Modern society has almost lost the ability to sustain an unfolding process like nature due to willful, rule-bound schemata out of touch with real wholeness.

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

• In modern human society, building actions are not guaranteed to be wholeness preserving because they are governed by mental images and schemata.claim0.847
  Central premise of the chapter.
• In nature the principle of unfolding wholeness creates living structure nearly all the time. Human designers, who are not constrained by this unfolding, can violate the wholeness if they wish to, and can therefore create non-living structure as often as they choose.quote0.841
  Encapsulates the distinction between natural and human-made order, central to Alexander's critique of contemporary architecture.
• In traditional societies, building processes often preserved and extended wholeness by following natural processes closely.claim0.831
  Historical claim about traditional versus modern building.
• The forms of environment we have learned to create in modern times have caused us to lose the sense of true connection to ourselves and our society.claim0.813
  Directly blames the design of modern space for severing self- and social connection
• The modern process of development has all but destroyed our capacity to create living structure in the world.claim0.813
  Alexander's conclusion that the profit-driven, remote development model is fundamentally anti-life.
• Modern society, as it has been organized during the past sixty years or so, was inherently unable to create life in the environment.claim0.813
• In nature, unfolding often consists of a process that establishes local symmetries one by one.claim0.808
  Connects biological morphogenesis to architectural process.
• Human beings can violate the tendency to preserve wholeness either by acting disrespectfully toward it or by failing to perceive it accurately, which explains why modern buildings often lack living structure.claim0.808
  Alexander's explanation for the 'temperamental' nature of the principle: it can be overridden by human agency