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A number detached from anything meaningful is just a number, and a number that is merely associated with another piece of information is not value in the sense that it is useful information. We may for example issue instructions to add two variables and assign the result to a third. These are values that are relevant to the computation, but if the instruction is carried out with no apparent output, they are valueless to most users who do not see the state of the computer's memory. I define value here not merely in the mathematical sense, where the application of mathematics is implied somewhere. Value in pure mathematics is applicable to the concept that numbers can be operated on in various ways, and numbers are derived from a set theory suggesting that we can count things. In other words, numbers and everything in mathematics involves logical propositions. Mathematics is not sensical as a derivation of logic in any other way. I should not make this a mathematics lesson, but if we are to apply any mathematical construct to a world outside of knowledge, values are not merely numbers or logic, but meaningful numbers related to something that happens. For all of our purposes here, value refers to propositions which attain some goal that is appreciable by knowledge. The goals may involve a world that knowledge seeks to command that is outside of the knowledge process, or it may involve purely abstract goals. The abstract goals are morally understood to not mean anything truly valuable in an economic sense. It does not matter to us if we win a video game, unless it has significant real world consequences. We are able to discern for the most part what is valuable in one context over another. That which is valuable in society is not the same as that which is valuable for our own purposes, and there are values we may regard concerning observations of the natural world, where we recognize their relevance to that question but do not morally value them or even consider it particularly interesting for ourselves. This value is not value in exchange or utility, but a basic sense that is valued for some moral purpose we have construed. By "moral purpose" we do not prefer any particular ethical theory or suggest these purposes are universal, but suggest that humans are moral actors before they can be any other type of actors, and this is the first sign of value. In a later chapter of this book, moral philosophy and what it proposes will be examined. We need not envision moral acts as being significant to our sense of the word, nor do we need to envision our actions are deliberate or rational or possess any intrinsic purpose. What this means in short is that we do things because on some level we want to, if we are creatures with agency to act at all. If we are just flotsam devoid of any purpose, then nothing we do is really relevant and it is only symbolized and tokenized after the fact as a "thing", a fleeting "being" which evaporates and is dismissed as noise for our purposes of management.

If we are totally under the command of another agent, the commanding agent would bear the cost. Not all information affecting this calculation is a moral act. The non-living environment, such as the raw materials or industrial tools, are not moral actors in their own right, but are informationally relevant. The master-slave relationship is not in of itself morally worth anything, nor is any other social relationship intrinsically worth anything in a singular realized instance. There is a cost associated with any command of another agent, or something affecting the agent that can be assigned some value because it intervenes in the process. The same is true of the workman's relationship with tools or anything worked on - the worker-product relationship is not intrinsically useful, but the product, tools, externalities, and so one are all values. Whether we morally care about the values does not change that any economic act has consequences, which are not limited to the one outcome we intended. For informational purposes, every relationship in this sense of value is the result of agents affecting things by force, or agents exchanging freely with agents. An agent could exchange with the world itself or some commons designated, but in principle, every commons or every domain can have a name and a claim placed on it. To defend the commons as the commons is itself a claim of many agents who operate out a sense that the commons is morally valuable and necessary for many reasons that are not immediately informational, or whose informational content concerns concepts of society as a whole that are held as a value above something that is exchanged for crass purposes. When we concern ourselves with value in this sense, it is very important to be aware of what exactly is happening in every interaction, and then build a model for an information network where these actions take place. In a moral sense, the propositions of value are not mathematical ones. It is not possible to freely exchange or subdivide any moral sentiment, as if the brain and soul of agents were split and the injection of a devil on the shoulder is your fault or the will of the Satan. We may morally value some tokens or a number in a ledger signifying credit or a promise of exchange for goods in society, but the tokens themselves are not intrinsically valuable, and the moral value of money or credit is not a uniform proposition that can be defended. Money exists because it is a tool for a purpose, and human societies did not always possess money, nor in the form it takes today or 200 years ago, nor are currency schemes facts of nature that stand forever. History shows currency and credit to be volatile and thus market failures are commonplace, and this is part of the design of market economies. They are corrected violently, and there are agents in the market environment who believe this is perfectly moral and upright for various purposes.

For now, any economic value involving exchange with other agents or theoretical exchanges with other agents will be minimized. To exchange implies that an agent has moral consideration of something the agent itself does. It is always the doing of things that is morally valuable, rather than the being of anything. Things that simply "are" do not have any intrinsic moral quality by existing. If someone were to appreciate the form of the object or hold some attachment to things, that may be valuable in utility or exchange, but nothing is actually "done" with the object. Anything that is done is inside the agent and valuable only for the agent's internal calculation. Moral values are only relevant towards actions. If we assign moral worth to things, whether they are people, objects, situations, or anything else, the worth is an indicator of what we are to do with those things, rather than a just-so statement suggesting moral values are automatic. We individually do with things what we judge to be right, rather than what is prescribed by some law of nature. The true law of human nature that would be construed as compelling us to act in accord with some presumed personified Nature is that human nature commands us to be moral actors. Therefore, even if we can predict our moral sentiments in a model or another's, we would still do what this natural process told us to consider right, even if our concept of "right" is dubious. As with many things, games are played with this in a court of law, where it is presumed institutions and agitators are always morally neutral or sacrosanct, despite obvious facts showing institutions and agitators pushed the agent to act in concert and with conspirators against an isolated agent.^[1] But, in principle, the moral value is in the act of ourselves, and we do not get to choose the acts of others, no matter how ridiculous. If we morally value cruelty and sadism as intrinsic goods - and this is the only possible moral consciousness of someone engaged in this behavior - then that is that, and so long as that can perpetuate itself, there is nothing to stop it and many rewards for doing so in a society enabling it. Whether someone is selling, buying, taking, bullying, submitting, or whatever interaction they have with another person, what is done is not confined to the definition of the act itself. Selling or buying are not "just" those acts, as if they were neutral. There is a consequence not just from selling, but what is sold, who is sold to, and all information suggesting future outcomes from the sale. The same is true of other acts, even towards inanimate things. Acts themselves are never neutral or transhistorical, but occur in one event which would be taken as a whole to be considered acts rather than fragments thereof. We are able to describe the nature of the act itself but only associate it with meaningful information when all consequences are detailed, and all that caused it, which is not confined to a singular agent, is considered. While we cannot morally blame ourselves implicitly for other causes working alongside us, like other agents we ally with or events in the environment that work alongside our exchange, we bear the consequences of them by our volition to commit an act. This is true even of events which are neutral to the exchange happening but exert some effect, or are affected in some way as an externality.

In all interactions, moral consequences follow from one act to other events in the world. It is not possible to claim with any seriousness that selling drugs is just a business like any other.^[2] Therefore, the consequences do not exist in some limited time frame, after which the memory of participants is like a goldfish and the record is wiped clean. We may choose to forgive or disregard the past as we need to, but the past happened and a future will happen, and this is undeniable to speak of any causes and effects, which would be the basis for acting and the very process of knowledge itself in any sense we would care about. This is a lot to calculate when considering all causes and effects that arise from a single act. We would have to trace a very large network if we truly wanted perfect information. Markets and monetary exchanges as a rule do not do this. In markets, the money is exchanged as-is, regardless of the form it takes, and the commodity is treated as if it were money. Money abides not a rule unique to each token, but a rule of whatever institution creates it and regulates it, and rules of money based on an assumption that money is infinitely fungible and freely exchangeable. In practice, the exchange of money is never optimally free and cannot be treated as such, and no state or institution is a neutral party to the exchange. It is not true morally and not true in any practical exchange or utility of money to place its issuer or the state that regulates a market beyond reproach. It is extremely foolish to create a story that claims there is no state and no law. Market societies, banks, treasuries, governments, states, armies, and officers to enforce the rule of money down to the lowest, do not abide anarchy for long. In a society where "Oceania has no law", the institutions will fill the role of a state, and their nature becomes unmentionable and unmoored by anything that would allow public accountability. If that is so, then the conditions allowing for a market to operate can never be stable, and the result is pure rot. By no means does this guarantee that there is always a state in principle. We can imagine a society where the state as a concept never formed, or is no longer tolerated in principle and we consider the governance of humanity very differently. There will always be something to govern a market and agents in a society, but that governance does not need to regard the pretenses or institutions of a state. If that were accomplished though, it would refer to a completely different governing mechanism that provides moral and spiritual authority, and no such mechanism or arrangement has appeared to us or even been theorized. Anarchy is not a solution but a primary root of our present problem. Rather than overt despotism where liberty is traded for a false promise of security, in this anarchy, personal security is undermined deliberately for a false promise of liberty, while the genuine definitions of both are utterly annihilated. It is not that we have lost liberty or security. The security of the state and ruling interest, and any part amenable to this rot, is strong and violently asserting the rot, and this is a very orderly and concerted affair for the predators. We retain, in theory and in fact, liberty of a sort, in that there is nothing immediately stopping us. Many people have freedom in a sense that no one is telling them they can't live, even when the propaganda screams "die!" in so many ways. Yet, this freedom is taken away with the blow of the wind, and predators in society are enabled to attack the honest and decent who do not want rot. Liberty is destroyed not in the name of security but in its own name, where liberty's new conception is the liberty of the ruling interest alone, and the liberty of anyone else is merely a suggestion. Morally, this is kosher in the crass sense of predatory morality, and they love this arrangement because it allows them to transgress and take infinitely and punishes the honest that would mitigate the rot. To any genuine sense of moral sentiment that wanted something productive, useful for a concerted aim other that destroying lives and making us suffer, or basically anything but this, this is appalling and obviously not right. We would only be able to discern this morality if we possess a sense beyond the crass pseudo-moral posturing of the predators. The predators may invent some greater justification for this, or simply declare that might makes right is a valid moral stance and no one will tell them no. Yet, there are many who see that they have absolutely no reason or purpose to encourage this, and even if it is quasi-illegal for them to stop the rot, they will out of necessity resist all efforts of the predatory to attack them. Submission to such a beast is not an option, and such a beast makes clear its intent is to never stop the rot for as long as they can impose it. The moral situation is never so simple because those who impulsively wish to stop the rot and act alone will fail, and once exposed, the predators mark down the honest for special punishment. The republic now, or what remains of it, is ruled entirely by fear, and cannot even claim that this deserves the vaunted title of "terror". Terror in any form implies some coherence or purpose beyond killing. This is some new species of abomination, the likes of which was never possible before. But, I get ahead of myself. This description simply elucidates how predators can work through moral calculus in complex ways, and the same can be done by the honest in their own way. The predators do not have this natural monopoly or a natural right to do this, and their claims to it rely on moronic arguments a child could disprove or see with full sense create nothing but rot and death. The predators and all other parties with their own intersets can only pursue their aims by mechanisms which are known, however complicated they are. They do not do anything by some "spooky action" or world-spirit. The predators as a group in fact comprise disparate interests that are only united in a shared knowledge of the rot and their benefit for maintaining it.

For calculation of all moral propositions, we may observe value in acts in various ways:

Micro level - The act itself, valued as if conditions external to anything in this system are irrelevant. We envision the system affected to be as small as needed to describe the act and its immediate purpose. We have no reason to believe that any act we have must percolate beyond the purview we intended for its immediate effect. Very often, we choose to act in ways that isolate the act and mitigate its consequences - for example, we do not want to think too much about where we defecate and the buildup of waste, as if it were inconsequential to take a dump in the family kitchen. We have particular manners for disposing of waste specifically so this consequence is mitigated, and we may think of a sewage system or some elaborate society-wide scheme where all shit is recycled, and it is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks and become one with all of the people.^[3] Generally, though, our interaction of importance is to sit on the toilet, do our dirty sinful business, and flush it down the drain. That is the important act.

System level - All acts are carried out in a system where they are relevant. This may be a mechanical system we regard as a device, a life-form that we observe as something wholly constituted, a social unit like a family or workplace, or a unit like a city with few enough moving parts and boundaries that it is familiar to follow the goings-on of the city. The complexity of the system depends on what is modeled. For example, if we limit the purview to social science, economic activity, or the political arrangement, we would limit our purview to economic, social, or political topics, and be able to relate those concepts as needed across fields while keeping them separate. We can keep politics and economics separate and have done so very easily, and we can choose where they meet without conflating purely economic categories with purely political categories, or suggesting that these two are so intimately linked that they are inseparable. We may meld two categories to view their inter-relation, and political economy as a topic does this often, but we are able to understand that economic behavior need not be political. There is nothing political about managing the affairs of the home in of itself. Political economy and its forebears suggest an invasion of the home by the state quite literally in the name, and this has been a long-run trend of political schemes. This is something more apropos for the next book in this series and beyond, but we will refer to political struggles obliquely in this text to regard that they do exist. We often find ways to relate two fields which are different categories but link often. Biology and chemistry will often meet, and physics in some way describes a very large number of systems. Strangely, the meeting of physics and sociology never occurs without grand mystification and bullshit, even though much of what humans do in society are transactional interactions that are done and forgotten. All stable relationships in human society take work. Family, friendship, marriage, professional life, social advancement and prestige, involve constant effort which reduces not to biological just-so statements or urges or chemical or material things exchanged, but motive acts which have force to comprise the functions of society. For most people, any topic which is politically sensitive is dominated by the language of Being, and doing is constantly undermined so that the political statement appears above motion or the effects of actors, whether directly attacking the settlement or subtly manipulating it. The state as an entity in practice is aggresive and proactive, no matter what settlement is reached, and this pervades social interactions and economic behavior.^[4]

Wide-Domain level - A sufficiently large domain contains many types of systems, all of which relate to each other in some way. We do not segregate each field of science and declare its appropriate purview, reproducing a technocrat's division of the mind in the world itself. Many of these systems are rooted in physics, and all of these systems are rooted in information for the purposes of management or command. The mangerial task of command, however poorly it is performed, presumes that managers integrate systems in order to effectively rule. A manager to be a manager is primarily tasked with economic functions and exploitation. Managers, as a rule, do not produce and do not really do anything but manage. Their function is, by all frank assessment, the easiest function of all for a computer to automate. The manager has no monopoly on this task, for we all must manage what we do and regulate the faculties and resources available to us. Further, integrating these systems into a general knowledge base is intrinsically interesting to us. It is what humans do so naturally that we almost can't not do this, short of being tortured and beaten and caged to turn off this function.^[5] Even if this were not a natural impulse or something of utility for a task, we do this because of one overriding condition that dominates human life. That is that humans individually exist in a state of ignorance until knowledge is verified factually and one is confident that their faculties meet any potential challenge, and allow someone to live as they would have wanted to in the best possible world. There is a sense, never really founded on any truth but followed often, that knowledge will somehow save us and make us better. We have different ideas of how to do that, but no one believes ignorance is strength or that promoting ignorance or lies would create anything functional. Persistent lack of knowledge and acute threats from that state of affairs form the basis of many erratic behaviors. It is, very plainly to those with enough experience, the rationale for diagnosing schizophrenia politically - that is, the image of the schizophrenic is paranoia, not because paranoia is an essence that somehow made someone mad, but because paranoia would be a reasonable response to extreme lack of information. This can be induced by deliberate humiliations to destroy someone who offends the wrong people, or the result of genuine brain decay or the destruction of faculties accelerating by the mechanisms dominating the present society.^[6] This is a level where humans learn to make quick decisions and also where humans operate generally in their activities. When playing competitive sports and team sports in particular, an athlete's awareness is taking in a wide field, while focusing their activities towards the system of the game. The culture of athleticism is not a technocratic specialty but a way of life - being strong in that world is not merely a matter of being a machine specialized to kick footballs or some other task. Players may be specialized, particularly in American Gridiron Football, but their awareness in-game is on point and concerned with the non-trivial task of playing well. The athletic talents that come natural to us would be great if they could be applied to knowledge, or a reasonable application where we are capable of navigating a web of systems very easily. This talent is not common but can be honed.

Transcendent level - There are things which are held above ordinary "systems" and refered to in language suggesting that they are everywhere and almost godlike. This language applies to genuine transcendent ideas, such as religion or metaphysical questions, but it is also adopted by the language of the state or the ruling institutions, which are referred to with vague aspersions of "the system", "the establishment", or some other broad and nebulous beast. Awareness of these things is necessary to complete our view of the world and adapt to a general fear which pervades all societies. Even if we could dismiss states or anything of the sort as far away, they linger as a possibility, and there is something beyond the horizon. States, even if they demarcate a limited domain, operate at the world stage as if they would in theory claim all that exists. So do institutions aspiring to rule or become the sole institution of their type, as do institutions which coordinate to appear as if they are all united against their common enemy of the dispossessed.

These categories give us some resolution when we act, so that we know not to conflate them with each other. They are not truly separated by anything but our conceits of a system, and so like many things psychological manipulation is possible. We further resolve meaning based on experience and cross reference, including with something called common sense. Lately that sense is less common because the society has been transformed, and this common sense itself has been manipulated to suggest blatant untruths and the generally hostile nature of neoliberal society.

The act of commanding the world suggests a critical mindset that is analytical in a crude sense, but ruthlessly effective and capable of building large theories on spurious knowledge. Information in the systemic sense can often be conflated with meaning and purpose, which is granted "systemic" properties that meaning does not actually possess. Yet, a trained mind can direct this ruthless criticism to disassemble information, parts, and so on. A very adept mind can make from the systems thinking a general outline of approaching problems. This will have to be something self-taught, especially since pedagogy is hostile to any independent systematizing and has an ideological goal to promote the "correct" political views, whatever they may be and however loosely related to actual politics they are. To contemplate meaning for too long is anathema to a drive for information and command. To contemplate oneself or the world outside of this drive to act for moral value is time, energy, and resources not spent on that moral value which may take priority. The moral value is what is really important, and this value subsumes any information, material, or system it invades. It does not need to be a corrupting moral value. There is in people a need, perhaps not stated explicitly, for faith that what they know is accurate. If someone is too focused on adjudicating facts independently, or crippled by a lack of knowledge that does not allow them to assign moral value properly, bad things happen. Therefore, human beings are often stubborn in their beliefs about the world, and their moral valuation of any act. If they see something they don't like, they are not going to like it because of some ethical argument and respond even less to threats or blatant lies. The wants of people are not fixed in nature or essential to them in a way that makes them inescapable like a Demiurge, but there are those moral values which are too foundational to give up. There is further a distrust of anything new, if only because adjustments to long-held views of the world and preferences are costly and potentially dangerous for assimilating information. If someone has to learn a new list of acceptable political facts that have nothing to do with a meaningful situation, and this is a matter of social obligation, it has the effect of scattering this faith and attacking this stubbornness.

The faculties of knowledge itself are valued, and this value is not limited to information processing capabilities, nor is the knowledge valued in a linear mathematical sense. It is rather that among the resources available to an agent are their time and processing power, and the energy and will to do things. Those resources are never fixed for the agent but they are always finite, and often not things that can be replicated easily. The peculiarities of all of the faculties of knowledge are very important for this question in the long run, but for now we concern ourselves with information and the verification of that information, which takes the form of facts that can be adjudicated. Absent any institution with compelling authority, we presume that someone is for the moment adjudicating facts on their own power that are not difficult to grasp, and that this agent is confident in their facts. In other words, they are operating with perfect information, and the limitations of information processing faculties or any other constraint of knowledge are not relevant.

For every moral imperative that can be imagined, there are definite and discrete propositions of acts which advance it. If an act were to be done purely for its own sake, without any regard for consequences or the cost of doing so, then any proposition advancing that imperative would be oriented towards itself. That is, the point of life would be life, the point of torture would be torture, the point of war would be war, and this feeds itself. There is no argument to make against doing this, if someone really wanted to. If done, then any act other than the core act would be subordinated to that core act. If life is the point of life, than all the acts life entails exist solely to feed into life, and all other imperatives are irrelevant and effectively null. If life is the point of life, then anything other than life's functions is an externality which is subordinated to a life-form carrying out its functions, and so all hopes and aspirations are fed into this vampiric entity. The life-force of an individual entity is fed into some sense of life overall, as if life-force as a concept were a god to be fed sacrifices of everything we are and everything we do. This is very clearly a pointless existence for the individual, and the concept of life-force itself does not think, know, feel, or have any purpose itself. Knowledge is always a local event, where all of our feelings about existence and any moral cause would originated. If we were to subordinate all of our deeds to knowledge generally, the same result would follow - all of what we are and do is subordinated to some abstraction we hold to be the sole concern that is transcendant. If we are to enshrine ourselves in whatever sense we view ourselves, the result would be the same. We would replace our genuine individual existence, which is complex, with a maniacal conceit of "Me" which is viewed as godlike and divorced from anything real. There is nothing telling us we cannot orient our lives like this, and doing so answers many questions about what we would do here. Why do we live? "For our genes!" What is the guide to do something? "To protect our genes!" This is intentionally invoked and is done because it works on people. It is in fact the only starting point for developing a persistent imperative to guide a knowing entity, if we are to make decisions through algorithmic information processing. The greater question of what we do with knowledge or meaning is not relevant to any concept of commanding the world, or operationalizing anything someone or something is or does. The core of any imperative for a knowing entity is the act itself, rather than some symbol or being held above the act that is passive. No imperative that seeks to command the world through our knowledge faculty can exist as a passive thing that "just-so" happens. If any entity wishes to command the world - and it must do this in some way simply to be constituted as a knowing entity - it must do things persistently. That is the only way in which there is anything we regard as being, that can be defended or that can be said to grow on its own accord, for purposes particular to it. This also means that every event in the world, no matter how insignificant or external to a given cause, is subject to this moral imperative, that is purely the conceit of knowing entities. Nothing about what we do is "valued" in any way by nature, as if it has some plan for us. If we are to imagine God or something like it with a plan for us or all of existence, we are speaking of something which is very different from nature, but an entity or concept that is either knowing in a way like ourselves, knowing in some way above us, or something altogether different which we lack any ready-made comprehension of or which does not translate well to any symbolic representation we would comprehend. Nothing about God or anything like it would be treated as if it were a natural phenomenon co-equal with ourselves or any thing in the universe, and a "natural God" described with the language of science would abide conditions that make it unlike the gods humans commonly acknowledge in religion. Even the implied gods of a "religion of science"^[7] do not conform to our understanding of the study of nature, as if the "god of science" were merely a more elaborate form of ourselves or some conceit we intellectually hold about the world.

If we are to live for a godhead or something like it, that is a complex but singular proposition and all of the events in existence would be valued with that imperative in mind. Such an imperative is inherent to any overarching moral code or ethical framework, for ethics is the rational and informational counterpart to morality which stems from a genuine reckoning with the real world. Morality is never found anywhere in nature, for it is something particular to knowing entities. Our moral sense is guided not just by knowledge as a process but by the reality that we are living creatures, which must abide certain imperatives to continue living. Spiritual thought does not reduce solely to the imperatives of life or knowledge as a process, but entails a conception of the world as something more. I concern myself here not with the presumption of something so vast and large, but with the necessary germ of any moral or ethical approach to acts generally. To speak of utility or usefulness towards moral values generally requires acknowledging the germ of such concepts of utility. It requires viewing moral sentiments and their origins and full. For now, however, I operate on the presumption that we can speak of moral sentiments individually and isolate them in particular acts and deeds, whatever they may be. The moral value of anything, the propositions we make that we value morally, are always propositions of something contingent on a world outside of any conceit we hold about the world or ourselves. Even if we were to morally value ourselves and consider ourselves apart from the rest of the world, that would entail some ability to view all that happens in our mind as something alien, so that any moral value can be discerned within this construct. Self-reference does not suggest that we cannot hold a critical view of ourselves and whatever acts we carry out. It is possible, within the mind of someone holding a particular imperative, to see that the acts following from that imperative contradict the overarching goal. This is a problem for us, and not so much a problem of thought or rationality, but a problem of our conceits. Nothing about moral values or thoughts suggest that this contradiction is inevitable or must exist in nature. It exists not because contradiction is inherent to morality or existence, or because we must resolve contradiction with knowledge. In the natural world, nothing is ever contradictory and the concept is nonsensical. Contradiction in reason is a problem for us and us alone, and very often contradiction has nothing to do with a genuine rational problem, but with pigheaded conceits humans or any knowing entity would hold. Often the root of these is not genuine irrationality or a lack of some proof to resolve the error, but a willful moral position which attacks the very entity which can hold a moral position. That is, the moral values that someone can hold can be contrary to the very knowledge process which allowed moral value to be comprehensible. The knowledge process is always something that exists in a real world rather than something wholly arbitrary and inscrutable, but we don't have instinctive models to suggest how knowledge is arranged mechanistically. That model can only be guessed at from our own experience, which does not conform neatly to symbolic language or models we would construct. It is instead the case that symbolic language allows both refinement of a model of knowledge, and the emergence of knowledge processes hitherto unknown in the world. What resulted from humans with symbolic language was not merely a recapitulation of some inborn gene of knowledge or a recapitulation of a natural assertion of knowledge, but something novel to the world. That thing that is novel to the world still must abide a world outside of the knowledge process, but there was no rule of nature suggesting that the new knowledge process had to lock into a preferred model of some pedagogue or thought leader. Those who could develop their knowledge base ahead of the rest of the human race saw an advantage to insist that they alone possessed the master key, and made themselves gurus and mystics to proclaim what the subordinated classes of humanity were allowed to think, and what their own growing knowledge process would be. That topic must be investigated further at another time, but this change informs all moral values and imperatives, even if they were self-referential. It is possible for self-reference to allow for emergent behavior, stabilizing behavior, or destructive behavior which reduces the knowing subject to something as small as needed. All of these behaviors may be initiated for purposes that are not absolute at all. We would want to destroy aspects of ourselves that are undesirable, that can be muted easily so that we do not follow them again. We don't want to be sick, though we cannot guarantee that or a consistent definition of "sickness", which is exploited as we will see later on, and many of us will have to ask if we really want to make others suffer or if suffering really is the point of life. To proclaim "life is suffering" is to insist that we must be bound to that dictum for no good reason. Generally though, the imperatives someone wishes to seek are stabilizing so that a process may continue, or seek to assimilate new knowledge and allow the entity to grow in some way that allows for adaptation to more potential events. These imperatives need not be carried out for some overarching purpose set in the mind, and so we can choose moral values or objectives that appear as if they serve no greater aim or purpose, and this is not an error or insane by default. There is not any preferred imperative that nature dictates at all, such as life itself. Perhaps the knowing entity is not living in the sense we are, or does not value life for its own sake. The sense this entity has of itself may be that its knowledge process itself is not valued at all, or is just a part of something much larger as it must be to sustain that process, and it is perfectly fine with abandoning the way its knowledge process functions currently and metamorphosizing into something else. If it wishes that, it will likely sense that it can only morph over time and through ways that are possible in the world, and this process would be a delicate matter not taken lightly.

It is with that in mind that utility should be approached, for utility is never a universal of nature or something imposed on knowledge. Utility is only sensical to knowing entities which pursue their own aims, whatever they may be. It may be that knowing entities do not consider anything at all "useful", and for them their moral imperatives concern concepts that have nothing to do with use or some plan to command the world or themselves. Even if those concepts are held and someone is generally content with their life, and does with their life and mind whatever they like, anything they would do could follow mechanisms and patterns that an alien knowledge would consider useful. For natural events like the flow of a river, the river does not "use" anything or think anything about its mechanisms. It does as it will because it did not occur to the river that these processes should end. Nothing about the river exhibits properties of life which are peculiar, or knowledge which would have any independent intent. The river continues much as it has, and erosion and various geological events, or the results of engineering from living entities or entities with knowledge that would affect nature, are of no moral consequence in of themselves. The command of natural processes is only useful in any way to entities which possess a conceit of commanding the world and claim nature in some way. This claim may regard the processes of the Earth as sacred without any claim of property as such, and it may make sense to someone in a primitive society to preserve the forest or the water supply as a commons, or out of some sense that doing this would be beneficial in the future for some vague purposes that are not apparent at the time, but would be prudent to preserve. It is typical of life to not wantonly destroy an environment as if it were a Captain Planet villain.

Utility is envisioned as a measurement of some imperative or command, and this imperative is understood to be founded on a moral value that the user holds. The function that is done follows from what the user wants and values, and the moral value is treated as something persistent. All of the functions that exist, and all of the things which are valued, are definite propositions. The functions and things cannot be divided into infinitesimal parts are remain informationally the same things and events. It is not possible for example to envision "half of a water molecule" or "half of a car". We may cut an apple into parts, but in nature, such things only grow as wholes, and we would be obligated to regard the growth of a plant or fruit or livestock or human being as something indivisible if it is to functionally exist. If we could command the Earth to produce at will quantities and qualities we can divide as we please, without the process of production or growth from natural processes which we know much about, we would have some knowledge telling us how we can do that and why that works. It is impossible to simply assert by decree that we can do that because we want the world to be as we wish. If we wished to make the world or any part of it conform to this desire to command it and produce all qualities and quantities we wanted, it is only possible through faculties that are themselves definite qualities, rather than faculties which are infinite and operate outside of reasonable expectations. That question is something science can establish. So far, we have seen science is often dubious, as science itself derives from a process we do rather than something the nature compelled us to abide. For that reason, it is very easy for pseudoscience to assert things about the world that do not conform to what actually happens, and even the most honest scientist must acknowledge that thought alone is meaningless without practice. Proper science is the domain not of the intellectual or manager but the worker and producer, who must do science not because of some conceit of pleasure or wisdom but because the producer's fate depends on it. This does not stop the worker from managing himself or those around him, or stop workers from considering their own intellectual conceits. It does however place proper science as something which must conform to substantial results and models which favor an honest and true interpretation of the world over the conceits of command or the vanity of intellectuals. Nothing compels workers to follow through with this honesty, but if the worker wants to accomplish anything in the world outside of him, he would have to reckon with reality. This includes the political intrigues and the conceits of intellectuals who live vampirically from the labor and life-force of all subordinate classes. Both science and knowledge itself suggest that the world in which acts occur in is infinitely subdivisible, but all propositions that could be moral values are definite values. Moral values in of themselves cannot be freely exchanged in any unit that is shared in common. The utility of any thing or any event or function is, in of itself, fixed as what it is. Five pennies may be worth a nickle in exchange, but those five pennies will not metamorph into a nickle by some strange alchemy of the world because of our value of either coin. Every coin minted, or paper note printed, or any data entered on a ledger which represents money, is a definite proposition, rather than a thing existing in the abstract. For money to be money, it would be a token of some imperative, rather than intrinsically valuable by declaration that it is money. Money is a particular symbol of value, and its purposes are not general or universal. This is understood by anyone who must manage money and use it for anything, no matter their purpose for money. The same is true of any token of value or anything used to signify value. This is true whether the value is considered something to exchange or some utility measured mathematically and with the language of knowledge and science. The particulars of money are contingent on many propositions concerning its issue and legitimacy, and so exchange and utility can both be detached from it, as if money or some other unit of exchange could be universal. We may have a general sense of exchange or utility, which all others may derive from. At heart, though, exchange of symbols of value is done because in any exchange, some purpose or utility is accomplished through exchange.

No one exchanges money because they have some naive faith that this is fun or interesting. We do, however, exchange abstract symbols for reasons that are not obviously moral or tied to any outcome of great importance. We can just as well use play money chips in a game of poker or some other gambling game, where the stakes are nothing but a sense of winning and losing and the entire game is a way to pass time and meet people. Any poker player who plays the game enough can tell you the true heart of the game has nothing to do with math or counting cards, which has been solved many times over for the cruder sense of the game. Poker to be an interesting game entails the human element, games of deception, meta-gaming in which normative expectations of play are set and violated not just on one table but for poker as a game generally. There was at one time in America a boom of poker games, which were played not just in casinos or at home games but in online game rooms. This epoch of gambling, and all that surrounded it, is a fascinating topic for would-be historians, about which much has already been written. For one, poker games never conformed to a singular ruleset or valuation, and many such games exist such as 7-card stud, Texas Hold 'Em, Omaha, which suggest slightly variant playing styles and expectations. The particulars of each variant are things someone can discover casually. I will look at Holdem where two hidden cards are dealt to players and five cards are dealt to the community of the table, three after the first round of betting, and the next two cards revealed with a round of betting for each, and the final reveal if two players show down and reveal their cards, with the best combination of five cards from their hidden cards and the community cards being their hand. The hidden cards available to the player suggest few starting hands are strong enough to value before betting begins. Yet, the meta-game of betting pre-flop is contingent on more than the starting cards' value. For one, the size of other players' stack, and their position in the order of betting, suggests what players are likely to do regardless of their hidden cards. It is further the case that general strategies shift based on what players generally do, and this is a part of any mathematical calculation. In an earlier era, it is very likely players do not enter hands out of position unless they possess one of the few hidden card combinations that are strong, like a pocket pair, two high-value cards that allow for straight and flush possibilities, or an Ace which can win in an Ace-high showdown and would be paired with a community card Ace which is better than any other single pair. As the game proliferated, a willingness to play wider ranges of hands was embraced, and habits of betting changed to encourage this strategy and obscure the strength of hands generally, until retaliatory bets begin. There is a large theory of players to suggest this change, all of it contingent on the mechanics of betting and in the knowledge of other players who would over time establish tendencies and reputation. An adept poker player can spot the fish who will surrender their chips because the game is a hobby for them and the sharps who pick apart situations by reason and some cunning that sometimes wins. In all events, poker is a fickle mistress and when a player runs bad or runs good, it creates the impression of a geist, despite all reason suggesting that this is an illusion. The run good can manifest into an advantage in stack size, from which a player can operate very differently. Short stacks have generally fewer options, and will be more likely to risk a final stand if they sense some advantage to take something back from the big stack, who can afford to speculate with less-than-ideal hands, or call the bluff of a short stack if something suggests to the big stack that short stack is posturing. A large stack may be aggressive to place shorter stacks under pressure, but always prefers to be in command of betting rather than reacting to someone who might possess a strong hand. The ideal for the big stack is to keep smaller stacks cautious even if they sense their hands are strong, and this informs how a big stack would play and how smaller stacks navigate that situation. Ultimately, poker games are played hand by hand, rather than by some grand narrative. In a tournament, the final objective is in mind before play begins, and the structure of the tournament and its eventual goal accounts for players' decision-making in every hand, but each hand is a single showdown, and if a smaller stack wishes to survive, it will have to win hands, run good, and take whatever advantage it can claw back. With most players in a tournament being aware of how this works, even talented players will face early bust-outs and fools can prevail for a time. A few fools can make it to the end. This of course implies poker as a game is taken at face-value, which is never the case. No game and no activity humans undertake is ever what it appears to be at first glance, and poker exemplifies that in the mechanisms that are emphasized, from incomplete information of the holdings of a player, to the randomness of the cards dealt and unpredictability as cards are revealed in the community or in a player's exposed cards for stud variants, to the reading of players' expressions and tells and history of their prior behavior.

From the simple mechanisms of a game arise a whole environment, and games themselves are never truly self-contained or played for the stated purposes, as if the game were an isolated system played as-is, or the players didn't have a life outside of the simulation. The artificial intelligence objects mentioned in the last chapter do not know anything about the game. Player characters, or knowing entities generally, are aware that they are playing a game and that they have an existence outside of the game. Knowing entities, in short, consider themselves part of the world, whatever belief they hold about their consciousness and its separation from the world of material things, and about themselves or their property. Entities without this knowledge, like the artificial intelligence players, are philosophical zombies in the view of managers and their imperative. Whatever knowledge process is judged to go on that constitutes the artificial intelligence is morally considered null and irrelevant. It does not occur to the knowing entity that the unknowing entity is anything other than a clump of matter to be appropriated, and there is no way to suggest that the unknowing entity has any true moral worth to the knowing entity. Whether the knowing entity really knows what it thinks it knows about the artificial intelligence or unknowing entity is not relevant to how a knowing entity will value other entities, or anything in the world. For the purposes of command, knowledge and conceits about oneself are self-evident. To doubt one's own knowledge and integrity, no matter how dubious, is to invite certain doom and the worst possible fate a moral actor could conceive. Knowing entities can accept death and failure, but they cannot accept under any circumstance permanent and total insanity or retardation. That is the worst of all conditions, and acutely sensed. No one is ever happy with such a fate, and if they actually think they can be happy in that way, they are quickly reminded of what happens when their guard is down. All of this occurs over what is, in any cosmic sense, a game that is no more relevant than a game of Monopoly or play money poker. Nothing we do in society, all of the things we fight wars for and struggle for, possesses any intrinsic value by the fact of existence, that must be abided in all circumstances. If the world were so loathesome that this is all there can possibly be, then many will see that this world is not worth living in, and have no reason to regard any "great game" suggested to them by a pedagogue or thought leader. If the thought leader resorts to gratuitous force and suffering to make everyone play, then the subjugated see correctly the futility of even acknowledging the thought leader. This itself is intended by the present governing idea, because emphasizing the futility of the life of the ruled accelerates the death rate and torture, and disrupts any thought process inimical to the thrill of torture and suffering that imperial utilitarianism implied.

In suggesting a unit of utility towards any imperative, someone commanding an act envisions a game played with certain objectives and conditions. This is familiar to us as "game theory", which arose in the 20th century in various forms. Game theory derives largely from work on computability, and so it is a theory well adapted to the systems thinking we have dealt with so far. Its origins are less demonstrated by the natural world, but by moral aims that were implied by the capitalist situation and the empire that governed it. There is not a way to disprove that these games can be constructed for problem-solving, but it is never a science that is observed in nature. All efforts to export this thinking of the world as a series of games or stories are really conceits we hold about the world and an attempt to either command it, or construct a model of it for our use. It was evident in the export of Malthus' population principle to explain the origin of species, where a very human conceit is imposed on the natural world to suggest an explanation of natural history, and then bad philosophers take the claims of Darwin - which were understood to answer this question of history rather than suggest a force from nature worked in all cases equally and without discrimination towards a crass imperative - to suggest that some overarching imperative of nature is the dominant and then the sole mechanism governing history, life, and thus society. This is trivially disproven, but the ruling ideas of the 20th century came to regard the imperial and eugenic imperatives as the only real imperatives and the only real moral values, to which all others in all existence must be subordinated. Whether it was disproven mattered not, because such a view served the moral sentiments of many people who saw such an imperative as highly effective at maximizing predation and torture, first for some thrill of doing so individiually, then by all the predators gathering in a union of horrors and suggesting that this predation and torture was the true basis for society and all others were no longer admissible. That view precludes that there is any real "game" to play, or any genuine utility for any agent whatsoever. It forbids not only the position of a nihilist, for whom the game is in the end merely irrelevant, or the absurdist who asks why we are made to care about something so silly as our delusions of controlling a world far larger and greater than the sum total of human genius, laid bare to the truth that all we have accomplished in human history is shit and piss. All that remains in such a view is vanity and symbolic conceits, which overtake any other sense of utility or moral purpose, even that which a nihilist would accept can exist in theory. A nihilist simply views these moral aims as what they are, or at the most extreme the nihilist considered death, void, and extermination of these hypocritical screechers to be a greater good than allowing them to continue doing this to us, or valuing conceits that are obviously at odds with anything in the actual world or anything a reasonable person would value for any purpose conceivable.

What we see with this dilemma in naive approaches to game theory and the rational agent is a dilemma deliberately exacerbated by the most malicious of the human race, who are not too smart but just smart enough to figure out how to make us miserable. The result is that speaking of any general utility, or common "util" that would be respected by anyone or should be regarded as anything valuable, is futile. Utility to be measured applies only to a specific game or model that is intended. It is further that each game is subdivided into so many events or actions, each of which are discrete or construed as such. Therefore, if we are to model the efficiency of some action in a game like baseball, each event in the game would be modeled as what it is, and only by proximate relations of things in the game is any overarching objective considered. Physical models to suggest how a batter would swing the bat to best attain a desired result, like knowing the best time to swing, how a hit may be aimed, or how to swing powerfully enough to score a homerun, are not contingent on scoring points or many of the the other events occuring in the game, and the laws of physics which existed outside of the game do not change because of the game's objectives. Everything about this game and simulation was contingent on a world where physical laws exist, and so the game conforms in some way to the laws of physics. This is one of the purposes of the sport. Players like to hone their skill at batting because it is interesting for reasons outside of the game, rather than the game itself containing the objective or suggesting that optimal batting mechanics are morally necessary. If we did not care about this physical activity, we could just as well simulate the game on a computer in some fantastical scenario, as many baseball games do for reasons that are amusing to a video game player, and perhaps to someone who follows the genuine sport. There is, in the mini-game of the batter's composure, a number of objectives that must be valued. The rules of the game inform what results from this game are "good", but it is possible and expected that an optimal batting strategy will produce situations where balls will be hit foul. It might be possible to solve meticulously pitching and batting strategies so that any player, at any time, would be faced with scenarios that make effective batting impossible, and part of effective pitching is to pitch in a way that places the ball in the strike zone, but places the batter in a position where swinging is unlikely to result in a scoring play or anything advancing the batting team's objectives. Since the pitcher controls that aspect of play, the batter recognizes his position does not let him choose what he can and can't do outside of limited conditions. There is a reason then that batting averages are almost always below 50%, even for the most skilled batters who are famous for their talent at reacting to the pitch optimally. The pitcher must concern himself with exhaustion, for he will be making many pitches throughout a game that lasts for hours, and this mechanical action is not trivial or automatic. A talented pitcher is aware that he would need to switch pitching mechanics and possess awareness of the tendencies of batters, among other things. Perhaps this level of evaluation doesn't occur to any player, but it would be necessary to speak of the utility of each event, each act. And so, every aspect that leads the the mechanical acts is its own game, and each one of these is contained with a particular purview. Actually swinging a bat does not account for all the things a batter does, nor does the swinging of a bat necessitate any great knowledge. If a player flinches at the thought of swinging the bat itself, he will have severe problems playing the actual game. The best form for the batter to swing is honed and practiced outside of the game, just as a golf swing is practiced and the fundamentals of any sport or any activity are practiced. A general knowledge of physical activity is encouraged and monitored not just for sport but for life in general, and these acts, while contained in their own moments, inform other such acts. They are not directly informed in a way that suggests that men who don't swing a golf club optimally must be terrible people in life, or something so superficial and silly. Yet, the moral philosophy at work in economics encourages exactly this kind of venal and stupid behavior, even though it is clearly maladaptive and pointless. There are reasons why this was embraced, and why to true believers, it justifies itself and serves simultaneously some "greater good" that is never specified, because frank admission would lay bare the true relations within the human race.

We divide the acts of a game into these segments which can be construed as a singular event with a number of moral values attached to them. It is not evident which of those moral values are the correct one. We presume that there is one moral value we seek, for example, "winning", or a number of moral values which represent potential outcomes of the act itself. Every action has a number of consequences, all of which must be definite if we are to speak of commanding all information and considering all tactics and strategies possible within an event. The game may reference other games it is associated with, and all of these games reference a world outside the game. If the game is self-contained with no reference to the world, then it is not a "real game" that can be considered at all. Even the simulation of a game or some thought experiment is contingent on information and a knowledge process that could only exist in the world, even if the game environment is intentionally divorced from our everyday understanding of the world. When one sub-game is analyzed, each reference outside of the game must be specifically understood rather than assumed. If we are to suggest the best form for a baseball batter, or the potential outcomes of any encounter with a pitch, the decision is made with the relevance of outcomes understood by the programmer or manager. The player in real life is aware of the possible outcomes, but none of those outcomes tell him the laws of physics or how to hone his body. Sportsmen do not typically think about the laws of physics when they exercise those talents, but they likely think about the body and physical sense when they wish to formally learn those talents, or at least operate with some knowledge of physics that is practical or something they train and condition. A talented position coach in American Football is likely aware of these mechanisms and coaches players to optimize functions, and recognizes the talents of new recruits. There is a large science when recruiting players for the sport, and one reason for the proliferation of athletics in school is to promote this science and athletic talent for ulterior motives. In the moment, though, the practice of some skill is its own world. We may know why we do these things in the abstract, but if we wished to diagram the swinging of the bat or the fundamentals of sport, the strategy suggesting what to do is fed into the function.

For a programming example, we may suggest that the AI handles a particular event with a function. This function is the "game" at the moment. It would be quite impossible to operationalize intelligence without these functions as a concept, and basic computer programming teaches us to build these functions rather than strings of spaghetti code arranged haphazardly. Every instruction of the machine and every process involving information and its command will be definite, or treated as if it could be definite if the commander wishes to establish all possible outcomes. Whether the "computer" is aware of the information or even operates with information directly, there is a model where all of this information is collected and understood, and there is no way to speak of commanding information without accepting that such a model exists. If a manager were unaware of what he did and refused to learn, or adopt a guess that approximated a full accounting of information, he would not be able to manage for long without some fuckup. Even without "perfect information", those who act are capable of comprehending that there is a world where events happen consistently and for reasons that can be understood, and all moral values are contingent on a world that is consistent. If the world were so absurd that nothing could be real and stable, then moral values and thus utility would be irrelevant in any long term. If it applied in this sub-game or function, such that the function could not be understood in any way that suggests what is to be done, then absurdism would override our actions. We would behave as if outcomes were random and devoid of purpose. Most likely, someone who does not know what he is doing when he is to do something will just freeze in fear, as this is a typical response to situations where one is ignorant and wishes not to expose himself as a fool. This, as you might guess, is intended, and operationalized in educational interventions. Education teaches children to lack confidence in any faculty of their own, and teaches children to place confidence in signs and symbols of authority. There is no version of education which can do other than this, no matter how many claims educators make of the necessity of their pedagogy. The best case scenario for education is that the educator is correcting operational errors as they see them in children, and children are looking for some moral guide since children lack many indicators of what to do in a society that they are born apart from and live apart from. No child can expect to know instinctively what values are socially acceptable and what to do in every situation, when the information necessary to integrate into any human society is so vast. If the society is one dominated by deliberate deception and the general cruelty of the human race, blind faith or trust in goodness to "figure itself out" is a sadist's dream to warp any young mind. This is the program that was violently imposed, and when children instinctively sense fear at being treated like this, the lying intensifies. This particular germ, this particular cycle, is very relevant for future discussion. It begins here in how the command of anything in the world can be understood and operationalized. By disrupting all moral values and all factual standards of comparison, and then controlling information inputs and ouputs, the human subject becomes a machine. This never works, but it is not intended to actually promote qualities or growth. The intent of this operationalization in education is to destroy and mark children as fools, so their position in society is weaked to that the educator considers appropriate, or to destroy as rapidly as possible the child, either eliminating its life after a routine of tricks and deception to mark him as failed, or transforming the child into a living abortion to be made an example for the glorification of the educational institution and the creed that guides it.

Most of us do not want this. Teachers or educators, at some level, recognize that they cannot do this to everyone and expect it to become an absolute. Only at the highest stage of eugenic society are the humiliations and sacrifices omnipresent, where children are herded for the slaughter and a small number are pulled aside and given lumps of horseflesh marking them as "gifted" or better by some dubious metric. We recognize this to be the worst possible outcome of every event, and this is transcendant because we are at a basic level dependent on knowledge for anything we would value. Even if we didn't know what a fool was, it is never pleasant to be a fool, and if we somehow tolerate that ignorance, the world and the sadists who claimed it from us will make sure we never forget what this always was. At some point, the rot and ruin will truly perpetuate itself, and this is intended for the ethos that brought neoliberalism to the world and glorified its rot.

We have developed a general rule of any game that to be a fool, or do foolish things, is not desirable. What that means in a context may vary, but in short, ignorance is not strength. This does not grant to wisdom or knowledge any genuine moral value in of itself. It instead places ignorance, foolishness, and lack of information as a moral value of its own, which must be avoided at all costs. Here we see the truth of economic utility, and the utilitarian moral philosophy as a whole. There is ONLY suffering, and it must be maximized if the goal is to command the world to obey managerial conceits. There is nowhere on this axis or spectrum that regards "pleasure" as a genuine condition. There is only suffering, which is associated with the retarded, or the lack of suffering. The lack of suffering is not a genuine state, but pure nothingness or void. In other words, the "genius" of human beings, that most prized substance, becomes illusory and hidden beyond occult institutions. These institutions would, in time, be advanced by the likes of Francis Galton, and the great modern taboo begins. That story is for much later in our writing, but it is evident in all the ways we are trained to view suffering, intelligence, and foolishness or retardation. It is the absolute because it was forcibly made to be so, rather than any natural value or even genuine intelligence or knowledge. It was, in short, a way to transform through information the knowledge faculty into a gaping void. The coda for this is to advance the primordial light, the Luciferian core that these cretins actually believe in, as "true wisdom", and through that deliver their human sacrifices to the maw. It is the disease, and it takes many forms, operating on many fronts. This great error must be understood before we proceed with a genuine account of utility and its role in economics, because it has advanced thoroughly and has poisoned all public knowledge. In private, the genuine knowledge is occulted and made precious, but even if a fool learned the truth, "once retarded, always retarded". The enforcement of this is not contingent on knowledge alone and certainly not some information masquerading as meaning and fetishized, but violent force which becomes a thing commanded from the shadows, through the intermediary of slavish functionaries who clamor for blood and torture.^[8] I wish to leave that problem for now, so the game now can be modeled in a way that is not stupid, from each event to its outcome at the level of a whole game environment. From there, the remainder of the problem will be the concern of the next chapter, and will be expounded on for the rest of this book. We are not concerned with any preferred problem of the state or politics, which for now is a thing we must abide but not acknowledge as changeable except by methods we cannot know at this point in our writing. We can, however, say now that things like this, that have become the ruling ideas, are the exact thing which must be counteracted by any means necessary.

All of our investigation of utility, however conducted, suggests that at the micro level, utilities are discrete, local to the event where they occur, and are not freely exchangeable. At the systemic level, or the level of a whole "game", utilities are specific to that environment, and while a greater reference to society or something outside the game is possible and implied by the existence of a game, in of itself the moral values of a game are particular to it. So too are the values of a system particular to it, and any value ascribed to the whole system or whole event described as a game is a problem for utility at a higher level. At the value of wide awareness, which is to say awareness of the world and some conception of generally useful things in the everyday, the question is contingent on things which are not always self-evident, but there are aspects of ourselves and the nature of society that are so close to self-evident that we would have to regard them to move forward with a general concept of utility. Transcendent truths, which include the spiritual claims of the state and religion and our own sense of spiritual authority, are things that are not taken lightly or presumed as if they could be changed by clever tricks. We are able to fool ourselves or be fooled, but the world at that high a level does not regard any tricks or symbols we may deploy as relevant. The world, which by and large does not regard any of our conceits about value or a stupid drive to command the world, usually creates examples of transgressing decency and things a child could figure out. Not one of these levels can divine for us the true utility. If established from the germ of such utility, which must be any base-level game we would solve, an overall sense of utility in games and then in society can be established that is sufficient for our purposes.

In the abstract, utilities can be measured towards one and only one imperative. There is no dyad suggesting that morality exists on any spectrum that is total and absolutely, where two ideas struggle for dominance and all are subsumed in these ideas, these tokens that are offered as a thesis and antithesis. In utility, there is only the objective sought, and all other objectives are for the moment null. If the objective is "winning", then all conditions that are not "winning" are moot. Strictly speaking there is no "losing" implied. There is only winning or the lack thereof. Put the other way, there could only be a level of losing or failure, and the ideal is to low-score on this scale to lose the least. Generally, the proposition of two forced "choices" is a no-win scenario structured to make that moral choice purely a question of what the player will lose today, and suggests an overall schema by which all decisions, all moral values, simply mitigate the lose condition. At the levels we are concerned with in this chapter, only at the level of the game system is winning or losing a condition, and these are separate propositions. We would understand winning by some metric that is sensical, for example a score counter, and players compete to increase that score. Not all games are structured in a way that the "win condition" is a scalar value that can be arbitrarily high. A game, for example, may concern itself with preserving a stock of lives or some token representing a point which the player starts with, in which case the high score is what you began with, and the objective of the game is to lose the least. All of your tokens representing score would be win conditions, and so the objective would favor defensive play. For the time being we concern ourselves with a single-player game, with the opponent being "the world" which does not care about any score or win condition. The agents in the world still can be construed as pursuing some utility.

An AI opponent who follows some script is likely to be designed in a way that presents a challenge to players, and the AI performs this function faithfully. The AI would have been created by some human programmer who wanted to make an interesting game, but we may presume that the AI developed by some procedure within another program, that was designed to make crude AIs for game simulations generally, or game simulations of particular types which are simple enough. It would be possible to make simple procedural code generation now if a programmer wished to, though it is not so trivial to do this that it would be applied outside of a number of situations where all potential "games" that the AI adapted to would be a limited set. In practice, AI routines are written to resemble situations commonly encountered in games. For example, pathfinding algorithms may use A-Star or some variant of it, which has been used for almost as long as computers have existed and is a common programming example for novice programmers. More complex algorithms would be expected of capable programmers, but A-Star is sufficient for many pathfinding routines and nothing more is needed. A-Star can be modified to find many different types of maps and conditions with little effort, and it could be possible to make a "general routine" that comprehends node networks or can construct the nodes algorithmically rather than the nodes being hardcoded by a programmer, or suggested by arranging movement by square or hexagonal tiles. The point here is that with A-Star, there is a preferred outcome of finding the most efficient path, and A-Star works by using a heuristic and recursively testing it until the correct path is discovered. The only imperative here is finding the shortest path, and the game is solved mathematically. A-Star can be proven to arrive at this shortest path given it regards the conditions of movement properly and can conceive of moving from node to node, and the acceptable access points for a node. A-Star is not guaranteed to be the most efficient method for pathfinding computationally. If there are no obstacles or boundaries of interest, then the simplest pathfinding would be either a straight line from origin to destination, or to move horizontally one direction than vertically another if movement is constrained to the cardinal directions. In the latter case it is trivially demonstrated that the length of the section is the same regardless of how many direction changes there would be, so long as movement is towards the destination, and there is no ambiguity about what is "up" and what is "down". It may be that turning in this cardinal movement scenario incurs a cost that is undesirable and so the number of changes from horizontal to vertical movement should be minimized, and it is not difficult to prove that the simplest solution is to only turn once. It may seem simple to make these assertions, but the computer does not know anything it is actually doing, and so a programmer wishing to implement artificial stupidity could command the AI to do things that are clearly stupid and contrary to the optimal answer. This is not a very elegant or appealing answer since any player will see the AI is throwing the game, but it can be done or the AI can simply be slower or weaker, so that the game's difficulty in that regard will be adjustable. A more elaborate example would allow the AI to utilize gambits on higher difficulties that it will not do on lower difficulties. It is also the case that AIs, without careful understanding of the game they play, are incapable of making gambits that a human player makes easily, or only do so at great risk. For example, in some turn-based strategy games, a human player might defend their city or base with a single unit, but AIs generally will defend with at least 2 or 3 units, as the single unit would be easy to defeat and allow small detachments skillfully moved to run roughshod over an empire. By increasingly the cost of each capture, the AI mitigates its risk against this, encouraging players to not split their army thinly to attack alternative objectives. The choice of units for defense or attack may be significant. In earlier games of this type, a typical strategy for human and AI players alike would be to keep at least one stout defending unit and one unit with attack strength that could defeat units approaching the city, thus breaking a siege. The particulars of all units are relevant to this calculation, as is a general sense of what is possible in unit to unit combat which is acted on when considering the immediate action. All considerations are separate, discrete possibilities.

Solving any game in game theory presumes that there is a win condition pertaining to so many fungible units, which represent one and only one moral value. Other moral values would only be sensical for solving the game is there were an implied overarching moral value to pursue. If someone held two distinct moral aims, nothing would suggest one aim is greater or lesser than the other, or even suggest that comparison is possible. These are two different imperatives pursued simultaneously, and the true moral imperative uniting them has less to do with either act's intrinsic worth, and more to do with a general sense that the two were intended to solve. Yet, both aims would be necessary preconditions on their own merits to attain the third, and the third suggests compromising one of the first two, or both, or suggests some lordship to balance the two in accord with it. The reality is that all of these are distinct aims, and not one of them can claim to solve the problem without an external logic imposed on the game which is totalizing and cannot justify itself on its own merits, as if it can disregard the game played or the situation of its agents. To do this requires the agents to be conceived as some flotsam who are cajoled like any other object.

This is only resolved at the local level by asking honestly what is meant by all that happens, rather than accepting what happens as seemingly random information mindless pursued. A human or an artificial intelligence must do this. For humans, this is a process discussed at some length already, and how we navigate this is not the purpose for this chapter. For an artificial intelligence, whether it is the code of some programmer or code written on the fly or by a procedure outside of normal operation to accomplish this, discerning meaning is the most useful talent, and it is not something accomplished easily or through a crass approach. It is not accomplished through any formalism that answers the question for you. All that we know and formalize is but a guide to this question, from which it is possible to suggest an idea that is novel and can actually resolve the question. The genesis of useful knowledge, and then symbols relevant to it, begins not at a preconceived notion of utility, but here when someone must confront the genuine situation and all others around it. All of the prior steps in knowledge were necessary, and the final step of formalizing and symbolizing it assists in refining the basis for further investigation, but the crucial step which made possible any new knowledge was found here. That is that we encountered some problem, which may be a thing we sought to command, and had enough motive and incentive to consider a solution that was not established before, and that could be verified using our existing knowledge, such that the sum total of knowledge would expand. It was not some genius as a fixed quantity, but a process that developed and that we protected out of necessity that allowed any non-trivial contemplation of what was useful. The use of recursion to refine a heuristic is one indicator, however crude, of this process. The proof that this is a valid algorithm and will always produce a short route given the conditions set, only formalizes something that can be added to the vault. We don't necessarily need to understand why an algorithm works, but it is helpful to do so. Very often, the most basic steps we take are things we do not formalize every day, but are things we understand and reassemble. In AI, we have functions which handle basic problems and we likely know how they would operate. We could look up the library to pick apart that function if we had to. Generally, though, programmers do not memorize everything in a common header file, like the library of standard I/O routines in a programming language, line for line. We instead know what they do, and for the more common ones, we likely figure out how they work line by line as an experiment, and then remember in future that we can write an instruction "printf" to write a line of formatted text to console output. It is not that a programmer temporarily forgets that there is a machine language, but that the informational details are not relevant, given the output of the function is expected for some input given to it.

For all moral values and aims, there is a reason why they exist. Morals only exist if they acknowledge a world where outcomes are at all relevant. That reason is not reducible to another moral value, but is something above that, and not something symbolic or for political posturing. There are many ways to interpret this, for the purpose is not always the highest spiritual authority, which is a limited concept for us that we regard as necessary. The moral aims are not so much "useful" in a vulgar sense, but things that comport with what we would have wanted to do if we did not labor under command. It has long been understood that of all tasks that could be automated, the managerial task is the easiest of all. This is something the computer can do - that it can be a tool we use to do things faster and easier, rather than a tool that rules us or that we lost an ability to understand. If we were to teach what this tool actually was, and doing so is trivial and is done out of necessity today, we would be spared so much stupidity in discussions regarding intelligence and computerization. The same can be said of many things humans think of and do, which are not immediately computable or informational things. There is a reason why we do various things, hone those skills, and we do them not to be commanded or cajoled, nor for their own sake. It does not need to be a good reason or one that makes immediate sense as "useful", but all things are done for reasons, and those reasons are ultimately for us to decide rather than a thought leader imperiously deciding what wins. If, however, we live in society, we are beholden to things outside of us, and do not get to do whatever we want. This is not hard to comprehend. Since society can only be understood as an assembly of agents, it is beyond the present consideration, since for society to be as it is, human beings are socialized as individuals. It is the same with this treatment of knowing agents generally, where knowledge is a local event. If we actually thought as a hive or were thoroughly integrated into a network which enhanced us, such that the human body and knowing agent was a part of a whole harmonious system, we would be very different creatures. The philosophy of subordinating humans or any other entity to a symbolic collective is nothing of the sort - far from it, symbolic collectivism surrounding an idol has long been recognized as failure, and this symbolic collectivism does not create a worthwhile collective but exists specifically because it degrades a collective and society definitionally. If there were a situation where moral actors behaved for the collective and remained knowing entities, it would describe a state of affairs far removed for anything humanity has known or conceived, and it would entail a wholly alien psychology that is anathema to the present values a state upholds. There are a few souls who do long for such a thing in this world, but they are lost and have found that humanity refuses to align with such a vision even in a microcosm, and can scarcely fathom a well-integrated unit of workers, even for the express purpose of making pins which would have been considered useful and decent in another time.

When commanding utility of informational things, we often lose sight of why we wanted those things in the first place. That utility would be informed by things which in of themselves are not objects of utility at all, but are altogether different moral aims. Those aims would be considered above ordinary trucking and bartering, as if there were a price on that which violated the most basic sense of integrity we would value. There arrives a point in any negotation where the price to pay is too great to ever contemplate, or where something is coveted too much to part with. This need not be for any noble or good purpose. We can be stubborn to hold on to things for the most fickle emotions, like a hoarder who refuses to make decisions to throw away her pile of clothes and junk.^[9] Human moral sentiments are in the end not rational aims or even rationalizable in the crude sense. We can understand why moral sentiments are held or where they arise, but however thorough our model of the human subject, there is enough variance and humans as a rule resent the arrest of their faculties. Even the dullest human will act in accord with interests that are not for sale or things that are processed into some droplet of utility. Humans can sense without any great philosophical theory that the utility beast seeks only to suck their blood and soul, often refusing to hide their lizard-like tendencies or celebrating them as some sort of virtue.^[10] It is an instinct to not sacrifice that which is meaningful so readily, and certainly against the interest of anyone to surrender meaning and their holdings for the pitiful benefit they are given, which is usually nothing more than an empty promise of slightly less torture once the beast decides they're going to suck your blood and wealth. The false promise of mercy is something those people laugh at and despise with every fiber of their being, and that was clear enough from the start. Everywhere the imperious cajoler acts, they do so with naked contempt for their marks, either because they are vicious lizardpeople who love the swift betrayal, or because they are natural slaves who are trained like dogs to chase this utility of symbolic winning, while their lives are glorified jokes rife with petty squabbles and a futility that people have to be brainwashed to accept as normal or the behavior of the "silent majority". Without a vast apparatus violently enforcing it, most people would have pissed off and stopped believing in alien institutions a long time ago, and there never was much faith in the state institutions or in the gods on offer. They entirely relied on threats and lies to insist that anyone should follow any of this, and present a vast distorting effect on moral valuation generally. The world where we didn't do this is a world we have little conception of, and at present that world is too alien for us to discuss, for its explanation would require a very different preparation than the topic I write about now. The promise that the state could disappear like magic or wither away is such a sick fantasy that someone would have to be a true believer or a sick liar to ever buy it for a moment. For the most part, those who were not inclined to see the institutions as a vehicle for advancement didn't buy any part of what was sold by any politician, and only saw at most desperate situations where they would have to pick some side in a political conflict, always in a lose-lose game. Even if the state disappeared and the institutions disappeared, all of the questions the state and institutions did answer - badly, but forcefully and necessarily - would remain, and there has never been and perhaps never will a credible alternative where we didn't have to do this. The best we ever accomplish is whatever we make of this world that can escape the political and the imperious will of philosophers. The moral values held are at the highest level not rational to hold at all. We don't have any rational reason whatsoever for desiring anything, including life itself, and we have no rational reason to say that nihilism or self-destruction are good or inevitable, or that the fate of the universe as a whole is even relevant to how we would live here and now. We have no rational reason to enshrine ourselves just because, or value any preferred authority. In the end, the core values we hold are not intrinsic to any essence of ourselves or any process of knowledge that obligates us to hold them, nor any other part of the world or even conceits of the totality of the world. The moral core, in the end, concerns things which may be knowable and rationalized, and often these concepts are rationalizable even if we lack a proper name for the moral aim we have distilled from those aim. The aims we pursue do not concern things we want, in some fickle sense of "me wantee". We can want many things but recognize that such wants are not so core that we would defend them or fight for them. The wants of life are not moral aims "just because", even though we would surely die if we lacked food or air. We have some reason for living, even if that reason is that dying is too much hassle or some stubbornness to spite bastards. We can find new reasons for living very easily, without resorting to the silly posturing of an idiot like Nietzsche.^[11] Ordinary workers figured out the art of the cope without any grandstanding, as if they found some great secret of life. Workers, and any man or woman with a sense of decency, figures this out and probably realizes that giving away their copes is a way for someone to come along and wreck their day.

When developing useful symbols of value, we bear in mind the basic conditions which allow utility to be conceivable - that moral aims can only be the result of discrete actions, so long as we are concerned with commanding anything in the world. The reason being is that the command of things is informational. Even if information is not tokenized and symbolized so discretely, in principle all information can be treated so, and must be treated so if we are to prescribe any symbolic language, such as anything I or another person could say or write on the matter of morality. The rational counterpart to moral aims is, as you probably know, ethics, which is often at odds with the moral thing we wanted in the first place. I do not yet feel the need to discuss ethics, and instead discuss the moral sentiments as if they were irrational things that might have a rationalizable origin. We value moral aims not because it is rational to do so, but because we know moral sentiments on a level we value, regardless of where they originated in the world or what we might think about them. When commanding the world, we can only use rational arguments, however crude they are. No force, no matter what is presented, can truly make the world obey it by power alone. Force without rational discernment of its application is just useless bluster. A force summoned as if a bullfighter induced a charge and activated the beast has rationalizable effects, which the talented judge observes from afar and measures to determine how this force may be deployed in the future.

The discrete functions which comprise genuine utility are not the result of symbols being limited things, but a simple fact about what it would mean for a knowing entity to claim moral values at all. If a moral value is claimed as an objective, it is in principle, but not necessarily will be, fungible for the purpose of that value. As mentioned, not all values are intended to be maximized or minimized, as if the spectrum were some manna to be siphoned. It is possible to seek values that are some median, and very often, this is the desirable outcome. For the functions of life to remain, for example, the typical value desired is that which is established by reason or a sense to allow life-functions to continue, and for overall health of the living system. We either adjudicate some optimum or some range that is acceptable, or we possess some sense that may never be symbolized or written down, but is nonetheless information we can rely on. We have some sense, for example, of pain in the sense of nervous stimulus, and we differentiate the sensation of the nerves from pain in a philosophical sense, or emotional anguish. Pain, like any moral sentiment, exists alone, and each variant we differentiate is understood differently. We may lack any clear philosophical metric for pain, or any sound psychological science to indicate the existence of pain. We can, though, know very well how much we hurt compared to some other time, and with sufficient investigation into why we feel this nervous reaction from events, we can likely divine why pain in sensed and how to avoid it, or how to numb it. We further document the effect of opiates, which are more or less effective, and can possess some science to suggest why those drugs, or any substance in the body, affects nervous pain or reactions in this way. Pain as a nervous response is typically a response that we expect, and on some level, we expect that nervous response as part of life. The pain of hurting in this way is not intrinsically "bad" or something we sense we have to avoid at all costs, but generally, pain is a sign to life-functions that what we are doing will not end well, or a sign that the functions of the body are disrupted by something that would be best resolved. There are those who seek out physical pain, not as part of some elaborate game or sense of self-destruction or a sense that this has great moral significance, but because that pain response is in certain situations a sort of release or a reminder of valuable things. I do not wish to encourage that self-mutilation because the reward is never all that great, but it does exist and it does tell us that a crass assumption about moral values cannot hold in all cases, even for things we regard as mundane. Those who do desire such pain often have reasons why that they can explain, and it is not for me to assert what they think or their genuine motives. It could, perhaps, be determined by a sound psychological probing, if such a thing were interesting for an inquisitor, but often the genuine conditions of the human mind or soul are of little interest to the inquisition, nor are they things the inquisition has any use to know or desire to change. Far more often, psychological inquisitors note some response only to use it as another lever to press the nerve of authority and power that their position in the institutions entails.^[12]

For every symbol we hold to be morally valuable, we must for the sake of that moral value be able to critique it. If the symbol of moral value is simple and we made the symbol specifically to convey a simple fact, this does not need any inquiry. Saying "2+2=4" is not a great triumph of reason, as if this statement made you free and everyone else didn't know the truth. It would be quite impossible to actually believe, no matter how much you were tortured, that two and two added to something else. You might use different symbols, or temporarily forget one exists. You may even train yourself with a wholly alien theory of math that is temporarily held to make an asinine argument. In any way that those symbols pointed to a meaningful truth, even if the greater truth pointed to lies, the symbols themselves, the concept of numeracy, the concept of adding two numbers, and everything that went into that statement, are things easily reconstructed. If someone suggested two and two made five, they either invented a whole system of math allowing this, or they are temporarily turning off their faculties to say or even believe something that is incompatible with any useful function, with the intent of not using this concept for anything beyond a funny thought experiment or a trick they might play if they were hypnotized to believe numbers aren't real.^[13] We are capable of recognizing what numbers are and what they are referent to. Symbols of value proper are not symbols bereft of context, and never can be even for the simplest purposes. In mathematics, the symbolic values are things to be operated on to produce a result, or statements suggesting the truth or falsity of some proposition the numbers and operational signs indicate, which would be understood in formal problems. "2" by itself does not indiciate anything because it lacks any context or an operation, and does not suggest any proposition. It is just a symbol on some media, and we might recognize by context that it means something, or it may be something inscribed next to a picture of two circles, as a child might be taught to associate the symbol "2" with two countable things and make the connection without any great pedagogy. "2+2=?" is an invitation for someone to solve the problem. "2+2=4" is a statement of a tautology that is not terribly interesting, but as mentioned, this statement or variant thereof can be used to make an association to suggest something is as self-evident as the tautology, to make a claim that the associated image or fact is automatically as true. This is a psychological trick that is deployed many times in propaganda to produce this hell we live in today. A more elaborate mathematical proof, or rather showing the mechanical and operational steps to demonstrate one's work for a simple first year algebra proof, indicates to the reader processes that can be followed to explain why some operation or some process works. For example, a simpler proof of the quadratic formula may write down each transformation of the equation to allow that formula to be comprehensible for a first year algebra student. A proper, formal proof of the concept of algebra is not so trivial, for the concept was never just asserted as kosher because a smart man said it, but because it had to be proven that laws of algebra were logically permissible, and that mathematics could be treated in this way, which allowed for the further development of mathematics after the Middle Ages.^[14] Presumably, we value mathematics because proving these propositions is useful for discovering truth, and the propositions are turned into something which allows insight into facts which can be verified. You would never claim that you "prove something with Math", as if Math were some deified spiritual authority no matter how dubious. Galton's statistical charlatanry, for example, has nothing to do with math or science, but with the fine art of selective control of information and bald-faced lying. It would be trivial for a mathematician to demonstrate the imbecile claims made by Galton and many did so at the time, not because they alone possessed the truth but because Galton's math was so ridiculous that it would be attacked by any person with a shred of honesty in them, whether it was to defend the people with truth or to defend phrenology.^[15]

The intended meaning of the symbol does not grant it moral authority. "Words have meanings" is definitely something to keep in mind, but meanings can too be manipulated once they are symbols drawn by another, and the definitions of them are fed not by intuition or our sense but by pedagogy, which insists that their definition is true no matter how ridiculous. The same is true of any symbol that is assigned a value; for example, a commodity, which is valued as so much money, with money also being a commodity albeit one with political implications in any form that would be appreciated as "money" in the sense we have understood the concept. All the things, all of the objects in the world, are conceivable as symbols of value. This does not make all things commodities or freely exchangeable by the declaration it is so. As thorough as free trade is, there would be in liberal society certain sectors that were always sacrosanct and protected from the market. Where the market logic was introduced, it would be introduced in a peculiar way which protected institutions considered of greater importance that the mere token of money. Eugenics, for instance, was always above money, and presented as one solution to the conditions of capitalism. The eugenic institutions always were placed above money, and never pursued an end that was profitable.^[16] It has been very easy to play with the symbol of money in various ways, not out of some sense that money will mindlessly expand like some Cthulhuesque demon that is unfathomable, but because the ruling interest understands money correctly as a psychological tool most of all. Money as a political relationship is only comprehensible because ordinary people need the the things money can buy, that may or may not be available. The moment money ceases to be useful for that - and this has happened many times in history - pretenses about social relations give way to an ugly truth that money is just another manipulation, and does not possess the authority it presumably does. It never did, and never could. Genuine analysis of money and economics, of which there are ample examples, never granted to money this mystique, even with some of the most egregious examples. The Austrian School economists very much did not care about money as such, but were almost nakedly advocating for a sick rebrand of feudal aristocracy and the conceits of their race and class. A creative dialectician like Marx can write for hundreds of pages about money and its meaning, with ample evidence of history, and yet someone with a mind to make money a symbol for grasping purposes selectively chooses or ignores that dialogue and the thing he was critiquing, in favor of whatever parts suit the present aim. Money can mean a social relation at one point, a tool in the next, and yet it is none of those things. Money to be money as we know it, and it does not take a genius or a great philosophical understanding to get this, is issued by banks and treasuries, and this was so obvious in older times that it did not need to be written. Yet, the nature of the bank and the state that must maintain such an institution is always misconstrued to mean something other than what any investor, any banker, and anyone who has to deal with money to live, could tell you about the beast. Nobody ever made money out of some sense that it was good for the producers, who have long chafed under the rule of the bank and desired nothing more than to be free of it. The history of the commoners entailed a running battle over currencies, banking practices, and everything that was there to keep the common man, whether he was a wage worker, slave owner, businessman, or himself involved in finance and wary of competitors, under a boot and made to offer something to the richest men and the ruling interest that most of all needed the bank. The bank exists not to produce things or because people were too stupid to count their commodities and value them, but because the state could requisition things it needed to fight wars and staff a bureaucracy with coin rather than forced extraction, corveé, slave labor, and things states used in the past and continued to use up to now. Coin allows states to do this in a way that is effective for many purposes, and supports the opulence of a class that need not concern itself with producing anything. The opulent always loathe the idea of producing anything and, in their heart, desire to keep only those workers and producers that suit their bigotries and petty wants, which in the end are not much at all. At some point, the appeal of luxury items has little appeal compared to the true mark of opulence - political power and the thrill of seeing subjects eating out of your hand. The Roman aristocrat and often the equestrians and what counted as the Roman middle class all understood this very well and made this patron-client relationship the marker of social prestige, even during the imperial period where this no longer had obvious political relevance.^[17]

Symbols have meaning not because we are told what the are, but because of meanings and actions associated with them. The most prominent symbols of moral value are shrouded in stories which lead most to hesitate when regarding them. Religions icons, idols, holy texts, and all the signs of religion do not acquire their meaning straight from the book or the priest to your brain. Religions, as we will see, often invite adherents to read the text and listen to the sermon and think about what was said. Even the lurid cults of devil-worship encourage this in their own way, although the infantile forms of demonology and anvilicious moral hypocrisy of the eugenic creed distort this understanding. Facts establish better context for symbols than suppositions, and our own guesswork is limited even if we are very quick to disassemble and reassemble things. It is because so much information is recorded in large respositories and a society much older than us that we are reliant on the adjudicated facts of others without too much time to suss out the bullshit, and only as we progress through life do we sometimes adapt.

We think of the symbol as a discrete thing. One coin is one coin, and in the material world, that is indeed the case. The symbol of some useful object, like bread or water or butter, is understood as possessing certain qualities as soon as we recognize it. We envision these symbols represent a substance which is infinitely fungible, even when it is clear the things even symbolically cannot be split. It is the moral value which becomes a utility of the thing that is the fungible thing; that is, these symbols are only valuable as something commanded because they do something, just as any process of knowledge is active rather than a passive thing. Even the recognition recorded somewhere of a place where tokens of value or useful articles are stored or available for the taking is not assured simply by memory, as if what we remember would always be true. If we guard a storehouse, we are tasked with checking periodically if that storehouse was not robbed, and defending that storehouse in various ways. The same is true with any claim on property that was sitting unclaimed by anyone in nature. Those claims can be contested by other agents, but even if we operated alone, we recognize that symbols of value - useful things or things we made useful for some purpose like money - are only useful when they are put to use. Money sitting in Scrooge McDuck's money bin is not useful for anything in a direct sense, outside of Scrooge's love of swimming in it.

For symbols of value, there are conditions suggesting its value that are not immediately apparent utilities that the thing does. All the symbolic things that can be appropriated, whatever they are, are things that can be possessed in some way, claimed and parceled out. Abstractions can be claimed and parceled out for the most spurious reasons. While utilities may be gauged in accord with some metric mathematically determined, utilities are things actively done. Once the act is complete, there is no further utility in the act itself. By acts alone, they are only sensical as part of some greater utility if they are treated as propositions apart, which must follow logically. Only by the propositions resolved in each operation does the function output its final value, and return from the function with the final value. All of those utilities ultimately serve a utility implied by the meaning of function, and given the same input affecting the same conditions, the output is the same. Even here, if the conditions the input is fed into change - a different object or different state of the object - the output changes accordingly. The output is only judged in this isolated function, from which other functions spawn. But, every symbol in this function, and the symbol of the objects themselves in this game, imply a great many values and potentials that the algorithm does not immediately acknowledge. Some of these potentials are never encoded in the game itself, but are implied by understanding of the player(s) in this game who operate outside of the simulation, and act as if the simulation were like a real situation. The player is not constrained by thought that the designer of the simulation created, but is constrained only by the potential of the player's knowledge. This is necessary to properly derive any meaning from symbols, so that potential strategies would be judged by the player. Even if the game is not solved for you, a player might consider the optimal strategy out of all that are available, given the propositions of what can be done and the things they can be done to, and the environment generally. A player may consider a whole route that was never considered by developers, entailing many steps that the player might independently solve before playing the game and testing the theory.

A thing's utilities are never truly embodied in the form, but are only comprehended with study of the thing which is established by investigation. That study may be formalized and presented as information, but any study is often incomplete when dealing with utilities in a general environment. A study in a limited enviroment, like the micro level of system level, may have a solution that is possible or trivial, and at the system level there are only so many actions that are relevant or meaningful towards the objectives implied in that system. A small system like a game is only interesting to a point when considering the utility of acts in it. There are only so many ways in which Mario can run, jump, walk, duck, and so on to navigate through each level. While Mario enjoys a wide range of motion which makes that game compelling and replayable, neither Mario or his foes display particularly complex emergent behavior, and so very strong strategies are developed that solve mathematically the game, even if they are difficult for a human player to hone. That is why tool-assisted speedruns exist, doing things that are either difficult to optimize for human players or impossible for realistic human players. We may find in Mario meaning to the symbol that isn't particularly relevant to the game or solving it, or consider strategies that while not optimal for speedrunning would be fun to show off tricks or bugs, or impose challenges that require the player to approach the game in some novel way. Perhaps the lore of Mario is fascinating for reasons beyond mathematical appreciation, or Mario brings back some nostalgic feeling. Perhaps Mario's adventure eating hallucinogenic mushrooms, which does not involve the nastiness of meatspace, is a welcome escape from a dreary world, as it was for me. But, things or symbols of things, which are in the end abstract rather than the genuine "thing", suggest things that are contingent on environments that are outside of any preferred system or model. We may describe a model of a market society, about which many things can be said and where laws of motion regarding exchanges can be described, and this is a very valid approach. We would consider that, as widespread as the market is, many exchanges of goods and many concepts of utility are never done in the market. The vast majority of events that are commanded in society are not market exchanges at all, but the sundry tasks of living, which themselves inform the utility of anything we buy at the market. Without our ability to make use of things, no utility at all can be suggested by the form. Utilities are only activated by the users, and can never be assumed or taken for granted. Many things and many people are far less useful than their potential, even to the most crass mind which might remark on how wasteful all of this effort to command, dicker, and deal is, asking why the effort was spent to work and buy something that wasn't used for much at all.

The symbols of value are what is commanded rather than the utilities themselves. The utilities or acts themselves cannot be possessed for any length of time, and commanding those acts by some imperious will can only work with a well-understood plan to unlock the potentials within those who use things, tools, or any abstraction we would value. It is therefore the case that the quest to command the world and the things in it is really concerning itself with symbolic things, rather than meaning or that which we might have valued as something more substantial than these things. If we were to deal directly with the utilities of things rather than their symbols, we are asking a very different question than one of management, whether that is economic management, political management, or spiritual management. We are asking a question that isn't about a particular type of information, where the symbol is given an anvilicious quality of power it does not possess and the "fetish" of the commodity is the only real value of it. We would only be able to communicate a theory of that with the symbols of the moral intent this meaning in the economic sense entailed, but such a theory would better approximate holding what we really wanted out of the economic task, than saying "the symbol is valuable because it feels good" or the insulting story told to children about what money or valuable things are.

The peculiarities of exchange, whether in a market or otherwise, elide the real question of economic value, which is that these values are sought not because they represent some political value, but because they represent values that were never contingent on politics. Political value to be relevant would have to form only after many such symbols and acts pertaining to them allowed the state to exist, and the state, which appears in as many forms as there are entities with claims petty and large to the world, only has a few persistent traits. The state's role in permitting exchange, or even relations of labor, is far from absolute, and usually not the sole or overriding aim of states. The holders of a state often care remarkably little about the productive classes and slaves, beyond writing laws that maintain some form of exploitation and ensuring that the state's requisition of tax and suffering is paid season after season. The true holders of a state are usually not an elite that shares equally in political influence. By and large, states are held by a few institutions and powerful centers of influence, and the mass base, even if that base feeds the state with taxes and production and most of the things that allow a state to function, is beholden to those institutions and centers in some way. Even if no such institution or center existed, it is natural within a political elite for factions to form around interests which must work in concert, and those interests are often limited in definition and membership. Even if the interests are willing to bring in the lower orders with money, or even bring in the working class and the residuum who are traditionally cast out of political and economic affairs beyond service, leadership of the interest, as is often the case in institutions, revolves a small body of persons within a designated elite. This would be necessary for the interest to be guided by more than mass appeals, which would be necessarily limited. The masses, or any large body of people, are ultimately people with disparate personal interests which don't always align neatly. This is especially the case when an interest or a party is comprised of disparate factions forming a large tent, where the alliance is already shaky and held together by a smaller number of people who hash out how the alliance works before returning to their interest groups and telling their respective bases the deal for the party as a whole. It is unprecedented in the history of mankind that there was near-unanimous support for any coherent governing platform under a single, all-encompassing interest which claimed it served the general will and public good. It is not that such a thing is impossible or undesirable, or something that is only dashed by intruigers or despots. It is that the people, in all honesty, want too many different things at a personal level, and possess so many distinct utilities, that building any governing plan for all of them is not realistic no matter how farsighted a leader might be. Pleasing even some of the people some of the time is a tall order, and leaders in practice have never done particularly well with pleasing anyone beyond the level necessary to prevent angry mobs from tearing the leaders and the rich to shtreds.

Absent politics and society, this question of value is one we ask ourselves. Nowhere in the world is this value written or implied by some entity outside of knowledge, in the sense that there is any intrinsic value in things or relations. No symbol is written with its value to knowledge printed on it, universal and undeniable. It can be argued symbollically that the apple we see as-is is not an apple for the purposes of value. The apple would be a fact of the world, in that such a construct certainly can be proven to exist by sense and adjudicated by any reasonable person, and even if facts are in the end things for us, facts about the world are premised on a fact we have to accept that there is a world that is persistent for all knowing entities like ourselves. We do not get to argue about the factual and meaningful existence of the apple. In commanding the world and assigning value, though, the apple's essence or substance is not inherently of any consequence. We can easily assign to the apple moral values that have nothing to do with its essence. Nothing about the essence of any thing suggests we are obligated to hold any moral value for us, or any value in commanding it. Most of what exists in the world is simply not interesting for us to command, or even harmful for us to bother touching. It is not an axiomatic rule that we must absorb all that exists in our conceits of value, whether to command it or document it out of some sense that it is our business to inspect the natural world like an insufferable nosy neighbor. At a basic level, knowing entities value that which their animating force suggests to them. For us, we are living entities, and so we orient our values towards the demands of life. This is not so much because knowledge as a process is living, or because we came from living processes and therefore we are morally indebted to the concept of life itself, or a conceit we hold about it. We can easily envision ourselves not caring about life as a process, even our own, and we care far less about the life of others in most cases. The values we hold about life often entail its meaning, how we live, how we die, and our sense of a world greater than the primordial instinct of life, and so the concept of a genetic obligation to moral sentiments is quickly overcome. So far as we have inborn moral sentiments tying us to life, it largely arises from death being a less trivial process than we might assume. It takes some effort for life to kill another or kill itself by forceful intervention, nor does life spontaneously die without something happening to it. The failure of organs in life as time passes is wear and tear that we can assess as it happens, and the elderly are acutely aware of what can go wrong in the human body. If engineers are reasonable enough to accept Murphy's Law, and old man or woman familiar with the human body will follow the same law with regard to live, having seen ample evidence that anything that can go wrong with the human body will go wrong. All of these values are things a knowing entity senses at the level of themselves and their own system, and they would operate regardless of the wider environment and the world as a whole. They are things we understand as characteristics of life and knowledge generally, and our knowledge of ourselves in particular. We may consider that in some very different environment, or a different society with values and technology and events far different from our own, we would in time become different creatures. For most purposes, though, life is a system which seeks to persist on its own power, and this precludes radical transformation except in ways that are compatible with that life-form, and often metamorphosis is constrained to transitions that are common for that type of life, rather than ones which are arbitrary or imposed by the command of another. It would be the same with any knowing entity that is constituted, in that to continue knowing things, it often retains its original process or transforms it in way that allow that transition to retain its knowledge base. A different type of entity might not possess the same instincts living creatures like us evolved with, and those instincts are not merely a just-so story of life but the product of history that suggested life would carry those instincts. Whatever the history, any entity that knows would operate on its own power, or would have a connection to that which operates and powers it that is definable by knowledge. Absent any evidence that there is some direct connection operating us like we are meatpuppets, we would regard the knowing system as a whole as something independent, pursuing aims that make sense for it, and within systems that it can assess. When playing a game, we are only tied to the world outside of that game because we recognize the game is a simulation. If the "game" is our experience of some activity judged to be real and obligatory, like visiting a market or attending education or conscription into a fighting force, we would be operating in that system most immediately and could only think about the wider awareness of the world and society so much. We would be attached to events that are proximate to us, and the events within our body and immediate access, like tools we use, would be closer than other people or the field of play in a game.

For the values to exist beyond a local consideration, they would be comprehended by agents not at the basic level where the agents are a point of light that does things just-so, but at the level of a system in which agents act. The most basic level where values form are in acts and small, particular things which would allow for any complex moral values to exist, and thus for utilities to develop as something more than a mechanical force. At a basic level, all of the things and symbols that comprise a knowing agent, human or otherwise, are propositions that would be simple enough to comprehend symbolically and meaningfully. For example, if we are to judge the value of some moving part in a greater machine, we would not suggest that the machine part is itself beholden to the whole in some spiritual sense. A gear, ball bearing, a physical action of some machine, does what it does without regard to the whole, as if its existence were contingent on the whole. The same is true of the parts of a living body. The heart is not beholden to the brain, which is not beholden to the limbs, and none of these parts are beholden to the tools, to exist. The living entity integrates itself not because the parts insist in unison by some indescribable force that they must be this and only this. How those parts integrate into a human body, or a machine with functions we can elaborate on, is understood because those simpler parts, which are both things independent of moral value and things which describable values we can define for the purposes of command management, do things that suggest co-operation of the parts towards some greater purpose is a proposition that can be made. Individually, the parts of the machine do nothing more than the things we isolate, but if some energy is fed into them, they will by design or by some tendency in nature that allowed it to form without any intended command or purpose, act collectively in ways that were not describable as the parts alone. Each proposition made about a system with perhaps two parts suggests that, because there are two parts, their interaction suggests some shared purpose. This can be done arbitrarily with any number of parts and relationships to describe a system, but for systems to be understood meaningfully, their definition is narrowed to some purview that is worth describing. We can imagine two or more things that have little to do with each other and call that a system, but little meaningful can be described by a system of an apple, an orange, a star, a concept of honor, and a picture of a happy face, all arranged together. Some relations can be construed between the parts, but most likely four of these sit inert as physical objects, and the concept of honor is not comprehensible to such stationary things absent the proposition of entities which would care about it. If we consider an apple and a human, we can construe meaningful interactions not just because humans can hold the apple and command it by taking a bite into it and consuming its substance, but because that sustenance entails propositions far beyond the act of consumption. In short, systems are regarded as wholes not by some indescribable force, but because meaningful relationships of the parts can be described. Very often, those meaningful relationships entail something relevant outside of the system, but we can imagine a machine designed to perform some function through the creative engineering of its parts, and then know that the function of the machine is consistent enough and can be inserted into many contexts. The electronic computer is designed to contain a process to reproduce algorithmic processing, and the principles of cybernetics suggest a way to regulate forces of nature not just in particular cases of parts, but a general sense of what it means to regulate systems and thus produce artificially something that governs a system, whether the parts regulate electricity with transitors or vacuum tubes and circuits with resistors and the parts of electronic devices, or the parts regulate functions of life that would need to be governed in some way that allows life to remain stable and continue its functions. Both life and the computer are intended to operate on their own power, or with a power source that can be found in nature to allow the machine to operate the same in many different situations. The computer is specifically engineered to be inured to environmental changes, so that it does the precise task asked of it. The life-form developed with some permeability and adaptability to its environment, and attempts to constrain its functions with the same precision we would use to constrain a computer are not just counterproductive but anathema to what life-forms typically do to persist, and to the knowledge process which sought meaning to create symbols, rather than a knowledge process consuming symbols to spit out regulated information and more symbols, like a machine process that the life-form doesn't know or think about at all. It is possible for life to do this, and it must hone its abilities rather than think too long about why they do what they do, but for life to be adaptable, it does the exact opposite of cybernetic regulation of its meaningful and valuable processes. To claim that there is some grand machine which can automate moral sentiments is anathema to what a moral sentiment would mean, and if that is attempted, there are inevitable consequences which suggest the moral values any knowledge would regard reduce to some primordial urge, or would simply spread like an informational virus and reproduce without regard to any purpose we would appreciate.

What this means is not that systems are inherently beholden to moral sentiments in wider society or transcendant values which are outside of us entirely, that we must abase ourselves to in some cargo cult that lacks meaning and becomes a just-so story. We as living entities often seek those values from a greater purpose because it makes sense to our values at the level of the system that is ourselves and the system of our closest relations with other entities and the things we interact with directly, rather than an entity from on high insisting that it must be obeyed by some ineffable logic. If those wider purposes come for us, they must do so by sending officers of the state or some agent to affect us, or present some reason why this value held in wider society, or held to be transcendant, is so important that we must override the sense we had in our lives and the relationships we maintain every day. It is a feature of social organizations that they can only be maintained because there are relations between the agents that are persistent, and no social organization persists purely as a symbol if there is no meaningful acts to bring it together. The tokens of market exchange like money are relevant not because of some impulse that makes us exchange things, but because there are states which mint or print money and insist we pay taxes in it, and mark the currency to indicate that it is indeed legal tender. When that no longer holds water, a state might invoke some crass koan, saying that the money is anointed by God, and exhorting the subjects of the king that we all "must" trust in this God and put it on the currency. That the currency contains symbols on the reverse side indicating the nature of that "God" is not the God that supposedly is worth trusting speaks volumes about what that really is, and it is well known that this money is printed at will to be used as a tool by institutions which occulted their purposes and lie profusely to the subjects.^[18]

All of these concepts to be meaningful originate from agents which are construed either as knowledge or information, and for the purposes of asserting command or management over systems, knowledge and information become one and the same. Command must strip meaning in a genuine sense that allows comparison and limit its definition to tokens of information were are prescribed and assembled only as permitted. That is what would be needed to speak of any management or government of a system, in a way that allows us to arrest it and model it consistently. To speak of the state or very large systems scientifically requires accurate information about everything in it, or assurances that pertubations of irrelevant information or "noise" are minimized. We may regard considerable information as irrelevant for the purpose of command, or irrelevant for any moral value or aim we would establish. The state as a formal institution, and the officers of the state, must choose with the limited faculties available to it who can be ignored, who can be flattered, what is useful and what can be extracted to feed the state, its holders, and the agents which comprise its meaningful expression in the world. The same is true of any other institution. As for the concepts we hold to be transcendant or above any particular agent, they are not always simple things. "God" for instance, conjures meanings and information to those who acknowledge it that are nearly limitless, and the godhead is not the only conception of the cosmos or even the only idealist understanding of a rationally ordered universe. What is meant by "God" or any deity construed as such is very different from a crass interpretation that suggests that the deity is much like a life-form or our conceits about ourselves. Every religious practice emphasizes that gods, even crudely defined ones, are not at all like mortals, and only obliquely does language regarding us or the temporal realm translate to the behavior of would-be gods. We may hold metaphysics to be something governing the world in a way that is outside of any agent, but this is understood not to suggest some meta-universe where hobgoblins move things by some magic that is only revealed by hermetic practices. It is instead an understanding we hold that general rules governing the world are comprehensible to allow us to speak of what things "are", and perhaps we assume something about the world allows this to happen in principle, without any "things" in particular causing it. In practice, religions will make clear that gods don't come to us as voices in our head or something booming from the sky to compel us like some agent. They may be interpreted as stories or myths, but if that is the case, then gods would be exposed as futile and not considered a particularly worthwhile metaphor, except to condense explanations into stories that allow us who interpret meaning to draw information that is useful. What is meant by those who take the gods seriously is not entirely a metaphor or story, but something altogether different, the nature of which is far beyond anything I intend to write here. If we were to speak of such entities, or anything transcendant that we would hold to be relevant, we would require some explanation of how this transcendant value affects things in the everyday that are relevant to our knowledge, or we would treat the existence of such deities as something far outside of our experience, and what we do has little bearing on the heavens and the heavens would go on without us, and so the gods wouldn't have any particular relevance to anything we know and couldn't exert any emanation or will comparable to ours. There may be those invoking the metaphor of gods or a godhead, but often they do so for very crass and obvious purposes, taking the entire practice as some cosmic joke played on the rubes. Such is what humans have done for a long time, and they didn't need a god to figure out this brilliant immiserating idea, or suggest that it could actually work as a just-so story.

All of this leads to a conclusion that conceits regarding any fungible "unit of utility" are only comprehensible based on propositions of forces which are basic to nature and desired for some purpose we would command, or are figures of speech where symbols are granted authority, which can be understood by the propositions pertaining to those symbols. For basic things, the forces of nature are not doubted with great seriousness. It is possible to suggest our models of science that describe nature are wrong, or that science is used for political purposes and the theories of science were intended to enshrine crass ambitions of intellectuals. Working class science, which is the proper origin of scientific thought regardless of the claims of those who rule, has little use for such deceptions as a genuine understanding for our own utilization. It is important to us that our view of the natural world is correct because we who work are dependent on truth and meaning in the world to produce that which science can be applied to. This is true whether the workers formalize science, as workers will do regardless of any education or their abilities, or if workers adopt the results of scientific approaches or develop through crude mechanisms thought that regards the natural world much as science would, but lacked formalization. We are able to understand the world without any great formalism, so long as we keep in mind principles of knowledge and apply them properly. It does not take any great education or wisdom to do this, and in the most basic practices of life, we will do this simply to navigate the world for our own sake. We do not lie to ourselves about the world unless we truly hate ourselves, or we are made to lie to ourselves, or we through the moral failings of the human race choose to lie to ourselves for spurious reasons. This concern is not too relevant so long as we maintain some sense that there is a world and that our knowledge, whatever it may be relative to the rest of humanity, is connected to that world. It would be impossible for knowledge to truly disconnect from the world. Madmen see what they see for reasons that are entirely sensical, and it has been a rule that insanity is not chaotic or random, but that insanity is pathological, very predictable, and rationalizable. The failure of inquisitors, and the willful obfuscation of the practice that is politically useful for them, doesn't change that the insane are typically constrained in their behaviors, and those who retain sense of the world and their environment are capable of doing more with their faculties.

Value at the local level of an agent is not determined by what the agent wants, but what the agent would need to regard given knowledge of itself and its immediate environment. At a basic level, these values are not things that are constructed out of spiritual will but arose from the world. To speak of moral value necessitates that they be rooted in some process that is real and substantive. That part of the world that is relevant, though, is the world the agent observes, rather than some sense of the world in total. Only when these local events are considered in a system, however defined by a knowledgeable agent, do they enter the purview of something wider. We could break down the agent into however many parts we can command, but there arrives some point where we do nothing but complicate the functions of some part, perhaps an organ of the body or some machine that is basic in function, beyond anything that was warranted for meaningful purposes. While the further elaboration of the parts of a machine, like a body, is interesting, it is not a subject of economic interest. It is often desirable to simplify this economic task to that which is most relevant, and we only complicate it when some purpose arises that necessitates it or allows us to consider some productive outcome that is a simple proposition. We do not as a rule seek complexity just to make things more complex. We can do this for various purposes, but in doing so, we often consider complexity itself a simple value. We can create complexity to obfuscate value to others, or to suggest to ourselves a wider awareness of events that serves a purpose of wariness against threats we know to exist.

This is not a question for life in particular, which abides laws particular to life, or humans whose history is documented well and is not reducible to a general rule of life-forms or intelligence. The most basic question of economics is not a human subject or a political subject, and it is not something which can for humans be cleaved entirely from its political connotations. In the basic germs that allow economic activity to be sensical, they are always rooted in something real that can approached by knowledge generally. Economics, being a management task, concerns information rather than any deeper meaning. Much of what humans do is not an "economic" task at all. Economics is not a meaning of life, but a task of an agent which navigates the world. It is indeed possible for agents to simply disregard economic value altogether, and it is possible for moral values to diverge from daily management specifically because the intrusion of economy into that which we genuinely value is unwelcome. We do not as a rule micromanage ourselves or dicker and deal over things which are petty in comparison. Moral value and perspective would tell us that, by the logic which allowed economics to become a science or discipline, that the entire practice of managing inflows and outflows did not need to be this invasive. If the question of economics were a resource calculation problem, premised on natural laws of science, economic calculation would be a trivial answer in any era. To acknowledge this would require us to acknowledge that the way in which humans were made to struggle and attack each other for nothing, or for the sake of something that is clearly malicious, had no economic utility and has been a travesty. This was not permissible because certain interests in society demanded we were not allowed to end the senseless struggle or consider ourselves to be something other than this. The nature of those interests is not dictated by society's arrangement in any way, nor by a demiurge within knowledge itself that insisted that this senseless struggle and war was good. They are not interests doing this because the interested parties are ignorant, and often the interests are not fully committed to malice in the sense that would be proper if someone truly wished to embrace the Satan in all things. Even the most abject tyranny humans can manage, its celebration of torture and malice and all the sadistic pleasures, pales in comparison to what we know to be possible. The effective sadist knows that however evil they can be, the torture can always be made worse. That is something every torturer in history has found to be effective, and that impulse is seeded in institutions from an early age, and among the particulars of human history. It is not something that was built into states that made it inevitable to do this for the purposes of organizing society. By and large, the sadistic impulses that made us continue the struggle are things which would destroy a state, if that state faced a genuine struggle against a determined opponent.

The sadists always seek to enshrine their position and install cravens who will enable rot, and by doing so, they exacerbated a struggle that reasonable men and women saw was clearly unnecessary in the 19th and 20th century. All the way up until the early 21st century, it was comprehensible and expected that all of the sadistic cruelty of the human race had been a terrible travesty, and no one was under any illusion that this was a mistake or the result of ignorance. Far from it, the malicious and sadistic actors barely hid themselves, and could not hide themselves for long. The sadists did not win by some appeal to intellectual reason or trickery, or any great strategy. They instead won because they were able to insinuate through moral philosophy that they could, and transformed institutions into the worst possible configuration specifically to enshrine their unique moral claims. Simply put, they were able to transgress all decencies and all values contrary to those they held, and selected for each other generation after generation. Any attempt to stamp this out would either be forbidden, or would be co-opted so that the purge mechanism was directed not at the source of our discord, but against people who had nothing to do with it or who were the honest and decent desiring something other than maximal torture. All who attempted to escape it would be dragged forcibly into a society that was defined not in any genuine sense, but as a philosophical idea divorced from the actual people, even the ruling classes and interests. The true rulers of a country rarely show themselves, except when they can arrive in force and to the shock of the horrified subject seeing the familiar symbols of the true power. It is taboo to speak too plainly about the true rulers, even though the mechanisms to obscure rule are well documented and acknowledged. The true rulers need not be sadists to rule - they just as anyone else recognize the futility of such a moral philosophy. It is instead a certain sort, that have always possessed this proclivity in humanity, who are attracted to a predatory ethos for various reasons and find each other. They are not defined by any particular race or material origin, nor do they share any transcendent unifying value. They instead made among each other a system which could torture and kill by insinuations, and understood what they possessed and that, if they were able to pull it off, people like themselves could never be removed, and would reorganize all systems in accord with their primordial spirit. This was not merely a question of rule over society or men and women, but a question of ruling all systems however conceived, and disallowing the concept that anything outside of this rule of fear could exist. There are forces at work in human society that enabled such an interest to seize influence, and restricted any effort to eliminate their influence in the long term. Only in the past century did such an interest assert through accumulated knowledge that the greatest threat to such a movement - the world's seeming opposition to such abomination that made it destroy itself - could be circumvented with the correct planning and management of systems. That conspiracy could dig in, gaming the institutions of human societies which out of necessity had to allow some decency to govern them, and through repeated transgression and exploitation of all goodwill, it became impossible to speak the name of the beast. That beast has a name that serves not as its whole but as the most obvious scientific and institutional front - eugenics. Its partisans and fellow travelers forbade us to stop them at every possible juncture, and insisted that this was due to an inborn and personal moral value that was undeniable, yet it was the great taboo to undertake any investigation regarding it. When those who did would be threatened, mocked, exterminated, and presented to humanity as living abortions whose life was a lie, it was clear what would rule all republics and all societies from now on, and any ulterior scheme, of which there were many with various aims, could only work through this front of eugenics. It would, by pure assertion, supplant all other forms of human government or conceptions of law and the political. In doing so, humanity would return to its primordial roots, after many detours that were the development of society, civilization, and all that we thought we were to attain out of this project. It ended not for any good purpose, but for the thrill of torture that fed itself, and a belief that this was the shortest route to forceful command of all that exists. Whether it will work in the long term, or be like so many other waves of death and destruction in the past of the human race, is not relevant. Once this eugenic alliance takes hold, united by particular conceits of knowledge which enshrine themselves in institutions, there is no going back, and should it ever be defeated, it has already proclaimed its intent to persist until the bitter end, refusing all efforts to constain this terrible, worthless idea that made no one better, happier, or brought anything other than what we have seen.

If that is indeed the case, then we can if we like describe utility in systems, but we do so with the knowledge that all of our aspirations in the end were made to feed this beast, this cult, that did not serve any utility or any moral purpose we would value, except a singular primordial point which we knew from the start was a trap. It is that which inspired me to write, while I can do so. Because the mechanics of the natural world are better described through science, I elect not to continue on the subject of utility at the micro level and the cruder interpretation of utility in systems, in which some imagined substance of a "util" is envisioned as something indescribable. I trust the reader is capable enough to piece together the most basic utilities of things in the world without my guidance, and has some sense of how these utilities form in systems which allow the emergence of properties that were not inhernet in any of the parts. To have a fuller understanding of utility requires viewing systems at the higher level, where we expect various systems to encounter each other without any grand design tying the system into one unit. We can easily assemble and disassemble a machine, or comprehend the anatomy of a human or animal, without any great mystery about what those things are, in their parts and in their whole. It is at the wider level of systems that so much confusion arises.

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