To hell with morality

The moon won’t fall to Earth without it

Gamma Gavia
Aug 25, 2017 · 4 min read

Morality is about what are good and evil. Two concepts that refer to nothing, and don’t clearly describe anything either. When we do describe them, we do so by giving examples like “killing is evil” and “distributing your money to the poor is good”, but we never agree on the details and often there is a shitload of exceptions, including to the two “moral truths” mentioned above. The reason for all the disagreement and exceptions is what we all should have suspected by now anyway: morality is an unfounded and dogmatic trap, that messes with our ability to reason.


In the end, all morality boils down to will, whether of a certain people, an almighty god, or that of some other murky bastard. Whoever, whatever or wherever they are, they are imposing their will; and very effectively so.

You don’t like it when some crowd kicks people in the face until they die? If your morality would now be taken away from you completely, you would still dislike it. Morality is just a bunch of rules telling you what you should or should not like or do, that coexists with, but is at least partly independent of, your actual likes and dislikes and behavior.

Whatever the exact causal relation is between morality and your actual behavior, morality has a terrible track record no matter what you currently will or find moral. Morality has given us excuses to burn people alive, enslave them and throw rocks at them until they die. And it’s not just physically violent moralities that have made our lives miserable. There are plenty of “peace-loving” moralities that still make life unlivable for anyone with a slightly different will than to live together with one opposite-sexed person from the same community for life, breeding as many offspring as is respectable, while working forty hours a week in an animal factory and praying for forgiveness on Sunday. And it’s also not only god-fearing moralities that are to blame, as is easily observable by watching the many ungodly regimes that claim to perfectly know good from evil. Even the most peaceful morality is massively violent, forcing us day in day out, to live the life that is required of us, not to be scolded by our moral peers and ourselves. In a world in which morality rules, the only thing we can do is hope that what is expected of us happens to neatly align with our own will.


Maybe it’s time to stand still, and to imagine yourself only acting on your own will. Will you stop feeding your children? Will you rape your good-looking neighbor? Will you stop loving the people around you? No? Then what is still preventing you? Is it the fact that a world without morality is unimaginable, or is it the fact that morality has absolutely nothing to do with your voluntary behavior, and is only effectively at play when it is forcing you to do against your will, utterly insignificant things that do not increase anyone’s well-being whatsoever; except maybe, the well-being of those people that are so infected, that they will worry their heads off if you are not doing what you are supposed to do, which you may see as a good reason to comply, as you care about those people’s well-being. But if we don’t break the chain somewhere, it will be firmly attached to our ankles for eternity.

So, even as you sacrifice yourself and comply to save your wise and guiding ancestors from a heart-attack, you might consider being the link in the chain that starts thinking about the well-being of your children. If you value your descendants over your ancestors, then act! If you bend and avoid the fight, your ancestors and rabbis and mullahs and priests and gurus will continue to dominate your descendants, possibly for many generations to come.

Do you really want to morally judge others and yourself? Even though you perfectly know it is utter insanity? Some moralities teach us forgiveness, but it’s the blaming, caused by those same moralities, that is the problem in the first place. Ideas like free will and good and evil do not make us friendlier. Instead they make us cold to the inner worlds and wishes of ourselves and those of others, and they drag us down to the utterly uncivilized level we are at right now, pointing fingers, inwardly and outwardly, telling how evil others are, and engaging in auto-mutilation, physical or otherwise, out of self-hate.

If you want to throw a serial killer in prison, by all means go ahead. But remember you don’t do it because he — it’s probably a he — is evil, but simply because you would find it undesirable having him roaming the streets. Don’t call it justice. There is no justice. There is no justness. There is no sin. There is no right. There is only will. In the end, the source of all legitimacy is will, and nothing but will. Sharpen it, and use it to cut down the tree of good and evil.


There are no good and evil; and at the same time, they are the things that make human beings the most wretched beings on Earth. A world without morality is much more pleasant to live in. It’s a world in which we understand that we are entitled to nothing by the grace of Good, and personally take responsibility for our lives. Instead of listening to morality, listen to yourself, and build not a moral world, but a world you want to live in.

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