Greetings,

Personal blurgh. You may or may not skip this.
in the past months the insatiable disaffection and dissatisfaction with the world that drove me into this fandom, awoken my love for the English language and what sent me through many hours of reading stuff others only quote on facebook slowly began to change. For me, community always was the bad guy in this world. Rousseau comes to mind: humans are good by nature, communities corrupt them. Amongst his most famous lines lies the idea of the first man who claimed land for himself and thus was the true founder bourgeois communities. I felt good with this for a long time. I would turn down the term dialectics as nonsense. Not Hegel nor Marx, not Smith nor Mills would satisfy me with their ideal constructions of a community. It didn't matter for me whether there was capitalism or socialism. I could not see the first as a necessary evil to create the latter. I saw both in their basic structure as pointlessly destructive. Hence I followed Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Satre, Kant. Never could I bind myself too deep into communities without getting those bad feelings. But after years in a community that practices the magic of friendship day to day, I got acquainted with that feeling. It began to feel wrong to think that joining other people is a bad thing on any scale. In the many nights I simply star-gazed I came nearer the conclusion that from this wrong idea my dissatisfaction with the world had to come from.

Thus, the ever-lasting pressure in my head that pushed me to search for more and more individual knowledge slowly moved downward. Funny, do some people compare me with Faust, albeit I carry way less knowledge. Apparently that infect, parasite, boon and bane eventually hit my heart. Not that long ago, actually. In fact, I spent more than 10 hours in the past three days only watching the moon pass my window. Today he has a light touch of red. The pressure became a fire, split in the two sides of my chest. It seems dialectic came back to haunt me. I read newspaper everyday, but now my base to understand all those conflicts, wars, crimes is gone. I can't no longer blame the pure construction of communities itself for everything. It's not enough, not right. It just doesn't seem right that people connect just to send each other to hell. That counts on every scale, be it the competitive relations developing in smaller circles or whole genocides. It isn't that I can't understand them at any point, tho'. I am a part of society and felt anger, love and whatnot. I did dumb things that I may or may not regretted. But what I up to this day can't feel among other people is the perfect peace I feel when star-gazing. This feeling, when the stars seem to tug my soul out of my body and the moon, brighter than anything I ever could imagine, erases my thoughts. Those nights inspire me to write, to practise art. I want to loose my spirit, my soul from earth, not the sins, but the despair, the coldness these times inject into me. Not the physical, mind you, but the mental. U.S. citizens may call this the pursuit of happiness. But now, with that new state of mind, where I feel closer to this than any time before, I also see how futile it is. How could I ever search for individual happiness, luck with such a world around me? A life dedicated to art may is the finest way to reach that, but by living in a democracy I now feel it is my duty to the world to actively control the directions with the possibilities history gave us. How could I be happy when the world burns uncontrolled around me, and how could I be happy when I throw myself into this discordant world? I never could reach the stars alone, but chaining myself to others just seems to tighten everything. A circle that bears strong resemblance of Rousseau's ideas. This peace of the night, when time becomes insignificant, can't exist when other people are around - during day. Despite it is unable to satisfy me, fills me with regret and other bad emotions, I always somehow searched the contact with others.

This is where I finally get to the point.
Here's where Kant comes into play: he speaks of the antagonism of unsocial sociability. This basically describes the human's urge for individual perfection, such as power and possessions, that is tied with the urge to connect with other people, even though the only thing one can expect from them is resistance against the own will, coming from their own targets. In this, humans are doomed to join together in a certain hostility, what is needed to drive them to improvement and cultural development. This would be nature's plan and the destination of mankind. For him this is no problem. This dialectic would be the engine of cultures. It just seems so wrong to me, to think that arts are born from the despair and pain of the world. And yet I would lie to myself if I said I can't see his point. Vonnegut, Büchner, Rousseau, Von Clausewitz, even Nietzsche. Non of them would - the existence of events not questioned at this point - have written wasn't it for the despair in the world. It plays down to a cliché I never thought I'd use myself: without evil the good can't exist. I don't like this. I really don't like this idea. It has to be possible to escape from this seemingly nature-given discord. Because, just as Kant claims nature's plan is to bind the humans together in discord, a man's urge for concord isn't distinguishable. And you also, to whom life is unending work and dissatisfaction, are you not very tired of life? Are you not very ripe for the sermon of death? - Thus spoke Zarathustra. In the original text he uses unrest instead of dissatisfaction, and this unrest and this work, it is what ultimately would be the highest things in our lives, would we follow Kant's argument.

The human - a life doomed in cercles vicieux or is there a way to achieve concord? How ironic of me to ask, with Discord being one of my favourite characters....

Should you ask yourself now why I wrote this, it's from an urge that was born with that fascination for social structures. I decided to follow it and share a bit more than necessary.

Carpe noctem,
--Chaodiurn

3214913
OK, you seem to be in frame of mind for it, so I'm gonna fully open the tap here...:

To use a math analogy, the problem is how people want human qualities to be a "vector," but they can only ever be a symmetrical "axis," with us forever sitting at the "0,0" origin. You simply can't create a one-way road in infinite conceptual space any more than you can create a particle of matter without an antimatter twin (precipitation out from the Inflaton aside, of which what we call "progress" might be a recapitulation in the medium of societies). But that desire for completeness is itself is another form of that same natural tension—The universe's obsession with wheels-within-wheels symmetry and self-similarity is not limited to matter. To extend the math analogy, stop thinking in terms of positive and negative and instead think in terms of "absolute value," or as it's called in literary terms, sublimity.

And you also, to whom life is unending work and dissatisfaction, are you not very tired of life?

Of the narrow scope of mammalian life inside a gravity well? Absolutely. Of existence in general? Impossible, even though awareness is also by definition impossible to escape, which is a daunting thought—There's no "outside" of the Buddha's metaphorical wheel of existence into which to run. Like Sisyphus' boulder, it keeps grinding forever, with us as the sparks thrown off by the friction. Even if the wildest cosmos-spanning dreams of the transhumanists (raises hand) come true, we'll never be free from dissolution, conflict, and misery. But that's OK—It's better than the lie that there's no potential for them, because reality will never allow a lie that huge to stand for long, or so lucrative a niche to go that long unfilled. "Whatever is not forbidden is mandatory."

is there a way to achieve concord?

No.
This isn't a human thing; this is simply the Way of the universe—Just as stars are held up by the tension between gravity and radiation pressure, the world burns, but it burns in the balanced way the way those same stars burn; everything is eternally formed, transformed, and retransformed in both tension and harmony with everything else, never at rest, never satisfied, and in H.G. Wells' memorable phrase about this history of life, continually turning upon itself in rage and hunger and reshaping itself anew. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

tl;dr "Whatever is, is right." - Alexander Pope

3215322
Thank you for your words. (And the watch, I suppose.)
They helped me to see new perspectives and I think that they are a proof for the superiority of sociability to solitude. I have to admit that it also appears to myself only logical to functionalize human qualities, i.e. morals as vectors in a given conceptual space. It almost appears resigned to dispossess the qualities of their most direct functions, the enablement of aimed movement on an endless plane. Maybe it's only the inglorious Maths classes I had to undergo under questionable education secretaries, but with the term symmetrical axis I cannot but imagine an action similar to watching one's mirror image. Would they translate into such, we would succumb the fatal deception of any value system. They would not cause movement but be a mere line of separation between the hunting for own deeds combined with the inevitable sociability and the judicial body of responsibility. The antimatter twin to our matter - us - has to be responsibility in its most abstract form, because it is what binds us. We cannot live carelessly, cannot get lost in arts because we have always a certain responsibility to bear. The responsibility cannot exist on its own either, as there is nothing but us who grand value to it, and the human values, with their size determining the symmetrical axis like a vector (I think this possibility to describe a straight line as a vector is what causes the confusion) setting the final position for the responsibility in the plane. Here also Aristotle could come to mind, with his lines of justice.

And yet the inability to ever leave 0,0 saddens me. This is probably exactly the reason why such a mammalian life inside a gravity well (please excuse the direct quotation) is that tiresome, there is no escape, no way of raising the absolute value. That isn't what concerns me. The problem I have is the relation, the ratio of the endless distances the different qualities create with their ever new (or ever repeating) lines. If I didn't lose myself in this whole analogy, one should be able to derive from Aristotle's lines that the different lengths put into relation can and must show the level of justice. And would you want to adjust that, on top of it all, actions force themselves into the opposite directions of the own urges. If it wouldn't, we either need no laws or no states - or neither.

That there is dissolution, conflict and misery in the world is one thing. But where it occurs to what degree, what I as an individual and citizen of one of the richest regions of the world, in a nation that praises itself a republic, a democracy and a leader of the EU, can do and would have to do is as opposite from what the will in my chest cries for as the dust below me is from the stars above me -- a unison viewed in greatest detail, yet doomed to be parted for an eternity. In this way I can understand your picture of Sisyphus' bane and the everlasting no to the question of concord.

Nonetheless it is dissatisfaction that grows anew. This can't be it. The best way can't be to simply wait for the capitalism to slowly get hold of Africa when it's finished bringing quality of life to Asia. After everything that happened in the last 300 years the answer can't be to let things roll out and the discord of tension and harmony between the people can't be the last step taken after nationalism and democracy.

And between all this, I still search the answer to the lack of peace I feel when being around others. Sure, it doesn't feel harmful, but this endless peace I feel in nights of solitude, where even my own needs and desires fade away into the realms of nothingness, can't it be applied to sociability? If not, I'm afraid this gravity well becomes too small too soon.