The monochromatic society we need to run from.

By Alex the Builder Philosopher

15 March 2026 

I recently read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a book about how to navigate the afterlife once we die and enter the ‘’spirit world’’

. Recently, I came to dislike the current house trends I was building, the popular madness of building houses with monochromatic exteriors, and a passage struck me:

“If to be born in Hell, songs (like wailings), due to evil karma, will be heard. One will be compelled to enter therein unresistingly. Lands of gloom, black houses, and white houses, and black holes in the earth, and black roads along which one hath to go, will appear.”

If one goes there, one will enter into Hell and suffer unbearable pains of heat and cold.

And this got me thinking, a mere sitting at a traffic light made this hellish reality appear before my eyes. But where are the colors?

Black, white, and gray vehicles as far as my eye can see, and the only color to manifest itself was the red and yellow of McDonald's, the red of Tim Hortons and the orange of the The Home Depot banners, like the only thing deserving my attention was some store imploring me to buy its product.

And when you think about it, in most movies monochromatic is also the color of evil. Think of the Empire in Star Wars, Giedi Prime, or House Harkonnen in Dune, etc. Furthermore, extreme sanitation is always a key point of these environments, where only one truth can prevail.

Dangerous, as when we enter without balance into this eternal battle against good and evil, darkness vs light, even the purest ideals will turn into ruin and oppression, always justified by a one-sided logic in its finality; them or me!

Afterall,

“Moral virtue is a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency.”

— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Is the extreme polarisation taking place in the materialistic mind of society simply an internalisation of this new monochromatic environment we’re building before our eyes, or is this environment the result of our internal state?

As within, so without.

However, the laws of the universe aren’t built that way, they always seek balance, not the extremes. So when we push hard one way, the return of the pendulum is inevitable. These laws are embedded in our psyche which will compensate an extreme by producing its opposite:

• Excessive order and control give birth to chaos

• Excessive moral virtues hide unprecedented levels of corruption

• As everything becomes more sterile, the craving for drama intensifies

What is there to top the release of the Epstein files?

Aliens or WWIII seem like good contenders.

It seems that the disappearing colors reappeared in emotional intensity.

Maybe it is time to stop the cultural monotony for the sake of economic optimization and leave behind the stupid idea that colorful homes and cars lower their resale values and embrace a colorful world again.

I say bring back the color!

*and weird too