On Life and Purpose

The Ethical Demand of Action in an Unjust World

Morning Comrades.

The other day I came across a line from W.E.B. Du Bois, that, as I am getting older and my own perception of purpose is changing, both metaphysically and materially, really struck a chord. It was:

"You and I can never be satisfied with sitting down before a great human problem and saying nothing can be done. We must do something. That is the reason we are on Earth."
— W.E.B. Du Bois

In a world increasingly numbed by spectacle, catastrophe, and abstraction, W.E.B. Du Bois’s words land like a hammer against the cold stone of resignation. His charge is simple yet world-shaking: we are not here merely to observe suffering, but to confront it; not to explain injustice, but to abolish it. At a time when the crises of climate collapse, mass displacement, permanent war, economic immiseration, and social atomisation congeal into an everyday “normal,” Du Bois insists on the sacred obligation of doing something. And not just anything but something that reaches toward the transformation of what it means to live a human life together.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) was one of the most profound and influential intellectuals of the modern era: an American sociologist, historian, writer, and revolutionary whose work reshaped how we understand race, power, and liberation. Born just five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Du Bois came of age in the shadow of Reconstruction’s betrayal and lived to see the early victories of the Civil Rights Movement. Across nearly a century of life, he stood at the intersection of scholarship and struggle, refusing to separate thought from action.

Du Bois was the first Black American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and he went on to become a founding member of the NAACP. But his legacy far exceeds institutional milestones. Through works like The Souls of Black Folk, Black Reconstruction in America, and The World and Africa, Du Bois developed a sweeping critique of American democracy, white supremacy, and global capitalism. He introduced the concept of "double consciousness" to express the inner conflict of being Black in a white-dominated world, and he challenged both liberal gradualism and narrow nationalism by calling for a radical reimagining of justice rooted in collective uplift and socialist transformation.

Why is Du Bois important? Because he insisted, before it was politically acceptable, that race and class are not separate structures but deeply intertwined systems of domination. Because he saw the Black working class not as victims of history, but as its potential authors. And because he believed that the purpose of knowledge was not to describe the world but to change it. His life was a tireless act of resistance against inequality in all its forms, and his thought remains a compass for those who still believe, as he did, that “we must do something—that is the reason we are on Earth.”

The Refusal of Helplessness Is the Beginning of Human Dignity

The first and most radical claim in Du Bois’s sentence is that resignation is not neutrality but a moral failure. To say “nothing can be done” is not just to describe the world; it is to give up on it. Worse, it is to consent to its continuing degradation. This fatalism masquerades as realism, but it is actually the triumph of despair dressed in the language of wisdom. In contrast, Du Bois insists that meaning itself is forged in struggle: to act against injustice is not only possible, it is the only reason worth being alive.

In this sense, Du Bois resurrects a principle that runs like a red thread through revolutionary philosophy: that freedom is not the condition we start from, but the horizon we aim for through collective transformation. Thinkers from Spinoza to Marx to Sartre have warned us: to be human is not to float in certainty or comfort, it is to risk, to resist, and to create.

Du Bois’s phrasing “that is the reason we are on Earth” locates human meaning not in metaphysical isolation, but in situated purpose. We are not on Earth as spectators, nor as owners. We are here as agents of change.

In today’s world, where “ownership” of Earth defines our relation to it, whether through capitalist extraction, colonial possession, or nationalist enclosure, Du Bois’s idea reorients us: we are not here to master the Earth, but to repair it. This is a metaphysical vision of mutual belonging: Earth is not a backdrop but a site of ethical responsibility. What we do here matters not just to ourselves, but to the future of life itself. This ethos echoes what Indigenous and eco-socialist traditions have long emphasised: to live ethically is to recognise the web of relations we inherit, and to act in a way that sustains the possibility of life beyond our own. Such a view destroys the logic of capital, which treats every human problem as a technical inconvenience or market opportunity. Instead, Du Bois invites us to treat problems, poverty, racism, war, alienation as calls to consciousness and demands for struggle.

The Material Task: From Moral Clarity to Collective Action

Motivational sentiment, however stirring, is not enough. Du Bois’s challenge requires that we organise, not just agonise.

To “do something” is not to individualise the burden, but to build collective power. What can be done against police terror? Organise against it. What can be done about housing inequality? Build tenants’ unions. What about capitalist exploitation? Build workers’ assemblies. The “something” is not an empty gesture, it is the living labour of building a counter-power to the existing world.

This is not mere idealism. It is practical materialism. As Marx noted, philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. But we change it together, through discipline, solidarity, and risk. We change it when we reject the capitalist logic that tells us only experts, only billionaires, only governments can act. The truth is more subversive: the masses of people, organised in struggle, have always been the authors of liberation.

Du Bois’s sentence does not just reject passivity, it affirms hope. But this is not naïve optimism. It is militant hope, the kind that emerges from the ashes of defeat and says: we still have a world to win. It is the hope of the enslaved rebel, the colonised intellectual, the striking worker. It is the hope that lives in movement, not in outcome.

To believe “something must be done” is not to believe we will succeed in our lifetime. It is to believe that struggle itself makes us more fully human. As Walter Benjamin warned, the enemy wants us to believe that the current order is inevitable. Du Bois answers: we are here to prove otherwise.

Du Bois gives us a metaphysical compass in a world lost in cynicism. His words are not only a call to moral clarity but a summons to material practice. You are not here to watch the world fall. You are here to stand against its fall, even if your hands shake. You are here to organise others, not because it is easy, but because it is necessary. That is the reason you are on Earth.

The greatest act of love in a dying world is resistance. Not because we are guaranteed to win, but because doing nothing is the one choice that guarantees we lose everything.

Let Du Bois’s words be your daily prayer and your daily plan:

We must do something. That is the reason we are on Earth.

As always, thank you for your time and attention.

Yours, warmly,

Steven