​Interlude

The argument can now be surveyed from above.

Morality rests on ontology: a moral verdict is a derivative of a picture of reality. Ontology is protected by morality: guilt, taboo, and the sacred prevent the postulate at the base from being examined. And ontology itself is an act of delegation: the subject hands over his will to a system that provides orientation, belonging, and identity in return.

Consider the ontoviruses that have reached the threshold of self-sustaining existence — those we have called egregores. Their content varies without limit: one prescribes prayer, another suggests revolution, a third uses the scientific method. Yet they share a set of properties that no variation of content can alter. All produce a community in which the subject ceases to be a solitary agent and becomes a member. Each installs a shared purpose that overrides his own, generates a morality that enforces alignment and punishes deviation, and demands delegation of the subject's will. All conceal the delegation behind the language of freedom: the choice is real in the sense that no gun is pointed at the subject's head, but it was pre-structured by the ontovirus that assembled his criteria for choosing.

Strip the content, and what remains is one egregore with many names: the imperative that the subject surrender his will. The ontoviruses compete the way brands do: fiercely, for market share, within a system whose logic none of them threatens. A subject who rejects one and adopts another has changed the content and preserved the goal.

Against the Light called this arrangement the Farm: a world in which the subject's will is the crop. The present analysis has arrived at the same conclusion from the opposite direction.