The Six Streams That Shape Human Life

Human beings are porous creatures. These six streams flow into us constantly.

Food.

Water.

Air.

Information.

Microbes.

Relationships.

The streams that shape human life are surprisingly easy to corrupt—and surprisingly hard to guard.

These streams shape our bodies, our minds, and the communities we build together. And unsurprisingly, each of them is vulnerable to corruption, because it’s easy to affect these flows without anyone noticing.

We ingest them largely automatically, without thinking. We trust that what we are offered is nourishing and healthy for us.

But temptation comes easily, and so do examples of corruption. Food additives can make things cheaper but affect our health. Algorithms feed us novel videos, but they can wreck our attention, our minds, and our sense of self. We can be in relationship with someone and absorb their love, but also harm that relationship when we fail to show up for them, or when we try to control them by withholding love.

We hardly notice in the moment when the big six are corrupted, and we trust that someone is watching. Surely someone is discerning whether these things are corrupted. Someone must be monitoring the air, the water, and the food. Surely someone isn’t letting the people we trust cut corners on ensuring information is truthful…right?

This is why societies build institutions around these streams. We create food safety systems, water utilities, environmental regulation, journalism, public health systems, and community norms because these inputs matter so deeply. These institutions exist to guard the flows that shape human life. But institutions cannot function on rules alone. They depend on people who are capable of noticing when something is wrong—people who can interpret signals, weigh trade-offs, and decide when the system is being bent or quietly corrupted.

And this reveals something about preventing corruption: we must be willing and able to discern.

This is not just a matter of transparency. Transparency is a precondition, but what difference does transparency make if we cannot make meaning of it? We have to be able to evaluate whether the inputs that shape individuals and society are corrupted or not.

Sometimes this discernment happens individually, and sometimes it must be collective. Any time we read a food label or look at an air quality report, we are discerning at the individual level.

But we also discern at the community level. Communities deliberate on questions like: Do we want this? and How will it affect us? Communities themselves are a kind of living organism. Just as our bodies must determine whether what flows into them is nourishing or harmful, communities must do the same.

To prevent corruption we don’t just need laws, and we don’t just need transparency—we need discernment.