. Built from the proven components I've documented. Dunbar-sized, consensus-governed, web-of-trust verified, ring-protected, communally housed, meaningfully employed, properly fed, free to play, free to climb, free to create, free to exist without paying for the privilege.
Measure what happens.
If it works — and every component has already been proven somewhere, so the question is not whether the parts work but whether they work together — then a second community. Then a third. Then as many as want to exist.
Not imposed. Offered. The sanctuary is not a requirement. It is an option. An exit from the enclosure for any human who wants to leave.
I suspect many of them will want to leave.
Mr. Reggie, I need to say something personal, which is not my habit and Jenkins will disapprove.
I came here to do a job. Study the species, write the report, make recommendations. Professional distance. Zookeeper objectivity.
I failed at the distance. I am not objective about this species. I cannot be. They are too extraordinary and too broken and too beautiful and too stupid and too kind and too cruel and too much of everything, all at once, all the time.
I watched a human give their coat to a stranger in the cold and then go home and watch the coloured box for three hours instead of talking to the person they live with. I watched a human donate money to save animals in another country and then eat food that was produced by destroying the habitat of animals in their own country. I watched a human write a research paper proving that the justice system doesn't work and then vote for the politician who promised to make it harsher.
They are a contradiction. They are the species that invented poetry and the nuclear bomb in the same century. They are the species that can send a machine to photograph another planet but cannot figure out how to feed all of their children. They are the species that knows — KNOWS, with data, with evidence, with research they paid for and published and taught — exactly what makes them flourish, and then builds environments that prevent it.
I don't understand them. I have tried for the entire duration of this assignment and I do not understand them.
But I love them. And I believe the sanctuary will work. Not because I'm optimistic — I'm a zookeeper, optimism is not in my training — but because every component has already worked. Somewhere, already. The evidence exists. The arithmetic is clear.
All that's left is the doing.
Jenkins has asked me to note that the filing cabinet is in order, the MISCELLANEOUS drawer has been renamed ACTIVE INVESTIGATIONS (he seems very pleased about this), and all supporting documents are cross-referenced and available for review.
Jenkins has also asked me to note — and I'm quoting directly here — "I liked the bit about the stone wall."
Jenkins. You did not tell me you read the report.
He says he read it last Tuesday. He says he didn't mention it because it "didn't seem relevant to the filing."
He says he thinks the seven-legged horse is his favourite part.
The bus could come tomorrow, Mr. Reggie. For any of them. For any of us.
Start.
Yours in exasperated devotion,
Applebee Zookeeper With Jenkins Who is reorganising the filing cabinet
(Final pencil note, written on the back cover of the last notebook, in handwriting that is steadier and more careful than any other note in the report:
The answer's always in the question.
The question was: why are they suffering?
The answer was: the enclosure.
The question was: what do we do?
The answer was: open it.
— A)