Ethics and fantasy - How Farkasember mirrors reality

When worlds teach truth - ethics, fiction and functional logic

By creating my own fantasy world, I have understood what many philosophers have never realized: That ethics, once decoupled from reality, inevitably become arbitrary. When I created the peoples, societies and belief systems of my novel world Farkasember, I didn't realize at first that I was also experimenting with reality itself.

Because worldbuilding is essentially nothing other than the creation of alternative functional systems - micro-societies with their own norms, laws, power structures and moral self-images. And while I was constructing these worlds, I began to understand how much the ethics of our own reality are not based on truth, but on majority consensus - in other words, on a kind of collective self-hypnosis.

Ethics as an illusion of consensus

When you create a fantasy world, you inevitably start to look at the foundations of morality. What is „good“ in a world where magic exists? What is „evil“ when life can be prolonged, altered or sacrificed by supernatural forces? These questions have been with me throughout Farkasember, especially in the creation of the Elven nations - once a single people until they were split into three ethically divergent cultures by the magic of Verozag:

• The High Elves, who understand magic as a divine order - a tool of the spirit that must be controlled.
• The forest elves, who understand magic as a natural cycle - something that can be used but not possessed.
• The Dark Elves, who see magic as liberation from divine control - an act of self-empowerment against all order.

Each of these cultures has produced its own ethics, its own moral canon. But none of these ethics is universally true - they all exist only within their social consensus. And that was precisely the moment of realization:

Ethics without a fixed point in reality is not morality, but statistics.
It does not arise from truth, but from consent.

From fiction to the diagnosis of reality

What began in Farkasember as a fictional conflict - a dispute about the right way to deal with magic - became for me an insight into human civilization itself. After all, our real ethics hardly work any differently: they are rarely based on objective effects, but almost always on social acceptance. Whether religion, politics or ideology - whoever mobilizes enough followers defines what is „good“ and „right“.

But this is not moral progress - it is just a stabilized coincidence. Because truth does not need a majority. And morality that is not linked to function, effect and reality loses its meaning. I realized:

Every society that bases ethics on consensus rather than function creates its own moral simulation.

Ethics as a mirror of the system

With every chapter I wrote, it became clearer to me that the world I was creating did not reflect my imagination - it reflected my insight. For while the elves struggled over the morally „right“ way to use magic, I saw that this dispute mirrored exactly what has been happening in our reality for millennia: Every civilization creates its own ethics, but none tests them against the reality that affects them.

What happens in the world of Farkasember For us, magic is power, knowledge or technology. And like the elves, we define our moral framework not from functional awareness, but from habit, emotion or fear. Ethics becomes a tool of belonging, not of knowledge. It serves to stabilize systems - even when they are objectively destructive. I realized:

Ethics is not originally a moral concept, but a functional one.
It is not meant to please, but to work.

But in our time, it has become a mirror of emotion, a semantic decoration for power structures that want to preserve themselves. It is no longer what controls the system - it is what justifies the system.

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The Strüver model - ethics through function

It was precisely at this point that I began to rethink ethics - not as a moral code, but as a functional balance. In the Strüver model, ethics does not arise from belief, feeling or majority, but from the interplay of three basic pillars:

• Strength - the ability to recognize and bear reality.
• Moral - the ability to maintain balance and responsibility.
• Knowledge - the ability to understand cause and effect.

Ethics is then no longer a set of rules, but a dynamic calibration process between these three forces. It is neither absolute nor arbitrary - it is stable because it is self-correcting. If one of the elements dominates, destruction results:

• Strength without morality becomes tyranny.
• Morality without knowledge becomes ideology.
• Knowledge without strength becomes powerlessness.

Only their balance creates what I call functional ethics - ethics that do not ask what feels good, but what is sustainable.

From the majority to mechanics

In the world of Farkasember, this idea became a narrative truth. The elven peoples who split into moral factions are no mere symbol - they are a functional diagnosis: any system that binds ethics to emotion or consensus falls apart of its own arbitrariness.

Because ethics that are legitimized by the majority lose their direction as soon as the majority changes. Real ethics, however, does not need approval - it needs stability. It recognizes that actions are not good because many approve of them, but because they preserve reality instead of destroying it. This is true in fiction as well as in history, in politics as well as in psychology.

In this realization, fiction and philosophy finally become blurred for me:

What I created in my world was not just literature -
It was proof that ethics are only real if they can be measured.

Fiction as a laboratory of truth

I never wrote fantasy to escape. I wrote it to test.
Every invented society, every people, every rule became a testing ground for me: How does morality behave when you isolate it? What happens when you take reality away from it - or give it back to it?

I realized that worldbuilding is basically a philosophical experiment. An author creates miniature societies that make the same mistakes as real humanity - but in a clearer, purer form. You can see there what remains hidden in reality: that ethics, as soon as they are not based on function, always lead to dogma, division or decadence.

That's why I don't write fantasy about escape, but about return. A return to order, to the cause, to the truth behind the myth. Because where fiction mirrors reality, knowledge begins - and where knowledge carries, ethics arise.

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Conclusion - When world creation becomes self-knowledge

In the end, I didn't just create a world - I used it to understand how reality works. What began as a literary project became an epistemological feedback loop: I wanted to tell a story about peoples, magic and power - and instead found myself at the heart of ethics. Because every fictional society I created showed me the same truth:

Where morality is not bound to reality, ideology arises.
Where truth remains unmeasurable, faith arises instead of knowledge.

The Strüver model was not the goal, but the result of this discovery. I didn't invent it to have a theory - it grew out of the observation that every stable civilization, real or fictional, needs the same principles to survive: a balance between strength, morality and knowledge. For me, worldbuilding became a method of understanding reality. Because when you build worlds, you learn that every rule, every ethic, every order has an effect - and that truth is not a moral state, but a functional stability. Today, I believe that fiction is the most honest form of philosophy. It doesn't lie - it just allows us to look at the truth in a different way.

And perhaps this is the deepest meaning of my work: I don't create fantasy to escape the world - I create it to understand it. Because only those who understand their own worlds will eventually grasp what reality really is.

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