Community: Why and How?

In my essay Activism & Mutualism, I made the distinction between activistic and mutualistic groups. While the former presuppose a certain privilege on the part of their members and direct their labor—including synergetic gains—primarily into the environment, the latter are directly beneficial to their members. Cooperation leads to synergetic gains that are distributed primarily back to the members.

In doing so, I left out one aspect: the need for community. In contemporary capitalism, community is scarce. Thus, even an activist group can be beneficial to its members in a broader sense, in that it satisfies an otherwise unfulfilled need for community. However, this works much better if the group is not internally moralistic. I use the term “moralism” to refer to the moral condemnation of individuals. In my essay Against Moralism, I contrasted intra-group moralism with inter-group moralism. However, this distinction does not align strictly with nominal group boundaries. Even within a formal group, moralism can function as “inter-group” and thus fail.

The deciding factor is whether the tendency which is to be moralistically curbed represents a total fringe phenomenon or a significant faction that can compete with the majority. A moralistic peace is therefore, in a sense, unstable. If opinions diverge too much and a critical mass of dissenters is exceeded, moralistic suppression will no longer succeed in stifling them. From this point on, moralism continues to be deployed, but without resolving the problem and thus eliminating its own necessity. The amount of moralism experienced by the average member then increases. The community function that the group once fulfilled for its members gradually ceases. In activist groups, this likely leads to collapse, since community was the sole benefit for its members.

Therefore, leftist groups must also refrain from formally intra-group moralism, as it can turn into effectively inter-group moralism at any time and thus pose a danger to the group. I therefore advise these groups to take inspiration from hippie communes, Christian congregations, or the like. In these, people tend not to act moralistically despite all ideals. An individual who does not live up to an ideal in their actions is not condemned or treated as an enemy. Instead of the group’s moral purity, immediate love and understanding are prioritized.

I was able to personally experience this understanding recently. Recently, I have begun occasionally visiting the Free Evangelical Christusgemeinde in Aachen. There, I met a left-liberal person to whom I expressed an opinion that is controversial in both left-liberal and radical-left milieus. I recently expressed the same opinion on the internal forum of the anarcho-syndicalist Freie Arbeiter*innen Union (FAU). As expected, I was morally condemned in the latter case and not in the former. That Christians should be tolerant in an anti-moralistic sense seems obvious to me, though Christianity can unfortunately also be interpreted differently. Fortunately however, this is not the case at Christusgemeinde. Here are excerpts from the sermon of June 7, 2026:

Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul. Our text describes the absolute beginning of the early Christian congregation in Jerusalem. ... That is always the case at the beginning of a movement. Everyone looks in the same direction toward a common goal and is ready to give everything for it. ...

Wherever people are involved with their whole heart and commitment in long-term communities, they cannot always be one heart and soul. ... What we need in the church is not “one heart and soul,” but rather many individual wide hearts and wide souls. This means a lot of tolerance... Not everyone has to build an equally close relationship with everyone else, either. It is allowed to be a colorful network of hearts and souls. In this mesh, some “loops” are tighter than others.

In his enthusiasm, Luke describes “one heart and soul” as the ideal state. But the very next text makes it clear that even in the early church, it didn’t last long. ... Yet, it is good that he writes it this way for us. In doing so, he admonishes us to work on our own “heart expansion” so that we can maintain a good togetherness in our community.

Additionally, the sermon of April 26, 2026 stated:

It is almost a geometrical truth: the closer each one of us draws near to Jesus, the more we draw near to one another as well; the less our milieus, even our bubbles, matter; and love for one another happens as a consequence, without moral effort. The biblical expression for that is: fruit.

The latter resonated particularly with me as a Daoist: the absence of moral effort. For me, understanding (Verständnis) does not result from moral effort, but from comprehending (Verstehen) the circumstances. Therefore, I finally refer strictly materialistic readers to my essay Deterministic Ethics. The Jewish-Portuguese philosopher Baruch de Spinoza once concluded that God and the world are one and the same. He, too, understood (in a different way) brotherly love as a fruit of getting to know God and the world.

Knowing God = Knowing the World = Love of Neighbor