Perhaps as much as 90% of our potentials as human beings, our potentials for learning, development, joy, and fulfillment… have nothing to do with nearly all of what most of us are doing.

Our sociality has been deeply and repetitively compromised, captured… and co-opted. In such profound ways that many of us cannot even remember what it is like to be deeply engaged with others for purposes true to our deepest nature not merely as human beings, but animals, organisms… and more that our categories fail to discern.

Our minds themselves are societies. They are inward reflections of all the people we’ve been in relation with. And, of course, the institutions, as well. With a faculty we have no proper name for, we imagine others… observing and relating with us… and we with them.

But it goes far beyond that.

The »purposes for which we will direct our attention or form mind-like states originate with our interest in others, and theirs in us.

So unless we form contexts in which we can discover and pursue true relation, hope is extinguished almost entire. We cannot live in the shreds that remain, or the ghosts of those we are no longer with… or the demonic visage of the institutions in which we may find ourselves enmeshed.

To know what it is to be human is something we remember, and discover, together. And if we are to understand just how primordially important this is, we must establish contexts in which our participation is true, authentic… and noble.

This isn’t as distant as it appears in generalities or abstract thinking. It happens all the time, spontaneously… but the scope is often momentary. We do it accidentally.

We’re made for something more than isolation and less than slavish servitude to ersatz fictions like those under which we presently labor.

Most of what we can be, absolutely requires meaningful collectivity. At all the scales. But especially at any that pretend to encompass and define us.