The Roots of Fidelity - Volume I

The Roots of Fidelity: The Dhamma, the Island of Reality, and the Relational Object is a three-volume interdisciplinary study of fidelity, monogamy, pair-bonding, family, and household organization as interconnected biological, ethical, relational, social, legal, and civilizational structures. Rather than approaching monogamy primarily as convention, sexual prohibition, or lifestyle preference, the trilogy investigates the conditions under which durable relational forms arise, the functions they perform in coordinating vulnerability, care, reproduction, responsibility, kinship, and social continuity, and the intellectual processes through which these structures have increasingly been redescribed as arbitrary restrictions upon individual autonomy. Across the three volumes, the project moves from the ethical and ontological structure of fidelity, through the evolutionary and civilizational architecture of monogamy and care, to the historical reconstruction of family and household authority and the critique of their ideological inversion.

Volume I, Buddhist Ethics, Austrian Realism, and the Structure of Fidelity, establishes the philosophical and psycho-ethical foundation of this larger inquiry. It asks what fidelity is before turning, in the subsequent volumes, to the biological, anthropological, legal, historical, and institutional development of monogamy and family. The volume treats fidelity not as a private sentiment or inherited moral convention but as a relational structure through which desire becomes trustworthy, vulnerability is protected, and intimate life becomes durable and intelligible. 

The first part develops a Buddhist account of fidelity as the lay analogue to monastic celibacy. Drawing upon the ethics of restraint, anattā (non-self), karuṇā (compassion), and sīla (moral discipline), it interprets fidelity as a discipline of desire situated within a wider field of responsibility, non-betrayal, non-deception, and the reduction of suffering. This framework challenges accounts of sexuality in which autonomy and consent exhaust the ethical meaning of intimate conduct. Consent remains necessary, but the volume argues that relational ethics must also consider intention, consequence, trust, vulnerability, responsibility, and the integrity of the relational whole. 

The second part turns to Austrian descriptive realism and object theory, particularly Brentano, Meinong, and Ehrenfels. Through the concepts of intentionality, objecthood, and Gestalt, the pair-bond is analyzed as a relational object whose properties cannot be reduced to the isolated preferences or formally authorized acts of its members. Fidelity, betrayal, trust, and relational harm are consequently treated as features of an organized relational whole rather than merely subjective responses to discrete actions. This provides the ontological basis for the volume's concept of the Island of Reality: the protected descriptive space in which relational structures are encountered as realities before they are linguistically or ideologically redescribed.  

The final part examines the temporal dynamics of intimate attachment through the distinction between New Relationship Energy (NRE) and Old Relationship Energy (ORE). NRE describes the intensity of novelty and relational arising, whereas ORE describes the mature stabilization of attachment, familiarity, trust, and return. The analysis connects the recurrent pursuit of novelty with craving, habituation, and dissatisfaction, while interpreting fidelity as a means of stabilizing desire rather than suppressing it. Polyamory and nonmonogamy are critically examined within this framework as relational forms in which novelty, autonomy, and consent may become detached from the Gestalt that gives intimacy its continuity and ethical form. 

Situated within Integrative System-Theoretical Realism (ISTR), Volume I therefore provides the inner foundation of the trilogy. It brings Buddhist ethics, Austrian descriptive realism, relational ontology, and system theory into a common analytical framework and develops fidelity as a reality-conforming structure: a disciplined form through which desire, attachment, compassion, trust, and embodied vulnerability can acquire durable relational coherence.