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We must begin the construction of society not with the agents who comprise it, but with a view of the world as a whole, transcendent and encompassing all that anything and anyone could navigate. For any agent that would be considered knowing, for whom society is a thing they are a member of and constitute through their own actions, this is something that they must do to know of any boundaries in the society, and contact other agents. For agents that are not knowing in any way, society is behavior ascribed to those agents by some observer that is knowing. The agents in actuality are both knowing and unknowing, or social behavior is ascribed to entities which do not know, and therefore is a misnomer. Animals without symbolic language are still governed by some impulse to describe social behavior emerging apart from anything other the power of their own life. It is improper to speak of a "society" of plants most of the time, but plants figure into a system of living things, including the plants' own emergence in the world and proliferation of themselves. A society of objects without life at all may be imagined if we were to consider the wind, earth, water, and fire to be animistic entities in some interplay. For our question, though, society exists not as a state of affairs arrested, but as something constructed by knowledge, whose loci are considered agents operating on a power source that it internalizes. It is possible to construe of the knowing agent as entirely vampiric on their environment, but if that were the case, the description is not of a society of stable agents, but an ecosystem where agents are tied to some parcel of claimed territory, or the world in some spiritual sense. Society consists of agents which operate with at least some independent initiative to act, or a force which is construed as initiative. Even if we suggest agents like life are vampiric towards the world, it would not change that those agents are acting towards aims that they consider moral. Society proper, though, suggests boundaries from which an agent could feed on the world or other agents. If the agents are presumed to feed indiscriminately over some domain or the world generally, and their existence is reduced to a point of primordial "Reason", then there is no genuine rational agent that can be considered independent at all, and nothing significant can be said about these agents to suggest they are anything other than informational flotsam. They would be in effect stripped of any context to suggest their reason is anything other than an illusion or facade, simulating acts of the world which operates on its own accord. Reason would be powerless and futile, and thus it would not be appropriate to speak of either a rational or moral agent, and the problem of society is abolished.^[1] If society is to exist, it thus is comprised of agents which operate in a domain surrounding them, and they would not intrinsically be tied to any parcel of space. Even if the true motion of agents is constrained by something that renders them largely sedentary, in principle societies involve relations between agents which are definite and understandable in some way to the agents, and those agents in principle interact with systems that may or may not be claimed by the society. For example, the sky and moon are not automatically claimed by "society", and there is a concept of a world unclaimed by social agents in the sense that is property, and there is a concept of freedom for anything in society that suggests that even if known, that thing, whether an agent or some object, is not beholden to any claim, or is held as something sacred and above the claims of any agent at all. There is then that which is known and claimed in some way, but the claim specifically does not regard it as property or possession in any sense, but as a claim of some meaning and relevance. We may for instance conceive a claim to a lake near the city, but consider it a place for anyone to visit, swim at their leisure, and something for public enjoyment. There may be laws pertaining to what can happen there, but in principle, the lake is not private property, and the right of property of any sort might not be enforceable. Property rights of any sort are inherently in flux, and the saying in force is that possession is 9/10ths of the law.

Regardless of claims to property or possession, agents in society will act towards other agents and things in that society. Declaring a pauper does not stop the pauper from eating, squatting, agitating, or doing something, so long as the pauper yet breathes. If the pauper is to be stopped, "society" - which would necessarily be another agent or something with force to do so - must lock out the pauper or eliminate it. In some sense, this society considered in the abstract is inescapable, in that there is always the implication that some agent exists elsewhere. That question, though, is a topic in the next book of this series. For now, we consider society an assembly of agents with regular interactions, operating on whatever power they possess. I will make no presumptions about that society's nature, other than those that are definitional of society as a concept. For a rational agent to exist - and not all social agents are deemed rational - it must be an agent, rather than a point of information or a statistic. For a society to exist, it begins not from the abstraction of the world, but acknowledgement that a world exists in which agents can encounter things, and agents can discover that there are other agents like it. The agents may be of various types and classes, and perhaps no two agents are equal in ability or a sense of worth, but agents can recognize other agents and distinguish them from objects without agency, and objects which superficially exhibit agency but are not considered true agents. In the game example earlier, the latter of these would be AI-controlled entities that mimic agency. The determination of agency is not itself relevant to the composition of society, for we did not consider agency relevant to our own existence in the first place. We began existence apart from any society, and would have to be apart from society to be constituted as an agent. Whatever our origins, a society comprised of agents must be built as agents, and there is no other realistic definition of society. If there were parts of the agent outside of it, all of those parts would be describable and the situation understood. If we imagined a society without "agents" as such, then once again "society" is a misnomer and we would be speaking of a different type of system. For society to exist, its members are socialized as individuals in some sense, before concepts of a collective or shared sociality can be established and deemed relevant.

No society can be taken for granted, and the immediate origin of society is not in some concept that such a thing must exist, but in the real relationship between people and things, and people and people. The two relations are the same basic thing, but people relating to other people will in some way reckon with two genuine conditions. The first is that there is a knowledge process occuring regardless of any conceit we hold about knowledge. The second is that for an agent, human or otherwise, to be a "person" is to abstract the concept of the agent, and so the person is not the actual body and existence of the agent, but a corporate entity that is understood to be something other than the body and the knowledge process that is apparent. Things could be granted the status of persons, but it is clear to anything that thinks and knows that those things are not people in the sense other knowing entities can be people. It is possible to discount the knowledge process of another entity as a person in this sense, and this is done very often to discount agents who are invalid in relations, or who are for temporary purposes seen not as persons but some sort of animal. Humans do not regard animals as persons, but can notice some process orienting their behavior that is not unlike the human's own knowledge in many respects. Humanity's disgust and cruelty towards their own is marked and specifically seeks to disregard any knowledge process, beyond any contempt shown to animals. Humans, though, do not enjoy a monopoly on the concept of society, and have assembled for all of their effort a mis-shapen, deformed creature, much as humans are at heart deformed Satanic apes who scarcely resemble the thing they claim to be. If that is so, you may ask why I bother. That has not stopped virtually every member of this race, regardless of intelligence, to question the nature of themselves and why any of this had to happen. It is often forgotten that human history and the characteristics of humans are highly unusual, and very likely, any other society that would arise organically would not have fashioned crude technology into this or embraced a cult of war and all the fetishism and stupidity that has defined human culture. It is very likely that anything like monetary economics, debt-slavery, the deliberate denuding of the world and the people specifically to prop up unworthy elites, and various political schemes that go far out of their way to maintain this misery instead of giving the people what they wanted in the first place, would not arise unless humans were deformed, malicious in ways that would be catastrophic if humans were not too stupid to exercise that malice towards aims other than petty venality, and do obviously silly things. If humans were to think long enough about the nature of their race and the society they have built, they probably would conclude that further human to human interaction should be minimized, professional militaries should be drawn down, all nation-states hitherto known would be immediately dissolved, and a considerably large standing militia would be delivered armaments, information networks, and command of the means of production, which would be arranged by a reasonable and publicly admitted plan for inspection by those who do not or cannot fight. The interest of the militia would, if its members possessed any reason, be purely to prevent the history of aristocratic conceits from ever appearing again, and thus their natural alliance would be with the dispossessed who had never done anything to them. Virutally all malfeasance in human history is attributed to aristocrats, whether they are warrior aristocrats, priests, intellectuals, philosophers, sadists granted promotion because of their utility to the ruling institutions, venal and greedy people who are obviously short-sighted and would be exposed as doing wrong if human societies were governed by the interests of the majority, and a group who are systematically enabled by institutions created by those sadists, which for some inexplicable reason are sacrosanct if their nature were to be described from an alien perspective. There is no certainty that the ordinary people would not repeat this cycle, but it would be very trivial to prevent the formation of such a beast if one rule became a religious tenet above all - "thou shalt not socialize with another human outside of true and proper relations, which shall be described thus and are intended to mitigate conspiracy and threats to the peace". That would be the best these apes can manage, until such a time that they would have studied history, diagnosed the problem correctly, and worked towards undoing the deliberate damage centuries of aristocratic filth have imposed on us. The obvious outcomes that would arise from this solution only appear bloody if the full scale of daily carnage aristocratic society created is mystified. The result of this cult in the past century has been to invert absolutely the proper target of guilt for the present situation. Instead of blaming the aristocrats who willfully and gleefully encourage the rot and select that trait among the lesser classes, the blame for society's woes first goes to democracy, when the majority of people did nothing but exist and are the actually productive engine that made most of this world possible, and most of all to the lowest classes of the insane and retarded, who by definition had virtually no power to affect anything and who have been sadistically tortured and exterminated to grand applause, the torture of whom has been an obligation of the race since its formation. If purging them were supposed to make humanity better, it clearly has not worked given all of human history. All genuine mechanistic views of human society place guilt squarely on the men and women who held all relevant machines and cards and resources that would organize this carnage, encourage it, and suggest to their inferiors that aristocratic sadism was the point. We only pretend since the rise of fascism and ideology proper that this is a new thing, when that was just the mask of human institutions and the aristocracy coming off.

It would seem very simple and elegant to do this and solve our problems. So far as human society has been made livable, the solutions have uniformly been along these lines - mitigate human contact and conspiracy, discourage large centralizations of wealth and force in few hands and in the hands of known malevolent actors, promote an egalitarian ethos in all things specifically to mitigate the former, and suggest that harmony with the world and each other is possible through some goodwill that would be recognized and considered not a mark of shame or retardation but a mark of probity. It was never the wise or the strong who set themselves above the race that made us any better. Every aristocratic initiative was either intended to aggravate the problem, or foolishly looked to culprits other than themselves and ideas their class and interest suggested were good. The common worker and slave diagnosed the problem without some wise asshole pedagogically feeding it to him or her. Whatever their interpersonal difficulties and the malice within the lower orders, which was an accepted fact of life, little of it was by any reasonable sense of scale comparable to the daily malfeasance of aristocrats and armies. Yet, every effort to push against this proves futile, or never gets off the ground. The moment such an idea can assert itself, it is as if some demonic force asserts historical progress must go on, reversing brief efforts to claw back a part of the world. It affects not just the workers, but all classes and the aristocracy's own struggles to survive as an institution. In many cases, aristocracies rise from men that were nothing particularly noteworthy at all, and almost as soon as they win, they succumb to the curse of aristocracy, despite knowing how this ends before they began their rise. The cycle repeats in miniature throughout human society, until it reaches a low enough level that a retard, marked and shamed by society, may consider himself a petty-aristocrat in the special education room, but can see that his position is worthless. He then finds that the whole of human society is, and has been since time immemorial, regimented to reproduce the aristocracy in miniature, and if he follows this mechanistically, he would see that aristocracy was a tendency seemingly built into the race, and the counter-examples - despite their clear superiority in the experience of most of humanity and their adoption among stable aristocracies when concerning their own kind - are always defeated. It is not that anarchy destroys a functional republic or despotism corrupts absolutely. Despots are not by nature any more vicious than republicans, and in many cases despots out of necessity rule with an even hand simply because that requires less work, and favoritism and venality imperils a despotic ruler just as much as it imperils a republican institution. The tendency of aristocracy in humanity is a phenomenon whose origin is one part inherited from nature, one part economic, one part derived from the origins of the state, one part the religious thought that arose because humans were too stupid to accept true and proper atheism without succumbing to their moral rot, and one part the victory of some malice which is beyond any particular ideology, political form, moral sentiment, or practice. There was nothing truly natural about aristocracy that was inborn and asserted inexorably. In some way, aristocracy is a message from the future that some may have forseen. It could be seen by extrapolating crude events and considering what was possible if one conspired to be an aristocrat, or extrapolating what someone saw around them if they were wary of a growing aristocracy freezing them out of life. More than that, aristocracy's deep endgame would be forseen by prophets with some form of madness that granted them an insight ordinary knowledge didn't access, but that was inherent in the very conceit and evident from its early formation. The horrorshow of the future is forseen, and the prophecy fulfills itself. The full impulse of aristocracy can only be described as a mechanistic act after diagnosing the illness of society generally. It is not a uniquely human problem, as if humans or a particular race of humanity were the only ones evil enough to do this. Nearly every race of mankind has, in one way or another, stories pertaining to this beast, both enshrining it and fearing it. It is because of aristocracy's total victory in the past century that we are more blind now than past societies were about this menace. It did not arise out of some instinct that the so-called best were destined to rule, or that nature rewards the duplicity and avarice of the race and declared that anyone who doesn't embrace this ethos is retarded, the most sinful thing there is. Nature has punished aristocracy many times over, and in spite of many examples of aristocratic failure, aristocracy cannot fail. It can only be failed. The pattern will repeat. It originates instead through what society did to constitute itself, and knowledge finding a way to assert certain thought-forms within the most basic relations of humans. It begins first with what society is in its basic mechanisms, and then inverting that understanding completely so that description of the mechanisms is the great taboo. Had we been frank about the nature of this Satanic ape from the moment it became clear, so much misery would be averted. Of course, the germ that began this cycle came before the ape was Satanic. This is not because humans were once good and fell, but because the Satan did not yet exist as we know it. In a later chapter the model's applicability to early humanity will be detailed, and to give that the proper grounding, sociality as a general concept must be established.

The most primitive values established as moral sentiments, utilities of things, and the basic symbols recognized, establish knowledge properly from its humbler origins. Whatever the origin of complex knowledge processes - from evolutionary history of life generally to the conception and development of young would-be knowing entities, or some other origin that brought about a knowing entity for our way was not the only way it could have gone - society as a formal concept is not a thing that existed in nature in any obvious way. A life-form would function independently before it would join in society, and even if a life-form is tightly integrated into a social unit due to inborn traits or the presence of a society much larger than the life-form that surrounds and indoctrinates it, it could only be so integrated because it is individually constituted to fill a niche, and this constitution is not a just-so story. If there is a genetic legacy that imprints society onto life, then it would not prove the necessity of society is intrinsic to nature, but that individuals reproduce society by some hardcoded volition that stubbornly persists. The variance in any society, and the need of life to adapt to changing circumstances, suggest that no such genetic hardcoding exists to lock in any preferred social relationships. The sociality of any knowing entity would emerge not from any managed plan at conception, but emerges regardless of those inborn traits, and regardless of anything we would have thought of in isolation. Whatever those values we adopt for ourselves, whether they are moral intents, utilities that are valued for whatever they provide, or the symbols of value we regard for our own use, they encounter a society of agents who do the same thing, and encounter things in the society which regardless of values exist outside of us. It would be impossible to speak of social values or anything shared in any social system without establishing that those values at first exist in individuals. They only become social values once communicated. This communication is only envisioned as a bilateral exchange, regardless of how the communication happens. Every agent to communicate connects with every other agent and every other thing, so far as the agent's communication has any real force to reach another agent, by some chain of events that can be traced back to its source once received. It does not matter if the receiver is unaware of the source or if the sender is unaware of the destination, for communication can only exist in some form that is outside of us and outside of society as a construct. Society in this sense can only concern definite things, and there is not one vaguely defined construct that is socially meaningful. So far as it is possible to speak of society, it consists only of things that are meaningful and symbolic - that is, the things communicated to, even if the symbol lacks a direct physical existence and is an abstract idea held in the minds of agents or written on some media that is to be read. For the communication to be relevant to society as a concept, the communication must be meaningful in the sense that the things in communication are known, in some way, to be relevant to the social, either as agents recognized as potential social entities or as things appropriated by social entities and circulating in society.

Things and people which are not claimed or registered as persons with social status are, for the purposes of describing a coherent social system, not part of the society in any way. There may be things or people that resist this claim or "forced registration" into a social system. Certain things in the natural world are in effect unclaimable by society, even if agents in society make presumptive claims to it. Many entities claimed the Moon, but no entity can bring the Moon into social appropriation with any seriousness and there are great barriers to establishing any continuous contact with the Moon, outside of looking at it from Earth. In that sense, the Moon's attachment to society is very tenuous, but there are many associations with the Moon, the planets, the stars, and especially the Sun. The Sun is not claimable by anyone and any probe sent to it would quickly burn, but the Sun on its own power exerts immense energy, and in this way, solar output provides a resource to all societies on Earth. It would not be possible to calculate the claim in part because it is impossible to enclose the Sun^[2], but also because the energy of the sun is so abundant that energy generated by Earth's natural processes is small, and the total of human industry is tiny compared to that. Earth without the Sun would freeze rapidly and be incompatible with any civilization or life as we know it, outside of what few pockets could summon heat and store resources to persist. It would be possible, but it would be a grim existence to say the least. For social purposes, though, all persons and all things have a personal relationship with the Sun before a wider network can be divined. None of those relationships entail a claim on any portion of the Sun's output that would be captured at the source. The most that can happen is that offshoots of solar energy can be captured directly by solar panels or by basking in sunlight. Indirectly, the Sun is the reason nearly everything we would appropriate in society can exist, but this indirect relationship is not intrinsically necessary for society. The Sun and its output are taken here as a whole, with most of its output not entering social circulation at all since it not directed at Earth, and isn't directed anywhere meaningful at all for the most part. We need not consider celestial bodies to be the sole unclaimables, or even large things like the ocean floor which until recently was not a thing that could be contested by societies, and is still prohibitively expensive to contact continuously. Nor is this a matter of specific legal claims, where only Terra nullius or dead man's land is outside of society. There are humans who remain stateless or who are for all intents and purposes outside of society, or barely in contact with society. They might know of society and civilization might know of them, but outside of sporadic contacts if that, neither party interacts with the other in any way that constitutes social behavior, and both parties generally do not want contact with the other in any way. There are things which are missing, or thrown in a garbage dump and sit doing nothing, and so their utilities to society are next to null. Garbage remains in society in some sense as a burden, but collectively, garbage is rarely explored beyond the fact that it is deemed garbage and must be disposed of in some place. We could just as well lose something of minor or even considerable value in our home, never finding it for years or decades, and during this time, it will be lost to social circulation in any serious sense. There are then humans whose existence is well known and who live among us, but who are specifically not considered registered persons in a legal sense, and who are treated not as persons in any moral sense, or even something that would be claimed as property. It is not that there is no social relations - there is communication and substantive interaction - but it is a strong social value to shun and reject such unpersons to the point where acknowledging their existence is a great crime and taboo, and all communication is considered an effort to eliminate an unwanted presence, an alien in proper society's midst. The hatred of such people is foundational to human concepts of political society, and so far as it can be enforced, the concept is realized by deliberate shunning, antagonism in all communications towards the unperson, and the inadmissibilty of their acts as anything with utility or symbolic value. In private, much of humanity intends this bigotry not just to a marked class to be shunned, but intends that status to be assigned to anyone who is not in the know of their social clique. There are humans who take great pride in rejection and shaming of the unwanted, and consider all who are not them to be abjectly and totally retarded. Those people and their proud adherence to the eugenic creed signal their undying faith to the creed, and they know what side of the war they are on.^[3]

The relationships of society are always frayed. Communication is never as constant as it would be between the parts of the body, even in the case of conjoined twins. Proximity and frequency are not constants and very relevant to the integrity of any social system. Symbolically, a known relationship, however tenuous, is treated as whole and recorded. What actually happens between two things, whether persons or objects, is ultimately between them. This dyad is never reducible to a preferred relationship or symbol, but is instead the result of some communication which is undeniable. Even if the communication is not relevant to society, the conceit of society we hold does not change that communication is a real event. It is easily possible to communicate with meanings "outside of society", without subsuming all of that communication into the social system proper. This happens with information or meaning that is dismissed as irrelevant. It happens when communications between two entities are concluded for the present message, and both are left to do with the meaning and record of that communication what they will. There are then those relationships which, while they can be construed by a third party as part of social behavior, the two parties involved intend to keep that message between each other, or for some reason cannot communicate that outside of the dyad. Secrets are a known possibility among social actors, but to speak of a social system formally, all such secrets are not things which the whole of the social system can acknowledge. Even between the conspirators, it is often the practice that secrets are not given as literal symbols, but that someone is expected to get the meaning without it being said. Secrets may be relevant to the most core actions of a society, but their occulting and revelation - by confession, gossip, or forcing them out in some way - is a thing existing outside of proper society, which must regard the relations as things which are acknowledgeable. The revelation of any secret is a great shame and failing of any social actor, no matter how innocuous or virtuous. Secrets need not be intrinsically bad things. Members of society often will hide their strength, keep their head down, or keep secrets specifically because revealing them would be damaging to the social system or some third party who did not need to suffer when the truth comes out. The secrets do exist, but society's values do not require that all secrets be revealed as information for the social system to be intact. It is also known that if perfect societies operated with perfect information in a perfect environment, all of it controlled immaculately, society as a concept would be undone in an instant. Too much would be revealed and the results of all plays, all future actions, would be a foregone conclusion, given sufficient insight. It may be possible to obfuscate the prophecy that would be made with such information, or suggest that some chaotic factor will throw off all predictions. In principle social systems intend not to be disrupted by such random events. The social relationship corrects for the intrusion of noise whenever possible. It may be possible to pretend that society continues once all cards are laid on the table and there are no more secrets and no more noise. All that exists in society would be going through the motions, and it could be said to all in society that, given this information and how it turns out, the best thing to do would be to cut the crap where these dyads are something special, and treat it as if it were just another mechanical force in the world. It would be as if the imagined hobgoblin animating everything in the world were true, or effectively so, if society truly possessed perfect information and all secrets were gone. At the same time, society to be society maintains that the information available in a relation is correct from person to person, and that all other agents and things can share information in the same way, however frequent the contact between them. Nowhere does a third party have direct access to information between two things. The third party must always open some channel that allows access to either information regarding one of the two things in question absent their social relation, or receive the communication en route from sender to destination. If the latter happens, then the third party is simply receiving itself the same message that the second party received and the first party sent. The third party's presence may be known or unknown, but in any real sense, the third party is bound by the same laws of communication as any other thing in the society. In the former case, the information available from another person or a thing is only accessible if the third party interrogates one of the two parties, which is a whole separate matter between two entities. What the interrogated gives is only what information is available in the communication. The person under interrogation may willfully obscure their knowledge and give false information, or genuinely forgot what was communicated in the prior exchange. The interrogator may not be good at this job and ask the wrong question, and only has the time and energy of this exchange. The interrogator does not have access to the past in a direct way to know what was said, and can only reconstruct what happened based on facts he can obtain in some way. There may be evidence outside of the social relation, but that evidence was not intrinsically part of society in the way we conceive of it. Evidence or remains of some communication or event may be left behind without any intent, but the evidence only enters social circulation if it is discovered. Someone wishing to hide any trail will be aware of this and take steps to not leave evidence, or simply not do things that would arouse suspicion. It would be entirely possible to insinuate something about an entity in society that is false, and so long as information is exchanged to suggest that the insinuation is acceptable in society, then that information becomes "true" in circulation, so far as anything in society can be said to be fact or fiction. Social systems do not possess by their nature any fact-checking or error-checking in their information. That can only be done by knowing agents who adjudicate fact and truth, or by institutions comprised of agents accomplishing this task and establishing by some institutional mechanism the truth of fiction of anything in society. The same can be said of individuals, who are not obligated by any natural law or intent of their constitution to produce true information, or even believe in the information contained within them for their own use.

Social values, unlike our own moral values, do not have any knowledge suggesting that they exist at all. There is no intrinsic utility recognized in any social value or social relation. The only thing that is communicated in society is symbolic values, in the form of information or things which enter social circulation. No social relation contains intrinsic meaning or purpose beyond the information that such a relation exists, and that relation only occurs in some time and place. The genuine material interactions between entities - for example, the physical or chemical actions or productive process - are not at all recognized by society, for the same reasons the command of individuals or self-command does not recognize the concrete existence of anything. All of these values in society are symbolic and abstract. There is not in society even the necessary recognition of utility in things which have a real existence. Social systems do indeed entail genuine interactions between entities to be social systems, but the material communication between agents is irrelevant to the construct of society altogether. This is not the case for individuals, who are necessarily constituted as individuals in a material sense, and whose knowledge process allowing them to exist as agents is a real thing. Nothing about social systems is necessarily "real" in the way an individual's consciousness would have to be. Social systems instead exist as something reproduced in the minds of people, and can only have a real existence as some information stored that pertains to society. That information may be the memory of agents, or it may be information recorded on some media. Outside of that information, which notes the official record of communications that constitute society, there is no "society" as such. And so, Maggie Thatcher was right after all. This of course doesn't mean that the social system isn't "real", as if it were a thing to ignore. We gather this information about society at the system level for very good reasons and hold it to be relevant to life, if not the prime purpose of life. What is meant here is that society is not a thing taken for granted, nor a thing that can be taken at face value. A society imagined as a perfect clockwork under the command of management is only realizable in part. The moment information slips from notice, and it must slip short of permanent integration of the social unit, the parts of the machine operate on their own power. While this may continue out of habit, as livestock persist century after century without rebelling, the parts left to their own devices do not form any social unit or a thing we would regard as society at all in this sense. A social unit that is automated and regulated cybernetically by a manager, or some abstract manager held in the minds of its actors, ceases to be society in this sense, and becomes a different thing that is describable not with the language of sociology, but the language of engineering and machinery. Society to be society entails that its members' agency is a thing that is occultable, regardless of whether the occult secrets can be exposed. Society is not intrinsically opposed to this secrecy. Far from it, society as we know it persists because secrets are kept, and this is consciously understood to the knowing participants in society. It is not done out of some sense that occultism is the point of society, but because secrecy makes any information relevant. It would be quite impossible to actually possess "perfect information" as once it is acquired information would resume to be gathered locally and the record for the whole system is thrown off. Even if an occasional record of "perfect information" were available, though, it would destroy society. Further, "perfect information" may be held by a privileged agent who uses that information against other agents.^[4]

A society with "perfect markets and perfect information" is a dream of those who crave not even slavery, but a petty-managerial power-trip which accomplishes nothing and means nothing. A master-slave relationship is still a social relationship, even if it is very tenuous and defined by stark alienation. If we did wish to describe this world of humans in clockwork machines doing their part, that is entirely possible, and it could perhaps be a world some desire if it met expectations of what they actually wanted out of life. Humans, after all, do not need society in any sense, and often see society in the abstract and its real communications as a great danger to the things they wanted. Humans could in principle find the meaningful relations they wanted with other humans without this concept of society at all. They would through the exchange of information establish a thing we call society, but that information exchange would be secondary to what the participants might have wanted, which is a meaningful and pleasant dialogue and interaction where both are happier. It would be possible to have this in a society we didn't choose to be part of or in relationships that were born in a situation of dependence, but society in the sense we understand it has often been a burden to those meaningful interactions rather than a guide towards them. With social relations in this sense where we value the entity "society" as a system or a wider sense of society that is also necessarily a system of definite relations, we are beholden to the possibility that some other party would disrupt that relationship we had. We could perhaps gather in a circle of friends and that meaningful interaction we wanted was not with one person but with a whole group, which gathered in some primitive sense of collectivity. That collectivity came not from society at all, but an impulse in humans that enjoyed gathering in circles and being around what they would perceive as friends, or some sort of interaction that no one involved objected to and found natural. The same caveats apply in this group situation as they do with a one-on-one extrasocial relation, in that all of these relationships become through the communication of information social relations. We don't always think of these moments of genuine bonding as "social information" or "values" to be commanded and probed, though. It could be enough simply to be in the company of another without trying to kill it or take advantage of it, and the same can be said the other way around. Society in the sense of information exchanges is not a thing that promotes harmonious interactions between agents. It is intrinsically a thing antagonistic to such an interaction.

None of this is to say "society is evil" in some sense, but it is to say that what we thought we wanted in life, whether it is between people or between things, or our relation to things, is not a thing that is resolved by society at all, or by any institution we could create. It is not resolved by the state for certain, but it is not resolved by any institution, even one that originated from the people and their shared interest in an informational sense. If we wish society to be a thing worth keeping - if we wish for institutions that are worth a damn for anything other than seeking advantage over another agent - then the only way that is possible is if there is some genuine dialogue among humans that actually wants such a thing. No plan, no theory, no political platform, or any other informational prescription resolves that. No struggle session or philosophical struggle or war will ever resolve the social question, for what the social question entailed was not really about wealth or status or prestige or any signifier. The true wants of humans, and those wants are not guaranteed to be good or at all interested in a harmonious society, are things that are not resolved easily or with some knowledge telling us the correct value. We adopt moral values and them symbolize them not because those values are life's prime purpose, but because moral sentiments guide us to do something other than the barest minimum of life. If we were morally valuing something in exchange because of a propensity to truck and barter, that isn't really the purpose of life.^[5] The propensity to truck and barter exists, and its origin may be argued in some natural cause. As we mentioned though, all of these social behaviors emerged from a seed, and are never inexorable forces asserting themselves by some impulse that is unchanging. That propensity came from somewhere, and the precise origins of it are not things that are simple and reducible to that sense. It developed and changed over the centuries because trucking and bartering, and similar practices of skullduggery, had an advantage in society where information would be exchanged. That advantage is not built in to nature in some sense that makes it inevitable, but it is highly probable such a situation was evident to enough people, who had nothing intrinsically stopping them from doing that and honed this skill. So too did the tendency of human beings to reject that approach to social interaction, so much that market activity in general was an unseemly activity, and one seldom entered into compared to the number of informational exchanges that do not entail this. Most of what humans do does not entail any market exchange or an implied exchange of tokens denoting social value, worth, proof, or some measure at all. Humans only attend markets every so often and do so with wariness of what they are paying for. This is not limited to the markets where money is exchanged, but any informational exchange between agents in society which could be mutually hostile. A similar wariness exists between people and things in society, as humans are aware from their personal tool use that things have a potentially corrupting effect on themselves. If the tools we use form a symbiotic relationship with ourselves, what would be said about things in society which are far more numerous and wielded not by our own hand but that are claimed by another? They are sold to us with far fewer guarantees of their goodness than the goodness we would sense if we built from raw materials we extracted ourselves the thing we wanted, without any of the vagaries of social interaction at all. They are more often than not used against us, as the things of society enter the circulation not of us or our friends but typically congregate in insitutitions and persons very hostile to us.

At the micro level for an individual, the utilities of things are discernable and can be symbolized and commanded. The physical force that may be commanded is measurable and gauged, and there was some reason it was desirable that may vary, but it is undeniable that physical force of that sort is wanted. At the system level of an individual, value judgements are made for the purpose of the knowing entity, which are not necessarily rational but are rationalizable in some way due to being symbolic information we can process and adjudicate. The wide-scale system thinking of individuals is exemplified by handling many systems and an overall sense of systems, whether those systems are considered "in society" or are part of some other construct. The system level of an individual concerns themselves and whatever "game" they are playing which involves a system with fixed expectations of what is encountered, such that a game strategy can be determined without too much difficulty. The wide-domain level of systems thought for individuals concerns their behavior outside of "games", where they must be ready for anything and encounter a world, or some part of it large enough to be meaningfully part of world affairs. To contain an individual at the system level is to confined them to a game or series of games played in sequence, such that there is little context for the player from game to game except a confused guess of what is going on. Wide-domain level thinking, then, is something that individuals expect if they are to be reasonably comfortable with their environment, for on some level the existence of that level of systems is apparent simply from the knowledge that system-level games are possible, or that they themselves are systems and have adopted systems thinking in some way. Whether that information is available or not, individuals will act as if it were a concern, and are noticeably uncomfortable if they are shunned from that level and corralled into games and controlled situations. They will likely see the wardens, inquisitors, and so on smirking at the systematized subject, who know full well that they've made the individual cattle. Wide-domain thinking does not entail "society" in the sense we have defined it. In practice, in any era, human beings maintain only a small number of genuine social relations and information that are sustained, and many of those relations are clearly imbalanced where one has authority and status over the other. Humans, like any agent would reasonably be, only maintain so many relationships that are directly relevant to them, and indirect relations are presented as alien information or a crowd of people who they wouldn't know as anything different from one another. For both the individual's reckoning of the real condition and for the social system the individual is actually in, that network of clear dyads is the most evident reality of society. Whomever sits as the president, whomever is a celebrity, the actors on television shows, whomever is notable in institutions, and whomever wears some icon indicating it's time to shit your pants in fear, is not relevant for the individual's conception of social relations. The individual is aware that there are many agents outside of this social system, this network, that is appparent at first, who themselves are likely in social systems of their own. Not one agent has a super-authority to claim they possess far more connections than typical in that society, and certainly no agent can claim a direct relationship with every agent and thing in that society. Yet, it is the pretense of executives of any large institution to relate to either everyone in society, or large numbers of people who arrange in a queue to be interfaced with. Specializations include sending underlings to deal with the people in the name of the institution, who are led by some manager or leader, who reports to a higher leader, et cetera. The organizational structure of institutions may be different, but all sustained social systems are premised first on the dyads of relationships that exist. Social systems in of themselves do not inherently regard institutions as equal to social systems, and often institutions are split into many social systems and networks, and networks split across institutions as well. The formation of institutions typically consolidates social systems, but it is an abiding rule of institutions that they turn against their stated purpose as soon as they are founded, as institutions are in the end not a social structure but an idea held above society as such. Institutions do not fit neatly into any sociality that is regarded as informationally important, as often institutions are not well-organized machines but battlegrounds for social influence. Much of the effort in institutions is not to bring new members into them, but to enforce discipline through fear or manipulation, and to mitigate corruption and waste, which often runs rampant because social systems and the individual agents answer the interests of their social system and the people they consider "in" long before any concern for wider society, institutions, or general good will is considered. There are reasons why this is so, which will be written of briefly later in this chapter, but the answer is probably self-evident to most readers. This is the view purely from someone thinking of their individual system and their world, where the social system is at heart some chart held by themselves detailing their ongoing, past, and potential future relations.

Pure self-interest is never as great a motivator as it made out to be, even if it is a reasonable indicator of what someone would do most of the time, and is most evident in relations between aliens or antagonists. Agents who know of society often, but not always, hold in their mind a concept of the interest of the social system as a whole. This is not necessarily identical with viewing the system as a singular collective, and the social system of someone involves disparate relationships which must be treated differently. The overall integrity of someone's relations with other people is considered on all levels, and each level is considered differently. First of all, someone is typically aware of their position with others, or seeks to be, and is conscious of that position out of necessity. If someone possesses a discordant view of themselves in the eyes of others and of institutions, it does not last long, and the contempt towards those who do not know where they stand is exemplary. Feigned ignorance of social standing is not the same, and in many cases this dissembling is obligatory in human society. Generally, though, it is not difficult to see where someone really stands with their stable relations. This interest in others' opinion is not purely crass self-interest, but something suggesting the virtue of someone, regardless of whether the society as a whole regards virtue as relevant, or how virtue is truly judged. Even those who seemingly lack virtue have some sense of what it is to be respected, and to not be respected. It is not limited to questions of respect or social standing, as if all relations were competitive. The complexities of love, obligations, duties, the games to test trust, tolerance for games, is a matter too complex to detail in full, but enough experience with society suggests that these relations are considered not just as sentiments or meanings vaguely understood, but as propositions indicating the nature of one-to-one relationships. The relationships may be valued for some purpose or may be something morally valued as that which makes someone's life worth living. I do not presume to give anyone advice on how to manage their personal relationships, since my own are dogshit and will remain so, but I trust that this concept is understandable and needs no further explanation.

The true standing of someone in a social system may not correspond to one's own assessment of their position, or where someone would want to be. This standing is not in principle dictated by any executive, but is instead a fact that can be adjudicated if, somehow, all participants in a social system could be isolated and questioned without disrupting any of the relationships in question. This is not actually possible, as the mere presence of an inquisition not only adds a very jarring one-to-one relation into the system, and because even if this surveillance were benign, the sense that relations are watched from above and in secret, or that some Gestapo asshole with a uniform is asking questions, has a chilling effect on all social relations. However, no such inquisition is necessary to suggest that there is an overall standing someone would hold among their relations, and reputation that would be judged by others who know a person. No such judgement exists in isolation, as if every agent's relationship with you were perfectly isolated. We may presume for the moment that the social system of someone is stable and there are few outside influences that are relevant - perhaps this is a small village of a few hundred where most of the inhabitants know each other by name and residence, and many have relationships beyond that, gossip with each other, and know generally what is going on. The opinion of the majority, or some hive mind, is not a foregone conclusion where judgement of someone is in all cases a pass/fail filter where those who pass get everything, and those who fail are shunned forever. What is the case in any social system is that all participants are conducting the same calculation with regard to each other, and they may have calculations with other social systems and spread word of mouth outside the system one person is in to another. Absent any context for wider society or knowledge of other distinct social systems, it is difficult to know what information leaks from your known contacts to those who are unknown to you, on top of what known contacts say to other you know behind your back. I don't need to belabor the games of posturing, gossiping, backstabbing, conniving, praising, humiliation, and all of the tricks used to mark humiliation and all of the ways someone indicates "like" or genuine praise. What is known is that the standing of each agent to each other agent is expected in any social system where the participants all relate to each other, to a greater or lesser extent. This may nudge undesirables down, lift up the virtuous by whatever way that is regarded, and establish who is in good enough standing to not be chased out of town. The esteem of someone in any part of society determines so much of what any agent can do, and this is largely out of any individual's hands no matter what they do or what they are. It is entirely possible and very common to destroy someone by nothing more than insinuations, and the choice can be made for any arbitrary reason or some omen of ill fortune where one is drawn to be sacrificed today. As a general rule, any esteem lost is lost for good. Any demerit, the most severe of which being the mark of foolishness, is never truly forgotten and it is absolutely not forgiven. Some deeds may be forgiven or not even acknowledged despite being known as bad, but to be a fool is a great crime of Being. To be retarded is the worst of all, and absolutely unforgivable. In general, deeds matter less than assessments of being in this assessment. Deeds may be compiled as evidence, but with all of these assessments being rooted in symbolic representation, that will win in the end. A deed in of itself is forgiven very easily because, at heart, humans know what they are and what they truly value. There are a few of us who do believe deeds make us what we are, as that is the correct assessment if we concern ourselves with truth, but in social values, it is what people are, their state of being, and their property which itself is a symbolic value, that remains most relevant to assess future actions. Someone can do a bad thing and their deeds may be understood as a mistake or something done under pressure. To be a shitty person is another thing. To be weak in any way is anathema, no matter what may be said about protecting the weak or allowing the weak sanction to continue. This is not always something for pig-headed purposes, and the punishments for being a shitty person can vary based on who and what you are dealing with, and what shit someone is willing to accept. It is not a default to view the weak with seething contempt or outrage at their presence, but this is very common and those who embrace hatred of the weak will taste blood and never look back. Others, like myself out of necessity, simply don't regard the weak as relevant one way or another. For myself, this is an unusual choice but one that would be an adaptation of being at the bottom and shunned in so many things, and so I consider humans correctly to be some sort of threat, and have little expectation of any deed from them. If others do good things or allow good to exist, or at least have enough sense not to make this situation worse, I am pleasantly surprised, but I wouldn't let any amount of good deeds circumvent my knowledge of general human wickedness, and certainly wouldn't forget documented wickedness and the signs of foul nature in those around me. The personality and standing of someone is typically obvious enough that a sense of their virtue is assessed, and even if it were not clear, one of the first things humans will do is detect this to determine who is bigger or smaller, and what threat or intent they may pose.

Many of these traits are particular to humans, but in principle, any social agent with knowledge would detect the same information and act on it, however they do so and whatever the customs in their society. Whether they care about what humans care about, or even see their social relationships in the same moral light we do, is another question. We should not be too quick to make sweeping judgements about human sociality and fixed roles of anyone, for humans have wildly varying stances and strategies for navigating this problem. It is further part of the occulting of information to maintain some ambiguity about this standing and reputation, and it is also an expectation of society in the same vein to maintain decencies, whether through clenched teeth towards an obviously despised person or because of a general disinterest in conflict. It is actually very common for social agents to not have that strong an opinion one way or another about anyone they know, and they even think this way towards social relations that are close and seemingly tight. When it comes down to it, the games of social position are not truly that important at this local level, and life is too short to dwell on this standing when it concerns only local conditions. It is very common in urban settings for social systems to diffuse and few close relationships to exist at all, and for relations to switch to new ones rapidly. It is also common for city-dwellers to simply disregard any close relations and prefer solitude, as this is a natural adaptation to the presence of a highly hostile and predatory race in close quarters. It is more pronounced still when that state is known and the predation is given sanction as deliberate policy of institutions and from on high, which places the city-dweller of the 21st century in a precarious position. As we can see, human nature in this regard shifts visibly, and in the past century, the definition of human and the basic behaviors of them have been engineered in ways that were previously impossible. It is possible to speak of the humans' tendency generally - speaking only of the concept of humans as a race rather than the spiritual concept which was never beholden to nature in that sense - but this never encoded highly specific social behaviors in the way such a concept is used to clumsily imply.^[6] The focus on human examples is made because that is the most obvious example which is translated to accessible information, and animal sociality abides laws which are understood but not so interesting for illustrating this value of information. We may consider the sociality of knowing agents that are very different from us and utilize some symbolic language, and it would consider its environment in the same way - that is to say, they make decisions that follow from knowledge of themselves and all conditions, chief among them being other agents. Since we observe significant variation among humans, who belong to many social classes and who have historically been treated in different ways based on time and place, the alien types which we have no examples of are an exercise for the reader to consider. We could consider perhaps what would happen if key social mores never developed, or some technology or practice arrived at a different time.

The wide-domain level version of social awareness is too something different from wide-domain level perception from an individual position, where the individual must look out for itself. Yet, the first question at the level of social organizations of larger complexity is to look for the same seat of authority. Since there is no obvious self to be that seat, the question is really a simple one - who, or what, rules. Whatever our beliefs about society being governed by institutions or ideas or some force outside of us, we recognize that because knowledge is a local event, any authority exerting a regulatory force is likely to come from an executive. Regardless of the political form or institutions in place, or what means a political class uses to rise above the rest, there is in a society of sufficient size a sense of someone who leads, and who by his or her presence commands authority over many people. This executive need not speak for the whole society, as the boundaries of society worldwide are vast, and many peoples will never be under the same executive. The executive does not exist because the executive alone waves a mighty hand to make agents obey, nor because the executive is a necessary symbol or nothing more. The executive instead exists because of a recognition that authority cannot be shared by too many agents, and so it is helpful for one voice to speak loud and clear. This executive need not be a political office or a formal position. It could be a public speaker with a large crowd, or someone directing the cheer of a stadium, or any number of conductors. It often is associated with some virtue that can be construed to command more than temporary attention. There may be simply a first man of Rome, or the queen bee all of the other girls envy and all of the men chase after in futile efforts. It could be someone who was seen as smart enough, tough enough, or gosh-darned liked enough to make decisions on a regular basis, whether in an institution or because it seemed like a good idea to follow someone. Regardless of social tendencies or mores, the executive functions not simply as a commander, but as a sort of law-giver that can suggest administrative strategies, and set a hierarchy of who is closer to the top and who is at the bottom and there to eat shit. The hierarchy need not conform to that idea of domination or submission, and could be rather a convenient way to organize larger social formations into something that can communicate effectively. A legion would not function well without centurions and a number of functions to regiment it, and this function can be found in armies. There are bosses, Dons of crime families, leaders of syndicates, union organizers, notables of the community, and so on. There is a sense from the executive of what generally rules and what is in, that is an impression the laws of a polity or institutions can't fully substitute with their preferred executive functioning. The executive function that unites larger societies does not neatly conform to conceits we would hold about leadership, because the concept requires someone to adjudicate with information a very complex thing, the answer to which is never given or immediately obvious. An executive in this sense is not appointed to any term of office or given any legal or political authority by esteem or whatever allowed them to govern. The executive may be shared by a small number of people or some group which is secluded in membership but associated with the same sort of authority that is not so much institutional, but the sort of authority the name of a dreaded secret society would hold. Such societies will have internally a hierarchy to climb to be taken seriously, but it is not clear to those out of the know who the Grand Wizard or Grand Dame is. In certain situations, the executive is someone whose name best not be uttered if one knows what is good for them. There may be in place of an agent or some concept a ritual, a practice, which is so lurid and seductive that it exerts by some fascination in the ape an allure that is not explicable as mere information without a considerable history, but that does not conform to any concept of culture or an institution.

These distinct levels of social awareness pertain less to the actual organization, but to an awareness that would make sense to speak of social information as something relevant to agents. An executive in the meaningful, functional sense entails something much different. Authority, which regulates systems by means of something outside of social or individual value and speaks of something of different moral values, is another, and authority does not have anything to do with the basic conception of society nor does it suggest any moral valuation whatsoever. The concept of the executive at the head of social organization is not a claim of leadership resting on the leader's appeal to members of an institution without barrier, but of some executive imperative which may be identical with a person for reasons that make sense to humans generally, and might make sense to other animals used to figuring out who or what is bigger and in charge. This is to say that what rules in an institution is not always "the only thing that could rule", as if there were a law of nature that assured the most capable agent or idea would rise out of struggle, chaos, or some procedure. Recognition of executive authority is something different from the recognition of a spiritual authority used to understand the world. At this early a stage, where society is just an institution and an idea in the minds of people, executive office or some thing that fulfills that role does not hold any inherent temporal, personal, or moral authority whatsoever. It is only a recognition that someone or something would fulfill an executive function, even if that function is procedural, like the role of presiding officers in a republican legislature. That sense is not itself a true authority, but a sense that must be acknowledged whether the authority is regarded by an agent or not; for example, it is necessary to acknowledge the reality that some institution is led by a particular person, perhaps a king, even if that king is not your king, and even if you or your institution do not recognize that king as a legitimate ruler, because the institution you are dealing with has an executive face or something amounting to it, and this king that isn't recognized legally by you will still issue orders as if he were that. There is always, in practice if not in name, something organizing social systems beyond the most basic. If we were to speak of a larger wide-domain society arranged in a decentralized network, where not one agent or center is apparent, then the executive function would be understood as a protocol shared in that network that is held by the agents as something regulating behavior, and this would include a sense of where to find the executive if that protocol fails. If that didn't happen, then that decentralized network without the protocol would disintegrate as a wider social arrangement. So too does a tribe without a chief suffer from a loss of leadership. Tribes, which are an example of an institution, may persist without leaders as such, but they face difficulty organizing large numbers if they lack any unifying force.

Executive organization being what it is, a tendency for underlings to seek position, sell out to another executive, and all of the traits common to feudalism is a trait that can be observed in societies generally. We may tell ourselves THIS society is above such behavior, but the simple reality of executives of a genuine society is that they only, by whatever means, regulate so many agents before they must rely on subordinates. Large assemblies of agents do not necessarily share a vision or direct loyalty to the executive function. It can very well be that the executive relies entirely on local chiefs, and the executive deals with those chiefs instead of the common agents. A decentralized network ruled by a protocol is not secure from this, either. An alien protocol, or some bug in the network, can override the intended execution of the organizing protocol, and this is a way to attack decentralized networks. And, as always, social agents are knowing agents with their own motives, and there is no law of nature or compulsion in then that necessitates following any executive, any more than agents are locked into any particular social system of a smaller sort. While it is very harrowing for individuals to leave a social system given the obvious deficits of having no friends at all, individuals can leave large organizations easily and do so very often. Nothing like patriotism or some sense of duty ties anyone to any larger social organization, as if the agent should give freely to something that is typically distant and uncaring towards the agent. It is also very uncommon for the self-interest of agents in large organizations to align for long on anything, unless that self-interest is something that is constant enough in the minds of agents that they will go to great lengths to defend it. There has been a great self-interest against many of the cruelties in human society, and this didn't have to arise from any goodness or virtue in the agents, or from selfish agents who didn't recognize submission to their social superiors "correctly". Social organizations, once all pretenses are dropped, are things sustained by the agents because those agents want to be in an organization and see this one, whatever it is, as suitable or the best of options available. If we are in a social organization purely by coercion and threats, then this "best of options" is compared against the suffering and death and probably great shame that not going along with the organization brings, but that is in some way a value held by the agent. It is also unlikely someone held in an organization purely with fear is going to be particularly interested in giving to that organization anything other than the least possible. Social organizations, in of themselves, do not give or take anything. They simply are a recognition that organization exists, rather than any token suggesting the whole is significant or worth valuing. There may be a sense that the organization itself, rather than an institution representing it, is really what would be defended. These are, after all, neighbors and possibly friends, or at least people you might meet at some point, with whom some sort of tie exist. No such wider social organization is something that exists purely as a token, unlike institutions which are corporate fronts and icons representing social formations and movements. There is something substantive that the information held in our minds about this arrangement points to. It may be an arrangement barely understood, but someone will recognize almost instinctively membership in some organization or lack thereof, and the arithmetic of the group's size, and the size of subgroups in it, is noted. This is not just due to the number of agents, but the qualities of those agents, the possession of things claimed by them. Intrinsically, there is no community of property or effort implied by the organization that is set aside at all. The agents maintain themselves and their things, and things neutral to any owner remain neutral. The existence of a pool of resources is not a particular thing outside of the society, since the pool implies that there is an institution governing its use, even a minor one. The institution and organization may overlap, but do not always do so.

Organizations can have as many factions and internal squabbles as any mass of people would have. They are united not by any stated purpose or institution or property, but by the simple recognition of some shared executive that would regulate the organization. Even where there are competing executives and no clear "head", there is an implication that competition for the executive, or some contest to decide what will govern, is necessary to speak of the organization as a thing. Even if the house were divided, it keeps standing as an organization in the sense that there are people in the same room, speaking of the same general idea. It need not conform to a name or a place or a nation, in the sense that the house divided would still contain "Americans". The organization is not the name or any identity or signifier, but exists because there is an organization governed in some sense by an executive that is definite, or an executive which is contestable. This may mean that groups of people who don't recognize they're contested are drawn, against their will, into some "organization" that they now must abide, and once that contest drags them in, they are aware there is a new chief or would-be chief to acknowledge. The members of the organization, who may be two opposing sides confronting in war or some struggle, will have to pick sides and the matter may be settled by battle. Even non-participants in the fighting are dragged into the consequences, despite their efforts to break away from any of this nonsense, in organizations they never wanted anything to do with. Even if the country fractured without a war as such and neatly divided groups were created out of the prior executive organization, the past existence of the country would be a fact, no matter what someone might say about the past. If the revelation came out that there is no United States, there never was a United States, and we have always been at war with Eastasia, a lot of the inhabitants of the former United States will recall that it was just a year ago the United States, with all that entails. The United States may be an institution and the nation is not identical to the assembly of people comprising it. That assembly of people were not united by any idea or institution or imagined community, but because they shared an executive for very long, and in some sense will likely see that organization as one thing in some sense. There wouldn't be intrinsically any sectionalism which immediately takes hold to say that three or more fragments of the organization are now, fully, the new thing organizationally, and everyone abandoned memory of the organization of Americans. Even if that concept were somehow abolished - let's say the mind control fully wipes away the concept that there were was a shared history of the people in the region formerly known as the United States - there are a number of reasons why this organization would be recognized as integrated in some executive sense to an outside observer. For one, geographic divisions do not suggest any natural dividing line in the continental former United States, and economically there are many reasons to consider the region a singular unit. Even if the organization doesn't exist as an organizing executive in the minds of its agents, someone looking to reunite the former United States, or seeing it as a territory ripe for overseas annexation, or seeing it as a bloc for economic trade, would recognize the possibility of such a thing. The same can be said of potential rearrangements that can be arranged. Realistically, though, societies are not understood as things arbitrarily assigned, but by a real and sustained relationship. Over time, it may be argued that the three different organizations are their own thing with some history and far more to do with each other internally than with the rest of the former United States. We could easily envision the European Union as a federation of one thing, which it functionally is so far as geopolitics is concerned. It is not difficult to see the "Five Eyes" alliance of Anglophone core countries tied by an exchange and common links that suggest that the alliance would be consolidated into a single polity, in some way. At the level of organizations, though, organizations are truly united by the appearance of some executive. It is important to note that it need only be the appearance rather than the genuine authority or force of an executive. What we usually recognize as a meaningful society, though, is not an arbitrary sample of agents and things, but agents and things whose relations are persistent enough that it wouldn't be difficult to see how that was an actual thing, rather than a fantasy story or alternate history.

The settlement between executives and organizations is understood not at the level of any particular organization of people, but in the organization's orientation towards the whole of the world. The transcendent level form of social awareness is identified as the proper domain of politics, or the polity. I refer here not to the formal institution of the state or any particular organizing principle of it, but that which is contested by politics. That is, that politics as a concept can only exist if there is a concept that social organizations settle and reconcile with other organizations. This claim necessitates that social organizations, and all agents that consider society for themselves, possess a general consciousness of what organizations exist, their executives, their members, and what all people and things in the world do in a sense that communicates social information. That is, all the agents and things in society can be classified in some way, and this classification is ultimately determined by some knowledge. Knowledge as a process occurs at the level of individuals, so far as we are concerned with society. If we were to imagine knowledge as a collective process without regards to individuals as such, then that process would altogether have boundaries just as an individual agent's would. In practice, it is recognized in society generally that no agent is truly isolated, and it is expected that individuals and things relate to each other. Individuals can join forces, acquire things as property, and these accumulations do not necessarily correspond to any organization or society we recognize as the state of affairs in society. It would be quite impossible to speak of any society, even at the level of an individual relating to possessions alone, as if it could be hermetically sealed from other things. Yet, we are also aware that all agents and things are related by proximity and meaningful relationships. Nation-states are almost always established with internecine conflict, revolution, and the settlements concern not an ideal model of society but the real conditions any society lives in. Never are these polities taken for granted. In principle, the polity does not concern any demarcated domain or selection of people. All polities must consider the whole world, and the identification of organizations within the world does not change that politics would happen between social agents. In other words, the highest level of social awareness of political consciousness of some sort.

This "politics" does not at first conform to any definition other than the sense that social agents are in relations with each other in some way by virtue of any potential social agent being in the world. It would not matter if an agent were on the other side of the world, or somewhere in a galaxy far, far away, to suggest that a relation would in principle be possible. It is unlikely any distant relation is direct, outside of a few channels which are understood. All of these relations are typically indirect, or arranged through established networks and protocols where the hubs and centers are identifiable. We can for example know where internet hubs are, which connect the world through mechanisms that are engineered and well documented by now. The most basic understanding of the political, before any claims about the nature of political acts are described, is that it would entail active relationships between social agents and information recording those events. There is no meaningful concept of the political that is that concerns an ideology held outside of those agents and things that are the purview of society. Any such ideology or conceit of a politics outside of people would be a figment of the imagination of social agents. This says nothing more about what politics "is", or what actions are politically relevant. There are many activities in society that are not "political", and arguably all activities can be argued to be apolitical by some logic of what spheres of activity are granted the connotation that they affect world events. Alternatively, private or personal matters of little importance to the overall state of political affairs may be deemed political acts, and this usually arises not from the subjects but by an imperious manager invading those matters. There is not any intrinsic boundary suggesting either of these extremes or some median position would decide what is and is not the proper domain where politics is settled. That boundary would be set instead by institutions, and anything institutions decide is in the end a choice of people and knowledge rather than a rule of nature, as I will shortly describe. Political acts need not be confined to people in this sense. Things which are not themselves politically conscious are objects which are involved in political acts, and things can by no design of any rational agent affect political events. A natural disaster like a hurricane need not be summoned by a politician to have an effect on the world, and the angry deity that may be construed as summoning this event would have some knowable purpose for doing so, however we understand the deity.^[7]

Here we see the nature of society in its basest form - that it is at core communication of information from the smallest act to the overall conception of the world. The genuine events which communicate this information are not, in their material and meaningful manifestation, social information, nor are they intrinsically tied to this informational concept of society. The information pertaining to society we gather is not a mere statement of scientific fact, but a means we adopted for us to govern ourselves and react to events which take place in a real world. All of these events, and the outcomes of society in total, need not be construed at all as "social constructions". It would be possible to reduce all that the people of Earth do, or the entire life-force in all existence, to some simple mechanism and say "this is the purpose of life". This is a very crass reduction, but if anyone believes that this social information is useful for navigating the world, it can reduce very large constructs of agents to this primal urge. Whether the information is true or false is not relevant. In practice, all of our informational conceits about society are woefully inaccurate, and have to be so. We never possess anywhere near perfect information, and for many reasons no agent could assemble that information. It is also not necessary to do so. We can consider the world of natural events as what it is without society or any institution, and we can consider ourselves not as social agents but as flesh and blood humans. We can also relate to other entities not in this way where we transact information but because we find some purpose in friendship or interaction that is not reducible to social information, and has no "political" nature to speak of. In other words, there is a very large world outside of society, and not all of the information we gather about the world and other people is inherently "social information" that must be subject to political intrigues or any social taboo. It is however the nature of social information and politics that we do not get to choose which information is protected or concealed from an interested party, or preferred boundaries to regulate the flow of information. If we wish to control information, that itself would require us to engage with society and politics in some way, and every interaction entails this risk of betrayal or some other horrible event. It applies even within ourselves or our relation with things, in our own space and without any other knowing agent interfering with us. The social and political is by its nature the death of our conceits of mind and ourselves in a crude sense of the individual we might imagine. This is something most of us adapt to in some way, however badly we do so or however well we rise in social organizations and political life. An advance of modern psychology has been to turn the political viciously against the very agent that made political consciousness possible, such that the downtrodden can be depoliticized in a way slaves and serfs couldn't be in the past. The social and political entails not just corruption from other people, but corruption from things and the integration of non-thinking things with thinking agents. There is no clean delineation between mind and matter in a real sense that would be respected by nature or any social actor. This was apparent to those who figured things out long before sociology arose as a modern discipline, and it was intrinsic to the ruling ideas and philosophies long in use, and the ritual humiliations and so on that largely define human conduct.

It should be noted that these scales and domains can be applied in some way arbitrarily, and do not denote particular sizes or numbers of entities or agents. They are all, in some way, evident in the same informational construct. An individual agent can be a polity unto itself, its own organization and its own system, and that individual agent can be in principle reduced to a singular token of information or purpose for some registry. An agent can even reduce itself to a singular proposition of purpose, a "vessel of the god" so to speak though this is no genuine divine act. The polity, whatever its real expression in a given time or place, can be similarly construed as just an organization of people, a system contained within itself, or an individual agent among many others conducting the same business. All of these levels are implicit in the concept that there can be a society at all. Not one of these concepts of society truly encompass all that exists, such that society becomes an abstraction that is truly inescapable. Such a conception is not even inherent to the concept of large organizations or the political concept. Far from it, the concept of large organizations and polities suggests that such an all-pervading society is a logical impossibility, if society is to be spoken of as anything meaningful. What such ideology and institutions purveying it actually do is reduce something which is necessarily complex to the system level, and due to some clumsy application of information, very sophisticated interactions are reduced to simpler information in a way that envisions a society as a total system, contained in some ecosystem which is managed by a thought leader. There are a lot of reasons why such an approach is useful for managing economic matters, and it would even be preferable for someone who manages a very large country with millions of inhabitants to simply these matters to some accounting scheme a human can comprehend readily. For example, figures of productivity are reduced to entries on a ledger, and there may be some unit of currency these products are compared to, in a sense that adjudicates value sufficiently for the purpose of distribution. This need not conform to money in the sense we use it, which has particular political and institutional connotations. The same problem would arise in a planned economy, and historically this is what did happen in planned economies - the same difficulty of distribution based on information applied there just as it would in market economies. This is not an argument that planned economies are intrinsically incapable of solving the social question, but that it is entirely possible for planned economies to exhibit the same behaviors as market economies. Market economies in principle are a type of planned economy, where agents meet at an agreed-upon location to conduct trade, under laws which must be enforced to speak of a stable market appearing. Without that much planning, and the planning of market actors who are always rational agents, markets would not appear because no one would know what to do in such a construct. That market activity is not a given of humanity. Markets as a persistent activity do not appear in any familiar form, and money as we know it only appears when there are institutions which can hoard something deemed to be money, loan it, record debts and credits, and enforce payment of debts. Someone collecting cowry shells for exchange is not engaged in the use of money in any sense we would appreciate the concept, but there is enough documentation of primitive practices of debt-tallying and enforcement of those contracts, which typically carried religious significance. Whatever the mechanism, in societies that engage in any exchange of products or things, or where claims on land or people are made, there will be this question of what the information means and the implications of exchanging in this way. It would be the case even if we went to great lengths to maintain the dignity of human beings in their actual person, as would be necessary if society is to be anything other than a menace stalking the world.

So far as society is seen in its raw informational form, it is only described as communication between dyads, and each of these would be symbolic things. For society to exist in any meaningful form, it is explained only through those dyads. All other constructs in society would be formed out of that information, and would be constructs of information rather than the material events that information points to. In this way, society is illusory, and this would be seen for what it is if the fetters of knowledge and conceits about it were not a barrier. It would be possible to simply disregard that information beyond that which is necessary for the existence of the underlying agent, and little would change. Humans would still be humans, and all of the objects studied in science would do as they would. The interactions between them would still occur, much as we acknowledge that they would in society. Whether that would be interesting to any of the agents, or if their consciousness regarding that system would be a "social" or "political" consciousness, is up to them. It is entirely possible to view this construct as something other than social or political. It is further self-evident that abasement towards this concept of society or the political doesn't hold any inherent value, beyond the recognition that a conception such as society and the most basic politics is possible. Nothing about the world or knowledge suggests that this society is inevitable or desirable, or holds any persistent value. In solitude, when someone does not need to acknowledge this information as immediately relevant, it is very easy and often desirable to connect with the natural world which makes society possible, rather than the informational constructs and abstractions society and politics entail. The same is true of shared activities between actual humans, or the things that involved in those activities. The things themselves have no concept of society or politics for obvious reasons, and have no intrinsic social or moral worth outside of this concept of knowledge. For the individual outside of society, all values we assign are for our internal purposes. They often, but don't always, point to a world outside of us where events happen, and we would need to hold that this world exists. In social consciousness, though, the world's genuine state is not relevant to values passed in communication. Societies entail deception, incomplete information, competition for position, and because at a basic level the relations are between dyads that are considered exclusive entities, cooperation between any part can only begin through understanding. For people and things which do not think or know, the things have no say in this cooperation. They are appropriated and it does not occur to the things that anything else were possible. People relating to people do not abide being treated as things. Even if some other person were legal property, the thing a master wishes to appropriate from the slave - labor - requires the slave to function with some autonomy, simply to be able to follow orders through their native thought process. The master may seek to mold the slave's thought process, but cannot do so continuously. At some point, the slave is conditioned and expected to follow orders without excessive monitoring. If the cost of guard labor is set astronomically high based on exacting and continuous demands for control, the slave system is far too expensive to maintain or completely unworkable with any real energy input. It is not difficult to see that today's overbearing managerialism is not concerned with any productive output for slaves, but exists for the thrill of managers and sadists who desire to torture service workers and humiliate them, out of some sense that this glorifies the manager. It exists, in other words, to accelerate as quickly as possible the death rate of the working class. This process, extermination through labor, was understood to be the purpose of Nazi slavery.^[8] Nothing about this apparatus is productive in a scientific sense, but in a social sense, the product of human misery, degradation of the body, and death is highly valued. Those most responsible for the death drive of what I have called "eugenism" have been described as the best and the brightest, paid exorbitant incomes and guaranteed security and privileges beyond mere tokens of wealth. They are enshrined institutionally, and it is this sort of person who values institutions more than anyone else, for institutions are their preferred vehicle to impose on societies and the world itself a conceit or vision held in their mind, which replaces the world as we knew it with an antiseptic mockup, no longer burdened by the ugliness of the natural world or social information that suggested information commanded and utilized in society had to point to something factual.

Nowhere was any institution necessary for us to make decisions regarding ourselves and other people, or any construct arises from social information or the material world. Yet, institutions are everywhere and very necessary tools for any social agent to organize conceptually any plan beyond the most basic understanding of these relations. Institutions never save us from ourselves or the truth of the world, but institutions are rife with those who see them as vehicles for some ambition, and the ambition of people is reproduced not as a thought-form of individuals but in the very existence an institution implies. In short, institutions never do what their ideal form purports they ought to do or what they are presented as doing, and in many cases, institutions in practice do the exact opposite of their stated purpose. This tendency, which was latent in the idea of an institution, would be exacerbated and became total during the 20th century, and emerged to its fullest state in the 21st century so far. The system and the institution are often conflated to make this appearance a realized condition, where in the past institutions could not command so precisely the information pertaining to their existence.

The institution is necessary for social awareness, which initially only contains a limited purview involve relations between people and things, to make claims about the world outside of society. This includes the bodies of the social agents themselves, which were not at first social entities in any sense, however they were constituted. The thinking of someone of "me" or "I" is itself a sense of someone as an institution, albeit in a cruder sense. Animals are not known to possess this concept of institutional identity as we practice is, due to a lack of symbolic language and memory storage. Institutions are particular to entities with sufficiently developed symbolic language to impose the concept. It is not that animals lack any concept of their own existence, or other entities, or some form of institution. Dogs recognize a pack, a hierarchy within it, and the members of it as they recognize them. None of that, though, is information conveyed with reference to the idea, as if the dog could articulate precisely the laws and practices of the pack in the way a human could describe laws and practices of their social system. This development did not occur overnight, and in humans, full awareness of all information in a social system would drive them mad. It is, as mentioned before, a great taboo to speak too frankly about what human societies are and their practices, for doing so would reveal malicious intent and that humans, for all of their symbolic language and pretenses, behave little better than their animal forebears, and often seek the same objectives. Humans have not at all moved past animal malice, and through sophisticated knowledge develop malice that animals would be far too noble to embrace and enshrine in institutions. The one thing humans might say in defense is that they at least know that this is wrong, and could on a good day mitigate the worst of their habits. For all of our efforts, however well-intentioned and forward-thinking, humans have never once suggested with any seriousness the problem of institutions themselves, and never acknowledge the root of the problem in institutions. This is because the institution, however arranged, is always malleable just as anyone else is, but institutions do not have any thought process or regulatory process that would correct for malevolent activities implied by the institution. A human being, who must live and eat and do various things to be human, can only stomach so much malice before asking if any of it was worth it. Institutions, not being thinking things or really material things at all, have no such limit. There are, if one understands the root of many institutions in ethics and moral philosophy, signs that far from limiting malice, institutions are by their nature favorable towards malice, exploitation, and disregard for any moral sentiment any thinking entity might uphold. Nothing about institutions is intrinsically moral or tied to the world in a real sense. They are, in the end, constructs of knowledge imposed on the world. No institution can claim to be inherent to nature, and any institution appealing to natural law is among the most dangerous of them humans have ever created. Institutional thought is certainly emergent from natural processes just as knowledge itself would be. Even if we supposed knowledge were created supernaturally by God, which was never really a claim religion made but was suggested as a false consciousness when sociology and liberalism came to the forefront of human institutions, humans in every religious tradition retain the will to act on their own and create institutions as they see fit. If the humans do terrible things, it is just the way God made them, or some strange working that God or whatever deity allowed to exist. Much in religion suggests an antipathy towards institutions altogether, including their own which must be policed by faith in something that was greater than the institution itself. If not for that, then religion would be nothing more than yet another bureaucracy and would be seen as such from the outset. Whatever the nature of the religion, it would not have held relevance simply because of the institution's intellectual claim. Religion to be religion proper entails something more sophisticated, which we have yet to develop in this writing but will encounter as we progress, in various forms. The institution in its raw form is not a spiritual creature or any authority unto itself. It is instead an abstract machine, which once built must be handed off to men, women, and the things they appropriate and create, to do with as they will. Institutions have corporeal representation in the material products and acts carried out in their name. It is with institutions that humans establish their sense of themselves, history, and formal knowledge and education in any sense we would recognize. This is a necessary step only in the context of society, rather than a necessary step for us to think of knowledge or existence itself. No institution "made" us do this by some force of nature that asserted we were to be ruled by institutions. Institutions in the end are animate only because there are flesh and blood humans, the machines they build, and the natural processes that they utilize in some plan, that make them real and meaningful. By themselves, institutions are just a name and information, perhaps recorded on some document or implied from the observed behavior of institutional entities.

If we lived without institutions, we would have lived in a world where society was merely acknowledged as some information, which was of little importance. Society conceptually carried no spiritual connotations, and nor do institutions or concepts of value which arose from it. It was further not the case that these institutions or other people gave us purpose, or that the institution, social information, or knowledge itself granted this authority by thought alone. The world without institutions, in which people were just humans in a world gone horribly wrong, would be a very different place, and probably a very somber place where not much happens at all. Spiritual awakening, which would have arisen from something outside of institutions and only encountered knowledge as an alien to our conceits of knowledge, might inspire the actions of people in some way beyond knowledge, the material world, or any institutional reprsentation. What people would have wanted or seen in their spiritual visions had nothing to do with any basis in the material world or any idea we held about it. We might claim we responded to some instinct in us that was natural, or natural events which could be rationalized. The proper origin for moral values was not our conceits about things or any institution or society we created, or anything we constructed for ourselves. They are not a simplified or materialist conceit about the world. They did not descend from a source that is unknowable, to which an elect few have access. They were not taught pedagogically, and all efforts at moral education have been disastruous and often faulty in their most basic premises. They are not self-evident or a just-so story, though this through the proper understanding arrives closer to a knowable truth we could hold. They originated instead from an existence and sense we were vaguely aware of, that took into account all of these things as possibilities, yet entailed an understanding that could not be easily encapsulated into some information, such that we would bark dogmatically about ethical positions far removed from what we wanted or what would have meant a single thing beyond stating information. Institutions often, and in our time axiomatically, present themselves as connected to this - that they connect to something so vast and incomprehensible that only expert adjudication would allow moral guidance. This expert class sought to eliminate, for various reasons, anything suggesting that moral values originated from anywhere else, and all serious inquiries into morality would be terminated or subordinated to institutions. The world where we didn't do this, or where we don't do this any longer, is a world difficult to describe in any writing I could write, and I don't pretend to have any of those answers. What I do here is merely to describe things I have observed with the time and energy I have, so that you the readers might find something useful, whatever your aims may be. I would hope this information is used for something other than perpetuating the rot, and I believe those who have such an aim already know this in spades. I also believe that, in the end, they know they cannot ever "win". Their aims, whatever their angle, are not to win any struggle decisively for ideological purposes or for some grand narrative, but to gain position in a giant rat race and ritual sacrifice. The nature of that sacrifice is only partially described in my writing, but it is underway now and I believe the readers will recognize that in their experience. If I were to speak of the world without institutions at all, where we became something else, I would write a very different book, and I would not be able to write much that would be readily comprehensible to someone in this time. I really don't have a great vision of the world past institutional invasion, that somehow allows us to maintain a quality of life. I also believe that without me, such a world has already been envisioned and those who must out of necessity attain such a thing are at work, regardless of what I do or any struggle against them. There wouldn't be any other way for life as we know it to move forward, whatever the outcome may be.

Institutions, like the earlier described social information, can be seen at four levels, which overlap each other in any of the ways we speak of institutions. The micro-level institution is the institutional entity itself, its name and personhood, its identity, and obvious markers of that identity that would be used to discriminate it from other institutions and other things. For individual humans, the institutional representation is a person, with a name, rank, and other identifying information pertaining to it. It is important to note that no identifying information is inherent to the institution itself. The institution's basic "shell" so to speak has no members whatsoever and not even a name, but is merely the personhood itself conceptually. In programming terms, if we were to define a class in the IT sense^[9], the basic form of the institution is the declaration of the class's existence, rather than the class itself. The instantiation of the class - or in reality, the existence we consider the institution's real form - is a separate instance from the class's definition. Reality being what it is and not being an information processing routine, the material reality of institutions is its own thing once they are realized. Institutions are not read into existence in the way we would read what an organization is. An institution to be an institution is always planned and instantiated by some agent or some thing with knowledge and structure. If this is not the case, then whatever is identified as a thing behaving like institutions is not an institution at all. Institutions are only sensical once social actors are recognized and the members of society recognize that society does exist, or is purported to exist. If there is no such thing as society, then there can be no realistic comprehension of institutions in the way we expect them to exist.^[10] An institution without a conception of society would be some incomprehensible alien, which due to its size and the ineffable slogans in its vast propaganda would have the force of truth over our individual reckoning. The only thing that would be possible for an individual with no concept of society is to assert that his or her meek potential is somehow morally equivalent in ability to the institution, which is unlikely. This also means that weaker institutions that would arise organically, including the individual person, are subsumed before the dominant institution. Those who operate institutions in such an environment are declaring their offensive, and certainly believe society is real. It is not intended to be a rational argument, but a exultant war cry, and this is reduced to some ideology which just-so happened but entailed something more - the victory of eugenics, which the ideologues coddled and sheltered. Such a declaration was, right then and there, the mask coming off. It became impossible and inadmissible to speak against it, and every sadist and predator knew that the institutions, from the highest to the lowest, were theirs and theirs alone. The institution of the person was dead, in the name of "freedom". Yet again "Freedom is Slavery". The control of information, and assurances that all predation would be sacrosanct, made this declaration possible and enforceable in a way that past society could not. The moment the reaction to this was not to immediately exterminate anyone brazen enough to do this and pursue that aim zealously was the moment eugenics knew it had won, and so it has. The democide did not start in the 21st century, but started then and started in force. Everything since has been a holding action to dissolve those with the last memory of a time before the victory of the creed. This is when all mystifications and lies, already in place to protect the eugenists after their atrocities of the war and interwar period, amplified and all ideologues picked their side. They knew what they were, and that the individual was dead. In its place would be the Nazified petty-manager, born to supplicate and kill, and the technocrat off its leash.^[11] The new "man", if the creature can be dignified even with a comparison to the deformed Satanic ape of old, would think of nothing but institutional privileges and some cheap thrill supplied to him or her in spades.

Only by extensive command of social information was this something that could be imposed on the world. This command of information was not a fait accompli, where the mere declaration that it is so made it win. Very likely, the current purge and thrill-seeking is, for all it will do, a phase that will pass, and this was forseen as part of a transformation for purposes unknown and occulted. It is only clear that all public-facing propaganda drips with contempt for anyone and everyone who actually views it in any way, offering at most whatever entertainment will pass the time as the democide happens. That entertainment only sporadically allows a glimmer of promise, only for the ruling institutions to shit up the recreation and entertainment we would turn to as a distraction from this nightmare. We will not even be allowed that, if that were deemed enough. We will not be allowed any thought of of our own, not one thing to call our own, and we are not even allowed prolefeed as substantive as what existed in the past. The moment some glimmer of promise is found, it is snatched away with a sadistic grin of those who were selected to live, the thrill of following Malthus' dictum on full display and glorified. This systematic deprivation is not something won easily, for it is born admidst many institutions that had no reason to go along with this, and that each aspired to their pre-existing aims. So too did the people who held those institutions, who imagined in some way that they could affect the world, and who themselves had wants other than this filth. Institutions are never simply names and identities^[12], stated as just-so stories. They will take some preferred form, and institutions must like organisms adapt to their situation. Societies taken collectively cannot do this through their own mechanism, as if societies were oriented towards any greater objective by nature. Primitive social instincts common to the agents might be interpreted as creating some order to institutions, but whenever they do so, they form institutions as if they were unwitting products that just happened. No institution "just happens" though, and to be a true institution, the primordial urge that would give rise to it unconsciously must become a conscious imperative. It need not be an imperative beyond a conscious affirmation of what the primordial instinct inside the agent built, but usually any such instinct that becomes a true institution will be formalized and a grand theory will be propped up around the conceits someone had before the institution was written in code.^[13]

The institution is, in many ways, an "abstract society", which itself abides the same rules of communication as society generally. Unlike society proper, which is premised on some genuine communication that is understood to both ends of the dyad, the institution is united by an idea, and some distinguishing characteristic that makes an institution an institution. It would distinguish who is and isn't a member, and what things are their property. To speak of property is to speak of institutions, for the concept cannot exist outside of that. Possession may be 9/10ths of the law, but this is the law's recognition of reality and it will consider the remaining tenth its own. Without that institution, all claims to possession only extend as far as force will allow, and individual force will not account for much. Regardless of claims of possession of forceful acquisition, the members of society would contest claims and do so at will. Nothing prevents a member of society from deciding that the farm, the home, the factory, or any other asset you hold is no longer yours. You may be able to defend it, but to do so you must pay someone to defend it or pay your time and sweat to defend the keep. This has been played out many times in human history, since it was the default of empire - a king's authority could only extend as far as his personal rule and the reach of his officers, without some institution to suggest that this was actually permanent and could produce edicts beyond more than the utterance of words every time it had to be said. This indeed was the difficulty for early empires - a conqueror would defeat a rival city, but the moment he leaves, that city rises in revolt, killing whatever governor the conqueror left behind. Because institutional states were not fully worked out, usually the conqueror could only rely on family members to be that governor, and it quickly became apparent to said family member that he could rebel and usurp his brother or father. There is a reason that profoundly stupid saying "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" came into being, because this sort of thing would be used to break apart clan societies ruled by personal honor and blood relations, which were an expectation of the Near East states for a long time, and remain a force in human society to this day. It is unsurprising that the family, in various forms, and its more elaborate form of the clan, is among the earliest institutions and one that recurs in every human society we know of. The most primitive tribes know very well of the family, and will know for certain the identity of the mother. It is expected that the identity of the father be known, or at least an identified father is named, whether father or mother has anything to do with raising the kid. Laws and taboos pertaining to consanguinity, or incest, are always present in human societies, so correct identity of both parents was quickly expected and normative. What constitutes "incest" in a given society may vary, but it is almost obligatory for more than institutional reasons that a child would ask who the mother and father are. It is also very clear to any competent mother who the father is, regardless of whether she with-holds the secret from everyone. Even without this information stated and revealed, it is not too difficult for someone to detect family resemblance. It is also a natural fact that mothers give birth, and that process is often documented and assisted because such a practice has been done for all the reasons that makes sense. Women being gossipers would likely make clear the identity of fathers even when the men are left clueless to the secret game of affairs played since time immemorial.

It is the games of obfuscation, which are inherent to society's existence, that become a source of institutional mischief. Institutions purport to resolve this problem in ways our own sense do not. Even if institutions did not exist to do this, we would create in our mind an ersatz institution to solve this question to our satisfaction. We would, for example, have a method of reason that we established, that we hold to be true regardless of our intuitions and in line with reality, and that method would likely be drawn from a formal institution rather than something we make up on the spot. If we have to invent for ourselves this method, we would likely institutionalize it in some way, even if it is merely recorded for ourselves in our sense of the world. The institution here is just a fragment, a rule we might reference that may tie into other rules to make sense of the world. It becomes an institution not because it has any existence outside of us, but because it pertains to social information rather than something purely natural. We can scientifically assert that offspring in sexed species have a male and female parent, but "mother" and "father" and the whole taboo of consanguinity concerns social information rather than a mere fact of nature that can be observed without any "social" awareness. Natural systems used in science have nothing to do with society. The question of motherhood or fatherhood is not merely a scientific question, but a social question that we hold relevant to conduct in society, and motherhood and fatherhood carried connotations of obligations, expectations, and so on in any human tribe. It would not be taken lightly to lie about such a thing, for all the reasons we would expect. For a scientific question, there is no such weight. A scientific fact has nothing to do with social values, but is simply a thing we would note and examine through experiment. Science of course has many implications for humanity and institutions of science are prominent today, but the institutions of science specifically shy away from open political or moral activity, and their involvement in economic life is always suspect for all the reasons that makes sense. When we assign moral value to interpersonal relationships - when we are to actually care about those relations - we would imply that there is a society where those interpersonal relationships are understood as meaningful information. This would not change perhaps a certain disgust towards physical or material things or acts, or a greater sense of wrongness in the world or with a situation which is not a matter of any social information or institution. So far as we do value motherhood or fatherhood as something of importance, in a way that is anyone's business but the parties in question, we would acknowledge that there is a society where that relationship is not a unique act isolated between specific persons, but a general rule that in theory applies to other agents like us. That is, the question of fatherhood is only sensical if there is a society where any man, absent any information narrowing our search, is just as capable of being a father as the next. The question of mating in general and rituals pertaining to it suggests that males, females, and relations between them are common enough to be noted as a general event in society, rather than merely a scientific claim of nature. Even if those affairs were discussed as a dispassionate study of the natural world, there is an implication of society to speak of them as general rules which could apply anywhere. We would perhaps see in observations of the natural world a replica of social information, and could easily lapse into seeing the natural world through social conventions and describe it with the language of society, which we attach to our moral values that are very personal. A wise sociologist may consider that they are above such things and recognize the bias, but time and time again sociologists and their related disciplines wear their bias not just as a badge of pride, but as something to be screamed to assert that the world conforms to society. This at heart is because sociology describes not a natural event in the way that much in nature can be seen as natural events, but sociology and all precursors to it describe a state of affairs between knowing agents. To speak of society without any knowing agents at all, as I have mentioned many times before, is to speak not of society at all, or any institution, where such a language would be appropriate as a description. I would say to the scientist that they should, in their study, look past the institutions and study the thing that is their proper purview when they study things that are not social in nature. If a scientist does bring social matters into their purview, and there is nothing inherently wrong with this, they would do well to remember that society is at heart informational. We would not possess society at all or institutions if there were not actors in society that knowingly acted to create it. We may imagine an animal sociality or some precursors of it, but the moral questions we invoke with society are not things that occur to animals in the same way. It is not because the animal is devoid of knowledge or even a crude sense of rational interest as they see it, but because human sociality developed specifically to develop consciousness of themselves, each other, and institutions in the abstract, and developed them further to elaborate schemes and acts that animals have not been seen doing at all.

After establishment, the markers which are at first identification for external entities become internal matters. Simply put, there is an expectation of who is in the institution and who is not, defining characteristics of members, and traits that could be considered a culture for the institution. There are various names throughout history for this concept of system-level institutions, but "nation", "tribe", "association", "society", "fellowship", "collegia", "movement", and various other names suggest a collectivity based on some distinguishing characteristics. The distinction is never strictly an identity, but entails the meaning of any identity. Here we see what "identity politics" seeks to eliminate. Identity in "identity politics" is never an identity with genuine meaning, but an identity imposed by an alien institution - and it is always imposed by an alien institution, rather than by an individual or some other source of authority to adjudicate identity. This is why the persistent narrative of "identity politics" is to reduce a concept like "race" or any other identity to a singular identity, and for an alien institution, typically one that presents as a judge to assert what others are, to decide who belongs to that race. This most obviously was used to describe racial identity in American history, where "blackness" as a legal category not as the institutional name of the black slaves who came from various tribes and whose tribal affiliations were stripped away early in enslavement, but as a category in race laws which existed to uphold the slave trade. A pseudoscientific process suggested that slavery was an inborn feature, and this distinguished the institutional assignment of "black" from the common observation of black skin and African ancestry, or any conception of race in a scientific or anthropological sense that "race" was usually considered. Over time, the black slaves, who had no other tribal or national affiliation, came to exist with a distinct culture and history, which is understood to be different from their racial origin altogether. The actual establishment of that culture, history, and so on has nothing to do with "identity politics". Overwhelmingly, identity politics was the domain of white intellectuals and a few black academics who were their courtiers, and it was adopted by petty-managers who always sought to pit workers against each other by race, creed, or any other identity. It would strip away all of the history that those workers had from prior culture, and most of all it prohibited the working class developing an independent culture or a sense of workers' nationalism.^[14] There will be more to say about such concepts in the future, though "identity politics" is a red herring for the eugenic ideology it had always pointed to. Such an ideology was latent in socialism and republicanism generally, but it was so obviously odious that it could only be introduced through violent force in the form it took. The reasons for doing this would be to destroy any institution alien to the eugenic institutions and the ruling interest, and this aim would be shared by those who occupied the leading institutions or were their enablers. It was only possible to impose such a view of identity from a high institution, which declared that all institutions with an organic origin were now to be moot. The Nazi appropriation of socialist language and the language of institutions and sociology was the first advance of an idea that would supplant the system-level concept of institutions I describe here with the managed institution that is a controlled subsidiary of the transcendent-level institution attached to the fascist state.

A nation has been described as "an imagined community of people", and this is indeed true, in that members of a nation do not often meet every one of their members. Yet, the nation is not the only archetype for this loose affiliation or understanding that an institution exists. "Tribe", "Culture", and many other concepts have particular definitions, referring to different aspects of this affiliation. They are all, in some ways, the framework for institutions, or an understanding of groupings of social agents that is observable from outside. In social systems, the communication is purely bilateral between the agents and things. In institutions, there is a sense that all in the association are one thing. Institutions at this level are not mutually exclusive with another. Someone can be of a particular race with history, a particular sex, member of other formal institutions, and any other groupings applicable to that person. These associations always involve institutional people rather than the actual human flesh. Non-persons are not active members of institutions and cannot be, and this is a particular trait of institutions. Who is a "person" for the purposes of that institution is decided by rules of the institution, which are always implied for any established institution at a higher scale of the institution. The definition of who is in and out is not in of itself the rule, and cannot be. Membership in an institution is defined not by the members themselves, but by the sense of someone that this institution is in fact a thing. It didn't "just so" occur to someone that there was a "white race", "black race", as if these were facts of nature stamped on the forehead of every human. Someone had to adjudicate what a race is, and then had to develop a concept of race as institutional or institutionally significant, for that to become a legal distinction in the sense we understand it today. It is not that the races didn't exist naturally, although who qualifies precisely in scientific language as "white" or "black" is disputed if race were to be treated as a category in biological science or anthropology. Science and the humanities do not dictate the institutional decision or institutional relevance of race for all institutions by any natural law or authority. The same is true of any other identifier that would be used to group an institution. Someone does not get to declare themselves a member of a particular institution by their own will, unless the bylaws of that institution permit such an action. This does indeed happen - many movements grow simply by exhorting potential members to look at themselves or their situation and say "hey, I'm an insert-the-blank too!" This identity alone is rarely the meaning of worthwhile institutional membership, though. Usually the associations of people that become institutions entail many qualifying traits, and those qualifying traits are never totalizing or reduce the members to a ready-made facsimile of a man or woman provided by thought leaders telling you what you are. People typically associate as nations, tribes, cultures, and so on, because they have something more than merely an identity token, but have already established some frequent relations with each other. Often the nations of modernity were united by the rule of a single sovereign, or a long history of conflict, peace, exchanges, and familiarity with each other. They often speak the same language or understand the languages common among them. It is not always the case, in that nations can be constructed from the most spurious evidence, or nations form not in any organic sense but were highly artificial because their prior national sense was destroyed. It is also not the case that "nation" and "polity" are identical. For most of history this was not the case. The United States or the American people were never constituted as a nation in any sense that word was socially meaningful, and this is very intentional in the design of American institutions and the conception of the polity and state as a whole. The nation as a concept does not carry any inherent political meaning, nor are members of a nation obligated to each other in any way. Very often, the thing uniting a nation most of all in modernity was the rule of a single sovereign, and this was a contributor to the French sense of nationalism. Absolutism as a doctrine of the French monarchy was a running battle between the crown and his preferred institutions against the lower nobility and their historical privileges, among other things that suggested the doctrine. That doctrine was recognized as a precursor to the sense that this one thing, France, was truly unitary, and as the commoners gained position in the country, they recognized that holding this thing together would be very much in their interest, without regard to the particular sovereign who eventually proved to be an asshole trying to kill them.^[15]

Associations that become institutions can be as small or large as imagined. It is possible to conceive of all mankind as a single thing and institutionalize it in some way. Mankind never has formed a persistent institution of all people, or even the valid of them, but there are those who claim to speak for mankind, much as fascist states have spoken for any nation or association of people. Associations like a family as small, and the structure of a family varies. A general model for "the family" has never been the reality of the family as an institution. Models are prescribed and some patterns are natural. For example, biological families require a mother, father, and at least one child to be constituted meaningfully as a family unit, and adoptive parents are distinguished from biological ones for all of the obvious reasons. The family as a formal institution is often a thing mandated by law rather than the dictation of a patriarch or matriarch. Given a choice, families often associate with extended networks and make relations outside of the household. The household itself is not always congruent with the family unit biologically, and it is entirely conceivable for children to be raised without biological parents, or to make association not with their biological parents but with a godfather or some alternative institution or structure. Generally, though, family units exist because of a need to rear children in environments that are not as alienating as some state institution, and this usually makes the mother at the least the most obvious candidate to lead the raising of children, and the father both needs to clean up his mess and sees biological offspring as something to pass on himself to the future. The genuine love of a child or parent is not intrinsic to the institution or social information in any way, and that has been the great tragedy of society all along. We would be careful not to confuse associations with more formal structures. Formal structures are by their nature associations, but not all associations will be formalized as elaborate institutions. Often, associations have little structure beyond the identifying characteristics, and recognized similarities in practices that are grouped together. Tribes, for example, are united not as institutions or polities in the formal sense but are united by conditions which are not uniform to describe a "tribe", as if tribes were a singular proposition.^[16] Families often formalize little other than the head's authority to make decisions, which is always questioned unless the family is in a world unto itself. Very often associations and institutions with definition are subject to higher-level institutions and encouraged by them. Families exist in any familiar form because of legal and political obligations of the father, mother, and children, and rights pertaining to the family that are recognized not by the family's assertion but because the family is regarded by states as a useful and necessary unit. The declaration of families to be a thing has little weight in how states and large institutions regard them, as they will often learn if they think they can buck the dominant trends and traditional expectations of families and the relations therein. There is a genuine interest to maintain the familial relations, but this does not necessarily conform to any institutionalization of the family beyond the recognition that families tend to reside in the same household and maintain contact and recognition of their relations for obvious self-interest and sentiment among the members of the family. The family as an institution, as an icon, was never really the concern of the members of the family or defended what the members saw in the arrangement, if they saw anything. Institutional definitions might have been a guide to suggest what family life could or should be, but what the members defend is not the idea of the family but it's meaningful results. Those results are not really social information or institutional information at all, but the various things family life means for members like security, an environment fostering growth, and all of the things that are typically defended. Because no alternative institution suggests protecting those things, and because blood relations typically have an affinity for their relatives for reasons that are not institutional, the family is defended. Because the alternatives on offer attack the family not so much to destroy the institutional form, but because the ruling institutions and states wish to invade the relationships and take the kids from the home for god-knows-what, the defense of the family is among the battlegrounds for defense of the subordinated classes. This defense of the family too has been co-opted by those with false pretenses, so that the predatory and sadistic can claim that they are "defending the family" while upholding the vile customs and ideology typical of their kind. Those who claim to defend "traditional families" have been among the vanguard calling for invasion of private life to break up any family they don't like, doing so for clearly eugenic reasons with the typical filth of meddling busybodies who like to see the decent suffer. They don't even hide with any seriousness what their true intent is, and gleefully poison those they deem "sinners" when they get on the high horse that has become their defining feature.

The sophistication of institutions can vary, from loose understandings of people with a name, to cultures with a long history but nothing else unifying them as a single institution. The most basic form of an association would be to simply recognize a group of people together. This would not even require a name other than "that group over there", which may be defined as any number of people, including a solitary person. In short, any ability to group people would be the most basic form of the institution. This isn't usually what is considered an "institution", but it would be possible to envision some abstraction that multiple people regard as shared existence. So, associations can be arbitrarily defined, including where no meaningful association exists. This wouldn't be recognized by the members of this dubious "association", but it wouldn't stop someone from suggesting a conspiracy of disconnected agents or imagined agents. We will for the moment consider those imagined agents a "thing" without any real existence, but there is no rule against creating fictitious persons and assigning to them social information as if they were no different from actual humans. It is also possible, through institutions alone since identity is a characteristic of institutions rather than the actual humans or their relationships, to falsify identity or obscure the existence of an association. Secret societies as a rule obscure their members or surround membership with mystique, and recognize an old wise saying that to know the name of something is to hold power over it. The secret society, to be constituted as something more than a vague aspersion, is a formal institution with some executive, chain of command, and so on, even if it is arranged as disparate cells. There would be something suggesting how members of this society know of each other, or know what the society entails beyond membership and certain knowledge held by them which may be merely cultural. Generally, secret societies do not suggest directly that they have a "nation" or "culture" since that would give away their membership and secrets, but the mystique they possess is a tool for their use, and any truly effective secret society would surround itself not just with a story but an aura of fear that suggests they are something more than a rumor, and that to speak too openly of their existence at all is bad for the existence of the hoodwinked. This fear is accentuated when said hoodwinking, which is ubiquitous in societies dominated by a conspiracy, is repeated specifically to remind those out of the know that this will never, ever change.

We would do well to recall associations not as an identity group or a formal institution necessarily united in some conspiracy against all others, or even an implied executive. The association instead is a shared history, culture, or some association with a central defining trait, which would make it an association. As mentioned, associations are not mutually exclusive. The higher-level understanding of institutions, which must be exclusive with any competing institution, applies to the formal facing of the institution, its explicit bylaws or rules, which constitute the government of the institution. This is how an institution is typically understood - that they are not associations or nations vaguely defined or an imagined grouping of people, but bodies with executive functioning. This shares similarity with social groupings mentioned earlier at the wider domain level, but unlike that where the executive is implied and always exists in some capacity, institutions need not be governed by any genuine executive to be formal institutions. What is consistent about the executive functioning of institutions is that it concerns not a loose and shifting number of associations with direct connections, but concerns the mechanisms of the institution itself. The institution's "person" is not a real entity with thoughts that must be abided, but a corporate person, with an organization chart, subordinates, defined roles, enforcement mechanisms, and so on. The parts of an institution may point to persons who are registered somewhere as employees or members in some list, and even when no such list of persons or things exists, there is a definite understanding of who is a member and what obligations are expected of them, and there is some mechanism to decide the position of persons in the institution, even if formally the rules claim that everyone is equal. Equality within the institution may be a principle governing it - for example, a democracy where one person has one vote - but the institution will likely mark their members as more or less virtuous or deserving in some way, and this is not incompatible with the principle of equality in membership or political equality of that sort. Institutions may consciously uphold social equality among the members. They may expect conduct towards non-members, judging who are friends and who are enemies, or different levels of access to the institution. That access can be to knowledge, resources, people, or anything else the institution claims as its property. It is at this level that property can become more than a conceit of one person or mere possession, and becomes a law that is enforceable. It is not at the highest level of institutions that this begins, nor is it settled by the polity or the state by decree. It is not decided by individuals, who on their own power present nothing but statements. If individuals are to claim property meaningfully, it would be because people are assembled and there is a framework to assert that property is a real thing, rather than a conceit or an imagined settlement. How that property claim is adjudicated may vary, and it may very well be that the institution where this is settled is war, or the expectation of the law of nature and no man's land.

War itself is a peculiar case in that it is always institutional. The participants in any war, any struggle, are always nameable and engaged in a definite relation, about which rules can be stated, if only in hindsight. The way the law of the war institution is settled is not by any formulation by any party involved, but by the conflict and competing formulations they fight for. It may be regarded by the participants of war that there are general laws or war, or laws pertaining to the current conflict. All wars and all struggles to be meaningful as true wars or struggles are institutions of this sort. In the natural world, absent thought, no "war" is recognized at all - to the world and to science, war appears no different than any other motion of things in the world. For individual knowledge, struggle and war are ultimately concepts they hold. They are only comprehensible in the context of society, where there are agents and things to contest. A war of one against the world is not a war or struggle, but a futile railing of a mortal against the heavens and all that exists. That condition is so clearly undesirable that few will see their existence that way, and when they do, it is because "the world" has been substituted with total institutions. A war within social organizations between dyads of people is not war in any sense, but endemic violence with no seeming purpose - and in any event, war is conducted not between flesh and blood men or mere social information in an exchange, but between persons who already have a conception of institutions. If nothing else, they are institutions unto themselves, or perhaps a single person considers his institutional existence a struggle against a world of things outside of him. While internalizing the mindset of institutional war is fatal, a person can see himself at war with all around him in this sense and not succumb to the madness of the institution. War may be, when seen as institutional, a thing somewhat removed from his flesh and consequences. It is only when the law of war leads to a genuine exchange of violence that war ceases to be a game played in institutions. The violence itself, the death, the torture, the humiliation, and all that war entails is of no consequence to the institution of war, except as another potential asset to measure and impose. There are things other than war that can cause all of those things, and those who favor the war institution have always found ways to shield themselves from any of these consequences. Typically, the violence and suffering of war is pawned off entirely to those who had the least to do with this terrible institution, for whom war has been nothing more than a continuous atrocity against their class, their nation, their history, and anything they would actually want out of life. Those who are fond of war are invariably those who face none of these consequences with any seriousness, and the same people bray endlessly about "their sacrifice", when no commander worth a damn expects his soldiers to fall on their sword for any sacrifice. Sacrifice is for the losers, and any familiarity with war will tell you that wars are won when other poor bastards die for their cause. The poor bastards dying need not be the soldiers, and often soldiers are spared so that they can go home and parade as if they were glorious heroes. The real poor bastards are those dragged into this horseshit, whether by drawing the short straw and becoming the armies' bitch boys to be sent to die in the front lines for this retarded institution, or being civilians and slaves who have always been treated like cattle to slaughter by the war institution and the cult of war. There is some genuine grit and determination among those tasked with defending themselves against this aggression, but this is only done out of dire necessity, and any student of war knows that the defending side in war, fighting on their own territory and sacrificing the things they actually care about, suffers greatly and wins no reward without an ability to counter-attack. It is abiding trait of war as an institution to ensure that defenders never counter-attack, and this is followed in all miltiaristic conduct to the letter. We will have more to write about the institution of war in a later chapter, but I bring this up now because it is very relevant to understand what formal institutions and executives do, whether the institution concerns war in the genuine sense or competition of another sort.

War is not the sole basis for struggle or competition, nor are all struggles or competitions violent, nor is all violence an act of war. There is considerable violence and cruelty without any war as such, conducted not for any warlike purpose but for various purposes which may seek to contend something, but could just as well be a proclivity of humans doing their usual stupid shit. It is not even the case that wars are conducted with violence or any of the traditional language of struggle. A "peace corps" invading space insidiously and killing with kindness uses all of the tactics of war and does them with a Midwestern-nice smile and cheery music. It is neither the case that executives inherently concern struggle at all, as if struggle were the foundational force of the universe or of human sociality. Far from it, most institutions and most executive functioning involves no struggle, but simple administration, management, discussions, and the sundry recordkeeping that recognizes society institutionally rather than society as a mere collection of individuals. So much of institutional life is completely fair and done with no malice, which is a remarkable achievement given the generally foul and wicked nature of the human race. It is unlikely humans would do anything other than kill each other and grunt without some institutional structure. This does not insist that men can only be governed by strong men ruling with an iron fist, in some Legalist doctrine where despotism is the natural law of all organization.^[17] Very often, large institutions with an executive understand that the best government of the institution comes from the rank and file, the grunts and peons who do any actual work that allows large institutions to persist. The best executive is someone with enough sense to let the little people work and aspire to be something better than immiserated peons. The terrible executives, and this is why managers and their petty-managerial slime followers encourage this behavior and train for it, emphasize overly complicated and pointless stamping and displays of pride, vanity, and all that we see as the awful face of neoliberal rot. Usually executives, however they are constituted, operate somewhere between these two ideals. The reasons to trend towards one or the other has more to do with influences exerted on institutions, rather than any law of institutions themselves. Institutions are run, ostensibly, for some purpose which necessitates that the conceits of ideal management are set aside so that their intended task is done. Rarely do institutions fulfill their stated purpose, but the corrupting influences are not always systemic or external, nor are institutions immune from the reality that all of their functions are passed to an actual factual world which never conformed to institutions as we would have them. It is also the case that building institutions in harmony with nature is an impossibility and obviates the need for most institutions. If we did build large institutions with executive functioning that was most harmonious with the natural conditions we live in, we would likely consider that the best way to govern institutional affairs would be to discourage the panoply of interests rather than institutionalize those interests, and to devolve knowledge to the members of the institution and encourage both scholarship and practice among the general populace, including the lowest class most of all. Even despite all that has happened, this is still a possible outcome for the world, but it would be checkered by the fact of what has been done already and how it came to be so. It is not that the dominance of interests and institutional feudalism has not been diagnosed - that has been understood since Antiquity as a persistent failure of cities and states, and many fixes throughout history have been proposed with mixed success. It is that the sharing of knowledge and meaning has never been genuinely attempted nor desired, for reasons that are not institutional nor inherent to life, but require an understanding not just of the basic incentives but the states that did arise and ulterior motives of actors that are difficult to describe too shortly and without further development of a basic grounding. The sharing of knowledge alone would not solve the difficulty, for there is a great moral difficulty in any such plan. That is that the lower classes as a rule despise the cults of education and knowledge fetish, and have only undertaken those efforts because they had to do so to survive, or because they learned things that interested them and had no regard for the political or a concept of shared humanity. Human unity and brotherhood is not a given of nature nor self-evident, given the human race's known cruelty and the prevalence of its sadistic streak against all reason, and this is a fact borne out by history time and time again. That tends to be limiting, because anyone with goodwill encounters this and asks why any sane person would spend energy trying to change a race that refuses to change despite every reason that would be a very worthwhile thing for everyone. They would rather hate the lowest class than allow the carnage to stop in the end, and every effort to mitigate that failed despite clear warning of what would result.

The formal structure of institutions are mututally exclusive with others that compete in the same sphere of activity. It is possible for others to join other institutions that do not conflict with the aims of one, but to join competing institutions is recognized as a great faux pas. Nothing stops someone from serving two masters simultaneously, but if caught it invites suspicion at the least. Legal statuses imposed on a person do not permit with any seriousness a slave to violate their station or be claimed by two deeds. The same is true of property - if it is held jointly, it is either through a single institution or with all claimants explicitly named as shared owners and judged appropriate by an institution that governs property. This need not be done for any good reason, and deliberate contradictions of this may be a strategy to disrupt institutions which are hostile, or are pursued by the institutions themselves to catch their members or the ruled in a bind where they cannot not contradict themselves, thus allowing the institution to trap the subordinate - or, sometimes, trapping the very leader of the institution in a similar contradiction, or twisting the rules to contradict themselves. Nothing about institutions suggests any internal contradiction would be corrected, or that it should. The internal contradictions of institutions do not occur to it as insanity at all, because institutions do not think or know as we do. This makes philosophies celebrating contradiction particularly dangerous and this is used entirely for the purpose of institutional fuckery, or most charitably to explain the trap of flagrant and deliberate contradiction. Most people, though, see such flagrant contradiction not as strength, but as controlled insanity and something obnoxious which warrants a smiting or a punch to the face of anyone so insolent.

At the highest level of organization, "the institution" becomes not a formal institution with proper executives or its less formal versions, but a force at the level of the political and society as a whole. The ruling institutions exist not just as formal institutions, if they are even formalized with an explicit organization chart. They exist as entities presumed to share the position of the polity and state itself. They often claim to be coequal with the polity's social system, such that the institutions are deemed universal. The institutions and the polity proper are always separate things and must be so. The polity at heart is only ever its actual agents and things. The polity, and thus the state, does not have any genuine existence without machinery affecting the real world. Institutions may assert that this machinery does what it is supposed to do, but without someone operating the machine or doing anything, there is no representation of the institution and thus no state. The state is not by default the sole institution of all institutions, unlike the polity in social systems which is definitionally exclusive with all other polities. The state is always a formal institution which claims transcendent properties, but it acknowledges the existence of other institutions that it does not inherently dominate. This, however, is the only thing that does balance the state's claim of authority over the polity. The state claims all people, all things, all lands, all ideas, and anything possibly construed as meaningful in its domain, but the institutions - those precious institutions which are in the end ideas in the mind and nothing more, just as the state is - are granted a special exemption from the state's claims. For one, the state as an institution often recognizes that it does not rule as a unitary entity, but as a thing which is constituted by people and things. Any state ruled by someone who thinks the emperor actually changes history by waving his mighty hand does not get how this operation has ever worked. Such an absurd statement made by leaders is a direct rebuke of any concept a reasonable adult would have about the state, institutions, or how any authority would operate. The state does not abide any institution which openly turns against it, and does not abide any actual human being under its rule turning against it with any seriousness. To truly turn against the state as an institution is not deemed an acceptable position, but one way to become politically insane and an unperson so far as the state and its allied institutions are concerned. States, and institutions at this level, wield power of life and death. The state in principle claims this power, but institutions in their highest form share in this power, and may contest in some way the state's imperium. It does not always work this way in legal form, but in practice, the holders of the state are disciplined by institutions that can, by their name alone, rise to challenge the central institution of the state. The state as a formal institution is, at heart, a very simple claim, which requires little explanation and need not be a unitary construct at all. Most of the time, states are not run from the top down in one big immaculate structure. States do not typically command bureaucracies directly, but institutionalize the bureaucracy and emphasize that the bureaucracy is an institution unto itself. The bureaucrats in principle serve at the emperor's pleasure, or the president's pleasure, but no president today believes he can fire bureaucrats without consequence. It was the same for the emperors of old, or anyone who believed the civil service could simply be terminated on sight. The army, while nominally under the commander-in-chief and the state and a visible arm of the state, can have its own mind about what truly rules, and every general is a potential usurper. The generals are often checked not by fear of the president, who is for all of his prestige and the body of officers around him just a man and a glorified warlord, but by fear of the non-military institutions which are necessary to feed the army. This is what a wise president or emperor would hold over the army, rather than threats of violence, and the institutions of the producers, who comprise most of the population and do virtually everything that actually allows a state to do a thing other than throw wasteful parties and maximize their degenerate pleasure function, exert the most constant threat to the state's existence. This threat is virtually eliminated not because the army or the men behind the curtain who are shielded by the president are so much smarter and better or have great virtue, but because the producers as a rule are governed by officers whose loyalty is to the collective of ruling institutions more than the producers, who are systematically denied any institution to call their own. The productive classes, ranging from the wealthy commoners to the slaves and including in organizational principle the unproductive wretches, are rife with internal conflicts which are endlessly exploited, and just like anyone else, the producers need money and must think politically if they are to challenge anything. Uniting the producers or the commoners rarely ever works because the wealthy of the commoners and the better off of them see themselves tied not to a working class or a concept of "the people" or democracy, but to the same ruling institutions that the president and generals sit in and hobknob with. What do the lower of the producers offer except complaints and harangues about how the rich never have time for them, when the parasitic ruling institutions have all of the good parties, all of the good sex and drugs, hold all of the levers for social advancement, and see the favored of the productive classes as clear allies? No common working man ever deluded himself and actually believed he was a potential millionaire, and anyone suggesting such a thing is an asshole who should be ignored. It is instead the conceit of upwardly mobile commoners reaching into the good life with the aristocrats, who often got where they are because they identified with the values of the aristocracy or are themselves aristocrats of "lower quality" tasked with producing. Aristocracies in all cases despise any sign of democratic ideas or the idea of the little people taking back any part of this beast, and do everything possible to take the shit of anyone who won't play ball and accept the grift. Such is the nature of republics.

As with social organizations, these scales are present in many institutions, and in principle all of the institutions regard every level if they are to exist in the world of institutions. For associations with little further definition, their higher-level expression is "basically null", except for other such institutions to note their existence. We see here the chief difficulty with forming institutions organically. Any open formation of an independent institution is detected and snuffed out ruthlessly by a million different means. This requires anyone wishing to build an institution to change anything to operate in sneaky ways, and this is one of the ugly laws of institutions. The state and all of the ruling institutions are, in the end, associations and, whatever their nature, they will have a name, or they will be named in some time and place, even if it is only at the end of time when all is revealed.

If society is defintionally a network of information, then this comprises the entirety of all study of society in the eyes of any rational agent. "Rational agent" must be understood as the product of institutional society, rather than a natural status that is undeniable. All natural events, and anything indicating a system of material things that appears to engage in social behavior, would be subsumed by a society that is defined by information. Natural disasters, which are not part of society institutionally, are only understood by rational agents as a thing affecting institutions and the agents and things subsumed by them. It can be readily recognized by any sufficient intelligence that this definition of society lacks many of the moral values we normally associate with society, and this is by design. To rationally approach society, all of those things that are not informational and adjudicated in some way are considered invalid for the purpose of measuring anything that affects society and its institutions. If they are acknowledged as socially relevant, they are dismissed out of hand as insanity and do not receive a hearing in any court. Only that information which is relevant to institutions enters the purview of social thought for the rational agent. If some agent claimed by institutional society is deemed irrational, or disagrees with the judgement of rationality on some grounds, it has no say and cannot have any say. This, you may say, is clearly at odds with a scientific view, but it is true in all of the ways society can be rationalized. To exit this is to leave the world of rational agents, and by doing so, one faces the ultimate demotion. It is not merely that insanity or retardation make one an unperson, but that it becomes the deepest moral obligation of all social agents to shun such people, and attempts to work against this work against the institutions which adjudicate rationality. The institutions which can make this judgement may vary from time and place, but they will always exist if rational agents and society in this sense is to be spoken of. It also means that any information contradicting institutional adjudication will simply not exist, no matter the evidence presented for it. The institutions of society may acknowledge sources of information that regard a world outside of society, but nothing in society or rationality guarantees this. Only some sense of the agents, who are in the end actual humans who know and live in a world, would suggest that institutions, which have no such concern, would have any interest in a world outside of society. So far as the institutions accept this, it is always with the ulterior motive of rational agents to apporpriate external information in some way, however benign it is. To speak of anything else is to undermine the claims of society as a construct of information. If we are to speak of society in any other way, it would speak of something very different, and rational agency and approaches to society would have created a much different understanding of the social and what we are here to do. This definition of who gets to be rational or not - who is sane and who is smart enough to meet the cutoffs demanded by education - is in the end not decided by anything fair, but by institutions which have a built-in incentive to hoard information, to occult their knowledge, and see their concerns as territorial rather than forward-thinking. That has been the direction of society thus far, and without any other understanding, we would have no other basis to describe what we see.

All natural processes are, in the end, appropriated by society in some way to enter the purview of society, and thus all question of economic value that would be relevant to society. We may question whether this economic valuation is worth this much struggle and misery, and that is a very good question, but the only way to challenge institutions in the end will be struggle of some sort. We might wish humans were nicer and saw that the path they are on is hopeless, but if I have learned anything in this life, pleading with bullies works 0.000000000% of the time, and this is the behavior of any rational agent. To believe such people would be anything else is the greatest retardation of all. To believe such people wouldn't insinuate the dominance of each other from the first available opportunity is at odds with all of recorded history and the conduct of the human race. We might conclude, if we were miserablists, that because this is the way it turned out, that this is natural and good and the way it should turn out. Any child can see through this argument, because it is stupid and at odds with anything we would want out of this experience.

Economic value in the material sense could only be described by the goods in-kind, without any question of social or institutional conflicts that may arise. If we did conduct our affairs in that way, it would be ideal, and in practice, we do so because most of what we do that constitutes social and economic activity does not involve the market or any institution other than ourselves. In some sense, it is contingent on the existence of society that allows us to live, but this "allowance" would not be an issue if it were not for other social agents and institutions. Little about society is premised purely on mutual benefit, but instead on mutual security and the opportunity for attacking that security. Liberty in a genuine sense is for those who are secure against that attack, and the going price for liberty will always be set by society's hostile actors rather than its good-natured actors. Whether liberty is worthwhile depends on our view, but we have considerable experience with the alternative to suggest that slavery is never going to be a fun experience, even in the best possible case. Beyond that, moral aims we would treasure often speak to things outside of society that are not rationalizable nor are self-evident from the material world, and these are not merely conceits of knowledge obsessed with itself. Those things are multifarious and can never be described by and economic or political plan, nor is society the vehicle to realize them. The best we could do is not destroy each other, or minimize the influence of that on that which we wish to defend. The defense of the city only makes sense to those who rule the city, who are the sort of people who would launch an invasion of another city and the chief source of such antagonism. Wars rarely serve the commoners' genuine interests, as war typically means nothing more than an expense and drain of wealth they would use for luxury, contesting position, or nearly anything else but war. The soldiers who fight wars are motivated primarily by their paycheck rather than buy-in with the belief that war will be glorious for the idea of it. Beyond that, war for soldiers means the potential for promotion, but it is often established that fighting men only rise so far through the ranks. Aristocracies are well established as a rule to suggest that the army is a toy for the aristocrats, and warriors' part in that arrangement is to suck up as much of the protection racket revenue as they can. This is not just taking what is handed to them, but taking anything that is not nailed down, including in most times and places human capital.

I write here to explain economic value not as a substance or a thing contested, but as both quantity and quality that is relevant. Economic behavior has never been a game of capturing some quantity, as if it were some mana of the universe. What has been desired, regardless of ideology, was the production of quantities and qualities that could be measured, and this measurement was not merely a desire of institutions or empires, but of everyone who has to work with a world where definite quantities and qualities are required to live or do anything in this world. If we would abandon this world altogether, or prefer a fantasy where we can clap our hands and believe the struggle will somehow solve our problems, then we can write a different book and forgo the economic question. Frankly, the managerial impulse doesn't allow for this problem to be resolved through any information, no matter how obvious it is that the institutions stultify both quantity and quality because it is in the interest of ruling institutions to denude the lives of those who were not selected to live. We are not able to prove, through any rational argument, that there is some quality to life which necessitates that we must hold it sacred. We could, though, regard the biopolitical thought that did arise, rather than act as if it were an unspeakable taboo and bray endlessly about ideologies far removed from the actual situation.^[18] The question of biology and life figured prominently in everything that has happened throughout modernity, and is in reality the true defining science of this time. It is in the biopolitical claims of fascism and eugenics that we see much of what came to pass in the past century, and part of my project is to explain why this worked. It was never an inevitable outcome, but instead was one suspiciously defended at key moments for reasons that probably make sense to those in the know, and happened for a reason, but did not have any good reason in nature or social thinking to suggest it had to be like this.

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