Intersubjective Reality: How Did Humans Build a ‘We’ with Strangers?

1. The puzzle of trusting strangers

On an ordinary day, we enter a car driven by someone whose name we learned only moments ago, transfer money to an unfamiliar seller, and entrust our lives to a pilot we have never met. Yet we may spend hours deciding who can hold the key to our home. The contrast shows that social cooperation is not built only on friendship or personal familiarity.

Episode 01 examined limits on time, attention, and close relationships. The new question begins there: if personal knowledge and relationship maintenance are finite, how do humans build cities, markets, universities, organizations, and networks in which thousands or millions of strangers cooperate? Part of the answer lies in shared meanings, rules, roles, and institutions.

We live inside a vast network of cooperation among strangers—a network that depends on institutional trust and shared meaning.

2. Three lenses on reality

Objective reality refers to features that do not depend on one person’s opinion. A mountain does not change height because two observers estimate it differently. Subjective reality concerns first-person experience: pain, memory, or the felt quality of a piece of music may differ across people while remaining real experiences.

Intersubjective reality takes shape among minds, actions, and shared expectations. A ticket’s validity, money’s value, or a degree’s social meaning is neither merely a physical property of paper nor one individual’s private feeling. It works when people and institutions recognize it, accept relevant rules, and act accordingly. This three-part scheme is an explanatory tool, not a claim that every aspect of the world occupies a perfectly separate box.

3. An intellectual map of intersubjectivity

Long before the idea became familiar in popular history writing, the phenomenological tradition associated with Edmund Husserl and later Alfred Schutz investigated intersubjectivity. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality examined how everyday knowledge and institutions are socially produced, stabilized, and transmitted. John Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality distinguished facts independent of agreement from institutional facts that depend on collective recognition.

Emile Durkheim’s account of social facts showed how language, norms, and institutions can precede the individual and constrain life from outside personal preference. These traditions are not identical and do not use one vocabulary, but together they help explain why people are born into worlds of already established meanings and rules. Yuval Noah Harari later made related ideas widely accessible through historical examples; he did not originate the entire intellectual tradition.

4. A football shirt with three simultaneous layers

Objectively, a football shirt has material, color, size, and weight. For a particular player or supporter it may carry a private memory. Intersubjectively, the same colors and crest can signify membership, rivalry, pride, or loyalty to thousands of people who have never met one another.

The layers need not be separate. A physical object may simultaneously support personal experience and social meaning. Flags, uniforms, academic emblems, and brand marks matter beyond their materials because a network of memory, rule, expectation, and action has become attached to them.

5. Why constructed things have real consequences

Money may be paper or an entry in a system, yet it can secure or remove food, housing, and opportunity. A passport is a booklet, yet it changes the ability to cross borders. A degree is not knowledge itself, but it is an institutional declaration that a person completed a recognized path. A border is not a permanent line visible from the sky, yet it shapes law, movement, and life chances.

Calling these realities social or constructed does not make them imaginary or powerless. Because they are stabilized through rules, records, roles, systems, and enforcement, they may affect people without their consent. Language, currency, and many customs existed before us; we inherit them and generally cannot replace them through one person’s declaration.

Being made by humans does not make a social reality unimportant; sometimes that is precisely why it becomes so powerful.

6. Institutions and impersonal trust

A handwritten sheet labeled ‘passport’ or ‘one hundred million’ does not become valid because its owner says so. There must be a form, an issuer, a record, and rules that let strangers know how to treat the document. Institutions shift part of the burden of trust from personal relationships to procedures, offices, and roles.

A corporation is likewise more than its current building, director, or staff. People change while contracts, obligations, ownership, records, and rules continue. This allows a firm to transact, bear legal responsibilities, and sustain a relatively stable meaning for customers. In literary form, the growth of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude also illustrates how a new settlement must gradually produce relationships, authority, memory, and common rules.

7. A declaration is not enough

If someone writes ‘I welcome criticism’ in a profile but deletes the first criticism and blocks its author, they have produced a sentence rather than a shared reality. A company that says ‘we respect customers’ must make the claim observable in staff behavior, responsiveness, problem resolution, and the customer’s actual experience.

Credibility and trustworthiness cannot be completed by self-description. Other people must encounter behavior, compare experiences, discuss them, and gradually reach a sufficiently shared pattern of judgment. For a person, organization, or idea, the gap between a slogan and lived experience is where intersubjective meaning is either constructed or destroyed.

8. A brand is more than a name and logo

Names, colors, and logos are signs; they do not create a complete meaning by themselves. Brand meaning accumulates through products, conduct, quality, stories, memories, expectations, and public conversation. Seeing Apple’s mark does not register merely as an image of a fruit; it can reactivate a larger history of experiences and narratives about technology, design, and use.

If an idea, personal brand, or organization is to occupy shared mental space, different people need opportunities to experience its promise. The sign can then compress and recall those experiences. In the path toward WEME, the aim is not merely to distribute a message but to build a durable relationship among narrative, experience, roles, and people who want to take part.

A logo is a container for meaning, not meaning itself; repeated and recognizable human experience is what fills it.

9. From shared understanding to shared intention

Several people may understand a problem in the same way without yet acting together. When passersby gather around a stalled car, coordinate with a count, and understand their own contribution in relation to the others, they move from shared meaning to shared intention and coordinated action.

Michael Tomasello and colleagues use shared intentionality to explain complex forms of human cooperation. The shift is from ‘I want this to happen’ toward ‘we intend to do this together.’ Humans display unusually elaborate forms of this capacity, although the precise comparison with other species remains an active research question.

10. The collared dove: common desire is not coordinated action

In the well-known Kalila wa Dimna fable, pigeons caught in a net initially struggle one by one. They share a desire to escape, but their separate efforts do not lift the trap. The collared dove asks them to beat their wings together; the group rises with the net and later a mouse gnaws through the cords.

The story is a metaphor, but it makes a useful distinction: sharing a wish is not the same as designing collective action. An idea becomes cooperation when there is a comprehensible goal, coordination, timing, roles, and a way to use different abilities. ‘We all believe reading is good’ is not the same as building a book club in which people choose texts, arrange a venue, register members, and facilitate discussion.

11. Roles and participation: the LEGO Ideas example

LEGO Ideas lets fans submit product concepts, gather public support, and move qualifying ideas into a formal review process. Reaching 10,000 supporters does not guarantee production, but it makes a project eligible for review. The system narrows the gap between raw enthusiasm and structured participation.

For a creator, leader, or founder, the lesson is to do more than assemble an approving audience. People need to know what role they can take, where the effect of that role becomes visible, and how their feedback enters the next decision. Participation becomes serious when contributors can see that their presence is not decorative.

12. The Emperor’s New Clothes and collective silence

In Hans Christian Andersen’s story, everyone can see that the emperor is wearing nothing, but fear of appearing foolish or unworthy keeps them silent and even leads them to praise the imaginary clothes. When a child speaks aloud, private knowledge becomes common knowledge: each person now knows that the others know as well.

The tale is a useful picture of pluralistic ignorance. Individuals may privately reject a norm or decision while incorrectly assuming that everyone else accepts it, so nobody objects. A durable collective needs safe routes for criticism, dissent, and revision. Constant agreement may create the appearance of unity while hiding error and weakening the group’s capacity to learn.

13. How shared meanings travel and change

People learn Nowruz before they know the precise history of each practice: the Haft-Seen table, family visits, and expectations transmitted by relatives and society. Yet performance is not fixed. Migration, technology, the pandemic, and changing routines can reshape visits. The custom continues, but the version enacted by one generation is not identical to the previous one.

A qanat is likewise more than an underground structure. It embodies accumulated technical knowledge, divided roles, maintenance rules, and cooperation across generations. Many intersubjective realities travel in this way: they change in practice, some changes endure, and the revised form is taught again. Even birthday cake rituals can be widely understood without every participant knowing their historical origin.

14. Not every cooperation creates a ‘we’

Pushing a stalled car or standing in an orderly bakery line is real and useful cooperation, but the participants disperse afterward. Temporary shared intention does not automatically create identity, belonging, or an expectation of continuity. A ‘we’ requires members to perceive a relationship among themselves, a collective meaning, an enactable role, and some shared future.

That is the series’ next question: when do connections become a collective whose members describe themselves as part of it, use the pronoun ‘we,’ and accept a share in its continuation and correction? Episode 03 turns more directly to WEME—the Theory of the Formation of Influential Human Collectives.

Cooperation can complete a task; a ‘we’ emerges when people want to preserve the collective’s meaning, roles, and capacity to continue.

15. Questions to apply after the episode

Where do you trust strangers every day, and which institution or rule makes that trust possible? Which sign carries a collective meaning for you that would be opaque to an outsider? Is there a gap between what your brand or group says about itself and what people actually experience?

If you are developing an idea, ask: what experience do other people receive from it? What role can they take? How will they know their contribution mattered? What safe path exists for criticism and revision? Most importantly, after a short collaboration ends, what could make them return and say ‘we’ rather than ‘they’?