What Are We Meant To Do? · PlainTextPoetry

The Purpose of Humanity

This is an age-old question, we’ve been debating our “true human purpose” since we could write and probably even before that. This question is at the root of existentialism, teleology, and humanism, amongst other philosophical disciplines. Our perception of our purpose underpins virtually all of our thoughts, beliefs, and actions. So it’s kinda important.

I don’t know what our purpose is. But in order to discover fundamental truths, I firmly believe we must speculate and poke at the fabric of reality. We make arguments, debate, find the things that feel most “right”, and these are the things which we accept. Things change over time, we must be comfortable with being “wrong”, and we must compromise with one another. In my opinion, that is how philosophy works.

That said, my argument here will be that humans are meant to CREATE & PARTICIPATE. In order to make this argument, I’ve got some premises I first need to establish around my understanding of reality, so that we can build a conclusion of our shared purpose upon an agreeable foundation. I’ve created the following “Rules of Reality”. I’m still iterating through them, but feeling pretty good about version 3. I will write something else that explores these rules in more detail.

Rules of Reality (v3)

R1. Language is the container of everything.
Nothing “shows up” for us until language carves it out. No language → no shared “things.”
R2. A thing is a named difference.
A thing is a distinguishable pattern we mark with language (an object, event, role, boundary, idea). Without that naming, it’s undifferentiated noise. It’s also quite literally the “unit” of everything.
R3. No thing is boundless; existence is contained.
Every thing needs a container (a boundary, a frame, a role, a place, a time) to stay coherent; without a container, a thing has no context in reality.
R4. Every container contradicts at its edges.
Boundaries overlap. That overlap produces contradictions (two true descriptions colliding).
R5. Contradictions are truth markers.
When we find the tension at the intersections of multiple containers, that is the moment we can actually see what’s there (experience reality). They are not errors or abominations that we need to hide from.
R6. To resolve a contradiction demands communication.
Only dialogue (definitions, negotiation, story, law) can reconcile overlapping containers.
R7. Communication is everything.
It’s the medium that makes things, containers, and contradictions legible, and REAL.

The takeaway (for the purposes of this argument about OUR purpose) is that language carves reality into three useful units:

Things: named differences.
Containers: how things are bounded and separated from other things.
Contradictions: where things and their containers overlap.

Language as Plumbing

Consider water, a thing. It only “shows up” inside containers: a glass, a cloud, an ocean basin, a pipe. The container gives water a form we can work with. Same H₂O, different boundaries.

Now consider the contradiction: the ocean, the cloud, the raindrop, the glass…the water is “the same” and “not the same.” Ocean water and rainwater overlap as containers (salt, sediment, altitude, phase). Their edges collide in a cycle (evaporation → condensation → precipitation → runoff). That overlap is where we collectively understand what water is*.* The contradiction is productive! Water is one thing and also many things. But it’s all water, right?

Language is the plumbing for our purpose, the scaffolding of our reality. We use it to create meaning (to define things), that one is pretty obvious. We also use it to build containers (“contract,” “citizen,” “family,” “deadline,” “merge request”) so we can move meaning around together. Then we use it to reconcile the overlaps (contradictions) — to learn, adjust, and refine reality.

We need shared pipes so thoughts become agreements and agreements become reality. There is a good bit of philosophical precedence for this concept:

Wittgenstein: meaning lives in use — in public language games, not private heads.
Vygotsky: inner speech is social speech turned inward; your “I” was co-authored through your interactions with others.
Habermas: coordination-by-communication is how free people build without coercion.

At this point you might be asking, what the hell are you talking about? Well, my point is that we aren’t brains in jars finding truth alone. We are mouths and hands and ears in a noisy crowd, discovering ourselves through each other. Without a common language, we have no real communication, which means we have no stable self to make sense of. The inner monologue you hear was trained by a million conversations before you ever “heard” yourself think.

SO!…if meaning starts with language, and language is communal, then whatever humans are “meant” to do has to be done together.

Create & Participate

Ok, so what are we meant to do exactly? Well, if reality is things + containers + contradictions, and if language/communication is how any of that becomes “real” for us, then our human purpose is simple enough to deduce:

We’re here to create and participate.

Creation is the act of making things and giving them containers. We name, shape, and frame: a tool with a spec, a poem with a form, a feature with a PRD, a norm with a rule. Creation is thing + container work. If humans don’t do this, nothing durable accumulates.
Participation is the act of meeting contradictions and keeping them livable. We show up in councils, teams, forums, code reviews, dinner tables (the places where one container rubs another) and we resolve or re-draw boundaries by talking, testing, and adjusting. Participation is contradiction work. If humans don’t do this, everything we make fragments.

We make things worth keeping. We join things worth maintaining. We do it together, in public, with words and movement (movement is language too).

Create: tools, art, families, gardens, code, rituals, neighborhoods, games, standards.
Participate: teams, councils, DAOs, unions, clubs, choirs, guilds, open-source repos, rec leagues, co-ops.

Creation without participation is nothing but an ego project. Participation without creation devolves into empty ceremony. You need both. And both require communication. It’s language all the way down.

Philosophical Pit Stops

Here’s some philosophy that I’ve read and how I would (briefly) frame the concepts within this argument:

Hegel’s master–slave (Phenomenology of Spirit): We become selves by mutual recognition — not by dominating. Selfhood requires mutual recognition, not domination.
Marx: Alienation happens when making is severed from meaning. Creation needs shared containers (product & process).
Wittgenstein / Vygotsky (again): the “I” is downstream of the “we.” Meaning lives in use, in the language-games we play together. Purpose is performed, not privately hoarded.
Elinor Ostrom: real communities can govern without top-down control. We don’t need a central wizard if we design rules and talk with each other.
James C. Scott: top-down “legibility” projects fail when they ignore local relations (“Seeing Like a State”). Contradictions must be handled locally.

I would argue that all of these philosophers point toward co-making and co-doing as the healthiest place to stand. Again, creating & participating.

Competing Blueprints for Human Purpose

Here are some competing frameworks that try to answer the purpose question for us and thereby govern our thoughts, beliefs & actions. I’ve written briefly about how each of them fosters or stifles creation & participation:

Feudalism

Create: mostly owned by lords.
Participate: coerced; your “relation” is vassalage.
Verdict: freezes upward creativity; participation is permissioned and gated.

Capitalism (as practiced, not in theory)

Create: huge upside for invention; also huge incentive to enclose and extract.
Participate: strong for markets, weak for everyone else. Selfishness is incentivized.
Verdict: great for building amazing ships, bad for maintaining public harbors. Over-indexes consumption as identity. Public containers inevitably erode.

State Socialism / Command Economies (again, as practiced)

Create: planned, brittle, low variety.
Participate: compulsory unity ≠ real community.
Verdict: crushes local contradictions instead of resolving them. Rigid structure disincentivizes creation. Strong participation.

Nationalism

Create: funnels creativity into identity myths and war machines.
Participate: “with us or against us”; minority relations get erased.
Verdict: participation via uniformity, not reciprocity. Plural creation is suspect.

Religious Fundamentalism

Create: bounded by doctrine.
Participate: high cohesion; low tolerance for contradiction.
Verdict: stable, until reality intrudes; contradictions get punished, not processed. Dogma can’t flex containers.

Neoliberal Consumerism

Create: personal brand as product. Public goods disintegrate.
Participate: algorithmic “engagement” replaces reciprocity, fragile community ties.
Verdict: citizens downgraded to customers, shared language gets gamed, relation becomes “engagement.”

Each framework solves a coordination problem, then basically overfits. We find ourselves sacrificing either creation (plural, bottom-up) or participation (reciprocal, local) to keep the model clean. Life is not clean. But why do we keep getting stuck in these systems that don’t work for most people?

The Case for Communalism

The Pyramid is the social architecture we’ve been marinating (perhaps even slowly cooking) in. This is a social model of hierarchy, elites, scarcity logic, “top-knows-best”. It scales control, it flattens relations and hides contradictions until they explode when reality leaks in. But we’ve been living inside it for so long that it feels natural and rational.

An alternative model is The Web…which is messy, resilient, and relational. Here we see many nodes, many ties, deep complex relationships. Redundancy beats heroics, commons beats enclosure (public goods vs. privatization), stewardship beats ownership. It’s certainly slower to start, difficult to maintain, but far less brittle over time. We can choose the web, if we want.

Let’s call the “webby” alternative Communalism:

Things: tools, stories, spaces that are locally meaningful and portable.
Containers: governed by consent, reputation, and shared standards rather than by fealty and capital. You can see the edges.
Contradictions: handled like maintenance instead of like scandal. They are surfaced early, negotiated in public, documented in plain language. Logged, discussed, iterated.

I’m not arguing for kumbaya, I‘m not naive to assume that we can live in absolute harmony, I’m arguing for better social operations.

We’ve got some precedent here — Ostrom’s design principles for successful commons (clear boundaries, local monitoring, graduated sanctions, real dispute resolution); modern open-source governance; cooperative utilities; platform co-ops; credit unions; community land trusts, mutual-aid organizations, even neighborhood associations. We need containers that can keep the lights on without a wizard at the top. And ones that allow us to resolve contradictions in a productive, healthy, honest way.

Communalism is simply The Web formalized. We’ve got containers we can change together, contradictions we can face together, things we can make and keep together.

The Usual Suspects

But….Property, Borders, and Buying Stuff…do they kill Communalism? They can, if we treat them as sacred. But they don’t have to be sacred.

Private Property (absolute)

What it does well: protects initiative; lowers coordination cost for some things.
Where it fails: encloses things that get more valuable as they’re shared (knowledge, standards, protocols, data).
Communalist rebalance: graduated ownership. Private where scarcity is real (your tools, your house). Shared where network effects dominate (research, code, civic data, utilities). Consider data trusts, copy-left licenses, community easements.

Nation-States

What they do well: rights frameworks, defense, some basic guarantees.
Where they fail: climate, pandemics, finance — problems too big for one border; plus local nuance gets flattened.
Communalist rebalance: polycentric governance — cities, regions, and networks that federate upward on shared risks (standards, carbon, safety) and devolve downward on local containers (land use, care, culture). More interoperable webs; fewer brittle pyramids.

Consumerism

What it does well: frictions vanish; choices bloom.
Where it fails: swaps participation for audience-hood; swaps creation for purchase.
Communalist rebalance: center producer identities (“what did you make, keep, or teach?”) and commons ledgers (“what did you steward?”). Celebrate maintainers, not just influencers. Shift status from acquisition to contribution.

None of this requires abolishing everything tomorrow. It requires rebalancing toward web-based models: more shared standards, more maintainers, more transparent contradiction-processing, less wizard-at-the-top energy.

If our purpose is to create & participate, then Communalism can be the social architecture that keeps the containers flexible, the contradictions visible, and the work worth doing together.

TUESDAY AT 3:40 P.M.

Ok all that sounds great but what am I supposed to be doing on a random Tuesday at 3:40PM?

Easy…do small web-shaped things:

Make a thing someone else can actually use (a doc, a widget, a bed of native plants).
Join a thing and improve it (a repo, a PTA, a mutual-aid chat; add labels, sweep issues).
Keep a thing (boring maintenance is where communities get real).
Name a thing (publish definitions; reduce friction; language is a public good).
Teach a thing (show someone how; record the pattern; contradictions and all).

Do those five on repeat and you quietly replace pyramid logic with web logic. It grows upon itself in a very natural way.

Final Musings

If you strip away the costume changes (kingdom, market, nation, brand), the pattern underneath is dumb and stubborn and beautiful: humans talking each other into existence, then keeping each other alive by talking some more.

My claim, grounded in the rules above, is simple:

Create — bring new things into shared containers.
Participate — meet contradictions in the open and resolve them together.

We don’t need a new god or a new emperor. We need better pipes, better communities, and more people willing to do the Tuesday-at-3:40 work.

We are; therefore I am.