Status symbols in NewVistas

The LAW and accompanying revelations received in the early 1830s by the early membership of the LDS movement suggest a revolutionary attempt to reengineer society in ways that champion innovation, transparency, prosperity, social cohesion, and knowledge as foundational stones of modern society.

Participants in the NewVistas community enjoy higher living standards compared to modern societies worldwide. This is thanks to unique and groundbreaking approaches to housing, transportation, clothing, and food.

The way these goods and services are organized, along with how social ladders are highlighted, results in a system that prioritizes innovation, ethics, entrepreneurship, and equity, while diminishing the influence of political patronage, coercive force, wealth accumulation, and celebrity appeal. 

NewVistas communities do not pursue equality of outcome. Instead, the NewVistas system enforces equality of access to capital, opportunity, and obligation, while allowing differences in merit-based outcomes.

Housing

In the post-war boom up until the mid 2000s, housing ownership was treated as a primary status symbol tied to wealth accumulation and permanence. However, things are changing. Currently, 20% of all American adults see themselves as lifelong renters.

This number has increased by 33% since 2021. Among these renters, mostly younger people, there is a belief that owning a home is not the only American dream. In many cases, a home is an inconvenience. It limits owners’ flexibility, dictating where they live and affecting their net worth, since a house represents a significant chunk of it. 

Renters believe that modern houses are more “updated” with features that might not have been possible just 10 years ago and would cost a fortune to install. They can live wherever they want and are not tied to a house they must regularly pay to maintain. 

NewVistas’ approach to housing recognizes the evolving trends described above, whereby more and more people will prefer to live in rental homes that provide greater flexibility, value for money, and quality. 

NewVistas apartments offer a high degree of privacy. Residents have an apartment module suite which contains a private bed and bath module and living space. Each of these suites is 4 feet wide and 32 feet long. A suite can be sealed off from others as needed, using partitions that are soundproof, odor-proof, and light-proof, thereby ensuring complete privacy. 

An apartment can easily be separated or combined, depending on the preferences of the residents. This flexibility means that participants only pay for what they occupy.

Each apartment features a spacious 24.75-foot-wide front grove and a 24.75-foot-wide back patio suitable for social gatherings. Every element of the apartment is modular, including the kitchenette, bed and bath, and living area. Residents have the option to have their own private bed, bath, and living space. 

NewVistas apartments can easily be assembled and taken apart. They use materials that are extremely long-lasting and designed to withstand the forces of nature. Living spaces can be quickly reconfigured, allowing suites to be combined into a single apartment or separated into multiple units. All suites are identical in features and size. The only differences are the number of suites in each apartment and resident-selected décor.

Renters, who today prioritize flexibility, quality, and value for money, will likely be impressed by what NewVistas apartments provide. Apartments are priced at market value, allowing them to compete with traditional real estate. 

NewVistas decisively removes housing as a lifestyle-differentiation mechanism or status or lifestyle, focusing instead on building their net worth so they can have a higher standard of living.

Vehicles and transport

When vehicles were first developed in the late 19th century, they were intended to replace horses and stagecoaches as a means of transportation. They soon gained prominence because they enhanced mobility, moving people and goods faster, more reliably, and more comfortably compared to earlier modes of travel. 

As time progressed, and especially after World War II, cars became a central feature of life as cities grew and people moved to the suburbs. People earned more, which allowed them to afford cars with the extra disposable income they now received. Advertising also played a major role in convincing people that they needed cars. 

By the 1960s, boosted by innovation, marketing, and rising incomes, cars shifted from being just a means of transportation to symbols of status, engineering success, and sophistication. Brands started to be associated with specific qualities of their vehicles. Mercedes was all about status and sophistication, while Toyota came to symbolize reliability and practicality. 

Today, many new segments have emerged in the market, appealing to many considerations, including environmental issues, which electric cars aim to champion. Cars are still viewed as functional tools but thickly layered with social meaning. 

Cars are underutilized, being parked for hours or even days on end when not in use. A good car is expensive, both upfront and in maintenance. This emphasizes that cars are more about social status than mobility. 

The community does not allow private ownership of vehicles or other assets. Instead, anyone can lease a car from the community as needed, which aims to provide what participants require. Mobility is central within the community. Besides being entirely walkable, mule transportation is also available.

Mules, which provide much of the necessary transport, are electric and can reach virtually every part of the community’s campus. They are well-maintained by contractors who facilitate access and offer regular care. This type of mobility not only negates the need for cars but also removes their use as a social status signal.

The community’s physical campus is inaccessible to vehicles when fully built up. Therefore, cars are only used outside the community for road trips, short-distance hauling, and leisure activities. Removing their role as a status symbol tied to ownership and giving access to any type of vehicle to those who can pay the lease fees improves their functionality. Cars are no longer seen as a differentiator of people’s income. Their use also becomes more focused, reducing misuse and the negative impacts associated with car use. 

Clothing

Over the centuries, clothes have easily been the best marker of different social groups. In medieval Europe, for instance, certain fabrics – silk, velvet, and others – were for the upper classes, as were some colors – purple was associated with royalty in England, and still is.

Even with advances in every other facet of society, clothing has stubbornly maintained its characteristics. Today, with fashion design heavily influencing consumption and cost, clothes are meant to show much more than wealth and social standing. Brands like Chanel and Gucci are synonymous with elegance, boldness, and timeless wealth. Others show culture and identity, while others show knowledge and subtlety.

Clothing is central to human expression. While many people may feel that a certain piece of clothing made by Chanel would suit their style, culture, identity, and standing, it may not be within their reach due to a lack of sufficient disposable income. However, if these clothes could be easily rented and returned when no longer in use, many more people would wear them, and society would show a more complete expression of human nature across different social and biological categorizations.

For instance, the outfits used in Nigerian cultural weddings are expensive and can usually only be worn once, thereafter outliving their usefulness. In the community, these outfits would be rented when needed, making these weddings about genuine happiness, richer culturally, and less expensive to participants. Having a better outfit would be more about taste and preferences, rather than income or net worth.

Food

Food is another marker of social status. Long ago, this was hardly the case. Food was purely for survival, calories, and access, with societies normally eating what was in season. Due to expansion in trade and economic prosperity in societies, especially those of Europe and Asia, spices, sugar, and meat (in agrarian societies) changed food to a social marker, as those who could afford sugar and spices ate tastier food than the poor. Food also increasingly became more about culture and identity, though it was still scarce.

The industrial revolution meant that processed food was now more available, further driving the essence of food from just gaining calories to a social marker. This trend continues today, where fine dining, which is expensive and focused on quality, class, and identity, stands in contrast to fast food, which is cheaper, easily available, but usually unhealthy.

Dining out is a measure of sophistication. In addition to the quality of food, people have embedded other concepts in food, including morality – viewing vegan diets as more moral, and sustainability, where local sourcing is encouraged.

Food is now seen as signifying many things beyond nourishment – wealth, social class, education, discipline, and values. As people chase perfection, waste piles up, as does the overall cost of food.

But what if all types of food were accessible to all people, at prices that were affordable to them? Food would revert to being more about calories, culture, identity, and taste. Its use as a social marker would disappear. This is what NewVistas does.

In communities, everyone eats out. Home-prepared food, which is wasteful, usually under-par, and expensive to make, would rarely be needed. All food is mass-produced, benefiting from economies of scale driven by purchasing and marketing in bulk and specialization.

Far more people in NewVistas communities are involved in food production than in modern economies. Food is grown close enough to the community. These two factors reduce costs, improve quality, and enhance variety. Therefore, a fine-dining experience that can easily cost $500 per person in New York would, due to the demand, availability of competing restaurants, and the overall cost of food, could easily cost 10 times less in a NewVistas community.

This, therefore, means that food will no longer be seen as a social marker of status, nor will it differentiate between incomes or economic classes. There is minimal distinction between everyday eating and luxury dining.

Redirecting/ reshaping ladders to social progression

Every society on earth, regardless of how egalitarian it may claim to be, has a specific number of pathways through which it is ordered. These pathways are wealth accumulation, political authority, coercive power, celebrity and attention, intellectual achievement, religious authority, entrepreneurial productivity, and community stewardship.

Types of pathways

In societies where social order has been built around the first class of pathways – political power, wealth accumulation, coercive power, and celebrity, there are high levels of inequality, with a small elite having unfettered access to decision-making power and resources. Such societies, throughout history, have frequently been oppressive, poor, and bereft of any meaningful paths of upward mobility. These pathways do not represent productivity and progress, but extractive systems where the status quo is always protected.

In societies where progress and influence, as well as social status is based on intellectual achievement, religious (moral) authority, entrepreneurial productivity, and community stewardship, there tends to be more equality, more productivity, and more ways for people to participate and be proud members of that society.

No society is perfect, much less NewVistas communities. However, by diminishing the influence of the first set of characteristics and amplifying that of the second set, societies can be more equal and enjoy sustainable social and economic prosperity.

Political authority

Political authority demands that a strict hierarchy be established and maintained. The NewVistas structure distributes governance, with every governance seat being occupied by four people from four distinct demographic groups. The overall structure, consisting of 480 seats, is non-hierarchical, meaning that no person has seniority over another, and each has a set of clearly defined roles.

Coercive power

Coercive power, today demonstrated through military might, is replaced in the community by productive stewardship, governance, knowledge, and infrastructure, which make military and coercive confrontation in competition for resources unnecessary. In addition, equal and uninhibited access to resources negates competition that usually makes people and societies resort to force.

Celebrity and attention

Celebrity and attention are unlikely to disappear by themselves, but in the community, it is more closely tied to performance and value creation. Recognition and the ensuing attention are tightly linked to competence, trustworthiness, and stewardship. Therefore, those who come to the attention of a community are those who have demonstrated high levels of competence in their stewardships, rather than through ambiguous and sometimes unproductive means.

Wealth accumulation

Wealth accumulation as a pathway means that those who accumulate wealth usually have the means to accumulate more, at the expense of others, while those who do not have much have minimal access to capital.

Over time, this exacerbates inequality, poverty, and other negative outcomes, resulting in societies that live in strife. The community is guided by two key principles, “all things in common,” and “no poor among them.” They mean that all people have access to capital and other tools of production. The storehouse represents an institution that powers economic production and to which all participants in the community have access.

Intellectual achievement

Intellectual achievement means that people can generate valuable knowledge, which helps the system become better. The NewVistas community system regards intellectual knowledge as a key resource that should be pursued by those able to do so.

Moral/ religious authority

The community also places strong emphasis on demonstrable integrity, wisdom, and ethical reliability. The entire architecture of the community is built on the integrity and credibility of systems. Wisdom is needed, especially in mentorship and governance, in order to make the right decisions when required. The community understands that emphasizing moral authority is a sure way to minimize and discourage unethical practices, including corruption.

Entrepreneurial productivity

Entrepreneurial productivity prevents speculative wealth accumulation, which takes essential resources from the economy and kills commerce. The community lays the foundation for a strong emphasis on functional, productive stewardships that thrive on innovation, organization, problem-solving, and creating value.

Community stewardship

Community stewardship refers to the faithful execution of a person’s stewardship duties. A well-run stewardship is reliable, stable, and able to meet all its obligations to the community and other stewardships. A responsible steward takes good care of themselves, their family, and other responsibilities that they may volunteer for in the community.

While stewards properly manage their responsibilities to generate enough resources for themselves and their dependents, they also do so because it is a way of fulfilling their purpose as stewards of the world. Doing this means discovering and advancing their purpose on Earth – through virtue and reason, as Aristotle taught- which can also be achieved through obedience and the responsible use of available resources, as the LDS and Thomas Aquinas emphasize. 

When everyone in the community is a steward, there is no means of differentiating between those with a business and those who are employed. There is no distinction between the haves and the have-nots. In modern societies, the top levels are occupied by people wielding wealth, political power, and coercive force. In NewVistas, entrepreneurship and responsible stewardship will help all people rise up the social ladder to the top.