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We consider the matter of the division of labor with the knowledge that, for all such schemes, not one of them really answers what the economic question entailed in the first place. Division of labor is a category of pure management rather than an economic necessity or natural phenomenon. By nature, any such division of labor, like other arbitrary barriers preventing free association and dissemination of information to all, would be seen as an impediment to life or anything someone would want to do. On its own, the division of labor is a gigantic just-so story - that because different people possess different abilities, it necessitated social inequality and particular political forms. The division of labor proceeded not from necessity or the faculties of people or the tools they possessed, but because division of labor would be a basis to perpetuate that inequality once people had a mind to recognize that their interests would be defended, and could be used to attack others. The division of labor always entailed enclosure of a space and control of movement in the public domain and any place people thought themselves free. If a division of labor were premised purely on natural ability, it would first of all be obvious - as it is to us now - that any function of labor in society as a whole would be of interest to other participants, regardless of their placement in the division. It is not possible to envision the division of labor creating what amounts to distinct races sorted by civic worth or function, where the men who pray and the men who fight could only be men with hereditary genes suggesting that they alone possess this power. It is not the division of labor itself that can enforce such an edict. A division of labor will, over time, produce accumulation of technology, knowledge, wealth, and various assets for one group that would be in their possession and institutional memory, and this is how class society can be maintained. None of those assets would be useful without an authority to deploy them and organize a defense of the wealth of a class. Both the initiation of a division of labor beyond the observation of distinct abilities and the long-run plans of a social class or those gathered around any interest that might form a class require something that is not managerial. It is in some sense economic, in that everything social actors do has a substantive cost. The existence of social actors in an environment which is effectively fixed in nature is not seriously questioned by anyone. Ecologism requires a presumption that the clique within the ruling interest is the only authority with a right to be the stewards of the environment, and consequently that every other group is an alien to the world. It is not the doctrine of a ruling interest as a whole, but the doctrine of a clique who believes they can manipulate information in the environment. Nothing about ecologism is an economic necessity, and does not do anything to protect the environment. Far from it, ecologism is promoted by those who follow Malthus' edict to crowd the streets and fill the lives of the lower classes with garbage, shit, disease, despair, and above all malice. Nothing about economic necessity in total would suggest anything we have to accept this as meaningful. I have said before and will say again that if all of this were a calculation problem, the solution would be easy in any era. Whatever mystification some feudal retards will conjure, the basic needs and wants of people are not expensive, and above all the cost of living increases because of a predatory clique that is allowed unlimited predation and thrill for doing so. It would make economic sense, if the predatory refuse to cease of their own accord, to eliminate them outright with anything like proportional retaliation. Since this would be in the interest of long-term economic viability, the rulers would have to accept that if they like ruling. To some extent, the rulers had to maintain a baseline level of decency if they wished for production to continue. The existence of "total society" that is defined as a thing alien to the people did not have the appeal it has now throughout history, and the sort of abject slavery that today's managers impose would have been met with violent rebuke or outright rebellion. The true question is the establishment of authority and what price it may extract or secure.

Authority as a concept defies meaning or symbolic insinuations about it, when concerned with the genuine article. Confusion may be sown, but this never really breaks people of their sense of authority. It instead makes certain authorities sacrosanct and establishes taboos, but the members of society are aware of what those taboos are. So ingrained is the ethos of sadistic humans that it is supposed to be obvious that their regular sadism, ritual sacrifice, malice, and so on are permanent features of the race to be celebrated and glorified, as that is the only god humans have ever consistently followed. We can write about authority and its history, but such recollections are not a meaningful impression of authority in the moment. Authority does not grant any meaning or purpose simply by being authority, nor does it necessarily seek to abolish meaning. Generally, authority requires someone to be able to think for themselves to even follow it. Those who would tell you that authority is the problem in of itself simply wish you to die as soon as possible, and will quickly crack the whip the moment you are annoying at all. There is no escape from authority without escaping from people and their bullshit, and this is certainly the subtext intended for the Fabian program of depopulation. Hatred of authority as a concept is immediately re-directed to hatred of humanity, who are viewed as intrinsically subservient to authority yet defiant in exercising that small shred of virtue authority leaves them with, which is then turned on the intended targets of the residuum. Understanding why this works is essential to grasp why economic management was able to insinuate itself in the first place, and why knowledge about authority was twisted to suggest authority was something other than it actually was. Briefly, there are three types of authority that are of note:

Spiritual Authority: Any entity that assembles symbolic knowledge and communicates it requires some way to ascertain if what they see and the symbols they communicate are factual and valid. This is not the same as adjudicating facts, which suggest that the facts are incontrovertible in all cases, but rather asks how we can adjudicate anything, and how we may operate with incomplete information. We may suggest crudely that what we see is the world, or at close to the world as we will ever really know, and leave it at that, but this falls apart the moment we can discern that meaningful knowledge does not conform to the symbols we use. Because we ourselves do not possess inherently everything we need to be assured that what we see is true and real, we must suppose there is something outside of us that can answer these questions, and then we can align ourselves with it. We would then quickly see that we ourselves are capable of judging for ourselves what should be accepted and what should be dismissed as lies or nonsense, but the truth remains outside of any of us in all cases. Any authority which purports to speak of the world at the highest level invokes spiritual authority if it wishes to exercise authority meaningfully, and this spiritual authority is required for other authorities to be at all relevant in the world authority would pertain to. If someone does not know what is what and cannot resolve the numerous lies, contradictions, and obfuscations inherent in symbolic representation, then this faculty of symbolic language is either useless or harmful. This is one requirement to establish authority - truth and verification thereof. Life and humanity being what they are, this is not as easy as it seems, because humans are liars and life doesn't have any built-in purpose nature provided for it. It is necessary in all cases for humans to recognize this truth about themselves, and they are held accountable not by personal virtue or the will of any state, but by a world which has no particular regard for humans or their conceits. All efforts to find a material or scientific basis for this fail miserably, and this gives an inroad for cajolers and deceivers to hector the unwitting into following a spiritual authority that works against them or anything good. Nothing prevents the cajolers from doing this by any natural law, but this is obviously not something most people wanted, and the odiousness of such deception is not merely something we instinctively reject. Those who would choose to follow the cargo cults find out the hard way that this system of mental cheating does not work and can never work, no matter how many times it is rearranged or suggested to produce a different result. This leads to a question throughout life to find a way to connect meaning through that which is not readily accessible, but which can be divined with experience and the good fortune to find the right authority that could make sense of a world that seemed to go horribly wrong. It does not take long for those who see the world gone horribly wrong to see that the overwhelming source of that wrongness was not some natural force, but the shitty behavior of humans, who do what they do for various reasons we have partly described here. The world absent humans is remarkably passive and in some way protective, for natural laws appear to prevent abomination from existing for too long. Human sentiments can see abomination and know it without a great authority telling them what it is, but as the sophistication of those who embrace abomination increases, the nature of the threat changes. Where before abomination scarcely cared to hide itself, the clever abomination disguises itself as friendly and progressive, and works through the sentiments we would rely on to discern right from wrong. Conversely, those who would align with abomination, and there is nothing preventing them from doing this, seek an authority that will align with them for this mission - that is, they usually invoke some deity, and it must be a deity rather than an impersonal force, because only the conceits of mind and the sense of an entity can project the ally an abomination would need. An impersonal force as the authority could be commanded, and while the cruder cajolers like to reduce all that exists to forces that can be commanded by a brute-force reasoning process, the smarter ones can corral those who are drawn to a reduced force and suggest a deity-in-secret that animates the world. We only need to see the success of the eugenic creed, which claims to be rational and aligned with science, but regularly invokes Luciferian or Satanic metaphors for a mission that has nothing to do with the world science describes. It does not take long to see that spiritual authority moves from a simple quest to discover truth to an elaborate conspiracy which can command political and economic power, which are devolved to temporal and personal authority respectively in their raw forms but are subsumed by spiritual authority in any ruling interest. Spiritual authority presents as impersonal, but must relate to the personal and political for us to regard it as anything more than a fantasy or a game we might play. Very quickly, spiritual authority takes on an importance that surpasses the political and economic, and this battle over authority becomes a necessary condition of life. Man is not necessarily a political animal, but a spiritual animal which is aware of this condition, even in the dullest of conditions. It is nearly impossible to not see what has been done to us and what we have done to each other and the world. Politics would arise from that, rather than politics creating this spiritual sense out of whole cloth. In the past, spiritual and temporal authority were one and the same. The rulers were aligned with priesthoods, and the temples were not just houses of worship but banks where business was transacted, with the priests and the gods watching over the process and presenting a danger to those who did not belong in the world of business. The separation arises because a growing sense in people that temporal authorities had no inherent link with spiritual authority, and this process is ongoing to this day. Those who rule have never given up on the conceit that they alone possess spiritual authority and thus have the right to command the world, both at the level of the political and temporal authority and to command the person and their inner life if they can make it so. We do not conduct business or politics for their own sake, or for some game of advancing on a scoreboard that has no real meaning to the world or anything our lives would need. We do those things because spiritual authority made it clear that we have to, even if we know the internecine competition in life is idiotic and we would be better off if we all stopped fighting over stupid shit and stopped being so malicious towards each other. This is so simple a child could see it, and adulthood of the crass sort teaches a value that sadism, cruelty, malice, and all of the lurid cultism of the human race is somehow maturity and anything decent is childish and infantile. This is paired by elevating the malicious traits that are inborn, so that the nastiest and brattiest children are encouraged in their vices, and the honest and decent of children are punished and shamed, declared "retarded" for wanting something other than this shitfest of backstabbing and fetishism. A child or a reasonable adult can see past the expectations of a spiritual authority suggesting this is indeed what it means to be a man or woman, but nonetheless accepts in the end that there is something in the world that allows this to happen, and that the world does not change because of thought-forms or ideas as the idiots and cajolers like to insinuate when their lying is more profuse.

Temporal Authority: Worthwhile authority for the world as a whole arises from outside of us, but the world does not suggest anything about our relations. All actors are dependent on the world, and here is what most people interpret as authority. It is a simple question: who, if anyone, should people believe is in charge of affairs? This is not merely a political question or a question of social status, and it is not a managerial or economic question. It is not a question of rule itself, which has nothing intrinsically to do with any authority that insists rule is necessary. It is rather a question of who or what possesses a connection to the truth spiritual authority implies. This connection is never something taken for granted or inborn from something entirely outside of the natural world. Authority from a person may be apart from nature as we recognize it, but all people and all humans are themselves products of that world. If that were not the case, then there would be no recognition of spiritual authority or authority at all. Temporal authority to be a meaningful proposition does not exist by any will of life that is beholden onto to itself or what it can impose on anything alien to it. Temporal authority suggests that some entity is favored by Heaven, God, the Force, or whatever spiritual authority may exist, allowing someone to do in the world anything they do. There is no way around this, for all that exists is within the confines of the world. Heaven or any other realm would still be a part of the world, and does not possess extra authority simply by being some essence beyond mortals, or because of some quality that is reducible to a naturalistic or scientific explanation. The reason for spiritual authority is not an essence or a "thing", but because that spiritual authority is regarded as something that holds true regardless of temporal conditions. Temporal authority recognizes that credence to any authority is ultimately decided not by some force compelling or cajoling things in the world to obey, but by the ability of temporal authority to align with the world as a whole in some way. In other words, those who hold temporal authority did something right with the world to be there. This is a different question than rule or politics, because rule entirely operates over people or by forcing the world to conform to the wishes of whomever rules. Temporal authority then is the typical claim of rulers, who assert that they did something other than rule and live parasitically off of the ruled and the world. All such authorities are beholden to the truth of the world, regardless of anything they would say to others. In this way, temporal authority would be the sole way to resolve political intrigues and confusion among people, who are not at all beholden to any truth in order to live, rule, manage, or do all of the things that politics, economics, and the accumulation of mere knowledge suggests. There is no secret of knowledge, wisdom, material technology, wealth, natural resources, nature in the sense of a Demiurge-commanded world pushing thought into existence, or some primordial will that will ever allow this, no matter how many permutations are made about it. When all of those things are done, what happens in the world will not care about whether someone thought they deserved anything in the world, or what was done relative to other people or some arbitrary comparison. There is always a truth that has no regard for any of the posturing and pathetic attempts at glory that humanity has claimed. The world did not care if you were better than some other pitiful human or scored a victory. No form of authority is won by the thrill-seeking and posturing that has prevailed in human society. It is a sad truth of the world that humans can rule through lying, cruelty, and a low form of avarice that was inherent in how the race came to exist in the first place. The idea that it was any other way has been one of the persistent lies told to us.^[1] Where spiritual authority seeks something from above, temporal authority is an Earthly representation that seeks to establish truth from the view of the people who observe the world. Before someone can really speak of themselves, they would need to be aware of the temporal authorities making competing claims, and the forces in the world that would violate or have no regard for the person. Personal authority without temporal authority would be a meaningless gesture, and both suggest there is a reasoning or purpose apart from either.

Personal Authority: The people who would recognize authority are always indiviudal entities with some capacity to recognize that there is such a thing as authority. If that recognition is made, then three things become self-evident; that there isn't a "great mind" that is an authority simply through will, that individual wills are not dominated by or submissive to authority but exist on their own power, and that the intermediary between the transcendant knowledge and the individual is the world, in which other entities like oneself are active. The recognition of authority is always made by individual entities rather than something that is a given or a just-so story. There is a reasoning independent of authority that can judge if an authority is right or wrong, and it is incumbent on authority most of all to be devoid of internal contradictions. This is played with by mashing together spiritual, temporal, and personal authority and suggesting that they are ill-defined and rife with contradictions, but there are no contradictions in nature or any authority worth regarding. This applies to spiritual authority, temporal authorities which must abide real conditions regardless of their claims, and personal authority which would not be possible with a split mind regarding it. The way to do this sleight-of-hand trick is sanctimonious pseudo-moral posturing and "purity contests" where shameless hypocrisy is regarded as a sign of strength, and the honest are deemed liars for suggesting that their thrill of ruling is anything less than total. For those who wish to usurp worthwhile authority, it is most necessary to suggest at the core that a fetish for power and projection supercedes authority, and that all potential authorities are in permanent conflict. Spiritual authority must be split from temporal authority and made sacrosanct, and personal authority is reduced to nothing more than individual wills, with no one able to say for themselves what anything is. The reality has always been clear - all three must run together, and this is not a moral question but a question of truth and the actual workings of the world. In other words, the final authority is demonstrated through labor and through the daily lives of all, including those of the lowest class who breathe and must live regardless of anything a society says about them. The conceits of discovering truth by thought alone, or some clever trick, do not hold up to any scrutiny. Thinking itself is a kind of labor, and intelligence is not granted any sacrosanct property until aristocracy decides that a signifier of intelligence is the difference between life and death in political society. The laborer is perfectly capable of thinking without being a specialist or receiving wisdom from the elders, and the better of the wise men understand this. It has long been understood by those who abide science that we only attain the sophistication of knowledge we possess because humans could communicate with each other, because in another time, this was allowed and the thrill of making others suffer did not snuff out any curiosity. The eugenic interest of life and the aims of the proprietors to arrest history are entirely useless, but insist that the will to power, that creed of infantile petty-managers, makes its own morality and own reality. The interest of life itself then is presented with a stark choice - the eugenic interest of others, which invariably becomes the will of might alone rather than any one person and consolidates in some center, or its own survival and harmony with others like itself. There is no true reconciliation of these two positions. The aims of both are to protect personal authority, claim temporal authority, and usurp spiritual authority which would not have cared about life one way or the other. It is here where confusion regarding authority is exploited, mostly by the eugenic interest but also by those who would herd those who want to live to the slaughter. Here is ideologically the master-slave mindset from the perspective of the master, who claims authority purely on the basis of "me wantee" and retroactively claims reality and the world ordained the relationship. This relies not on any genuine authority, but a will to abrogate authority and transform it by some strange alchemy that only knowledge can conceive.

In all cases, authority does not justify itself or exist as a thing, but instead arises because we ask how we are to resolve what is and isn't real, and what is and is not moral. No other basis for authority would be sensical. We may presume that there is a god or deity that is a mind like our own, but that only moves the question further away from us and supposes that will and thought, which possess no authority, are granted this status. Such an entity would either not be like us at all, or would not be something treated just like any imperious will. Authority is not the absolute word or final judgement, but instead is the beginning of our ability to operate independently in a genuine sense. All who wish to live would have to reconcile themselves with a world outside of them, and it is evident from viewing the world that the world does not exert any willful force on anything in it in a way that must be abided. We can choose to reject the presumed authority of another, or reject the world entirely, and do with it what we wish. What we cannot do is decide that authority is not real or that there is no way in which events in the world can proceed. To do that is to abdicate the question entirely to another. This is intended by those who would claim to oppose authority, but embrace an imperious will that is more oppressive than any truth the world presents.

A crude spiritual authority can be manufactured by simply suggesting the world itself is the spiritual authority. This does little for us though, because the world does not inherently possess any of our knowledge, and did not need such a thing in order to exist. We presume by working backwards that there was a process that was knowable that allowed us to exist, or anything we would recognize in symbolic representation to exist. Planets and stars form out of natural processes we see ongoing today, and we suggest that there is a truth of physical reality outside of us. We are also able to read meaning into past events and ask why the past was as it was, why it led to today, and where it is heading. We are also aware that physical reality does not enjoy any natural precedence as a spiritual authority, as if the world were created by physical laws before there was anything physical to speak of, or our concepts of physics were somehow encoded into the universe as hard metaphysical diktats from an arbitrary authority. There is a way in which the world works which was not beholden to any of our conceits about it, and we may be able to know it. We imply that this is possible in order to conduct anything we would appreciate as science or an inquiry into the world.^[2] I suggest in the prior book of this series one ontological view, but leave open the possibility that this ontology is mistaken and suggest that this quest for metaphysical claims is a part of the spiritual authority I expound upon here. The split into spiritual, temporal, and personal authority mimics not the five-part ontology I have used as my model, but a tripartite model which resembles the philosophical state of most of history. Authority abides this tripartite model because of what it is, rather than anything about the universe, for the world is not moved by authority at all. Authority is something we as knowing entities summon and abide, and we read into the world a spiritual authority governing it. It is not that we need to see a mind like our own as the authority, but we presume there is a knowable way in which the world works, whether we regard physical laws or some metaphysical laws that gave rise to it which are not reflected in physics and material analysis. We are aware on some level that this quest for spiritual authority entails something different from the view management would require, and that effective rule - for ourselves or for anything humans construct - requires acknowledging that this is the case. Authority proper is not managerial or concerned with deciding the smallest iota of thought processes, as if the authority were constantly at our backs, drooling and pushing all that exists, both as a hobgoblin that is unknowable and as a looming presence we cannot help but know. Presenting authority of any sort as contradiction or the sole force which can resolve contradiction is the ideology of a slave religion and slave morality. This is intended and was seized upon by the modern philosophers to construct institutions which would terminate our ability to think by presenting authority as pure contradiction, and consequently this authority declares that God is unknowable, the world is unknowable, and this spurious "authority" rules by knowing us better than we know ourselves. That is the stock and trade of every petty-manager and those who enjoy the thrill of bossing others around. Such an authority is not conducive to answer any question authority would resolve for us.

It is not difficult for someone to see in primitive conditions that none of this was necessary, and that any purpose for life would not be informed by the material world in some way where the essence was evident. The only evidence the material world offers is that we would not need to do such a thing as follow some cargo cult telling us "science" wants us to live a particular way, which is curiously in line with the conceits of a social class that wishes to enclose the world. That is stupid and pointless. Spiritual authority would present a purpose to live that is outside of us, and suggests that there is more to existence than our own conceits about it. We are merely a part of a much larger world, and no exercise of self-abasement changes that no one can argue that our thought or sense suggests any morality by assertion alone. All of our thinking would be informed by the world, and so, spiritual authority is one way in which we can make genuinely moral decisions, rather than decisions that are beholden to some fickle interest or another. Without that, then any enterprise that would be conducted through management, rule, or science would be futile. This does not suggest there is a singular spiritual authority that all must follow. People can follow whatever they like, but they invariably act upon something that suggests what they should do. If that is their own will to act upon the world, then that would be sufficient, but selfishness is obviously circular and pointless as a spiritual authority. The conditions of oneself are but one of many that someone would regard if they are to make any decision that would be worthwhile. Mere assertion of self-importance is nothing more than an indulgence, and a child can see through such arguments, even as depraved adults insist that greed is good as a drooling Reaganite retard does as they plunder and destroy anything decent in the world. Authority to mean anything requires something other than self-importance or virtue. It implies the authority is backed not by mere substance but truth and something meaningful. Therefore, the proper foundation for authority is not mere existence, nor rationality, nor temporal merit, and certainly not the imperious will of aristocracy. The proper foundation is in labor - and this is not labor in any sense, but labor in its fullest form, where the worker commands not just a material thing or some idea, but commands the meaning and purpose of the toil. Those who hold the machines that make anything possible hold the true authority.

This authority does not itself grant rule. Someone can do everything right, yet fail to rule and fail compared to another authority. Authority does not inherently have a truth above any other authority simply by virtue of appearing stronger or "truthier". Rule, the victors of management and conflict, and so on, have no inherent tie to authority in any sense. For authority to exist, someone must be able to step outside of themselves for a moment and consider a connection with the world as a whole. Self-indulgence and avarice for petty things are the death of authority. An authority to be truly effective does not bark contradictory orders, or revel in the thrill of making others follow. That is the authority of fools and cajolers, which would be rejected if it did not denude the faculties of those subjected to it. Authority is not mere virtue, or some inner quality that allows men to rule or command other people. Virtue has nothing to do with the truth that authority entails, and men can command other men for no particular reason. Neither does authority create any impression that it should rule or hold any recognized authority. Authority to be worthwhile is something that others follow in the end because they either chose to, or were given no option but to follow. Either is acceptable, but nowhere does authority have any right to rule, or regard right in the legal or philosophical sense. Authority does not get to decide unilaterally what laws or philosophy will be. Authority to be worthwhile is beholden to a world outside of us, but it is always represented in people rather than mere things or ideas. If authority does not entail rule, reward, or denote any property or state of being that would be innate, then what is its use?

That has been the great misery of the human race. Authority, which would have belonged to those who actually did things and did them because they had to survive, is usurped by those who believed that they had some hereditary advantage, or who held some technology or clever trick to take from labor. Most insidious were those who claimed that they spoke for some higher power that demanded sacrifice, self-abasement to some mere person or worse an institution, or who simply used psychological tricks and manipulations to cover a series of lies, often employing the former two for the task. None of these people would survive without the laborer, who never needed nor wanted any of these things to live or do what was needed. The laborer is made into a simp and sucker for doing the only things that allow rule, management, and exploitation to proceed, and told that the source of labor's woes are not the parasitic beast feeding off of them, but the lowest class whose crime was simply existing. By what authority is this decreed, except the authority that was taken from the worker? The lowest class has no authority and is trained to be indolent and fearful of authority as a concept, so they are prepared for extermination - life unworthy of life, which has always been the aristocracy's view of humans outside of their own club. The classes situated above labor in the present order all suggest that they are the rightful authority based on spurious grounds, refusing to acknowledge the true fount of this authority because doing so would make their cajoling and scheming seem like a comical error. It is only because they have exacted a grim retribution on humanity for refusing to like them that it does not appear as a joke.^[3]

It is a rule of authority that it derives not from a view of the world in total, but a view of that which is transcendant and not beholden to any particular bias. Authority in the main always starts for us as spiritual authority, because that is going to our first sense of this concept - not what "we" do on our own power, but what in the world made us and what things outside of us do and why they happen. That is the first question we would ask when we seriously consider authority - not whether there is a vast world animated by some Demiurge or some totality that must make the world go, as if authority were identical with mind or will. We do not need to presume that the world is governed by a mind at all, let alone one that is curiously like the mind of aristocrats, or the mind of those who form the ruling interest and exhort submission to it. There is always a way in which things in the world occur, that requires us to consider the world as if it could be viewed objectively and without our bias. Spiritual authority resolves the problems of adjudication knowledge from thought and knowledge alone. It suggests that there is some way in which facts can be verified, that does not devolve purely to the will of those who hold machines to make facts real by diktat. It would be impossible to consider facts at the level of society and our communication with each other without this. That is why, as we will see, rulers always seek to capture spiritual authority, and other forms of authority would follow. The other forms of authority are very necessary to have a true understanding of the concept, but at heart, authority stems from truth rather than right or privilege or might. No authority of any sort can be effective without fidelity to a world outside of subjective experience.^[4] No authority is given respect automatically - the source is judged, but it is not something that is judged by intellectual reasons alone, as if authority responds to a reasoned argument to change its truths. It is incumbent on anyone who holds authority to act in some way that is consistent with their claims. Of course, nothing prevents someone from believing that authority derives from will or thought alone, or that anything can be anything. Such an authority shouldn't be followed for obvious reasons, because because authority is not a rational creation but a necessity for understanding a world that does not care what we think, it is possible for clever tricks to be played with it. At the highest and primary level of authority, there are no contradictions or games that can be played. Something is either true or right or it is not, and no amount of struggle or willpower changes it.

Authority's basis in truth is something different from rule or government. Power for the ruler laughs at authority and truth, and by the authority of the world, there is no reason those with worldly power cannot do this. Legitimacy and the impression of rule does not come from authority, but acts only because it is allowed to do so. There is no kindness in the world that makes people moral, but the world implies consequences of any act and consequences for the power to rule that no ruler can abrogate. Rulers can make their own laws, but they cannot make their own truth or reality and insist that their rule is in any way natural, or that nature prescribed any particular course of action for us or them. The ruler who claims the name of nature to justify their rule is neither authoritative nor particularly sound as a ruler. An authoritarian seeks not the impression or superficial marker of strength, but rulers that suggest they hold some merit or purpose beyond simply ruling. Whether this actually exists does not change that those who would abide authority do not follow blindly, but do so with full knowledge that authority exists for a reason. Those who would follow an arbitrary or capricious authority are as fickle as those who lead them by the nose, and deserve contempt. Likewise, those who claim contempt for temporal authority but deny spiritual authority are often the most useful servants of rule and empire, who do not challenge temporal authority but enable the most fickle to claim it and enshrine it by will. In the end they only exist to annihilate personal authority and usurp spiritual authority. The mindless follower of authority and the anarchist are natural allies. They are able to do as they do because there is a sense in us that no man or intellect can claim spiritual authority by thought alone, or a marker of distinction that is socially valued. Authority proper exists outside of society, and thus by making society total and inescapable, authority is replaced with the most fickle rule and government man can possibly create. The existence of society, provided the information pertaining to it is verified, is something authority can determine, but spiritual authority never tells us exactly what to think like a pedagogue. To truly approach authority, whether one accepts the world or wishes to change it, requires acknowledging that there is a world outside of society and rule, and that government would exist not to abrogate the world but to survive in it. In this world, society is not antagonistic, but cooperative based on experience rather than someone insisting that we live for "society", which is often reinterpreted to refer to an institution within society claiming by spurious authority the whole of the world.

A ruler or governor can rule without authority, and in some sense must do so. Politically, asking for permission from above is a crippling liability against opponents who will not wait, regardless of whether they will shit up the world by what they do. Generally, though, rulers who are ignorant of the world or the status of other people in actuality will not last long. The only way rule by deception and cruelty can be maintained is by continuously dragging down the quality of life for everyone else, and destroying any sign of something that would challenge that type of rule. Since deception and cruelty have numerous advantage for ruling over approaches which do not, and deceivers have an offensive advantage at seizing power and usurping a ruler, this places the benevolent and far-sighted ruler in a terrible situation. That, though, is not my concern, since I am not ruling anything. I do not concern myself with the question of how to rule or govern effectively here, since that is not immediately related to the economic topic I chose for this book. For too long, authority and rule or politics have been conflated, when they refer to very different things and necessarily must do so. The possession of virtue, which would be very helpful for ruling, is not a claim of authority by a combination of many claims, such as merit, superior breeding, inherited property, strength of will, moral probity, purpose which can motivate oneself or others, and so on. All of those claims are intended for interpersonal rule, rather than any mission outside of society or regarding truth as authority would. The virtuous person might seek the favor of something outside of society or be someone who is genuinely interested in something other than ruling, but this is not a given of virtue. Virtue is of little interest to this series due to its vague definition, but in some sense virtue is what political society must defend, moreso than authority, mere rule, or particular institutions purporting to do something other than what institutions usually do, which is run a racket to control whatever thing they were supposed to do. Nothing about authority cares about justice, and it does not appear humans in general regard such a concept as anything other than a self-serving lie. If it were so, humanity would not have allowed modernity to become what it did, and the dark force eugenics has summoned would work in reverse - it would have crushed the eugenist on sight and thought nothing of it, for that would be most necessary for a society to continue. The dark force that eugenics summoned claims itself to be a super-authority above truth or reality, but is something very different from authority or any prior concept of ruling that was regarded in the past. The authority of the world itself did not prevent this dark force from existing in entirety, but the world had up until recent history placed a check or sobering influence on such rot, limiting its reach. The battle ultimately became one over technology, machinery, and who would be allowed to use such things in the future. It is that struggle which pitted the emerging political class against the broad masses of humanity, and the position of the latter was simple - the machine was to be the property of labor rather than any other interest, for those who built the machine had every reason to use it as they saw fit, rather than the machine being used to feed aristocracy, the cult of war, or some conniving merchant or technocrat. The lowest class, for the most part, was a spectator to this battle, but would be dragged into it as a ritual sacrifice to decide its outcome, and so that is how modernity did happen, and the results are at this writing inescapable. The only question is what, if anything, would be salvaged from this, and if the eugenic creed attains its ultimate aims and makes a world without it unthinkable. What is clear to me is that the eugenists have no interest in authority or ruling with any level of competence, because they have never had to. The more incompetent their rule, the greater their hand, so long as they can poison people more. There is something impressive about the utter stupidity and malice of the eugenist which takes decent men and women aback when they encounter such a slobbering beast.

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