The Verse You Contribute
A Meditation on the Nature of Meaning
Meaning is the felt recognition that existence is not passive.
It is the moment you understand that you are not merely acted upon—
you are an actor in the play.
Meaning is awareness meeting agency.
It’s the spark between the world as it is and the world as it could be,
and the quiet realization that the bridge between them is you.
Watch a parent reading to their child—not just transmitting information but creating a shared world through attention, voice, presence. The meaning isn’t in the story itself but in the relationship, the choice to give time, the mutual construction of something neither could create alone. That’s meaning: consciousness participating in significance rather than consuming it.
This is the substance that utilitarians are digging toward in their calculations, but it’s one that can’t be apprehended. Because to do so would be to stand outside the nature of description itself—to observe meaning from a position that eliminates the observer whose participation creates it.
Jeremy Bentham promised to reduce all human motivation to pleasure and pain, to build moral philosophy on what could be measured and maximized. John Stuart Mill refined the calculus, added qualitative distinctions. But something always slipped through their fingers.
David Hume saw the problem: You cannot derive “ought” from “is.” The gap between facts and values isn’t a flaw in human reasoning—it’s the space where meaning lives.
Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons represents perhaps, the most rigorous attempt to build moral philosophy on purely rational foundations. What does his ruthless logic produce? The Repugnant Conclusion: that a world with billions living lives barely worth living would be better than millions living flourishing lives.
This is what happens when you try to optimize meaning rather than create it. The logic hasn’t changed, only the tools—now armed with machine learning and network effects, the optimizers have more power to implement their error.
The rationalists and technocrats are still trying. Artificial intelligence will solve human flourishing through superior optimization, they promise. Effective altruists calculate precise resource allocation to maximize utility. Silicon Valley oligarchs design systems to eliminate democratic inefficiencies in favor of algorithmic governance.
But meaning is not happiness.
It’s not achievement.
It’s not the accumulation of pleasant experiences.
Meaning is the sense that your life participates in the larger story—
that the universe isn’t just happening to you, but with you.
Whitman understood this.
“That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”
Meaning is the verse.
You can optimize for happiness, but not for meaning. You can deliver prosperity, but not purpose. You can solve problems, but not the fundamental question of what makes consciousness worth having.
Because meaning requires what optimization eliminates: the capacity to choose wrongly, to value things that don’t maximize utility, to participate in constructing significance rather than merely consuming it.
This is why technocracy cannot govern free people—not because experts lack knowledge, but because governance through optimization eliminates the participatory agency that creates meaning in the first place. You can deliver every material good except the one that makes material goods matter: the dignity of co-authorship.
Human dignity is the political form of meaning—the recognition that each person has an irreducible claim to participate in shaping the world that shapes them.
Human dignity is the opposite of being optimized by someone else’s model.
It’s the opposite of being governed as problem to be solved rather than partner in choosing aims.
You can give people welfare, but not dignity.
You can give people safety, but not dignity.
You can give people prosperity, but not dignity.
Because dignity is the condition of being co-author, not beneficiary.
The stage isn’t up ahead.
It’s all around you—every moment, every choice.
You’re already in the scene.
The only question left is whether you’ve practiced your lines.
Meaning is when you stop waiting to be written into the story
and realize you’re writing it as you go.
Meaning is what makes resistance rational.
Meaning is what makes sacrifice intelligible.
Meaning is what makes love powerful enough to be dangerous.
Meaning is the one thing no system can manufacture and no regime can smother—
because meaning is born in the human refusal to be reduced to anything less than full participant in the world.
The powerful play goes on.
Your verse awaits.
Remember what’s real.
Go Deeper into the Circus
Two Boys Who Never Grew Up
There was a time in America when the most powerful man in Hollywood was someone who still believed in fairy tales.
And just when you think that the written word cannot get more inspirational.
I would gladly sacrifice an arm or a leg, or my life, to have a world leader sharing such thoughts with the country and the world.
This is what most of us wish to see, to live in, and to leave for ALL that come after our departing.
This is the spirit of Tikkun Olam, that it is our obligation, each and every one of us, to restore the world, to show our humanity in our one-ness, in our human unity.
I have traveled the world, sailed thousands of miles upon open seas, climbed to high mountain peaks and seen the world beneath the oceans. I have seen the ravages of cancer and held the hands of those dying and felt their light go out. Still, I have also felt the joy of seeing lives restored, and lived with fullness. How can we not want to share the wonders of life, the beauty of the Creation and teach such a Gospel as in today's commentary? Ask yourselves, what is the meaning of your life, of the lives of others, of the life of the Earth?
I love the great poets, but found many relatively unknown, that have shared these same thoughts about meaning for centuries. For many years, in love with the poetry of Emerson, I pasted copies of his poem Success to walls and computer monitors. I vowed to practice what he preached in that poem. Later I learned that it was Bessie Stanley, a poet I was unfamiliar with, that was the author of the poem attributed to Emerson. Here is one version of Bessie's poem "Success".
Success
To laugh often and love much;
to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children;
to earn the approbation of honest citizens
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty;
to find the best in others;
to give of one’s self;
to leave the world a bit better,
whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation;
to know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived
—this is to have succeeded.
Bessie Stanley 1905
Bessie would be grinning, ecstatic from reading Mike's commentary. Now, if we could just put someone with the mind and heart of Brock in the role of leadership, this country and this world would turn the parking lot back into a paradise.
This is terrific. Really stellar. It's the connection I feel with, for example Chopin, or Bach, when I hear their music. And the amazement of wondering how then and now at this moment at least 2 people are communicating through sound, or rather each registering meaning in music that is the intentional arrangement of sound, a property of the physics of the universe.
Or, more prosaically, my cat invariably wagging his tail when he heard me singing "his" song ( that I did in fact compose for him, both tune and lyrics, which were simply his name repeated and repeated!). He didn't react to my singing anything else,except probably to wish I would shut up, though he was too polite to say so. Nor did he often react to my speaking his name, which will surprise no cat slaves out there. But during his song we were connecting, both seeing the meaning in relationship. Different species but each with agency. Sheer wonder.