Return to Table of Contents | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

All of this is a great story, but a narrative is not a theory or at all scientific. There are many great problems with conducting such an investigation with the language of science, where science is used to make grand theories and then force the world to conform to the theory, which is really a story and a narrative divorced from reality in total. Two great gripes with this story I have written will be raised - the theory of knowledge and consciousness, and the principle that life is an aberrant intent which should not exist, which has no basis in natural history except as a freak occurrence where random shit happens.

The consciousness question is hampered not by an inability of natural science to answer the question in principle, but because subjective experience will never be a thing isolated in a lab. Its existence can be inferred by a few simple questions we would ask about ourselves. The greatest barrier to adjudicating this is that if it is accepted conscious knowledge is just a process, it eliminates the courts and institutions that would be able to adjudicate who is and is not conscious, and the scientists who make this judgement would possess a monopoly on law. They would in effect be above the law and obviate the need for any other institution. This is a problem not of the truth, which has been admitted in so many ways, but of the legal fictions that society entails. Whenever the question is actually important, the legal fictions are dropped, and human experience is treated like that of any animal. That was accepted by all in the early 19th century, and it was never not the case that humans were seen as a type of animal. The question that was really at stake was not whether "the science" proved that mankind was a spiritual creature, because religion and the science of the day ruled very clearly that humanity without a spiritual sense was blind and hopeless. What was really at stake was a conflict over which religion and which elites should possess spiritual authority, and the struggle was never as simple as tradition and the new fighting in a dragged-out battle to the death. The new authority of pseudoscience was no less given over to cult behavior than the Christian churches. Liberals and their offshoots have been more fanatical and zealous, and less attached to reality than the typical Christian, and the greater the institutional strength of the liberals, the more fanatical they become. Nearly all of the ideologues are staunch pseudoscientists, and only the more practical of them understood the need to actually use this knowledge to govern a country or lives beyond their own cloistered bourgeois environment. Outside of pseudoscience and religious cult behavior, the question of consciousness is not a hard problem at all. Humanity has shown its disdain for other humans since humanity began, and acted in accord with that disdain more than anything that suggested human universalism. Human universalism was almost always used as a way to declare that large swathes of the race weren't really human, or were naturally subjugated on the grounds of inferior intellect and the "rights of conquest", that idiotic eugenic claim that a child could see through. Our thinking suggests that, at a basic level, knowledge does not contain any spiritual component - that those who think do so without being told that their thinking is approved by authorities. In this way, the quest to establish political sanity or political intelligence is a foolish errand. That is the only way in which this question of consciousness can be approached in the methods of science. This is to say, conscious experience arises from things which are very malleable, but none of this results in the pretenses of a technocratic state regarding knowledge. No one can truly be "shrunk" or contained within a preferred model, and in the genuine seeds of knowledge, all men and women are equal. Nothing about this conscious experience is hardcoded or "wired", in the eugenic sense that prevails today. We have written at length about this thinking regarding consciousness. As we can see, the question of consciousness does not adequately answer any spiritual question we would pose of the world, and doesn't really have anything to do with the natural world which existed before us and without our knowledge of it. Granting to knowledge the political position it has today is the source of all of our misunderstandings, and this is promoted deliberately. Under the hood of government, the men and women who study consciousness have known that the legal posture is a lie. They certainly have operated in that way for the past century, and if one looks back to philosophical, religious, and practical thought regarding knowledge, it has always implied that human consciousness is very malleable. Our religious beliefs regarding sin, history, and spiritual authority would be meaningless if human consciousness were absolute, whole, and divorced from the material world. If we were just material automata, then there wouldn't be anything at all, and the human body could not do as it does. Consciousness and knowledge arise then out of a persistent energetic process. It is tying this process to life, and making the conceits of life the conceits of knowledge in the ruling ideas, which has been the most persistent error, and it is a deliberate error. Spiritual thought has long understood that living consciousness entails interaction with the non-living, and a world that life did not get to choose or create in its own image. Life and knowledge really are not tied at all, and neither are tied to the world in some way that allows either to dictate fundamental truth. It just so happens that we are living, and the world does not give us anything other than a knowledge process which arose out of life, but necessarily entailed the non-living to constitute it. That really is the true "just so" story of reality. It is not that events in the world just happened, but that life "just happened" and certain members of humanity are haughty enough to believe they are co-equal with the world itself. This stupidity creates nearly all misunderstandings, and they are not questions we were too dull to resolve, as much of humanity's accumulated wisdom made the folly of such thinking as plain as day.

Whether consciousness can be "proven" to fit some model is missing the point. The only way we would have to verify this claim in total with science would be to presume momentarily that knowledge is illusory and yet at the same time a unique type of substance. No substance of "mind" can be found, and we are also aware that this mind is not universal or inherent to the world at all. Mind is not so much reduced to information processing, but information processing is a requirement of knowledge as a process to begin. That is, there would be something that regulates energy in such a way that something continuously active may manifest what we experience as this. The energy itself is not the substance of "mind", as energy is common and necessary to speak of anything moving in the world, and much of the world's energy does not form any mind or consciousness. We can demonstrate in experience how we think internally, and assess other such entities because, no matter our conceits about knowledge, we will know it when we see it face to face. The peculiarities of living consciousness would not impede this understanding if we were honest about what any of this is, and we regularly discount living consciousness as something inferior or irrelevant. What we do not get to do is claim boldly that something we have seen thinking does not really think. Everyone who engages in that stupidity is invoking a ritual which cannot withstand the most basic reasoning process, if we are to regard knowledge as something existing in a real world rather than a story of no consequence. We would be able to judge this reasonably well, but the conceits of mind became political conceits. All that was needed was for a judge to decide that expedience overrides a truth that we all would sense, and an admonition to destroy sentiments that acknowledge a process playing out in front of our faces. We would never have done such a thing if it weren't for the pigheaded conceits of life and the interests it entails, which had nothing to do with honesty or what was actually good. It did not even entail something that was necessary for life. The only way in which an artificial story of consciousness other than this can be maintained is through controlled insanity, which disregards genuine knowledge that belongs in a world where events can happen, and decides from the outset that mind exists to be commanded and cajoled. I cannot claim that this is the sole truth, without succumbing to the same insanity. Generally, the concepts of mind and consciousness would all be lumped together, and this is not so much out of pigheadedness but out of a need of life to remain whole and not be violated by malevolent actors. It was always understood that a mind divided cannot maintain itself, and the details of the knowledge process would be told not as scientific facts but as stories which people could interpret with their own sense. The meaning of the stories would tie to a truth which is universal, without exposing the vulnerabilities of conscious experience. It would not be difficult to see this model presented in prior writings concerning mind and the spirit, and the counter-arguments for "crass mind" were written for purely political purposes. They are the sort of stories told to the retarded children to mark them as inferiors, because the occulting of mind was among the first steps that made formal human institutions possible. Those who engage in circular and idiotic debates regarding "mind" are not interested in anything real. They are laughing at you, me, and anyone, and usually they are stupid men and women. In a decent world, they would be ignored, but we do not have that luxury when such stupid people have taken imperial authority to decide that we don't get to think of this for ourselves. The final proof is very simple - we are under attack every day, and the methods would not work if those who ruled were not perfectly aware that consciousness can be attacked in every way they can imagine. Their imagination is of course limited, but we experience this every day. Even if we did not face direct attack from malevolent humans, enough events in the natural world show us every day that our conceits do not match the world we live in, and all of humanity's posturing and petty thrills are a stupid joke. We would be far better if we did not allow such people to brag about their stupid behavior. Education sadly suggests the exact opposite, because education has nothing to do with learning and considers genuine knowledge anathema to its function. A vapid scholasticism takes over when this question of the mind is viewed scientifically. Whether science as a method can truly answer this question does not change that there would be events in the material world which allow this consciousness to be real, in the sense that we are real and cannot deny this no matter how much we would want to. I hold then that there is sufficient working knowledge to support this claim, or a similar metaphysical claim about knowledge which would account for its malleability, and regards knowledge not as a judgement of experts but a reality that doesn't go away even for the madmen or the lowest class. The lowest class has since the start of humanity lived with this misery and humiliation, and so we have never forgotten this. If we do, we only imperil ourselves. The comfortable who live vampirically off of labor and the humiliation of the lowest class do not actually forget this. They've always known and enjoyed seeing us suffer, and see no reason they would ever stop. Since they refuse to listen to any argument telling them they cannot do this, they will always recapitulate lies on this question and the question of life. That is the impasse we are trapped in, and likely will remain in for the forseeable future. The only way to truly resolve this for good would be for humans to become very different creatures, which would be resisted for a number of perfectly good reasons. While we might believe that overcoming human stupidity would be a good thing, the predatory have always adapted to such truth, claimed it as their own, and invented new lies to constrain their prey. As the truth is revealed, new lies emerge, and new understandings emerge in tandem to resist those lies. It cannot arrive at a truth in the distant past, which can only appeal to genesis in life, nor does it arrive at some preplanned historical progress. So long as knowledge is a thing that can be appropriated, this danger always exists. Even if life were to become "non-living", all that would change is that the intent of organic life becomes an abstract beast, taking on new forms that lack the sentiment that life would have possessed. The true heart of this problem is that knowledge is a local event, and because it is, it is very easy for truth to become proprietary and secret. Even if there were some free flow of information, all it would do is accelerate the advantage of the predatory, and encourage them to keep the suppressed classes stupid and fearful. That is what has been done since the eugenic creed could rule, consistently put into action during the past century.

If I am wrong about consciousness, that would be a debate for another time, as it entails topics far too difficult to summarize in one book, and strays from what I wished to write. I would think, though, that if I were wrong, there would be no value in Nazis and miltiary scientists chopping up brains and testing electric shocking devices, which is not disputed by anyone who is at all serious. The atrocities of the past are there for the world to see, and never seriously denied. Anyone who would deny what was done to us is an asshole, and I will not bother engaging with such phony contrarianism. The errors I might make do not concern the recapitulation of the retarded claims of ideology, but particulars about knowledge and information, or aspects of the world I would not know. This process of knowledge, in the end, does not exist in a preferred model, but must exist in a real world which we hold to be consequential towards something. I suggest the mechanisms of this process not to arrest knowledge, but to understand why we came to the conclusions we did, and the seed of knowledge as it did exist. The true knowledge and wisdom does not concern a simple model, but arose as a greater process in the world. Subjective experience does not connect to this wisdom intrinsically and could not. If it did, we would have become very different creatures, and chosen a much different path. That was my mistake - presuming that humanity would see the senselessness of the current course. To their credit, humanity largely does avoid letting this beast swallow anything decent. It was because the worst of humanity found there was nothing stopping them that this fate came to us. While I doubt that this endgame I will describe in the rest of my writing is the true end of all experience, I highly doubt humans will ever be much different than this. The best that humans could possibly do is transform into something less egregious and abominable, when the filth of their forebears is laid bare. I am not the sole voice to do this, nor the first. Better humans than me have made this writing possible, and I only do this out of a sense that some fool has to carry on, however futile that may be.

We then face the problem of life itself. We are accustomed today to viewing life as a spiritual whole, inescapable and identified with existence and truth itself. This is a far newer conceit than we are led to believe. I have written obliquely about how life has been treated in spiritual thought of the past. The view of the life-form as a contained technocratic polity, conforming to imperial management, is highly artificial and at odds with our most basic sense. Life, like mind, is not any substance in the universe that can be fundamental, nor is it a thing isolated in a lab. We can isolate chemical compounds and elements in a way to suggest that these are actual things in the natural world, that would have existed long before we adjudicated their existence.^[1] The current ruling myth is that life is information, managed like computer code. Defending this claim is paramount to the ruling system today, and they will act violently to defend it. It's false counterpoint is the "vitalist" woo woo invoking some dialectical magic to say that life is unknowable - but only unknowable to us outside of the vaunted institutions. It is always clear bullshit, to cover what had been known from the start. Life as a process did not concern any preferred form of matter. The study of life had concerned in the past organs about which we could say definite things, but organs were understood to connect to an energy source. The organic view of life was not an effort to technocratically define and manage life, but to assess the situation as it existed for us and for animals. The spiritual claims eugenics and the cults of pseudoscience made had nothing to do with the genuine study of life in the world, but asserted that biopolitical truths negated spiritual truths we long understood, and that were behind the scenes still in force. All that was really claimed by the eugenists is that the common people were no longer life worthy of life. It is purely political. I maintain that life has no particular bearing on natural laws of science. Life abides these natural laws in its basic constitution. We are materially assemblages of chemicals which form bones, organs, and so on. That anatomical reality is not definitionally "life", as a child could see. A dead body, or mockups of organs in a simulation, are not living in the sense that we are living and can attest to. The mystification of life must go hand in hand with the mystification of knowledge and consciousness. I will proceed, then, as if these claims I have made about knowledge and life are true enough. The finer details may be argued at another time, but this scholastic pseudoscience is for me an inadmissible and idiotic claim. It can only be forwarded to retard and disrupt genuine inquiry into questions of natural history, or the economic behavior of mankind.

To make judgements about human economic behavior requires us to view the economic task not as a uniquely human affair or a necessarily political affair. To the extent that we can, economic thought must be understood as a general rule, rather than one that is contingent on particular institutions. How much "economism" is relevant to our lives may be debated, but if we are talking about the management of life's affairs, or the management of resource inflows and outflows in an abstracted model of society, we are talking about a task that does not go away simply because we do not wish to face it. For this book, I concern myself with mechanisms that are purely economic or that pertain to natural history, and only obliquely reference the political which is the subject of the following book. That, too, will not be a political treatise, since I am not a political writer with an agenda. It would instead be a view of the state and its conceits with a dispassionate and cruel view, as I hold the political in contempt as much as I hold contempt for those who bray about superficial economic or civic worth. Both of these things arise from something in the world, but did not found the world as we know it. They are instead things that emerged from living activity which at first did not have a concept of "economics" or "politics", and only adopted them sporadically as the faculties of life grew and could assert their intent. I believe it is clear enough that there is no similar intent in the natural world outside of life, that suggested the material objects like molecules or rocks had any vitality or historical destiny to become life, or be appropriated by us.

I will not resort to fear, uncertainty, and doubt, the common rhetorical trick of charlatans. I will further refrain from cheap "gotcha" questions to poke holes in the establishment theory. The reason for this is simple - I do not believe institutional science has answered the question of natural history and the evolution of life in any satisfactory manner. Far from it, institutional science has gone out of its way to defend a broken paradigm based on eugenic assumptions about human nature, and the need of institutions to naturalize themselves. Darwin opens the question of natural history in a way which allows it to become a political history of sorts, and this is perfectly acceptable. It should be clear that this thinking was not entirely novel, but it had in the past been the domain of charlatans and mystics. Honest men of science would not dare answer a question so large with spurious evidence. Darwin comes at a time where the question of life is not merely a historical question, but a question which science in the modern day can ask in full detail. One way or another, claims about human nature and life itself would be made, and already had been by philosophers. Marx, the German idealists, the British imperial philosophers, and their forebears of the Enlightenment, all took their swing at this question of life, and all were steps which informed the modern eugenic practices at work today. Of these, Marx was among the most critical of what would come about, predicting in advance the excesses of such a civic religion. For Marx, though, the question of natural history was the domain of institutions, rather than random people who wanted to get a word in. Even if Marx disagreed with the sitting institutions, it was inherent to the Marxist way of thinking that some institution would adjudicate this history. Marx inherits the institutional science of the Germans, but famously "flips Hegel on its head", producing similar reverence for institutions. Where Hegel is the ideologist of the conservative order, Marx seeks to capture it and direct it. It is this entire German tradition that presents as the overt face of much eugenic thinking, and it would be adopted in parts by the British imperialists who believed that all of the continental philosophers were pawns and useful idiots. A proper reading of the Scottish enlightenment and liberal thinking in the empire would tell that the direction liberalism took was an abomination, an abortion, and that the liberals in secret knew that once the economic problem became an ecological discipline, no more free debate regarding the matter would be tolerated. For all that "the science" has written regarding evolution, the truth is that this story was always built on scant evidence and supposition, which would become institutional dogma for one faction or another. The factions would bicker over scientific questions that are more absurd than Aquinas arguing about the number of angels that fit on the point of a needle.^[2] These questions rarely entail any mechanism that would actually exist in living things, but instead view life as a political struggle. It is here where "contradictions in nature" and other such absurdities are introduced into a purview where this does not apply at all. They do not even entail a frank discussion about life or the political. They are merely triumphant utterances of a Hitlerian sort, where feels are greater than reals, as long as a smug grin can be violently asserted in the face of any genuine meaning. When the pollution of this pseudoscience is recognized and filtered out of the record, humanity for all of its accomplishments is left with a smattering of stories and fables about the origin of species, some fossil records that reconstruct a dubious history of life's trajectory, and some speculation that is really little better than my own. Man's descent from apes is an educated guess and conforms to the evidence of natural history that is accessible.^[3] DNA evidence collected since the 1950s suggests that this is the correct line of descent, and in this the study of biology has been reliable enough. The eugenic creed could not tolerate this being conducted with too much honesty, but for their theory to mean anything, it would have to at least verify that prediction. The "genes" of DNA are not blueprints. What can be done with "genes" is chemistry, for example splicing a fragment of DNA which points to a chemical reaction changing the pigment of the eyes, or conferring resistance to pesticides which are designed with chemical knowledge in mind. We would do well to view the history of life not as a "genetic history", but view DNA as a marker which can verify certain facts in the living record. If we did, we likely would arrive at a story of natural history that violates the eugenic and economic assumptions of the present model, and this was intolerable. Therefore, the institutions will always lie, most of all to us who were screened out.

If there is a model for history, it would entail not a grand narrative of institutions, but the genuine mechanisms that we could pick apart and put back together. Life as a basic principle would not change no matter how complex it becomes. Humans, however much they might "evolve", never spiritually become something other than human. The transhumanist retards, and they are retarded, can't even get over themselves, let alone the condition of the human race that most of us have long known. The eugenic creed resorts to the most idiotic koans to justify their vileness, their mark of shame that is the lowest of the race by far. They are retarded, and imposed violently their sick religion onto us of the underclass. Most of us lumpens saw correctly that serving the beast of society in any way was contrary to anyone's interests, and every time we have tried to make something work with these people, we were violently rebuked and told "retard, retard, retard", as the same idiocy of the human race asserts itself. The human race, from our perspective, is a failed race and never can be anything else. The proper answer to human history is not to remark on a greatness that never existed, but to ask the obvious question we've all asked - how it went so horribly wrong. To understand the problem requires approaching history not as a story of glory but as a tragedy from start to finish, viewed dispassionately. Somehow, we overcome the contempt we must feel for this race of deformed apes, and accept them as what they are. We would do this not out of some foolish quest to "perfect" humanity, but to mitigate the damage aristocracy has left us to deal with. Aristocracy presents itself as the solution to the problem, as if the workers who built the world and the lumpen who exist to suffer were the culprit instead of the aristocracy's rank and repeated incompetence and malice. The reality of life, now and in the past, did not conform to a narrative of history that happens to support today's ruling interest, or any ruling interest. Those who ruled, and those who dominated in the kingdom of life before humanity, ruled because they could claim victory. They may claim victory only over a small fragment of time and space, and in some small way. The pretenses of state society are never natural laws, and the state in practice has never been able to enforce absolutely any of its claims. We will see in the following book that there is no "state of nature", any more than there is "society". Maggie the milk snatcher may win today, but she always relied on spurious claims of human nature to pull off what she did. If that is accepted, then the proper view of natural history is not "dialectical", which has been used to justify all manner of irrational claims, but mechanistic through and through. What has been missing is a proper accounting of what mechanisms would exist in the past. The introduction of anachronistic political thinking onto the past, which will be the eugenic creed's recurring goto to naturalize its retarded ideology, has been the great mis-understanding. We could speak of an economy of nature, but any economy in the end relies on mechanisms that we can re-assemble very easily. Markets do not exist without a mechanism to set prices or fix them in competition. We are trained to think of "the market" in a cargo cult sense, but during the 19th century, this concept of "the market" - properly speaking, the world market, or the visage of the dominant empire - was not yet taken for granted by anyone. Even as it could be asserted, "the market" left much to be desired, until those who dominated it declared victory and established the total command of aristocracy and oligarchy. That is the condition we have lived in for the past century, and because it is so odious that they cannot operate too openly, they must rewrite history to insist that humanity was naturally inclined to live under miserable technocracy, and that the technocracy would remain an aristocracy where the more incompetent they are at anything useful, the greater their value and reward.

If natural history is seen in this light, we would see the history of life not as a story told generally, but a story with as many nooks and crannies as there are living entities. The general rules of life are not inherent to nature collectively, but are emergent from the life-forms that actually exist, and some shared existence in a world that did not need or want this imposition. That is why the approach of biology-as-information would become the last refuge for the eugenic creed, and the way in which they desired to declare victory. There was no version of eugenism which could have ruled without information control, and thus reality control and total slavery. It arises because the prior forms of slavery were no longer viable nor efficient, and those who ruled saw a need to enslave outright most of humanity, rather than a colonized race. That was always the endgame of chattel slavery, had it continued into the 20th century. That was the true reason for such antislavery sentiment, rather than a mere idea that slavery was mean. The aristocracy has never and will never oppose any form of slavery, without a new institution of slavery ready to go. The true struggle against slavery was the struggle of labor and the struggle of those who have been the first sacrificed in humanity, who are a harbringer of what comes for labor and the people generally. It is a great testament to Whig History's insidiousness that the cause against slavery was declared to be an aristocratic aim, when the aristocrats of North and South spent the entire war dancing around the slavery institution, and imperial slavery was already moving to an ecological and eugenic basis rather than a racial or spiritual one. Without millions of workers who were about to be destroyed by the peculiar institution, there would be no aristocratic concept that slavery could be abolished. Today's Reaganite petty-managers have worked furiously to wipe out the history of the American Civil War, while claiming that they will preserve history by promoting their bastard revisionism. If there were not considerable revulsion towards the institution in its entirety, then it would have moved to enslave the working population regardless of race and that would be that. That has always been the fetish for those people who worked as petty-managers, not even granted the sense that an overseer would possess. Where the overseer had to maintain an operation, petty-managers of today's sort only think of sacrifice and drool like retards for their pitiful pleasures. They don't want any mechanism to work, and so a spurious theory of natural history arises in which no mechanism is actually describable, and all of history is a series of just-so stories that emphasize feels over reals. This is true for the petty-managers and for the theologians who call themselves biologists following the "modern synthesis", or a political story to tell the masses that they were subhuman and eugenics was now for the true masters. From then on, natural history would be the property of institutions, who have spent the past 80 years recapitulating more lies to defend the institutions and the men and women who hold them. The theories are such idiotic bullshit, and those who try to salvage something from the official story find that humanity really are just deformed apes, and simply aren't willing to ask the question honesly. That is largely because the only people who would want anything to change are systematically cast out of the institutions, specifically because they are the residuum and the Great Enemy of the human race.

A simple way to view the proper approach would be to extrapolate what you would do if you were something different than yourself, in a different time and place where certain assumptions did not apply. To do this is not as easy as it seems, but it is something we would do if we weren't committed to institutional science and political conceits. If those are abandoned, though, we are left with a grim picture of the human race. It would be undeniable that the race was born of fratricide and ritual sacrifice, and humanity spent most of its existence stalking the Earth with nothing to show for it except the thrill of torturing each other and any other life it came into contact with. Only the people given over to the eugenic creed are allowed to state this truth, and it is the mark of retardation that if we simply respond to this situation as what it is, we are punished and shamed. At the same time, this ultraviolent eugenic creed teaches its followers to grin sadistically as we suffer, and every humiliation, every thrill, is intended to maintain forever the intent of the human race, its genesis, and tell us lies that it was ever anything else. Those who would truly want us to be different are always defeated under the eugenic creed, and that has been the sole source of difficulty in reproducing natural history. So far as natural history has been genuinely assembled, it proceeded not through institutions or ideology, but by those who have viewed social systems of earlier life as information, not unlike our own social systems. A form of politics in the natural world is appropriate, so long as we understand what animal politics would have been. I have left a number of hints about how mechanisms could be approached, and what that would tell us about how life would have developed, or how certain traits came about. It is very likely that as life developed into animal life and then into mammalian life with peculiar traits, there would be a general trend towards larger brains and the accumulation of primitive knowledge, despite the general malice of life towards other life and the world. It is not as if the malicious characteristics of life are truly eternal or worthwhile, for even animals possess some sentimentality and a sense of right and wrong appropriate to them. Humans are no different, and did not "fall" in any spectacular way. It is a choice of humans to take the lesson of the Fall of Man in religion and decide whether they should recapitulate it, or realize that humanity fell from the moment it spawned on this Earth. As I said, there was no age when men were good and were corrupted. They were always evil, and they knew, and they knew they didn't have to do any of this. They do not get to claim innocence at any point. That is the great lie. However much science attempts to claim that they look past this, they never actually do, and insert either their own version of Man's fall which guarantees ideological rule of their institution as the original story intended, or a tawdry revisionist history where the serpent was the good guy and Yahweh was a mean poopyhead, which is childish and dumb. The real history is that no such drama would have played out until humans required a story to justify one of their frequent intercine cruelties to make something simple into something miserable. Humans would, without cults and rituals of temple prostitution, likely see such affairs as miserable and pointless, and stopped pretending that the rat race to mate was the ne plus ultra of existence. We would then conduct those matters in some way that was not so onerous, or better yet, circumvent the process altogether as soon as the means are avaialble.^[4]

A surface belief of history is that science drives human development, and this technology is represented by the machines we build, which include reproduction of our own bodies. This is a very crass view of history, because the machines do not operate by instinct or blind ambition, but are held by people who have a purpose for them. If we are to introduce political economy into the question of natural history, we are implicitly introducing the spiritual interest and authority and the occult interest. Those interests in animal life are never thoroughly developed. Even so, the faculties of animals are never truly fixed or utilized for reduced purposes. What really happens with animals is that, however creative they are, they never develop far, and crucially they lacked any mechanism to communicate information in the way humans did. Human history proper begins not with the sordid origins of the race, but with language and the way we came to speak to each other. We didn't speak with each other purely for the utility of doing so, and language never developed in line with a technocratic plan. For one, among the uses of language was to obfuscate communication, a sort of cipher or encoding specifically intended to mark who was not allowed to access certain information. Different languages among mankind are still used to this effect, as they produce a kind of encryption that is difficult to recplicate algorithmically. Never are humans forthright with their words, even when it would suit them to be so.

If technology is to drive history, it cannot be understood as a passive thing, as if it just appeared one day. Technology arises by processes that are known, by necessity, and by that principle that scientists loathe to hear - random shit happening because an apple fell from a tree or a lightbulb sparked somewhere. All of these things mean nothing if technology cannot be realized and put into practice. Technology cannot drive history as a passive force; but, technology is the evidence that would be available in the record. We have no way to mark spiritual authority beyond interpretation of others words and behaviors and an independent faculty to acquire meaning from them. We have no innate knowledge of the ways humans occult anything. With the intent and genesis of life being things that are not really the domain of science, the materialist view of life can only look back to the most primitive mechanisms and constructs life would assimilate. This is a valid approach for answering many questions, but it would not be a true view of history to build grand narratives and then force events to fit the "theory". Just as "genes" do chemistry rather than provide a master key to explain the world in total, all technology and mechanisms do is allow us the most basic operations, from which a history could be assembled. A "theory of history" in the materialist sense would first concern these mechanisms, rather than presuming some vitality exists in history apropos of nothing in particular. A dialectical approach may allow us to determine if mechanisms are possible, but it would only become truly valid if those mechanisms discerned by dialogue were seen in the world. This does not necessarily require "proofs", in the sense that some symbol will demonstrate the mechanism, and without it we cannot propose its existence. If we are to construct a model based on limited knowledge, and we have very little to go on when reconstructing something as vast as society and its history, we would want to be clear about which mechanisms we refer to in any general theory.

I have described life, economic value, and social information in ways that are meant to be general mechanisms. I do not suggest that these are total and all that economics can entail. I do suggest, though, that through these mechanisms, which I believe to be applicable to enough situations, we can reconstruct a sense of how economic thought would proceed for people who lived very differently from us. We further could extend this model to animal life, and non-living agents in a general sense. We would attach all necessary caveats when describing different epochs of history, and warn not to build a total narrative or cosmology based purely on these mechanisms. They can, however, shed some light on things which can happen. The truth is always going to be more complicated than any single theory can claim. Human beings in the real world are not reducible to these interests and the most scant information about their society and sense of value. The interests and economic behavior instead would be the foundation to begin developing a sense of what problem economics actually entailed. It has nothing to do with money or finance, which properly understood are political matters divorced from how humans live their life, or must conduct their expenditure of money when converting it to useful things. Economic thought would need to be based not on tokens of exchange, but on mechanisms of action and the products of labor, natural events, and the machines that will ultimately exert an effect on the world by the threat of their existence and active use by people, who are themselves a type of machine in this economic view.

Return to Table of Contents | Next Chapter

Return to Table of Contents | Return to Chapter Start