I’d like to update our philosophy of human nature, or as I prefer to call it, “the psychosocial essence,” so that we can update our psychosocial philosophies and the realities that rest on it.

I don’t believe that there should be separate philosophies of “human nature” and social life. Everything human is psychosocial. Or I should say that anything social is inherently psychological, and almost everything psychological is social. There is a lot lost when we try to look at a human on an individual level. We function as groups. Our psychologies are inherently social. We are raised with at least one guardian for many years, and we are raised in social setings. We aren’t frogs or snakes or whatever animal just leaves the egg and does its own thing.

In this psychosocial existence, there is a lot to be invented or made up. We can make up whole worlds in our imaginations and then manifest them in reality. We can make little pieces of reality and iterate on them. We can also make and shape each other’s psychologies based on our existing beliefs of others psychologies. We are self-fulfilling prophecies. I want to point out that we live an inherently imaginative existence. Our imaginations of each other shape each other and then manifest into reality. Basically, we make each other up. And if we don’t realize that, we will make each other up based on false beliefs, which includes any view of a person or people that does not account for the self-fulfilling element.

So it’s important to realize the circular and imaginative nature of our existence. We become what we believe ourselves to be and what we imagine ourselves to be. The circular or self-fulling property of our nature must be included in our psychosocial philosophies. From there, we can talk about how we want to design psychosocial life without any fixed assumptions of how we are.

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Vanessa Molano is the author of Redesign Everything, a participatory, self-redesigning book that asks philosophical questions for a well-examined social reality.

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