Beyond Contract and Contingency: Toward a People of Being
Modern society is built upon the belief that individuals are autonomous agents who form relationships: personal, social, or political; through choice, negotiation, and mutual benefit. From this standpoint, community becomes a fragile contract, always subject to revision, dependent on will, agreement, and utility. But this vision of social life arises from the deeper metaphysical error that sees the self as a product of becoming. If identity is fluid, contingent, or self-made, then so too are our connections with others. In such a world, there is no unshakable foundation for community, only shifting networks of desire, interest, and power.
But if the self is eternal, if each person is the appearing of an immutable necessity, then community takes on an entirely different meaning. It is no longer a structure built from the outside in, negotiated or imposed, but an eternal bond revealed from the inside out. A true community is not a collection of autonomous wills but a constellation of eternal selves, appearing together in the luminous structure of Being. It is not manufactured; it is recognized.
The Collapse of Contingent Community
Contemporary society is marked by a growing sense of alienation and fragmentation. Social trust is eroding. Polarization intensifies. Even the most intimate bonds, family, friendship or love, are increasingly fragile. We speak often of “connection,” but rarely of communion.
This is not merely a sociological crisis. It is a metaphysical one. When identity itself is unstable or performative, every relationship becomes tentative, negotiated through constantly shifting terms. Even moral obligations lose their grounding. Ethics becomes a calculus of preference or utility. Justice becomes power arranged through consensus. Responsibility becomes a function of choice. And when choice changes, so too do the ties that bind.
Such a world is not sustainable. A community based on becoming is necessarily unstable. For becoming implies that nothing is truly what it is; not even the self. And if no one truly is, then no one can truly belong.
Recognition, Not Construction
A community of eternal selves cannot be constructed in the usual sense. It is not the product of policy, contract, or cultural will. It is revealed, and it is already real. The task is not to create it, but to allow it to appear.
Such a community begins in recognition. When one sees the other not as an accident of biology, culture, or desire, but as a necessary presence, an eternal being who cannot not be , then the ethical and social relationship is radically transformed. The other is no longer a means or a threat, a role or a performance. The other is a revelation of Being.
From this recognition flows a new kind of responsibility; not imposed from without, but arising from the very structure of existence. To betray the other is to violate not a social norm but a metaphysical truth. To love the other is not simply to feel or to act, but to see, and to respond to what is seen.
Toward a New Social Imagination
The implications are far-reaching. Justice is no longer the distribution of goods or the balancing of power, but the right relation among eternal beings. Politics is no longer the management of will, but the appearance of shared truth. Education is no longer the shaping of becoming, but the unveiling of presence. Family, friendship, and community are no longer contingent arrangements, but eternal bonds that reflect the structure of Being itself.
This does not mean a withdrawal from the world, but the transformation of how we appear within it. It is not the rejection of diversity or difference, but the grounding of difference in the unity of necessity. Each eternal self is unique, but not self-invented. Community, then, is not sameness, but harmony: a symphony of beings who, in their distinctiveness, shine forth as parts of the same eternal whole.
The Church, the Polis, the People of Being
Throughout history, humanity has glimpsed something of this truth. In the idea of the communion of saints, in the classical polis, in the longing for a just society, there are echoes of a deeper reality; the possibility of a community that is not based on becoming, but Being. Yet each of these attempts, to the extent they remained tied to the will, to power, or to historical process, could not fully reveal what they intuited.
Today, in the midst of fragmentation, the memory of such a community still stirs; often in hidden or distorted ways. But its true appearance depends on the recognition of what the self truly is. Only eternal beings can truly belong to one another. Only those who are unshakably grounded in Being can live together in peace.
This is not an ideal to be imposed, but a truth to be seen. And once seen, it cannot be unseen.
Looking Ahead
If the eternal self opens the path to a new understanding of community, it also unveils a new vision of history; not as a linear process of becoming, but as the eternal unfolding of truth.
In the final article, we ask what it means to live in time while belonging to eternity, and how the recognition of Being reshapes not only identity and community, but destiny itself.
Next: Article 10 — The Eternal Destiny of the Self: History, Time, and the Unfolding of Being
It Is What It Is 
Leave a comment