​Chapter 15

Delegation works. The person is a terminal, executing verdicts he did not produce, experiencing them as his own. One question has gone unasked: in whose favor does the terminal operate?

A soldier delegates his moral judgment to the patriotic ontovirus and kills. The killing serves someone. Not "the nation" — the nation is a word, not an agent. It has no interests and no capacity to benefit. What has interests is the set of concrete human beings who occupy the positions from which the nation is administered: the officials who issue the orders, the generals, the industrialists supplying the weapons, the politicians whose careers depend on the outcome. The soldier's subjectivity serves these people. He experiences it as belonging to something vast and sacred, but the vastness and the sacredness are properties of the ontovirus, not of the beneficiary. Strip the ontovirus away, and what remains is a transaction: one person dies because others require it, and the ontovirus called "the nation" stands in between, absorbing the moral weight so that neither the killer nor the beneficiary has to carry it.

Benedict Anderson called nations "imagined communities" whose members will never know most of their fellow-members, yet hold in their minds an image of their communion. People do feel national identity, and the feeling has consequences. But the community is imagined and produced by the same institutional channels that distribute ontoviruses: print media, education, census, and maps.

This is the ontologization of collective nouns. "Society," "the state," "the people," "the market," "the Church" — each of these words names something that does not exist as an agent. There is no being called "society" that has preferences or suffers. There are people, arranged in patterns, and some of them hold seats from which they can direct the actions of others. The collective noun conceals this arrangement, converting a network of power relations into an abstract entity, and then this entity is treated as the subject of moral claims. "Society requires sacrifice." "The state demands loyalty." These sentences attribute agency to an abstraction and thereby erase the concrete beneficiaries.

The ontovirus performs this erasure automatically. A subject who has delegated to the patriotic ontovirus does not think "I am serving the interests of General X and Minister Y." He is serving his "country," the ontologized abstraction that makes the delegation palatable. And because the idea is sacred, the transfer is an elevation rather than a loss. The soldier does not feel diminished, he is ennobled. The greater the sacrifice, the greater the ennoblement.

This is the first type of beneficiary: concrete people. They exist and profit from the delegation, but the ontovirus ensures that the subject never sees them as the receiver.

The second type is stranger: delegation to no one. Every culture carries a residue of ontoviruses whose beneficiaries have long since disappeared. Taboos that once served a purpose, protecting a priesthood's authority, maintaining a clan's genetic isolation, persist as "tradition" long after the institution that produced them has dissolved. The subject who follows the taboo is feeding an ontovirus that no longer has a living host at the receiving end. His subjectivity flows into a void.

The concealment takes several forms. The beneficiary is hidden behind an abstraction: the soldier serves "the nation," the volunteer serves "the society." Or the subject himself is named as the beneficiary: the Christian delegates for his own salvation, the Buddhist follows the Eightfold Path for his liberation. The reward may also be displaced onto a cause: the communist sacrifices for a future humanity he will never see. In every case the actual feeding occurs in the present. The institution collects labor, obedience, and the perpetuation of its structure in real time, while the subject's reward is deferred to a domain that the institution itself defines and controls.

And here, at the bottom of the analysis, something comes into view that we have been approaching from the start. Every chapter since the first one has dealt with abstractions. The soldier, the bureaucrat — they appeared as a function within a system, not as a person. It is the only way the analysis could proceed. The question "who benefits?" was supposed to be answerable in conceptual terms: institutions, elites. And these answers are correct as far as they go. But they do not go far enough, as "institutions" and "elites" are themselves abstractions. Behind an institution stand specific human beings, behind elite there is a person with a face. To complete the analysis one would have to arrive at a concrete person. And at that moment the analytical framework encounters something it was not designed to handle.

A concrete person is not a carrier of an ontovirus, not a function. He is someone — irreducible and unsubstitutable.