Conflict and competitive adversarialism are not necessarily moral failures or aberrations. They are contingent, historically acquired, culturally entrained mechanisms by which complex cognitive, cultural, and communicative systems reliably differentiate, learn, and reproduce themselves over time. These mechanisms arise because complexity does not form around completeness, nor does it arise from closure, certainty, or final resolution. Complexity emerges where and when a system stabilises itself around a conserved pocket of difference that is structurally unresolved: missing information that cannot be eliminated without dissolving the processes that sustain adaptive variation, coherence, and continuity. Like a keel beneath the waterline, this undecidability is unseen but indispensable; remove it, and the system may still move, but it can no longer be steered. This absence is not accidental.
The self follows the same logic. It is outlined by opposition, held in place by distance and tension, sustained through the continual rehearsal of what is not self. This role-play is not psychological ornamentation. It is maintenance. Boundaries remain legible only because they are repeatedly traced. What is missing from the system is not an external object at all, but itself. The gap is internal: the system’s unattainable closure, the impossible coincidence with itself that would end motion, relation, and life.
We often say we are interested in peace. Without understanding conflict, this is unlikely. That understanding is uncomfortable because it requires distinguishing non-closure as a condition of vitality from non-closure experienced as threat. When uncertainty is tolerated, difference remains productive. When it is not, separation turns defensive, abstraction replaces relation, and control substitutes for coherence. War and domination are not inevitable, but they are low-resolution strategies for managing undecidability by force.
Unrepentantly boorish (as incoherently aggressive) insecurity, technologically mediated communication, and dissociative pathologies of control converge here. The pathology is not difference itself, but an inability to remain in relation to it. The system seeks completion, certainty, capture. It cannot get them. So it repeats. Freedom, then, is not freedom of the self. It is freedom from the self’s demand for closure. Peace begins there, not as moral correction, but as a systemic release, still incomplete.
Daedelus Kite 