Currently, human communities are composed of a bunch of individuals, or ‘I’s.  A traditional font writes I as I (times).  Contemporary fonts are ‘sans-serif’; they drop the curly-ques at the ends of the letters.   In either case, there is a close visual connection between I and 1, the numeral.

The numeral 1 is the first number in our counting system.  Primary, singularity, and importance are all attached.  In the same way, humans generally prioritize their personal existence and survival as the most important.  Is this related to the “I” experience? Could we re-brand the “I” to be something else?  Would community-building, fundamentally related to the prioritization of others before yourself be helped if we could escape the tyranny of I.

I will not pretend to be an expert in academic-semiotics.  Semiotics is the study of communication and meaning.  One of the more accessible and interesting branches of semiotics deals with the idea of signs and signifiers.  Wikipedia notes:

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the “father” of modern linguistics, proposed a dualistic notion of signs, relating the signifier as the form of the word or phrase uttered, to the signified as the mental concept. It is important to note that, according to Saussure, the sign is completely arbitrary, i.e. there was no necessary connection between the sign and its meaning.

The signifier is the scribble on the page, or image, or collection of vowel sounds.  The signified is how we interpret and impart meaning onto that visual or verbal sign, and is arbitrary.  Arbitrary means freedom.  In the light of this knowledge, let us consider our famously divisive friend Rene Descartes and his best known:

cogito ergo sum
je pense, donc je suis
i think, therefore i am or i am thinking therefore i exist

His ‘I’ is a unity of mind and body — existence is based on thought.  I am also not an expert on Descartian philosophy.  However, to me this means the body and mind are one and the same.  Mind is limited to the experience of bodily feeling.  You, and your thoughts are dependent on the very existence of your body.  Now, for a semiotic experiment:

I think therefore I am

Replacing I with E.

E think therefore E am

What does ‘E’ mean?  Right now it is meaningless to the majority of individuals.  What if we design meaning into E.  And that meaning is something about how you are not just you.  Your personal survival is dependent upon the survival of your community, and all that sustains it.  And by community, E means everything from small bugs, microbes, birds, plants, small children, grass, light, water, clean air, evil humans, good humans, your family, to dirt and everything around you.

Try it for awhile:  intentionally replace all thoughts in your head that include the ego-tyrant ‘I’ with E, defining E for yourself as a total experience of community, something like that described above.

Extrapolate this to a larger group.  A community is no longer a collection of individuals, all half-working towards a common good, and half working towards their own self-advancement.  Rather, you are the community.  In every thought, every sentence, every spoken word, you are community. It is no longer possible to exist outside of this.

Sounds totalitarian, a little too like Orwellian doublespeak eh?

Yet, if the world is as Marceau Merleau-Ponty describes, “glowing with meaning radiating from within”, our world might start to radiate with community.