Sociology on Shane's Personal Blog

Where Meaning and Value Come From — When Logic Starts Questioning Itself

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is the sequel to When Hustle Loses Its ‘Why’ — The Ordinary World and the Crisis of Meaning. The previous piece explored the social foundations of meaning. This one digs a layer deeper and asks: where do “meaning” and “value” — the concepts themselves — actually come from?

A Question You’ve Probably Never Asked

We spend enormous energy debating whether life has meaning. But almost nobody stops to ask:

Where did “meaning” itself come from?

It’s like spending years arguing about whether a painting is beautiful, while never once wondering: who invented “beauty”? Why does the concept exist at all?

This isn’t a word game. When you actually trace where “meaning” and “value” originate as concepts, many of the philosophical puzzles that have haunted humanity for millennia suddenly become less mysterious — not because they get answered, but because you start to realize that some of them were badly formed questions to begin with.

Part One: Where Meaning Comes From

A Tiger, a Stone, and a Byproduct

Let’s start at the most primitive scene imaginable.

Deep prehistory. An early human is walking through tall grass. A tiger appears. He feels fear, turns, runs. Survives.

Another human standing nearby sees the tiger and doesn’t react. Stands there. Gets killed.

This isn’t because the first one was “smarter.” It’s just natural selection — individuals whose brains could link “tiger” to “danger” survived; those who couldn’t, didn’t.

This is causal reasoning in its most embryonic form. It wasn’t a gift from the cosmos or a truth etched into the brain by some deity. It was a blunt survival tool: those who could form cause-and-effect associations lived. Those who couldn’t died.

Another scene. A hungry early human has a walnut he can’t crack open with his hands. One day he accidentally picks up a rock and smashes it — the shell breaks. From then on, rock plus walnut. Every time.

What happened in his brain? It linked “rock + smash” with “walnut opens.” He didn’t need to understand physics. Didn’t need to know what “force” or “hardness” meant. He just needed to remember: that worked last time, so do it again.

This is the origin of human cognition: compressing complex reality into simple “if A, then B” models.

Kant Saw This Two Hundred Years Ago

In the 18th century, Kant made a claim that was radical for its time: humans don’t perceive “the world as it truly is.” We perceive it through cognitive frameworks that our minds already have built in.

He called these frameworks “a priori categories” — time, space, causality. These aren’t things we learn from the external world. They’re organizational tools that come pre-installed. The world we experience has already been processed by these tools.

In Kant’s terms: we can never know the “thing-in-itself” (Ding an sich) — only the phenomena as filtered through our cognitive architecture.

This was a watershed moment in the history of philosophy. For the first time, someone formally proposed that causality might not be a property of the world, but a property of human cognition.

But Kant had a limitation — he believed these cognitive frameworks were “a priori,” innate and given, but he couldn’t explain why they existed or why they took the particular shape they did.

Evolutionary Epistemology Filled the Gap

In the 20th century, evolutionary epistemology — pioneered by thinkers like Konrad Lorenz — offered a more complete answer:

These cognitive frameworks exist because they helped our ancestors survive.

Causal reasoning isn’t divinely bestowed truth. It’s the product of natural selection. Individuals whose brains happened to be capable of causal modeling were better at predicting danger, finding food, and making tools — so they survived and passed that brain architecture to their offspring.

This answers the question Kant couldn’t: why do cognitive frameworks exist? Because they’re useful. Why are they useful? Because the ones that weren’t useful got eliminated.

Lorenz had an elegant way of putting it: the human cognitive apparatus relates to the real world the way a horse’s hoof relates to the steppe — it’s not a perfect copy of the terrain, but it’s effective enough that the horse runs fast.

Our logic works the same way. It’s not a complete reproduction of reality. It’s a highly efficient compression of it. That compression is what allowed humans to pull away from every other animal and build language, tools, civilization.

But Here’s Where It Gets Interesting: The Tool Starts Questioning Itself

This cognitive toolkit was too good. So good that the human brain kept evolving, growing more and more powerful, far beyond what was needed to dodge predators and crack nuts.

And then something remarkable happened: a tool that evolved for survival began questioning the purpose of survival itself.

“Why do I exist?” “Where did the universe come from?” “What is any of this for?”

These questions didn’t appear because the universe is posing them to you. They appeared because your brain is engineered as a causal tracking machine — it asks “why” about everything, even when some things have no “why.”

Camus described this situation with precision. Humans, he said, have a deep-seated need: they demand that the world be rational, meaningful, comprehensible. But the world itself is silent. It doesn’t answer.

This collision — between “humanity’s hunger for meaning” and “the universe’s silence” — is what Camus called “the absurd” (l’absurde).

Crucially, Camus’s “absurd” doesn’t mean “life is meaningless so nothing matters.” It’s the opposite — he believed that only after accepting the absurd can a person truly begin to live freely. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he wrote: “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Not because rolling the boulder has a point, but because he chose to keep rolling.

But I think Camus stopped one step too soon.

He diagnosed the problem — “humans demand meaning, but the universe won’t provide it” — yet he never pushed further to ask: why do humans demand meaning in the first place? Where does the demand itself originate?

If we connect evolutionary epistemology to Camus’s absurdism, we get a more complete picture:

Humans ask about meaning not because meaning objectively exists, and not because the universe is beckoning us to find it. We ask because our brains are causal modeling machines that apply cause-and-effect tracking to everything — including their own existence. When the tracker hits “why do I exist?” it discovers that the tool has exceeded its design specifications.

This is the true root of the meaning crisis. It’s not that “meaning doesn’t exist.” It’s that the tool we use to search for meaning has inherent boundaries.

This Is Not Nihilism

This needs to be spelled out clearly, because it’s easy to misread.

Saying “logic is a product of evolution” does not mean “logic is fake.”

Saying “causal reasoning is the brain’s compression model” does not mean “causality doesn’t exist.”

The more precise statement is: the causal relationships humans perceive are not a complete copy of all reality, but an abstracted model produced by a finite cognitive system processing a complex world. This model is extraordinarily effective in the vast majority of situations — effective enough to have built an entire civilization. But it has limits, and the most ultimate philosophical questions happen to fall beyond those limits.

The horse’s hoof isn’t a “hallucination” of the steppe. But you can’t use a hoof to survey the entire planet.

Part Two: Where Value Comes From

Value Doesn’t Grow Inside Rocks

Now let’s turn to the second concept: value.

Intuitively, we feel that some things “have value” and other things don’t, as though this were an intrinsic property of the objects themselves. Gold is valuable, scrap paper isn’t — that seems like objective fact.

But is it?

Think about sand. For thousands of years, sand was about the most unremarkable substance on earth. It was everywhere. Nobody cared. But today, when humanity needs to manufacture semiconductors, high-purity silicon — derived from sand — is suddenly a strategic resource.

The sand didn’t change. What changed? Human needs.

Now think about art. In peacetime, a painting might be worth a fortune. But in the middle of a war or famine, can you trade a Picasso for a bowl of rice? Almost certainly not.

The art didn’t change. What changed is still the same thing: what humans need in that particular moment.

So: value is not an intrinsic property of objects. Value is a relationship between objects and human needs. When needs change, value changes.

Menger and Subjective Value Theory

In the 19th century, Austrian economist Carl Menger systematically articulated this insight in what became known as subjective value theory.

His core argument was clean: an item’s value depends on the degree to which it satisfies human needs, not on how much labor went into producing it.

Water is nearly free in a city but could be worth more than gold in the desert. The difference isn’t in the water — it’s in how badly you need it.

This stands in interesting contrast to Marx’s labor theory of value, which holds that value is grounded in “socially necessary labor time” — the amount of work required to produce something under average social conditions determines its value.

That theory has explanatory power, but it also has blind spots. Take a modern example: Linux. It’s free. But countless servers, phones, and supercomputers around the world run on it, and the utility it generates is almost beyond calculation. How do you measure its value in “socially necessary labor time”? One person’s code and ten thousand people’s code, if they ultimately meet the same scale of need, carry the same value — yet the labor inputs are wildly different.

I’d argue that value’s essence lies not on the creation side, but on the demand side. It’s not “how much effort went into making it” that determines value — it’s “whose needs does it satisfy, and how much.”

But we’re not done. If value were just “individual needs,” it would remain primitive — I’m thirsty, so water has value; I’m full, so food doesn’t.

What makes value genuinely complex is society.

Once humans began cooperating, value stopped being just “is this useful to me?” It became something that could be exchanged, accumulated, amplified — a social relationship.

I can make clothes, but it takes me days to make one garment. You have a factory that produces hundreds per second. So I trade my unique skills for your output — and at that point, “value” is no longer a physical property. It’s become a relationship within a cooperative network.

Émile Durkheim introduced an important concept in the late 19th century: social facts (fait social). He argued that morality, values, and norms aren’t invented by individuals — they’re produced by society as a whole, they exert binding force on individuals, and they can’t be reduced to individual psychology.

In other words: value is an emergent phenomenon at the social level. Without society, there’s no complex value system.

This point is critical, because it directly answers a question that gets confused all the time.

Part Three: The Question That Was Badly Formed

”Does Human Existence Have Value?” — A Category Error

Now let’s bring the two threads together.

Meaning is a product of human cognitive architecture — a causal modeling machine that asks “why” about everything.

Value is a product of social relationships — only within a network of needs and cooperation does the distinction between “valuable” and “not valuable” arise.

So when someone asks “Does human existence have value?” — what is this question actually doing?

Think about it carefully, and you’ll realize it’s quite absurd.

It’s like asking “How much is money worth?”

“Money” is a unit of measurement internal to society. You can’t use money to measure money’s own value — that’s self-referential and meaningless.

Similarly, “value” is a concept internal to society. You can’t take it outside the system and use it to evaluate whether “human society itself has value.” This isn’t a question without an answer — it’s a grammatical error.

Wittgenstein had a deeply perceptive insight into this kind of problem. He developed the concept of “language games” (Sprachspiel): the meaning of a word isn’t fixed; it depends on the context in which it’s used. Each context is like a game with its own rules.

The word “value” has clear meaning within the social context — this shirt is valuable to me, this relationship is valuable to me, this invention is valuable to humanity.

But when you lift it to the cosmic level — “Does humanity have value in the universe?” — you’ve stepped outside the language game the word was designed for. It’s like trying to apply football rules to a chess match. The rules aren’t wrong. You’re just using them in the wrong arena.

”Life Is Meaningless” — An Equally Misplaced Judgment

The same logic applies to “meaning.”

When someone says “life has no meaning,” they’re doing something strange: they’re using a concept generated by social cognition to negate the system that generated it.

It’s like standing on the third floor of a building and announcing “this building doesn’t exist.” You can only make that claim because the building exists — otherwise where are you standing?

The more accurate statement would be:

The universe did not endow human life with a priori meaning. But within human society, meaning genuinely arises, operates, and shapes people’s choices and behavior.

It’s not a commandment from heaven, but it’s not an illusion either. It’s a real socio-cognitive phenomenon.

Part Four: After Passing Through the Void

Nietzsche Diagnosed the Disease but Prescribed the Wrong Medicine

We have to talk about Nietzsche here.

Nietzsche was the first to treat the “crisis of meaning” as a serious philosophical problem. His famous “God is dead” wasn’t about biological death — it meant: the religious meaning system that had undergirded Western civilization was losing its binding force.

That diagnosis was devastatingly accurate. In cultural contexts with weaker religious traditions — like where I grew up — the problem is even more direct: there was never a widely shared religious system to answer “why should I be a good person” in the first place.

But Nietzsche’s prescription — the Übermensch and the “will to power” — is fundamentally an individualist solution. He asks the strongest individuals to create their own values, define their own meaning.

The problem: if meaning is entirely self-created by the individual, who judges whether that meaning is good or destructive? This circles right back to the trap we discussed in the previous article.

Sartre took a similar road. His “existence precedes essence” — you exist first, then define yourself through choices — sounds liberating, but it faces the exact same issue: pure individual freedom, without social constraint, provides no standard for distinguishing good from bad.

Camus Got Closer, but Stopped One Step Short

Camus was more restrained than Nietzsche or Sartre. He didn’t try to “create” meaning or “choose” meaning. His stance: accept the absurd, then keep living within it.

Sisyphus pushes a boulder up a hill. It rolls back down. He walks back down and pushes it up again. No endpoint, no purpose. But Camus says: “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

It’s beautiful and dignified. But I think it’s still missing a piece: it doesn’t explain why a person should keep pushing rather than stop — beyond an aesthetic gesture of defiance.

Camus’s absurd heroism is ultimately an individual stance. It doesn’t address the social dimension: if everyone is pushing their own boulder, what’s the relationship between those boulders? Who decides which ones are worth the effort and which aren’t?

The Real Answer Isn’t in the Individual — It’s in the Connections

If we lay everything discussed so far side by side, a more complete picture emerges:

Meaning is a product of human cognitive architecture — not a cosmic mandate, but the way the brain operates. This explains why we ask about meaning.

Value is a product of social needs — not an objective entity hovering in space, but a relationship that emerges from human cooperation. This explains why value shifts across eras.

But precisely because these are generated inside the human system, they are real inside that system. Trust is real. Harm is real. The gains from cooperation are real. The costs of betrayal are real. They don’t need the universe to co-sign.

So the question truly worth asking isn’t “does life have meaning?” — that question is itself an artifact of a cognitive tool trying to exceed its own boundaries.

The better question is:

In a world with no predetermined meaning, in a society where value isn’t handed down from above, how do humans generate meaning that actually works? How do we create values worth defending?

There’s no ultimate answer to this. But there is a direction.

In the previous article, we explored part of that direction: society’s positive feedback loop, the invisible contract between generations, “do not do to others what you would not want done to you” as the system’s minimum operating condition. These aren’t empty moral slogans — they’re structural rules that human society needs in order to sustain itself.

This article tried to lay the deeper foundation: meaning and value aren’t given by the universe, but they aren’t made up either. They are real phenomena that emerge from specific cognitive and social structures. You can question their “ultimacy,” but you can’t deny their “effectiveness.”

A horse’s hoof isn’t a perfect copy of the steppe. But the horse runs fast on it all the same.

Final Words

As I finish writing, I think of the line Camus placed at the opening of The Myth of Sisyphus:

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

He meant: judging whether life is worth living is the starting point of all philosophy.

I’d now reframe that thought:

This question exists because humans possess an overpowered causal reasoning engine. It evolved for survival, but eventually turned its lens on survival itself.

It can’t find a final answer — not because the answer is hidden, but because the question exceeds the tool’s design specifications.

But that doesn’t mean you should stop living. Quite the opposite.

Because you aren’t a solitary consciousness drifting through an empty universe. You’re one link in a chain — countless people before you built the ground you stand on with their suffering and effort, and countless people after you are waiting to inherit what you leave behind. You are interlocked with the people of your own time, shaping each other. Every choice you make produces real consequences in this network.

Inside this network, meaning doesn’t need to be “discovered” — it needs to be generated. Inside this network, value doesn’t need to be “proven” — it needs to be created.

This process has no endpoint. But that’s precisely why it will always be worth continuing.

Disclaimer: Written by a human, with AI assistance in structuring and refining.

Sea Level: Why No One Person Controls the Direction of Society

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Look at any history textbook and you’ll notice a pattern: we tell history through names. Alexander conquered. Caesar fell. Napoleon marched. It’s tempting to believe that these individuals steered civilization — that a sufficiently powerful person can grab the wheel and point humanity in whatever direction they choose.

But can they, really?

The more I think about it, the more I believe the answer is no — and the reason why reveals something fundamental about how human societies actually work.

What Would It Take?

Let’s start with a thought experiment. Imagine you wanted to truly control the direction of a society — not just influence it, not just lead it, but dictate its course the way a driver controls a car.

What would that require?

You’d need what I’ll call supreme power: a kind of power so asymmetric that no one else could meaningfully resist it. Not political authority, not wealth, not charisma — those can all be challenged by others who have comparable amounts. Supreme power means a gap so vast that resistance becomes physically impossible.

Think Superman. One being who can do what no other being can. In that scenario, yes — one will could dominate all others. But that’s fiction, and for good reason.

In reality, humans are remarkably balanced. No individual is so strong, so fast, or so intelligent that others cannot collectively match or exceed them. A king is still a human surrounded by other humans. A general still needs soldiers who choose to follow orders. The gap between the most powerful person and the average person has never been wide enough to constitute true supreme power.

Which means control is never absolute. It only works as long as others accept it.

The Atomic Bomb: A Brief Glimpse of Supreme Power

History offers one instructive near-exception.

When the first nation developed the atomic bomb, it momentarily possessed something approaching supreme power. Other societies hadn’t yet grasped the underlying science. There was no countermeasure, no equivalent response. For a brief window, one state held a capability that could reshape the world unilaterally.

And the world panicked — precisely because everyone intuitively understood what supreme power would mean.

But it didn’t last. Within years, other nations developed the same technology. The asymmetry collapsed. Power became distributed again, and with distribution came the return of negotiation, deterrence, and balance.

This pattern repeats throughout history: gunpowder, naval fleets, industrial manufacturing, nuclear energy. Whenever a new capability emerges, it briefly concentrates power — and then it spreads. The moment multiple actors share the same level of capability, no single actor’s will can dominate.

Supreme power, it turns out, is inherently unstable. It exists only in the gap between one party’s discovery and everyone else’s.

Power Is a Scale, Not a Switch

We tend to talk about power in binary terms — democracy or dictatorship, freedom or oppression — but reality is more like a spectrum.

The real question is never “does this person have power?” but rather: to what degree does one person’s will actually shape society?

Even in highly centralized systems, a leader’s influence is filtered through layers of interpretation. Officials carry out orders — but they also reinterpret them. Citizens comply — but they also adapt, resist quietly, and pursue their own goals within the constraints. Messages get distorted as they travel downward through bureaucracy, culture, and individual self-interest.

This is why the same decree can produce wildly different outcomes in different regions of the same country. Power weakens as it travels. It’s less like a laser and more like a flashlight — bright at the center, diffuse at the edges.

The Ocean

Here’s the metaphor that ties it all together.

Think of human society as an ocean. Each individual’s influence is like water — most of us are drops in a vast body. Some areas of the surface are calm. Others have towering waves. Occasionally, a storm surges and it looks like the entire ocean is being reshaped by a single force.

But beneath all of this — beneath the waves, beneath the storms — there is a sea level.

The sea level is the collective will of ordinary people. It’s the average of what billions of individuals believe, tolerate, hope for, and accept as normal. It moves slowly, often imperceptibly. But it is the sea level, not the waves, that determines where the water actually rests.

Leaders are waves. Ideologies are storms. They rise dramatically, they command attention, they can cause tremendous damage or change in the short term. But over time, they subside. What remains is the sea level — and the sea level is set by the collective.

This is what the Marxist tradition gets right, whatever else one might critique about it: history is ultimately pushed forward by ordinary people. Not by heroes. Not by villains. By the slow, aggregate movement of what most humans come to believe serves their lives.

Hidden Currents

If the sea level is what matters, then what happens in societies where the surface looks perfectly still?

In highly controlled societies, compliance is often performance. People act loyal because they must — not because they believe. They repeat the right words, display the right symbols, show up to the right events. But internally, they maintain their own judgments.

This creates something like stored energy. Outwardly, the system looks stable. Inwardly, pressure accumulates.

When conditions shift — an economic crisis, a leadership transition, an external shock — this hidden energy surfaces all at once. People who appeared perfectly loyal suddenly speak differently, act differently, organize differently. What looks like sudden revolution is really delayed expression. The disagreement was always there. It was just expensive to express.

The system didn’t collapse because people suddenly changed their minds. It collapsed because they finally could show what they’d always thought.

This is why no leader, no matter how powerful, can fully override human nature. People still want safety, dignity, agency, and meaning. These desires act like gravity — invisible, constant, and ultimately irresistible. You can build structures that resist gravity for a while, but you can’t abolish it.

Communication: The Tide That Raises the Sea Level

So if the sea level is what matters, what changes it?

Communication.

Consider why caste systems could last for millennia in the ancient world. The lowest castes never saw the emperor. They had no access to information beyond what was handed down through official channels — myths, religious narratives, stories told by people who served the hierarchy. When information is expensive and slow, it’s easy to convince people that the social order is natural, eternal, even divine.

An emperor who is never seen can be a god. A noble who is only encountered through intermediaries can seem like a different species. The distance between classes wasn’t just social — it was informational. And that informational distance made supreme power more achievable, because it allowed a small group to control the narrative almost completely.

Now consider the modern world.

Cameras are everywhere. Information travels at the speed of light. A person on one continent can watch, in real time, what a leader on another continent is doing. End-to-end encryption allows private communication that even states struggle to monitor.

The cost of communication has plummeted, and with it, the ability to maintain the kind of informational asymmetry that supreme power requires.

This is why the modern version of “caste” — wealth-based hierarchy — must justify itself so differently. Today’s most powerful individuals don’t claim divine appointment. They claim merit: hard work, intelligence, entrepreneurial vision. They must frame their position as earned rather than inherent, because the informational distance between them and everyone else has shrunk to nearly zero. Everyone can see that a billionaire is still a human who eats, sleeps, makes mistakes, and sometimes says foolish things on camera.

The narrative of inherent superiority simply cannot survive cheap communication.

Information Control and Its Limits

Even the most sophisticated attempts to control information in the modern era illustrate how difficult supreme power has become.

Throughout history and into the present, states have invested enormous resources in controlling what their citizens can access — building infrastructure to filter, monitor, and shape the flow of information. These systems can be impressive in scale and can significantly limit what most people encounter day to day.

But “most” is not “all.”

Some individuals still access outside information. Some use technical tools to bypass restrictions. Some encounter alternative perspectives through travel, trade, or personal relationships. And once even a small number of people hold different information, the uniformity that supreme power requires is broken.

More importantly, the people who hold alternative views may exist at any level of society — including within the institutions responsible for maintaining control. Hidden disagreement doesn’t respect organizational charts.

Complete informational control would require something approaching the fictional “Big Brother” — total surveillance of every channel, every conversation, every thought. In theory, this is conceivable. In practice, the technical and human complexity makes it virtually impossible. Every new encryption protocol, every private conversation, every unmonitored moment is a crack in the wall.

And cracks accumulate.

The Pragmatic Sea Level

Here’s the part that ties everything together — and it’s the part I find most reassuring.

The sea level doesn’t settle at whatever ideology shouts the loudest. It settles at whatever actually makes collective life better.

This is a pragmatic claim, not a moral one. If a highly centralized system genuinely improved most people’s lives — made them safer, healthier, more prosperous, more free in the ways that matter to them — then people would not resist it. They’d accept it willingly. That would be the sea level, because the sea level is defined by lived experience, not by theory.

Conversely, if a more distributed system delivers better outcomes, then that becomes the sea level. People gravitate toward what works, given enough time and enough information.

This is why propaganda alone cannot determine the direction of society. Propaganda can create waves — sometimes enormous ones. But if the underlying reality doesn’t match the story, the sea level eventually corrects. People compare their lived experience to the narrative, and when the gap grows too large, belief erodes — quietly at first, then suddenly.

The direction of history is not decided by which system has the best marketing. It’s decided by which system most people, through lived experience, come to believe makes their lives genuinely better.

No Final System, Only Water Finding Its Level

If this framework is right, then a few things follow.

There is no permanent supreme power. The conditions required for it — total asymmetry, total informational control — are too unstable to maintain. Every technology that concentrates power eventually spreads. Every wall around information eventually leaks.

There is no final system. Human society is not converging toward one permanent arrangement. It’s adjusting continuously, like water in a basin that keeps getting tilted. The sea level shifts as conditions change, as communication evolves, as people’s understanding of their own lives deepens.

And there is no absolute evil or absolute good — only shifting balances. Whenever one extreme dominates too long, counter-forces emerge: moral movements, new technologies, cultural shifts, economic pressures. The system corrects not because the universe is just, but because human beings are numerous, diverse, and stubbornly committed to their own well-being.

Leaders rise like waves. Ideologies surge like storms. But the sea level — the quiet, collective will of billions of ordinary people — is what reshapes the shore.

And the cheaper communication becomes, the harder it is for any wave to pretend it’s the ocean.

Disclaimer: Written by Human, improved using AI where applicable.