Editing Openai/6904e1b3-b1d4-8007-b938-da625cb3f2bb (section)

=== Assistant: Yes — I see what you mean. ===
Yes — I see what you mean.
You don’t want to romanticize dirt and violence, but rather capture the feeling of immediacy, of life unfiltered.

For Book 3 (Horizontal Social Model), you could frame Pompeii (or ancient life in general) not as “better” or “worse,” but as an example of immediacy of existence — where every human act (eating, walking, trading, celebrating, grieving) happened without layers of abstraction.

Here’s a possible framing you could adapt into a chapter section:

Immediacy of Existence
Modern society prides itself on safety, hygiene, and efficiency. But in achieving this, we have also layered existence with abstractions. Our food arrives wrapped, our streets sterilized, our emotions medicated, our deaths hidden away. Life comes prepackaged, clean, but distant.

In earlier societies, even exploitative ones such as Rome, there was a raw immediacy. To walk barefoot in a Roman street was to feel the presence of life and death at once — the earth, the animals, the people, the blood of conflict and the laughter of festivals. Life pressed directly upon the skin. It was not sanitized, but it was present.

A horizontal society does not seek to return to brutality, nor to glorify dirt or suffering. Rather, it seeks to recover this immediacy of existence — a way of living where reality is not hidden behind excessive mediation. It means contact with nature, authentic relationships, transparency of processes, and recognition that life’s texture cannot be reduced to efficiency. True freedom lies not in avoiding the rawness of life, but in dwelling fully within it.

Would you like me to expand this into a structured section for Book 3 (with practical examples of how immediacy could look in daily life within a horizontal society)?