​Chapter 22

Any honest reader who reached this point may ask: if morality is dismantled, what do you propose instead? What is the alternative moral code?

The answer is apparent: there is none. The error is in the question itself. It assumes that the only possible response to the collapse of one morality is to build another. But the entire argument of this book has been that a morality is the surface expression of an underlying ontology, and an ontology is a delegation of will. To offer a revised morality would be to install a new ontovirus under a different name.

The self-closed subject does not need a new code. He determines his relationship to others directly, in each concrete encounter. The interaction is authored in the moment, not derived from any pre-existing grid. The patriot’s brother, the bureaucrat’s friend — these were the cases of the personal space. What the subject does there is his own decision, made in real time and carried with full responsibility. No book can prescribe it.

Strip away ontoviruses and what determines how one person treats another is a direct perception: is this a faceless unit, someone I love, or an enemy? The perception is prior to any rule. The mother who shields her child with her body is not consulting the categorical imperative. The man who strikes someone who has humiliated him is not running a utilitarian calculation. Both act from an immediate sense of the other — a viewpoint the constructive space works constantly to override.

Real human relationships between friends, husbands and wives, parents and children are not governed by moral codes. On the contrary, most people are instinctively offended when someone tries to introduce one. A partner who suddenly starts talking about "the moral rules of our relationship" or "our family obligations" is usually met with irritation or outright resistance. The same thing happens among close friends: if one begins to judge the other according to some abstract principle of fairness or duty instead of simply responding to the person standing in front of him, the relationship immediately feels forced and artificial.

Frans de Waal spent decades documenting reconciliation, consolation, and targeted helping among chimpanzees and bonobos. A chimpanzee who has lost a fight receives grooming and embraces from bystanders, capuchin monkeys reject unequal food distribution, refusing a reward if a partner receives less for the same task. Bonobos share food with strangers when no rule compels them to and no audience is watching. None of these animals possess a moral code, a concept of duty, or a theory of justice. What they display is a direct perception of the other's state and a response that arises from the encounter itself. De Waal's conclusion is that the building blocks of morality, such as empathy and a sense of fairness, precede any moral system and do not require one. The personal space, in other words, is older than the constructive.

A man walks past a beggar. If he gives money because charity is prescribed and alms buy salvation, then this is a moral act, a transaction between the subject and his ontovirus, in which the beggar is the part of the machinery. The beggar could be anyone; what matters is the act's value on the subject's spiritual ledger. If he gives because this specific person, right here, provoked something in him — this is an amoral act. The result may look identical, the difference is who authored the decision and for whom it was made.

Any sincere personal relationship is amoral.

This is the position we defend: genuine amorality. Not immorality, which is the inversion of an existing code and therefore still a form of obedience, but a stance entirely outside the jurisdiction of moral categories. The subject does not discard the vocabulary of good and evil, nor does he invent a private replacement. He can still employ any ethical framework: utilitarian calculus, Kantian duty, virtue ethics, tribal loyalty. But none of them hold him.

The classical trolley dilemma is a problem only for those who believe that a correct answer exists and that the right system will produce it. The amoral subject sees a concrete person, in a specific situation, who must decide and carry the weight of the decision. Whether he applies utilitarian calculus or saves the one he knows personally is his choice. The textbook does not give him the answer. The subject must accept the burden of having decided.

Ethics, at bottom, is the search for a system that will make the decision for the subject and relieve him of authorship. The entire argument can now be compressed into one definition:

Morality is a mechanism of agency delegation that protects its own ontology, relieves the burden of decision, and breaks upon encountering a concrete other.

The subject does not author his verdicts; he receives them from the ontovirus and executes them as if they were his own. The moral layer exists to shield the underlying postulates from examination. And it breaks upon encountering a concrete other in the personal space. Autonomous creation is the positive content of this position. The subject who has recovered his agency creates values deliberately and with full responsibility for their existence.

One may object that the subject who answers to no authority beyond his own will is a sociopath.

But the sociopath does not create values — he lacks the hardware that makes valuation possible. His relation to others is pre-moral: he treats people as objects because the construct never installed the relevant module. The position described here is post-moral. The subject retains the full capacity to recognize the other agent; he has changed his relationship to the machinery that once dictated how he should respond.

But if morality is abandoned, would not the result be chaos? Without shared moral constraints, society collapses into a war of all against all.

Actually, the constructive space is the single most prolific producer of large-scale destruction in human history. The Crusades required a theological ontovirus that classified an entire civilization as enemies of God. The Atlantic slave trade reclassified human beings into property. The Holocaust required a bureaucratic apparatus so thorough that personal space could not open at any point from policy to gas chamber. Stalin’s purges, the two world wars, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Red Khmers, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years’ War, and the colonial projects that depopulated continents — all relied on the egregore: an ontology that justified the violence, a moral framework that sanctified it, and a delegation system that distributed responsibility so evenly that no single subject felt accountable.

To put the scale in perspective, evaluate the raw numbers. Estimates of deaths caused by governments through genocide, political repression, and engineered famine during the twentieth century vary widely depending on methodology. Conservative figures from mainstream historiography place the total in the range of 100 to 150 million; higher estimates that include indirect deaths from state policy run considerably above that. Adding military casualties from both world wars and other armed conflicts brings the figure higher still. Criminal homicides during the same century are harder to aggregate, but estimates suggest a figure in the range of 20 to 30 million. The ratio is stark regardless of which estimate one adopts: organized state and ideological violence killed many times more people than individual criminality. In the twenty-first century the picture is mixed. Deaths from wars and genocides, however, have risen sharply in recent years — driven primarily by armed conflicts in which annual military casualties run into the hundreds of thousands. Even so, the long-term historical pattern holds: when violence is organized and justified by an ideology or state apparatus, its scale far exceeds what individual criminals can achieve.

It also would be misleading to classify most criminal killings as acts originating in the personal space. The majority are still driven by constructs, merely on a smaller scale — gang codes, "honor" killings, revenge for "disrespect," drug-related turf wars.

One individual can cause real harm, but his capacity for destruction is bounded by physical reach and lifespan. The egregore does not just permit large-scale destruction, it is the necessary condition for it. Mass atrocity requires coordination: soldiers who believe in duty, bureaucrats who follow procedures, citizens who hate the enemy. Each of these beliefs is a product of the ontovirus.

However, this argument is primarily a critique of the constructive space rather than a claim that the personal space is inherently superior. To assert that it is "better" would itself constitute a moral judgment and therefore another form of the ontovirus. The amoral position does not propose a new collective project. It remains the domain of individuals.

A reader may object: what if a self-closed subject chooses radical egoism and hedonism as his own postulates? How is he different from a dictator who starts wars for personal power or an oligarch who exploits others for his own pleasure?

The objection is still made within a moral frame — it asks "is this better or worse?" The self-closed subject does not evaluate his choice as good or evil; he just authors it. Externally, such a person may indeed look no different from an ordinary egoist or dictator. As mentioned previously, it is the subject's responsibility to determine how to exercise his freedom.

Another self-closed subject will not judge him as a moral monster or incarnation of evil. He will respond from his own postulates — perhaps with calculated strategy, but without moral outrage or the need to condemn. He does not waste energy on hatred or indignation; he follows his own line of action.

It is highly doubtful, though, that most historical dictators and ruthless power-seekers were genuinely self-closed. Far more often they are possessed by a particularly strong and personalized ontovirus — the construct of absolute power, historical destiny, divine mission, or unlimited accumulation. They have not stepped outside constructs; they have made one ontovirus the new center of their reality.

A true self-closed subject tends to see the ultimate emptiness of fame, billions, and absolute power. He may still pursue them if he chooses, but he does so without the illusion that they are sacred or necessary.

Self-closure is inherently solitary. A self-closed subject cannot confront or replace society as a whole. Society is by definition stronger than any single person or a small group. This is just a recognition of its nature and limits. Amorality does not aim at maximizing the good or creating a better collective order. What is liberated is the one who ceases to be the raw material for the ontoviruses that use him for their own reproduction. The self-closed subject stops being part of that machinery.

Such a subject can, and often does, conceal himself. He may mimic participation in social groups, political movements, or religions, because openly declaring amorality usually provokes an immune response.

Amorality, like the Left-Hand Path as a whole, is a strategy of the individual subject. Its sole concern is the liberation of one person. Any attempt to evaluate this position from the social perspective, to ask whether it is beneficial or harmful to the collective, drags the discussion back into the constructive space. Such questions presuppose a shared moral or ontological framework in which one can weigh "the greater good." The personal space does not scale.

The freedom at issue here is the capacity to create values, knowing they are illusory. This freedom is experienced as the Abyss.

This is the other side of good and evil.