Faunacide-Vectors: Freedom and Post-War Ethics
In contemporary discourse, figures of authority, emergency language, and migration politics dominate public attention. Meanwhile, faunacide and ecological destruction proceed largely unremarked, normalized as technical or logistical necessity. This analysis argues that such destruction is not incidental, but the structural endpoint of consumer belief systems: where inherited ethical frameworks are hollowed out, freedom becomes choice without responsibility, and moral reflection is suspended. Migration discourse absorbs ethical energy, obscuring the species-bound limitations of post-war ethics on both sides of the Atlantic. Faunacide thus reveals what these societies cannot confront — the ethical boundary at which civilization itself is measured.
Faunacide-Vectors: Consumer Belief, Freedom, and the Dissolution of cross Atlantic Post‑War Ethics
- Introduction: not decline, but a system outcome
What is commonly described as moral decline or cultural decay is better understood as a structural outcome of late consumer civilization. Ethics have not disappeared; they have been reorganized. Belief has not vanished; it has been simplified and “automatized”. Across both the United States and Germany – despite their radically different histories – ethical vocabularies are thinning, freedom is reduced to gesture, and responsibility is increasingly externalized. This is not primarily the result of migration, religion, or individual ignorance, but of a deeper merger between inherited belief structures and market-generated logic, where cultural tension and collaboration add their dynamics but need to be seen in forefront of even further and global developments [anthropogenism; the belief that hegemonial human systems alone are the source and measure of meaning, value, and moral agency and relevance.].
- Consumerism as a belief machine
Consumerism does not function merely by producing/selling/obtaining goods. It requires belief systems that are fast, emotionally legible, and low-cost. Skepticism, reflection, and ethical ambiguity slow markets down; simple belief accelerates them.
Thus consumerism produces beliefs that look moral but operate as habits:
- freedom becomes choice between options,
- identity becomes visible alignment,
- goodness becomes certification or branding,
- meaning becomes recognition.
These beliefs are not argued; they are absorbed. They do not ask for dedication, restraint, or responsibility, only participation.
- Historically inherited belief structures in the Western Christianized world
Before consumerism, belief systems were heavy. They imposed limits and demanded ethical cost. Across religious, national, and philosophical traditions, four structural elements were central:
- Belonging – identity rooted in shared fate (church, nation, class).
- Moral authority – ethics grounded in something external to the individual (God, law, tradition).
- Sacrifice – meaning produced through restraint, duty, or loss.
- Teleology – history understood as directional, carrying responsibility across time.
These systems were often violent and exclusionary, but they produced ethical depth because belief was not frictionless.
- The merger: structure retained, substance replaced
Consumerism did not destroy inherited belief forms; it ‘colonized’ them. The structures remain, but their substance is hollowed out.
- Belonging becomes branding or camp affiliation.
- Moral authority becomes metrics, algorithms, expertise, or visibility.
- Sacrifice becomes performance and signaling.
- Teleology becomes the illusion of progress through optimization and growth.
The result is belief without transcendence and ethics without cost. People feel morally certain while lacking ethical capacity. A vacuum is filled with externalized, delegated history making.
- Freedom as consumer belief
This merger explains the collapse of freedom as an ethical concept.
Historically, freedom implied responsibility: the capacity to refuse, to limit oneself, and to bear consequences. In consumer logic, freedom is redefined as abundance of options, personalization, and exit without loss. Refusal appears antisocial, limits appear oppressive, and responsibility feels archaic.
Freedom survives as a slogan, not a practice.
- Cross-Atlantic > The US and Germany: two failures, one convergence
The United States and Germany arrive at this condition from opposite directions.
The US developed a strong idea of freedom, but a thin ethical foundation. Freedom was primarily negative and expansive—freedom from restraint, freedom to act. When consumerism hollowed out meaning, freedom collapsed into spectacle, culture war, and belief without depth. Ethical language became binary and performative.
Germany, by contrast, never trusted freedom. Historically associated with chaos and danger, freedom was replaced after 1945 by order, legality, procedure, and later technocratic morality. Ethics became institutional rather than lived; responsibility was formalized while freedom was managed away. Germany exports compliance aesthetics rather than ethical autonomy.
One side retains identity without responsibility. The other retains responsibility language without freedom. Migration exposes this fracture, but does not initially cause it.
- Migration, governance, and ethical suspension
Migration functions as an override switch because it brings ethical questions into the present tense. Rather than confronting universal responsibility, states reframe migrants as risks or management problems.
In the US, migration threatens symbolic identity and triggers overt exclusion. In Germany, migration is administratively absorbed through labor, NGOs, and procedural tolerance. Patriarchal and authoritarian social patterns are not admired, but instrumentalized as forms of low-cost order.
What appears as tolerance is often ethical abandonment. Violence becomes culturalized and responsibility diffused.
- The rise of functional primitivism
The outcome is not barbarism, but functional primitivism: technologically advanced societies with reduced ethical articulation. Moral vocabularies shrink to slogans, outrage replaces judgment, and belonging overrides conscience.
This primitivism is systemic. It produces cheap consumers rather than thinking subjects, because thinking subjects introduce friction. Ethical complexity does not scale.
- Why resistance collapses
Resistance movements fail when they adopt consumer belief logic: branding, optimization, moral simplification. At that point they no longer produce ethical subjects, only consumers of dissent. Critique becomes content; opposition becomes niche.
- Faunacide: where the merger becomes undeniable
The structure described above reaches its clearest and most brutal expression in the human–animal relation. If there is one domain where the absence of freedom, responsibility, and ethical depth can no longer be rhetorically concealed, it is the systematic destruction of nonhuman life.
Faunacide is not an anomaly within consumer civilization; it is its logical endpoint. Animals cannot be fully absorbed into consumer belief systems as moral subjects, because they do not participate in identity signaling, political camps, or symbolic belonging. They cannot be moralized into visibility. They can only be managed, optimized, and eliminated within this apparatus.
Here, the merger of inherited belief and market logic is exposed without remainder.
- Animals as the absolute outside of consumer belief
Historically, animals were never outside belief systems. They were drawn into human world-making as sacrificial bodies, cosmological mediators, moral allegories, or co-inhabitants of an ordered cosmos. These positions were violent not only because animals were killed, but because their lives were subsumed under human narratives. Animals did not appear as wise, complete, knowing animals, but as carriers of meanings no space was left for their own ontological presence. Their suffering mattered as instrumental for symbolic, religious, or social coherence.
This narrative absorption was the first abstraction of animal life – and already a rehearsal of a basic philosophical human self-impoverishment. The capacity to overwrite living beings with imposed meaning, trained human consciousness to accept domination as sense-making.
Consumer civilization radicalizes this logic by assuming that it has overcome symbolic inclusion, to bolster the speciesist object status even more. Animals are narrated under the collective human terms that rule over them; they are processed by a system. They are expected to be seen as “units of production”, “datasets”, “environmental parameters”, or “interchangeable sustainability icons”. The shallow myth, ritual, or justification could easily become fauna that requires management, in forefront of humanities dominating identity.
Animals are excluded not only from moral considerations, but senses of belonging, own authority, own commitment, and teleology altogether is ascribed to the human sui generis. Animality is projected to exist only as functions within human systems.
Their experiences with this dominating ruled by humans carries the symbolic or ethical weight to humans that they rule over the nonhuman caste, homo sapiens confronts the world in this manner.
Their deaths do not interrupt the story of progress, because progress no longer tells a story – it merely continues.
In this sense, animals become the absolute outside of consumer belief: sacrificed for trifleness to mark the hight of contempt for animality; instrumentalized for meaning-via-negation, reduced to the experience of total interruption and trauma. The disappearance of animals from reasonable narratives with people marks not an ethical advance or mastery of sterility, but the final stage of a civilization that has learned to narrate life itself out of existence while grasping for full control.
- Ethical collapse without ideological conflict
Migration functions as a global moral theater that pacifies speciesism across political camps. It generates permanent ideological conflict in which opposing human groups appear irreconcilable, while remaining structurally united in their domination of nonhuman life. The right externalizes violence by projecting brutality, disorder, and moral deficiency exclusively onto migrating individuals and groups; among migrants self-images marked by ostensive speciesism are signaled in the social scales deemed suitable; western/ized liberals and progressives respond within the same human-centered moral frame. All participants perform ethical conflict, while its deepest foundation – speciesist hegemonial destruction – remains untouched and unquestioned. Migration and cultural clashes absorb ethical energy and these conflicts allow societies to rehearse morality without confronting each groups and group mergers morality’s limits.
Animals and Animal Habitats (Nature), by contrast, are not perceived as political subjects at all. They are framed as biological variables that appear and disappear, not as beings and life whose destruction demands ethical confrontation. They are not granted any recognized constituency, any symbolic leverage, and no mirroring terms to destabilize current human identity politics. As a result, no ideological conflict is required. Faunacide proceeds without moral friction.
Where migration discourse erodes post-war ethics through the language of emergency, crisis, and exception, faunacide erodes them through normality. Industrial or single killings, habitat destruction, and extinction are processed as technical necessities, logistical challenges, or unintended side effects of progress – never as ethical events.
This asymmetry exposes the truth of post-war ethics. They were never universal. They were conditional, selectively applied, and fundamentally species-bound. What appears as moral polarization within humanity functions, in practice, as a shared silence regarding the systematic annihilation of nonhuman life.
- Germany and the US: convergence at the animal boundary
Despite their differences, the United States and Germany converge completely in their destructive hegemony over animals and nature.
- The US applies market freedom directly: animals are property, resources, inputs.
- Germany applies managed ethics: welfare regulation, certification, procedural compassion.
Both systems produce the same outcome: large-scale, routinized annihilation.
Here, the contrast between freedom-without-ethics and ethics-without-freedom collapses. Animals and Nature receive neither.
- Why animals expose the fiction of ethical progress
Animals reveal what consumer belief systems cannot tolerate: beings who demand ethical consideration without offering any symbolic return that fits the human belief systems. There is no consumer reward for civil courage towards animal and animal habitat concerns. No identity capital. No scalable narrative of sacrifice. Therefore, ethics is reduced to mitigation, not transformation. Sustainability discourse functions as the ultimate moral anesthesia. It preserves the illusion of responsibility while protecting the underlying logic of destruction, murder and infliction of torture.
- Faunacide as the measure of freedom
If freedom were understood as ethical capacity rather than option abundance, the human–animal relation would be its primary test. A society incapable of refusing systematic and individual animal destruction is not unfree because it is coerced, but because it lacks the ethical imagination to correct itself at all.
Faunacide thus becomes the negative proof of freedom: where animals are annihilated as agents of knowledge, an idea of freedom beyond utter insularity has simply been bypassed.
- Conclusion: the boundary that cannot be outsourced
Animals mark the point where consumer civilization can no longer externalize responsibility. There is no cultural proxy, no intra-human unsolvable dilemma, no ideological schism onto which violence can be displaced.
Faunacide is not a side issue. It is the structural revelation that post-war ethics, consumer belief, and managed morality never combined a form of reason with a degree of involvement (…) where would have been necessary. The results are parallel developments of moral decay in all their consequences. A civilization that cannot articulate ethical responsibility toward nonhuman life has not lost its ethics, it has revealed that this ethical limit causes an inversion of anything that might be considered to be a “human” idea.