​Chapter 9

An ontovirus that could only persist unchanged would eventually be outcompeted: the institutional environment shifts, and a rigid program loses its feeding base. The most successful ontoviruses are those that update their moral content while preserving their core. This mutation is experienced by many as moral progress.

Slavery was abandoned, and judicial torture disappeared. Children were pulled from the factories. The temptation is almost irresistible to read this sequence as a story of moral awakening: humanity gradually recognizing the demands of justice, shedding cruelties one by one, and ascending toward an ethical clarity that previous ages lacked. Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature remains the most ambitious and data-rich expression of this narrative. The numbers appear decisive: violence has declined, life expectancy has risen, literacy has spread, and legal slavery has vanished.

Yet the very smoothness of the story should make us wary. What looks like a steady ascent toward justice may be nothing more than a new ontology quietly updating itself and rewriting the morality so that the previous version now appears barbaric. The interpretation of that improvement as moral progress is the ontovirus speaking.

The materialist explanation, advanced by Eric Williams, holds that slavery ended when industrial capitalism rendered it obsolete: the new economy needed mobile wage labor, not fixed human capital. The timeline of abolition broadly tracks economic transformation: industrial economies abolished it first, agrarian last. Seymour Drescher's Econocide dismantled this thesis with statistical evidence. British colonial slavery was still profitable and expanding when Parliament moved against it. What drove abolition was a mobilization within a different ontoviral channel: evangelical Christianity, running through Wilberforce's parliamentary campaign, mass petitions, and a consumer boycott of slave-produced sugar. The abolitionist ontovirus built its own feeding apparatus and won against the market.

If abolition had simply tracked economic obsolescence, the ontovirus would reduce to an epiphenomenon of material conditions. Drescher's evidence shows that an ontoviral mutation can overpower the economic interests that sustain the existing order. The Church that had justified slavery for fifteen centuries contained the resources to condemn it. Wilberforce genuinely believed slavery was an abomination before God. His conviction grew inside an ontoviral system, drew its authority from that system's postulates, and propagated through its institutional channels. The sincerity is real; the sovereignty is not.

But abolition is the exception that clarifies the rule. Most ontoviral mutations track material conditions with far less friction. Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, demonstrated that the modern state abandoned public torture after the source of its legitimacy had changed. The medieval king displayed power through spectacle — the wheel, the public burning. The liberal state does that through the smooth, invisible administration of a population that polices itself. Visible cruelty became counterproductive; it undermined the fiction that authority rests on consent rather than force. The tortures migrated into prisons hidden from view, into procedures that leave no marks, and into administrative violence so diffuse that no single actor can be held responsible.

Women’s suffrage, the gradual dismantling of legal gender discrimination also tracked economic necessity. As long as the economy could extract sufficient value from a male workforce, the exclusion of women served institutional interests: it kept the labor supply manageable, secured unpaid domestic labor that subsidized wages, and simplified political management by halving the electorate. When the demand for labor outstripped the male supply during wars and full-scale industrialization, women’s rights expanded to the degree required to bring them into the workforce.

René Girard located the engine of social order in mimetic desire: human beings imitate each other's desires, the imitation produces rivalry, and the rivalry escalates into a contagion that threatens to dissolve the community. The scapegoat mechanism resolves the crisis. The accumulated violence is channeled onto a single victim — an outsider, someone guilty enough to justify the violence and marginal enough that the community can afford to lose him. The collective act of expulsion produces temporary peace, and the victim is retroactively sacralized: the one who caused the crisis and then ended it.

The fuel the ontovirus burns is the previous moral consensus. Each update needs a scapegoat: the people who still hold the version that has just been replaced. Racism was the moral common sense of the colonial world. When the ontovirus updated, the racist turned into the scapegoat. Homophobia, the unquestioned default for centuries, was reclassified next. The subject who holds anti-LGBT views today occupies the position of the racist a generation earlier: he is the designated scapegoat of the current update, the figure who proves the community's moral advancement by being publicly condemned.

The process cannot stop. Once the current scapegoat has been fully expelled, the moral energy has nowhere to go. A new target must be found. The ontovirus scans for the next consensus that can be reclassified from norm to pathology, and the cycle restarts. The convictions that feel most unquestionable right now are the candidates for the next rotation.

What today seems "obviously right" rests on the current balance of institutional interests. Should an economic model arise tomorrow that required unfree labor (and some would argue that camouflaged versions already exist in gig economies and migrant worker systems), the moral consensus would shift — but over a generation, exactly as every previous ontoviral update has propagated. New experts would explain why this form of labor is "different," and new moral categories would be coined to separate the acceptable from the now-discredited.

The ontovirus also generates a particular kind of amnesia. Each generation experiences the current moral consensus as obviously correct and the previous one as barbaric. The Victorian who tolerated child labor was not a monster; he lived inside an ontovirus that filed such labor under "natural order". The antebellum Southerner who defended slavery was not evil; his ontovirus had categorized it as "the natural hierarchy of races". And the contemporary subject who is horrified by both is not morally superior, he is inhabited by a later version of the same ontovirus.