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The costs of the cycle of construction and demolition
Given the costs and legal risks, putting up buildings without permits is a tremendous expense, not only in money (above all) but also in energy. Energy spent building them, just as energy is spent demolishing them, all the more so with explosives.
So we spend to put them up and spend to bring them down. In both cases, our country spends energy, money, human resources, labour, usable and unusable land and, above all, time. At a time when problems, particularly social ones, abound, we run on the spot after unreasonable, illogical expenditure; we pursue illegality under the demagogic promise that one day our illegality will be legalised.
And so this pursuit becomes a race at election time.
But as we rush blindly in this direction, our demagogues come boomeranging back at us, arrogantly rushing to show that they will supposedly impose order, that they will sort out all the chaos. They rush to instil fear, and then nobody builds any more (at least without a permit).
The very choice of how to demolish these buildings (with explosives, that is) is a way of instilling fear. Our historical experience makes fear what identifies authority for us, what identifies the State. Now frightened, we will stop making a mess, while our demagogues will try, through pyrotechnic spectacles, to convince us that they are putting it right.
And so our cycle continues: “demolish, to build something that will be demolished”. The chaos remains the same; it simply goes unmentioned for certain periods.