The Real Do-it-Yourself

Recently i have been reading a book called HIGH-RISE By JG BALLARD where the inhabitants of a luxury high rise block of flats started violent clan wars due to a breakdown in the functioning of the buildings systems. Instead of working together to fix the systems they live in squalor not even blaming the buildings managers but blaming those from lower or upper floors.

Which reminds me of real life:

"In existing States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it." -Peter Kropotkin, From "Law and Authority"


p.53

"In effect, the high-rise had already divided itself into the three classical social groups, its lower, middle and upper classes. The 10th-floor shopping mall formed a clear boundary between the lower nine floors, with their 'proletariat' of film technicians, air-hostesses and the like, and the middle section of the high-rise, which extended from the 10th floor to the swimming-pool and restaurant deck on the 35th. This central two-thirds of the apartment building formed its middle class, made up of self-centered but basically docile members of the professions - the doctors and lawyers, accountants and tax specialists who worked, not for themselves, but for medical institutes and large corporations. Puritan and self-disciplined, they had all the cohesion of those eager to settle for second best.

Above them, on the top five floors of the high-rise, was its upper class, the discreet oligarchy of minor tycoons and entrepreneurs, television actresses and careerist academics, with their high-speed elevators and Superior services, their carpeted staircases. It was they who set the pace of the building. It was their complaints which were acted on first, and it was they that subtly dominated life within the high-rise, deciding when the children could use the swimming-pools and roof garden, the menus in the restaurant and the high charges that kept out almost everyone but themselves. Above all, it was their subtle patronage that kept the middle ranks in line, this constantly dangling carrot of friendship and approval."

The people in the building become more and more violent and crazed

p.58

"Their real opponent was not the hierarchy of residents in the heights far above them, but the image of the building in their own minds, the multiplying layers of concrete that anchored them to the floor."

p.76

"Royal had noticed that the manager's office was no longer besieged by indignant residents. Even his own top-floor neighbours, who in the early days had been only too quick to complain about everything, now never criticized the building. In the absence of the manager - still lying in a state of mental collapse in his ground-floor apartment - his dwindling staff of two (the wives of a dubbing-mixer on the 2nd floor and a first violinist on the 3rd) sat stoically at their desks in the entrance lobby, oblivious of the deterioration going on apace over their heads."

well i think its an interesting book anyway

why didn't the people fix it up themselves why don't we fix it up ourselves???