Communication never rests on certainty. It proceeds in conditions of opacity, where perception is private and meaning is selectively externalised. Any policy, norm, or governance we design is itself a artifact, another selection among alternatives, exposed to mistrust and failure. Rules cannot stand outside communication; they can only stabilize it temporarily.

Because every utterance bifurcates reality into affirmation and negation, social coordination requires redundancy, repair, and re-entry. We build procedures not to guarantee truth but to keep communication going when selections collide, when interpretations diverge, and when trust is thin. Paralanguage, gesture, institutional form, and protocol: each supplements speech, and each introduces new sites for misunderstanding.

As we have already established, words alone do not carry the burden. Tone, rhythm, hesitation, posture, and silence give orientation to selection; they stage whether “yes” or “no” should be taken as acceptance, refusal, or mere continuation. Yet these same cues multiply the horizons of interpretation. They help communication endure and give it more ways to fail.

Because every message forces a distinction, doubt accompanies all speech. Trust appears only as a contingent settlement—useful, provisional, revisable. Hence the grim clarity:

“Mistrust, that's what communication is made of.”

This is not a verdict against communication but a description of its material. To speak is to expose oneself to refusal; to hear is to risk misunderstanding; to continue is to accept that repair is part of the form.

Perception remains enclosed in consciousness. Communication works only with what is uttered and taken up as information. Between consciousness and communication there is no direct passage, only selections that connect or miss.

Thus knowledge is communicatively structured, not because matter is irrelevant, but because without uptake there is no contribution: what is not communicated cannot participate.

Autopoietic communication systems produce their own elements and structures through use. There are no independent building blocks waiting to be assembled; information, utterance, and understanding exist only within communication’s circular operations. What continues is what can be re-selected; what cannot be re-entered disappears.

“No, it is not just a beacon. It reacts to our signals. But it seems communication has no goal or end, no immanent entelechy. It occurs or it does not; that is all that can be said about it.”

There is no final ground, no terminal justification. We persists without an ultimate purpose, sustained by interpretations that couple, repaired by the interpretations that follow.

To continuing under uncertainty, the consequence is severe and practical. We cannot escape the system by appeal to perception, to matter, or to intention; we can only redesign the conditions for selection, protocols, media, forms, and forums that make continued uptake more likely. Only communication can repair communication; only renewed selection can overcome failed selection. The work is not to abolish mistrust but to route it, contain it, and sometimes even use it to sharpen distinctions worth keeping.

Communication therefore remains what it has been throughout this text: emergent, circular, fragile, and failure-haunted yet capable of continuation. It offers no guarantees, only the possibility of the next selection.