Gray, Concrete Gray, and More Depressing Gray

This is not just about depressing the population with ugly buildings, cars, and shades of gray, it is about the global transformation of the west into a socialist/communist society to better control the naïve population in every way;

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh ——Bio and Archives--April 9, 2026

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In 2020 I was looking to purchase a new SUV and, repeatedly, the dealers stocked only black, silver, and gray.

I attributed at the time the lack of color and choices to the reduced inventories and manufacturing shortages due to the Covid 2019 pandemic Necessary chips for cars were in short supply. It would be four years before I could buy my desired red color but not necessarily the make and model I wanted.

Corporate globalists have decided in the last few years to transform the face of our colorful society into a drab and communist-looking tapestry

Perhaps car manufacturers want to move cars quicker and thus the bland choices of paint colors.

Perhaps Minimalism has blanketed the world, and we are just now noticing the trend. Maybe the many shades of gray indicate 21st century sophistication.

Healthy subjects in a study conducted by the University of Manchester in 2010 chose yellow as the color that governed their mood. Anxious and depressed subjects participating in the study chose the color gray because it represented “a dark state of mind, a colorless and monotonous life, gloom, misery or disinterest in life.” Depressed people “tend to describe life as ‘monochromatic’ or as having ‘lost its color.’

Then I started seeing a lack of color in department stores and furniture upholstery – offerings were gray, beige, black, and grayer. The furniture, whether plastic or wood, was gray.

Accessories were gray, towels were gray, shoes and tennis shoes were gray, plates, napkins, carpets, backpacks, coolers, tapestries, plastic, and glassware were all gray. There was so much gray to give a survivor of communism a permanent headache and depression. The color gray was even declared the “color of the decade.”

It was apparent to me that corporate globalists have decided in the last few years to transform the face of our colorful society into a drab and communist-looking tapestry.

The buildings’ exterior, the depressing colors, the lack of colors and offerings in stores, the promotion of gray, ash, concrete gray, puke gray, drab gray, beige-gray, petroleum gray, black, white, and brown, became a bothersome uniformity which I recognized from my previous twenty years lived under communism.

Le Corbusier, the “father” of modern architecture, wrote that “color is suited to simple races, peasants, and savages”

Why would communism pick such drab, dark, dull, and uninspired colors? Because they wanted to keep the population under their control, oppressed, sad, and depressed. Everything became a soul-less gray and darker gray, light gray, medium gray, with barely lit train stations and stores as if to conceal the stains of gray misery.

After the lockdowns many public buildings, restaurants, fast food chains, and even apartment complexes and homes had undergone a similar transformation to dark gray, various shades of gray, black, brown, and beige. Maybe paint was only offered in gray and it was cheap?

Fast food buildings removed large windows and added small, prison-like windows, and the previously happy colors and signs disappeared. The choices of towels, furniture, cars, clothes, and other products have narrowed to the same basic hues of gray, black, beige, and brown. People excused this trend as minimalism. I knew it as Bauhaus utilitarian ugly.

Granted that lighter colors are less showy and easier to match more tastes, then why the previous opulence of colors and choices? Was it that the well-heeled wanted simpler and minimalist lines to show off their good taste? There is no denying that something painted in less showy colors sells much easier and quicker.

Austrian architect Adolf Loos said in his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime” that “evolved people gravitated toward clean lines and plain surfaces,” unornamented and clutter-free.

Le Corbusier, the “father” of modern architecture, wrote that “color is suited to simple races, peasants, and savages.” Well-to-do Americans call those who like bright colors, “Lilly Pulitzer people.” The Lilly clothing line is famous for bright hues of pink, blue, yellow, orange, and green.

The Bauhaus was a German art school which existed between 1919 and 1933. Its vision of mass production and function was adopted by all former Iron Curtain countries in Europe; they started churning out ugly concrete block apartments where the helpless populations were herded into from their former homes and farms which the Communist Party had confiscated. An occasional crumbling concrete piece looked like a loose tooth hanging from its dirty gray façade.

Walter Gropius’s (1883-1969) vision from Weimar spread into modern design, modernist architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. The Bauhaus school was closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime who considered it “a center of communist intellectualism.”

Digital currency sold as convenience

Bauhaus spread internationally to the United States and to Tel Aviv via Jewish Bauhaus architect immigrants. According to sources, “The White City of Tel Aviv has the highest concentration of Bauhaus architecture in the world.”

As Bauhaus spread increasingly across the world, selected and pushed by globalist corporate controllers, it is no surprise that the color chosen for this decade is gray and the style is Bauhaus utilitarian.

When I visited my favorite department store which was always decorated with red, white, and green before the Christmas season, decorations displayed a gray table with gray chairs, gray plates, black glasses, and white napkin holders. One solitaire painting of a red bush surrounded by green background was overlooking the funereal décor.

This is not just about depressing the population with ugly buildings, cars, and shades of gray, it is about the global transformation of the west into a socialist/communist society to better control the naïve population in every way. And the quickest way will be via digital currency sold as convenience.

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, Ileana Writes is a freelance writer, author, radio commentator, and speaker. Her books, “Echoes of Communism”, “Liberty on Life Support” and “U.N. Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy,” “Communism 2.0: 25 Years Later” are available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

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