Return to Table of Contents | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter
Where we begin the economic task is not out of an inborn tendency to do economics nor a matter of the world compelling any behavior due to some constitution of the body and the environment. In both cases, this has the effect of reducing human motives to various hobgoblins, whether they are described with the language of religion or the language of a crass pseudo-materialism that falls back on koans and meaningless ideas which are a "just-so" story to explain human behavior. This is inadequate in describing the mechanisms of the social agent that is a human, or the mechanisms of anything humans create or their environment as humans have been able to reassemble it in their sense of the world. There is a world outside of us which presents conditions we cannot change, but those conditions are few in number rather than totalizing and inescapable. If we are to believe in the latter, we are left with a philosophy of self-abasement, which is turned to abasement to institutions or other people rather than a genuine reckoning with the world. If we believe in the former, then events would appear as nothing more than reduced forms of the potential human beings embody, which are to be ruled by institutions or other people. The two positions are established to work alongside each other, and feign opposition only to the naive. In either case, nothing new is truly possible, either because the world has been reduced to fixed and immutable essences which merely re-shuffle and are organized by an overmind, or because change is described as a contradiction which is nonsensical if you think about it for five minutes.[1] Every attempt to rehabilitate this dual system retreats into claims about Being which cannot be substantiated nor allow for a useful mechanistic understanding of events, and it is done precisely so that nothing new can be formed, even when necessity suggests such a thing is necessary. Every attempt to piece together a view of human development, whether for individuals or for mankind, suggests that nothing of the "grand theories" could possibly have been a singular source for human development, let alone the dominant force. That has always been a political doctrine superimposed over anything that actually happened.
It is simple to say that we approach the world not by what it is but what it does, and every attempt to assert being over doing has been a disastrous failure. We identified all that we can and attempt to identify all that exists not because of some urge to do so and absorb reality itself, but because we had to do this to do what we do - to live. It is this that is the proper basis for economic thinking, rather than any idea imposed from above or a primordial urge from within. If either of those were the purpose of human enterprises, the answer to life is simple and terrible - all life is to be sacrificed in some terrible ritual or another. There is no good way life ends if that is true, and that is precisely the point. We could accept that, in which case the only conclusion for most of us is nihilism and disdain for the entire project of rule. We would only live for whatever escape is possible from such a world, and mortality would be a blessing. In the end it would be clear that there was no purpose to anything humanity ever did, and that the world would be far better off without us. In all cases, those who would reduce existence to a series of idealistic koans show their utter contempt for human existence and the world as a whole, and believe their idiotic conceits are greater than our common sense that tells us this whole approach is stupid. Economism and managerialism were born of that sickly impulse, rather than the thing any reasonable person would have wanted out of existence. The reasons why have been clear from the start - we did not live to work or live to serve some crass political ambition, particularly the ambitions of cajolers and connivers. Economic thought proceeded because we had some moral cause to live for, which was not a rational purpose read from nature nor a pure act of will.
What this means is that humanity begins its efforts by an authority that is outside of them, but that only they recognize at a personal level. If we thought collectively - if we had some form of telepathic communication that allowed us to truly know each other - then the society and the way we conduct ourselves would be very different, because the odiousness of the human race would be laid bare. We do not need any telepathy to see that something is wrong, and a primitive sense in humanity allows us to sense that others suffer and think much like ourselves, at least in the basic functions humans do. Not one conceit of the human race has ever actually moved past being an ape, and those who claim enlightenment are often the dumbest fucks this sorry race has produced. We never "just existed", as if there were no other way we could possibly be. Even as animals, a primitive process struggles to reconcile with the world. Humans with symbolic language begin the process of replacing "the world" with "society", first in the relations inherited from the past which were very real, and then replacing society with a simulated and false version of it, which supplants not just the former relations but the whole of the world we were a part of in the first place. Once humans are parted from this native connection with the world, they are left with nothing at all, and told "this is the future", and the world is presented as an alien that is commanded by thought leaders and minds greater than your own, with a mind towards empire and humiliation of the weak. That the world as a whole would have no use for this stupidity is not admissible, even though a child can see the absurdity of human conceits. Authority in the genuine sense would be in line with that, and so authority too had to be replaced with a facsimile. A posture and impression is granted authority in this false society over the things authority originally answered. Things that did not need to be judged by an alien authority are commanded, and any question that authority from outside us would truly be needed to answer remains a mystery. The rubes, that is us, are told "it is unknowable", and threatened if we dare ask too many questions about Project Mayhem.
Here we find the genuine object economic planning would attain - authoritative knowledge pertaining to the world that is not freely replicable or a thing open to questioning; in other words, the resolution of certainty, or information, that is pertinent to the world and can be morally valued, not just in of itself but in an overall framework. We may ask questions about why the world as it is, but none of those questions present a challenge to authority, however it is constituted. The knowledge we may covet may be a thing that is commonly available, and a thing we naively assume should spread out of good will. Other knowledge pertains to claims of property or natural resources which are mutually exclusive with other owners. This does not arise by some imperious will to say it is so, which can be questioned by anyone, but by the final outcome authority would grant. We do not get to challenge authority's ruling after the fact, and we would only be able to operate without the boundaries authority allows to change the world. The substantive things in-of-themselves carry no value, without any particular reason why we would value them. Nothing in the world would be valuable by some rule of nature, or even the limited rules of nature governing life or mankind. Those things that appear to us as natural needs, like breathable air, food, sunlight, and so on, are useful for reasons that authority has allowed us to see without too great an explanation. No mind game can be played to say that those things are "mere wants", as if living things are obligated to commit suicide because an imperious asshole decided they found most of humanity ugly. We can contemplate starving or suffocating ourselves for some purpose. Above all, no authority can compel us to live as an absolute. If a situation is truly intolerable, humans will go to great lengths to kill themselves or shut down, so that those who seek to maximize torture are left with nothing for the elaborate effort spent making it so. No authority prevents humanity from choosing the imperial path, but no one has any good reason to accept the endless terror of eugenics and all that we have seen. No one has any reason to accept the kick in the teeth the institutions give to those out of the know. None of us were born to serve that, and no authority granted those people any right to rule beyond the mere claims to legal property they made. There is a reason why it did turn out this way, despite a total lack of purpose to any such sadistic mission, but those reasons are in any worthwhile analysis reasons that we could change, and they describe only a sordid history rather than something about nature that compelled this. The claims of the eugenic creed and the sadists run counter to what a child can determine about the world - that if the world truly operated to maximize the thrill of torturing others, it would be a far worse place and become so far faster than any human could fathom. It would preclude the cooperation that sadists exploit to claim the world and turn it into this parodic nightmare. As the sadism intensifies, the only reaction of most people will be to shut down, spiting the beast for as long as they remain alive, because acceptance will no longer be an option. The simplest act for us is to simply not do sadistic acts, because it is not difficult to see that such a course leads nowhere good and won't build a single thing. It is only on that basis that an authoritative knowledge can be assembled, that would give to any human labor purpose beyond a mere statement of fact or the claims of fickle wills which change from day to day. Those who did this never forget where their ability to do this really arises, and it is not because they are actually so smart and we're so dumb and they were destined to win. Those who did this to us stole the world, and did everything necessary to claim then obfuscate authority.
I will spend this and the next four chapters describing how this authority is valued, and where it leads to the utility that is purportedly the purpose of economic management and ecology. There are five key points here:
- The initial act of seeking authority to better navigate the world. This is to say, the first claim to authoritative knowledge is not based on expedience, the effort of attaining it, a sophisticated scheme for teaching and occulting this knowledge to increase its value in society, or any merit that allowed someone to claim they earned the right to anything. This authority is claimed at first because the needs and wants are real and meaningful, and because absent any compelling reason, we would see this knowledge and then do what is needed for our purposes. This includes the most basic moral sentiments and passions, and a sense common to thinking life. We separate this genuine want from the more fickle emotions and sentiments, with the knowledge that those fickle emotions exist for a reason. If there is a nagging pain, it is likely the body or something in our life telling us that something should be addressed; so too is there a sense of anomie and dread, which humans are habituated to due to their highly antagonistic way of life in all things. If we had a placid and calm world, countless centuries of dread and predation suggest that this cannot last, and given the prevalence of predation and the frequency of lies promising peace, we would learn that such seeming tranquility is likely a ruse. When these things, which are necessarily vast and concern a great deal of accumulated wisdom in human society, are so necessary for our existence, we would not wait for the adjudication of merit or the wise technocrat to tell us what is what. We instead would follow people of merit or some distinction because that is what makes sense, given our limited information and how unlikely it would be for us to reverse-engineer the accumulated wisdom of those centuries. So, it makes sense for humans to seek teachers, or ask their parents all manner of stupid questions. This sense doesn't always serve us well, and there is a great production made of justified or unjustified hierarchy.[2]
- The peculiar practice of struggle and war, which arises as an expression of a particular authority, where victory and merit secure position in the world. This becomes the rights to property and forms the first basis for state institutions. Struggle and war are possibilities with varying intensity, and must be understood not as inevitable urges, inexplicable, or the primary authority. To wage war effectively requires something more than "me wantee" - it requires authority to claim victory, and neither the victors nor the vanquished forget this. To claim otherwise is to declare something much worse than defeat and existence under the yoke - it is to claim that certain agents are not even slaves in society, but vermin to be exterminated. This practice of war varies in intensity, for if it were total and absolute, it would quickly devour all goods in sight and leave nothing and no purpose motivating the war. It degenerates into the most fickle and vain causes to keep the rot going, and that has plagued us in the past century despite the clear lack of any of the historical causes or sobering influences that mitigated the war cult.
- Authority to acquire and systematize knowledge at a basic level. In other words, how people learn and how people think about how they think. This is what is usually considered spiritual authority in vulgar and crass terms, but spiritual authority speaks not to any particular task but all processes from which authority can arise. The task of knowledge is not its own perpetuation, nor that of wisdom that is passive, but for knowledge to produce events of both moral value and of use for the world we live in. We may choose different parts of the world as our home, as we must, but we are aware that there are people in a different walk of life much like ourselves, and some conceit of knowledge of wisdom is not going to make that other person get along with you, or not spend their effort destroying your conceit of a perfected humanity or perfected world, or the more crass conceits of egotism. If we choose to ignore that out of some technical specification of intelligence processing or a lack of symbolic information used as a password, we are making a very silly decision when we could have seen the other person having a purpose, and certainly having no reason to glorify us. Systematizing knowledge then is not merely a matter of choosing one metaphysics and envisioning the world as a gigantic clockwork moved by this mind that is like our own, but reckoning with the reality of knowledge itself. No model to view the world is authoritative unless it is reconciled with facts and meaning, and we would take the integrity of basic knowledge faculties on faith until there is a reason to doubt ourselves. This is the fatal weakness that must be attacked for authority to be usurped, and the most direct route. Other methods will only be seen as a way to dispute this authority over knowledge itself as a process. The authority of a knowledge system is beholden to meanings and facts that are outside of it and must be so.
Only in retrospect can there be an initial seed, and describing genesis is where the orderly procession of events loses its explanatory potential. The existence of something new may proceed from prior events, but something does not arise from nothing. It is for this reason that posturing over authority often degenerates into just-so stories, even for those who know better and are aware of the trap. The primordial conditions of existence, and the origin of life, does not intrinsically hold any more authority than the present moment or an imagined future, but it is a simple fact that everything arises from some prior condition. The past does not hold any intrinsic authority by being the past, nor does the future hold any authority due to some inexorable trend of progress. The imperious mind then looks to command the present and disallow the possibility that anything new can exist, and in doing so, arrests entirely the process of knowledge itself. It would not be difficult to step outside of this procession entirely in looking for that which is authoritative, and suggest that time and causality are relational concepts and do not have any intrinsic authority at all. Since there is no way for knowledge to exist in any form we recognize without causality allowing for logical deductions, the question of Real Ultimate Truth is one that we would not answer with the crude tools at our disposal. There are aspects of the world that are outside of any spiritual authority we can recognize at present. This is not the same as claiming they are totally unknowable or that there is nothing beyond our ability to reason, but suggests instead that if we did seek a final answer, we would be asking very different questions from those any philosophy or religion could pose. It makes the posturing of priests and ideologues appear silly if one thinks on the matter for five minutes, and so it is necessary for the ideologue to deny anyone those five minutes and the means to suggest the ideologue could be wrong. Here we see the origin of that familiar koan, "He who controls the present controls the past; he who controls the past controls the future." It is only possible with a preponderance of force and control over some space - which is to say, it relies on the economic managerialism that usurps any authority that would be a genuine mark of value, and replaces it with imperious will alone.
- Moral authority - that is, attempts to answer those questions that thought alone or a crude analysis of the world do not answer. This is not a philosophical or rational intent of us, but one of practice and doing, that allows any knowledgeable approach to the world to assemble meaning and purpose. Humanity became religious creatures out of necessity, even when they profess atheism or do not see any existing institution as correct in interpreting the divine and moral authority. Humans as political animals are not wholly unique, for in the animal kingdom there are crude forms of politics, but humans are alone in the practices of religion and formalities. The political theories of mankind worth anything make not just claims of knowledge or claims of property, but claims of spiritual authority which imply something greater. All of those theories must reconcile with a basic desire of us to live and do the things we would have liked, or serve some purpose beyond sacrifice for its own sake or sacrifice to some cargo cult. It is here where humans can begin assigning values to anything that mean something more than their whims. In short, the beginning of moral authority and proper economic value suggests that anything economically valued exists in a span of time and in a world where those values are relevant. Outside of this, there is no economy. Any self-contained ecology is compared to others of its type in principle, and can be so. We would only be able to ascertain the violability of that ecology by knowledge of all agents and their actions, to see what if anything contaminates the lab conditions we imagined. The existence of anything worthwhile in the world is not merely a just-so fact, but contingent on our ability to make meaningful comparisons, and ask ourselves if a value we hold can be reconciled with the world and the values of others. Whatever values we assign internally are for our use only, and inform a general situation that is entirely outside of us. The situation outside of us does not present any pre-made moral values we would abide, let alone eternal ones. The moral authority and value is only sensical as economic behavior if it is presumed these calculations take place in the world as a whole, and that all that exists and all that is possible is potentially up for grabs. We must accept this to consider economics in any sense - that our selves and everything we valued is violable. Only when doing so would we be able to consider the security that allowed ourselves to exist and regard authority, let alone possess it. It is in that light where moral philosophy of any sort can exist, whether it concerns economic matters of a limited purview, political matters, spiritual matters, or any other aim life may morally value.
- Authority of identity and symbols - To complete our understanding of authority proper, we associate meanings with names, symbols, icons, and marks which carry explanatory power. The symbols themselves should not be confused with power, but the symbols will for us acquire a meaning beyond the mere fact of the symbol. This happens not because words have independent power of their own, but because we react and act in accord with symbols to construct our more elaborate models of the world, the tools we use, the language we communicate with, and all of the things which allow for social behavior in any recognizable form.
All of this must take place first in the simple act of living, and the various activities someone engages in every day, before a more elaborate authority can be established. It may not be perceived that someone is following authority when they walk outside, swing the ax to chop a tree, or build something, but they are following something that suggests that these activities work and accomplish what we set out to do. Never can this step be taken for granted, however trivial it may seem. It is not self-evident that we would do the things we purport to do. This operates at the local level, and it operates in institutions, society, politics, and all of the higher wisdom humans accumulate. It is not particular to humans - animal life would in its own way carry out this process, but lacking symbolic language or complex social structures, animals remain preoccupied with the tasks of obtaining sustenance and their social affairs. The concept that it could be significantly different is not something that occurs to an animal. An animal may adapt to situations which are new and develop independently some novel way of doing things, but without any way to communicate that knowledge or any way to conceive of more elaborate authority, the animal will only develop so far. Animals in conditions of severe deprivation will lose the functionality they would possess if their environment were healthy, to the point where they could not survive in the animal kingdom - and this is how animals in capitivity lose the will to live and do things that would be bizarre in the wild. Humans are no different, but humans are adapted to enclosure, and humans build elaborate systems of enclosure to control animals and control each other.
At the most basic level, this authority is only for our purposes and judgement. We look at first to what works, and do not see this as authority in the genuine sense that the word is relevant. This might be called a working knowledge or a sense we attain about the world. We don't necessarily have to look to the highest spiritual authority to do this in our lives. Most of the time, and throughout early existence, we do not think about spiritual authority at the universal level, nor the temporal authority we are made to abide. We don't think about personal authority in full, which is only relevant when we are considering our position relative to the former two things or other people. In casual existence, we are instead interested in knowing how to do what we set out to do, and what things are at a basic level. It is only because we encounter wider society, politics, and interpersonal conflict that we face something that sobers our more primitive judgements, and eventually personal authority at the least must override what our instinct would regard as an authority. Since we cannot stop to ask why endlessly, authority is not the asking of why, but that which allows a resolution to the question of asking why, and suggests a time and method to ask why again at the appropriate moment. No authority can claim to be final and unquestionable - we can always question it or question the conclusions it leads us to - but to resolve decision making in any way that isn't just a processing of instructions, we would be drawn to authorities that are either reliable, or that can impress upon us that they have to be followed.
At all levels, authority begins at first as a question for ourselves, because we rely on that authority for persistent behavior. Without that, orienting planning is not possible, or only follows a number of primitive instincts or a few observations. This is why attempts to degrade any authority or guidance seek to reduce the whole of existence to a few koans, like "all is suffering", "all is mind", and so on. To establish any worthwhile authority suggests something more than that would guide our decision making. To claim authority is a singular point or pressing of the nerve is to deny any authority that is worth following or that can say much at all about the world we live in or ourselves. This authority is not the whole to explain decision-making, but it is the starting point to establish a more thorough system for knowing the world, society, and all of the things in it, including ourselves which we know very well and in ways no outside agent can easily ascertain. It would be necessary to know why we do anything, rather than simply say that things are done, like commands barked and digested without any barrier. No drilling would stop someone from asking why some action is to be taken, or why a chain of command is to be followed. The drilling and muscle memory of a repeated action is only effective if there is in the first case some indication of why the drilling takes place, or why following this is effective. It need not be a rational explanation, but at some point, the grunt drilled to fight will ask themselves what purpose the exercises fill, and how to make that work. The most desultory pedagogy can never substitute for an answer to this question which is suitable for the purposes of daily life and the tasks at hand.
Science as we have known it has three purposes. The first is to assess truth about some aspect of the world, and in doing so it is possible to relate those aspects to other aspects and suggest general principles at work in the world which unite the things we observe. The second is that science is something we use to act on the world. Science as mere ideas is meaningless unless its findings can be put to use in applications we value. Even the formation of any genuine science or storehouse of information is a laborious task, which can only proceed as it is able to proceed. The third is to suggest a view of the world in total which is free of contradictions and errors, or something as close to that as we can attain for ourselves.
At root, we do not have any hardcoded axioms or ways in which science in this sense can be conducted. Science is not a fixed method or dogma, and science in of itself does not prove truth or that the methods of science are infallible. The most basic instinct allowing science is a process which itself can be subject to verification - that is, there is no scientific method which can claim to be a singular authority above all others. We built science not to receive it pedagogically from outside. We instead built methods and honed them like any other faculty of the body. For the faculties that allow for science, we had to regard a world outside of us, and possess an ability to temporarily disengage from our conceits about the world and ourselves. The world did not provide us ready-made or final answers for personal consumption, nor does it make any sense for the world to translate all that exists into language compatible with our subjective experience.
The authority mentioned here does not grant in of itself the status of "science". We can appeal to authority for many purposes, and we are not "scientific animals". Even if we chose such a goal for ourselves - a commitment to truth for its own sake - we would never arrive at a purified form of science or truth, and even if we did, the truth does not inherently possess any moral authority just by being the truth. We would seek truth because that is in our experience useful for our purposes, and we would if we choose comprehend the consequences of our want for truth and adapt the methods of science accordingly. There is in reality no fixed definition of what moral goals a human, or any animal, ought to pursue - and so, humans cannot be "political animals", "social animals", or "biopolitical animals" pursuing a fixed set of eugenic directives. Animals are just that - animals which are capable of potentials their faculties allow. The human distinction is not a fundamental one, but the qualitative distinction between humans with language and all of the faculties that permit civilization is unique among life on Earth. That distinction did not arise out of nothing, nor was it ever something wholly internalized in the human race. Far from it - humans outside of civilization would be little more than clever apes with tool use, but still amounting to nothing. It would take only a band of humans working together to make that savage human little more than prey; and so further does civilization and empire attack the sociality humans would have held in a different world. A crass interpretation of knowledge and science suggests empire is inevitable and absorbs all life in its path, and the empire is presented as a unified front, a deity pressing on the world and all life from above. This is trivially debunked if someone is familiar with the workings of empire, civilization, and human social units down to the individual. The individual itself is not a point a life, but a confluence of events allowing for it to exercise these faculties, and so the savage man is not a creature that can be isolated in a lab. Savage man is capable of understanding, in some way, that there is a world outside of him and the potential for sociality. Whether he sees himself as compatible with human society is another question, and typically human society cannot abide the existence of the savage, or must substitute the savage's genuine existence with a preferred model of savagery. Both parties involved know this is an imperial conceit and a stupid one at that. Human polities of different development trajectories, which held different values, could understand each other and knew there was a thought process on both ends. The American Indians held their own values and concepts of property and society, and saw the white colonists not as something descended from the heavens to tell them pedagogically what reality is, but as the filthy and foul-hearted castoffs they were. The makeup of American colonial society was not too difficult to discern - the colonies were populated by slaves, indentured servants, and merchants looking to make a buck, and there was little reason to pretend it was any other sort of arrangement for the colonists. The colonial society did inherit some definition, and acquired its own upon establishment of the colonies. They were not merely the scum of English society, as an imperial conceit in the mother country had to hold, and many of the colonists held particular religious views about why they did anything they did. There were those in the colonies who saw a religious mission in what they established, and certainly they had lives of communities they wished to protect for their own purposes. All of this is to say that people of various backgrounds will assert authority without any necessary genetic lineage telling them their destiny, and this is not a random process to be adjudicated by an imperious authority telling us what we are and what we are allowed to be in the great game of humanity. It is not a process of struggle for its own sake, unmoored from any purpose, as if two social entities were just destined to fight due to some genetic essence. To make it so obviates anything the actual struggle meant, and makes struggle effectively a foregone conclusion, which imperious minds have always desired. Only in hindsight does the victor declare that their victory was inevitable and ordained by Heaven, and in this way, the past can be edited and repurposed as a series of just-so stories.
The social and political example referenced here is not the sole example of this process. Science to be science did not have any pure seed suggesting it had to existence. The confluence of events allowing the human animal to think at all required many events working in concert to allow the simplest abstract thought, language retention, and so on. The formation of a full system was never handed down to us. It was assembled bit by bit, by the only agents capable of doing so - our individual experience, which receives revelation and acts on that with the tools at its disposal. It is the same for our approach to the natural world - we build working models to build more elaborate models. While the same basic process of recursion to build better knowledge takes place, we would not intrinsically consider this motivated by any political goal or social value. Science to be science is premised on a world existing outside of any conceit we hold about it. We must presume we confront the world without any knowledge, and that the entirety of the world and any God itself is wholly knowable, in order for any science to begin, but these presumptions are never rationally stated before the process begins. They are implied by the very idea of what it would mean to conduct science. The true origin of science then is not from any of the traditional founts of authority, but from our labor, and from the basest conditions of existence which we acknowledge instinctively without any division of labor or intent. We seek authority because we must, rather than because it is preferable, and we do not take the world "as-is", as if the world were an alien bombarding our senses and demanding submission, screaming "submit to Allah" ad nauseum until the torture works. The world, and any deity we might imagine governing it, has no interest in shouting at us like a screaming fanatic. That quality is peculiar to humans and their fickle conceits for power, which are of no interest to the world. They are really of little interest to any entity in the world, ourselves included. In the first instance, the purpose of our scientific endeavor, and much of what we do outside of science, is not a political or economic goal at all. We do many of the things we do because they are instinctive to us, or because a primitive morality and reasoning process suggest doing those things would be in some interest we may or may not be aware of. If we seek any truth to guide us in the world, there is a brief moment where we are seeking the truth for its own sake, before dismissing that goal for the goal we might assign based on some other interest of life. If science is only a means to an end, then it ceases to be science in the sense that the concept is useful to us. If science becomes life's prime want and divorced from anything about ourselves, then it also ceases to be science and becomes a morass of self-referential stories and just-so facts, which can be purposed for anything and by anyone. Because both of those outcomes are implicit in the formulation of science as a practice, we would look to something in the world to resolve that, since within science itself there is no resolution. Science can guide us to a better of understanding of how we resolve this problem, but ultimately, there is something science points to suggesting that the reality of the world, or the best facsimile of reality we can construct, is more important than the process of science itself, and necessary for science to be conducted. We can point to authority in the sense we have described, but we could also point to some entity, force, or object that is not interpreted as any sort of authority, but as something that simply is or does as it does. Because humans are adept at recognizing patterns in a way that works prior to the rational faculties, this makes a lot of sense to us. We look not to a concept of authority rationally understood, but to particular objects suggesting that they are a source of knowledge. We may for example imagine a nature god, or a god representing some recurrent aspect of nature like lightning. We may imagine a fetish object, or a token representing some value. And of course, we recognize other entities like ourselves in a way that is very different from our regard for any other entity in the world. How much like ourselves they would need to be may vary, but we have a sense of likeness and know when we are dealing with another human, or some entity we would regard as spiritually, politically, or personally relevant. This sense is not hardcoded or eternal, but something that emerged from a basic germ allowing us to assess objects.
For anything that can be regarded as an authority, for science or any other purpose, it is only recognized by people, rather than existing in the world. It is recognized by this primitive process to allow any other authority to exist. We need not regard "science" as the spiritual authority of note, or as something relevant at any level of authority. We can apply this germ of reasoning not towards science but some other design regarding the world. So far as we are concerned with the reality a model of the world points to, as I am attempting in this book, we at least temporarily rely on this germ of reasoning being used for scientific purposes. We do not yet have institutions ready-made for us to systematize this process rationally. That process is described a couple of chapters from now. To attain that level of development, we must pass through two stages. One is the processes of daily living that we would do in a world absent of significant struggles, where struggle is obviated and we regard the world largely as events which proceed without the dominance of that language. The second is recognition of struggle at the highest levels of the world, which is not a trivial thing, and devolves into the struggles between societies, within societies, and ultimately down to struggles between individuals and within themselves. The former is what I wish to describe in the remainder of this chapter. The latter is the subject of the next chapter.
"If the mayor of your village obtains a concession for you over the neighbouring villages, you are pleased with him, you respect him; city-dwellers exhibit the same desire to exercise superiority over other towns in the vicinity. The provinces compete with each other, and there are struggles of personal interest between nations which are called wars., Among the efforts made by all these factions of mankind, can we see any which aims directly at the common good?"
- Henri, Comte de Saint-Simon, "Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva to His Contemporaries"
It seems simple enough that when the multitude of petty struggles and conflicts in the world are seen past, that much of the world proceeds by laws which make sense to the inhabitants. In the main, human existence, even in a savage existence, is remarkably regular, and periods of conflict are intermittent and never carried out for too long. Even as society develops, and antagonistic relations like slavery and humiliation become routine, the individual acts to enforce those relations consume a small portion of time, and must do so. Those who would pursue war or conflict out of some sense of pleasure can only do so for so much time, with such resources that allow the hunt to continue, and the pleasure of the kill is a momentary pleasure. Often, the hunter returns with nothing to show for his effort, and the activities of the hunt are less about the thrill of the kill and more about having something to do. The hunt is not even carried out for the pure joy of killing, but often carried out because it provides meat, exercise, and purpose. The hunter in savage and primitive society doubles as the soldier, scout, and free man, and those were the qualities defended, more than a cult purely devoted to the thrill of killing. Even the cult of war in its most elaborate form cannot survive as a cult devoted to the thrill of torture - such a cult would in actuality be something very different, which is at present beyond the scope of our writing.
If that is so, then it makes sense to many in the world that we would, given a choice, not wage incessant war, and could see the appeal of mitigating the practices of war, such that we could do what we wanted to do before politics came to us - live our lives and associate with each other in ways that are mutually beneficial, so far as we would desire that. Conflict for its own sake is typically a losing proposition for the individual, outside of a niche where elevated hostility presents a substantive reward. The resolution to this problem seems to a naive soul like a trivial one, and the primary barrier is political. This is of course entirely correct - the state of war and endemic misery among mankind is a state chosen. It is not one we chose for ourselves, but one chosen by those who could impose it and saw no reason not to do so, and had no reason to ever stop doing what they did. No decency in the soul of humanity convinced a bully to stop, and in an environment where bullies are sacrosanct and granted explicit and absolute impunity, the chance of decency prevailing is precisely 0.0000%. In reality, that situation is never so immaculate. It can only be engineered with technical precision in our time, and those who desired such a world have indeed conspired to create it. That world was never a given of the universe, and the ideology naturalizing this state of affairs is a complicated matter, beyond the scope of this writing. It is clear to anyone who believes history can exist that this situation arose because it could, just as our nascent freedom existed because it could and we could before it was snuffed out.
Authority did not arise purely out of a reaction to this war and violence, as if war and struggle were the sole motor of the world. Authority preceded struggle conceptually and had to, and authority in the genuine sense did not need to regard an existing struggle to be a meaningful authority or force in the world. We can indeed consider authorities that are entirely benign and interested in the good of the ruler, ruled, and the world as a whole. This is not at all un-natural, and would be a necessary precondition for any society to exist at all. Even in this denuded world, the interests of genuine authority often entail something other than struggle for its own sake. The ideology of unrelenting struggle for no purpose is a tool used by certain people, and usually the believers in such an ideology are not the governing power or even immediate subordinates, but the scum of humanity assigned a cybernetic task of culling the ecology, thinking of little more than their cheap thrill and the next supply of drugs, booze, or low-quality prolefeed to sustain their Satanic, filthy existence - the lifeblood of a failed race and abomination that is cheap to animate and exists solely to do their part. Such people have been commonplace, but it is only due to the dominance of eugenics that they were selected for and told to maximize their proclivities, at the expense of literally anything else. In this way, the most basic germ which makes science or genuine knowledge of any sort possible can be destroyed, and this was intended by the thought leaders who pushed this scum into motion.
The authority arose not from an inner assertion or from a world's imposition, but where those two met - in our knowledge process and the ability of people to relate to the world. It arose, then, as a dialogue in the genuine sense, rather than the dialogue imagined as a struggle between two apes screeching and shouting. It does not take long for the germs of authority to compile the basic knowledge used to navigate the world, and for our purposes, this is enough to build a working knowledge independent of any judge beyond ourselves. We can, and have to, know what we are doing at a sufficient level to carry out our tasks. We may have trained ourselves to carry on merrily without concern for what we are doing, since we do not have time to turn inward on ourselves for every decision we make. We built personal authority with only a fragment of understanding of spiritual or temporal authority. Nowhere is it cleanly written for us what truly rules the world, whether we speak of temporal authorities in the form of the state and institutions, or the spiritual authority and the wisdom of the world and its people. No child is born with this knowledge, nor with full access to it given to them by pedagogy. Even if a pedagogue desired to give the child everything possible to know the proper spiritual and temporal authorities, there is only so much time, and given the nature of spiritual and temporal authorities humanity has recognized, the answers are an even greater challenge.[3]
It is typical for humans to transfer this dialogue from things to people, who are themselves things and founts of knowledge. The human is much more sophisticated in knowledge than an inanimate thing, being what they are, and so it is common for humans to center entities like themselves in their understanding of the world. This is illusory, since there is a large world outside of humanity, but it is a sufficient understanding given the scale of those concepts we hold relevant. We don't really care about the quantity of some substance, or the qualities of various artifacts. Those quantities and qualities are relevant because we must exist around other people. If we lived in a world without people, or where people largely agreed to let each other be, our sense of existence and what is valuable would be very different, and much of what we take for granted would be absurd. But, we are in contact with people, in whatever environment that happens. Even if there are no active people, we have a habit of sensing another entity just out of sight, or granting to non-human entities human qualities. The reasons why are numerous, but we will often relate to the world not with crude statements of facts, but with stories that allow us to attain many meanings in a compact space. It is only after familiarizing ourselves with that existence that we begin formally dissecting the world into facts, scientific knowledge, and formal systems, where the question of authority becomes relevant. Even if we do this on our own, by whatever tools are available to us, we would build a similar assembly of knowledge and work with it, and would be able to relate to alien systems as best as we can. There is never truly a point where two systems, however different, are too alien to ever understand each other in principle. It may be unlikely, but there is no grand barrier of knowledge or wisdom that can cleanly split the world into valid and invalid. There is just the world, and our attempt to survive in it and find something in it worthwhile.
And so, with the trivial struggles in the natural world preceding us, we see a world where it seems humans could very easily resolve their social affairs by some generally agreed upon plan, or some modus operandi that is common in the society even if not planned. Bad things may happen, either by intellectual failure, moral failure, or misfortune, but in general, the procession of society has to be sensical for the arrangement to continue in any workable form. At a basic enough level, human societies must be seen as working towards some end, and there is no reason to believe that human societies could not be better by some simple and agreeable adjustments. If the societies were too abominable, humans would refuse to participate, and if they were locked into such a society, they would turn towards degrading themselves to spite their masters, suicide, or any number of escapes. Such actions would make any material incentive of such abject slavery a moot point. Slaveries could persist in history to the extent they did because there was some tolerability in the arrangement. Non-cooperative slaves were killed or humiliated or both to set an example to the rest of the slaves, but there would also be carrots, among them manumission and the status of the freedman or becoming a citizen equal to the freeborn in all respects. Even as a slave, there was some life from the perspective of the slave. The slave does not exist in his or her own mind as a tool for the master no matter how conditioned they are to accept such a fate. There is some small iota of life, if only for the slave to carry out its functions without overbearing managerialism. Very often, the slaves could find ways to avoid work, and lashings and humiliations only worked so far when a productive goal was desired. The conceits of the master's ideology or bourgeois ideology have no relevance to the genuine functioning of any slavery, and no slave master is ignorant of that. Whatever a master may say to sell the institution of slavery, the master knows that no slavery is ever passively enforced or a thing taken for granted. Considerable ink is expended on the topic of managing slaves and every iota of labor that can be extracted from them. Even if the master is ignorant of the scientific details of working life, he is aware that there is such a thing and that some taskmaster is delegated the responsibility of ensuring the slaves' product meets some standard of quality. The master is certainly not ignorant of the quality of product coming out of his plantation or factory. If his slaves are to be an investment worth keeping, his fortune and the institution as a whole is dependent on both qualities and quantities to reproduce the master and his institution. If slavery didn't work towards productive ends, then it would serve some other interest of life. If slavery were to be purely a death cult, and the slaves were already enclosed and at the whim of masters, then there would be no rigamarole of "extermination through labor", as if the joy of making workers suffer were the point. Slaves would simply be lined up and their throats slashed, one by one, or fed into a literal meat grinder and disposed of. These are the contradictory images of the Holocaust conjured by post-war Fabian propagandists, both of which are intended to obscure what actually happened during the Nazi period or why the concentration camps existed; and the dual false narratives serve the purpose of rehabilitating the Nazis who want to repeat the process and perfect it. Since the Nazis and Fabians feed from the same trough and believe in the same global cause, this is unsurprising.[4] The aim of eugenism is to make horrific and terrible struggle appear as a natural feature, such that it is invisible and carried on "out of sight, out of mind", as the slogan went to invisibilize the eugenic cull in the United States.
Without significant struggle, the problem of slavery evaporates. Slavery, after all, is premised on a lie and continuous management of the slave, which is always a wasteful and unnecessary task absent a struggle that is not really economic. For economic necessity, our free labor and cooperation would be far preferable to the alternative of property, avarice, and malice that have been the sad rule of human society. At a basic level, this is understood and acted upon. Primitive society rested not on domination but on the association of members of a band who had reasons to be together, and who saw life outside of the tribe as life outside of the law, where they would be alone and open to attack. The band or tribe could not exist without a cooperative basis, and the mitigation of struggle to an acceptable minimum. So too does the pin factory rely on cooperative labor in the productive enterprise. The management of the pin factory is an alien to the social process of production, and the management of workers in their labors - whether by a foreman or by the workers knowing what to do and communicating to each other - functions best not on the basis of struggle but by shared interest. Management of the money and political consequences of production is a whole other matter, and humans are not mindless producers. In the main, though, we produce things with the expectation that doing so is useful, and that is why productivity in society would be valued in the first instance. Even if the goal in the end is struggle, product at this basic level is a necessary precondition of any struggle beyond basic grunting or the petty intercine struggles of the human race. If, however, slavery itself is the prime want of society - if the thrill of beating a slave becomes the product itself, or the aim of production - then the values are completely inverted. Far from being naturally industrious, the aim of every free man will be to work as little as possible, and sap as much morale from the enslaving beast that lords over them, seeming far away yet always ready to whip someone who refuses to go along with this slavery. The aim of every slave will be to give as little as possible, become indolent, attempt escape or overthrow of the master, or become free - and if possible, gain legitimacy in free society. If management is conducted on the basis of work being the task of slaves, then no one has any good reason to believe production is worth anything at all. Most of all the slaves have no reason to ever regard production as anything more than a worsening of their conditions, unless they steal away the product for eventual rebellion. The free, too, face competition from slave labor if they themselves are laborers, and the proprietor and elite classes have long understood the economic failures of slave societies, and the mechanisms at work which lead to those failures. No master is ignorant about slavery and its long-term effects, whatever they may believe about keeping their property. The ideal is not a world where men are trained to love slavery, but a world where all men are free and choose to engage in this project. This is not some unattainable goal if we look at the raw material required to allow it, and the reality that much of humanity's labor and effort is spent on nothing but making each other miserable, for no truly necessary purpose. If that did happen, though, political society and every concept of humanity we have ever known is shattered within days, and the reasons why are a very complex machine which very likely will not end without significant changes in human existence. It is not something innate to the race, as if humans were "designed" for slave societies. No such slavery existed in primitive times, and in most societies slavery was an exceptional status rather than the rule. Typical human societies were dominated by the peasant who lived his or her life, and occasionally dreamed of something bigger or at least different from the humdrum existence of farming or rearing children. Industrial society is dominated not by chattel slaves or the lowest depradations the proletarian faced. As the cities of modernity formed, men of many trades meet, for this society was not born in a blank slate, where liberalism created year zero and reset all humanity to the same low standard. Men began this not as the lowest factory worker, but as printers, tailors, and various skilled trades that were already a part of urban life, in addition to new trades that industrial society allowed like the mechanic. The proletarian in social rank was seen as all the same only in ideology, but in practical function, grades of civic worth were apparent to liberal and socialist thinkers alike, and never truly ignored.
This distinction in civic worth did not correspond necessarily to any built-in rights of the favored over the disfavored. So too did a large swath of the proletariat remain largely ignored - the submerged beggars and itinerant workers, who were often identified and attacked on sight. This attack of the lowest class was not a universal habit or naturally ordained, and at first the lowest class could and did find alliances with the more favored workers, since it was understood that the injury of the lowest class was a prelude to the injury of all. It took more moral persuasion and political machinations to create the familiar pattern of knowing who to lock out, who to promote, and how this game really worked within the ranks of the proletarian, and this varied depending on which political faction or ideology someone held. Any faction suggesting the lowest class could be rehabilitated would be immediately attacked and destroyed, as it was contrary not to economic necessity or the realities of struggle, but to many political ideas that allowed graspers to find their desired scapegoats. In both an economic and military sense, the lowest class are either irrelevant or potential assets to someone, somewhere, simply by virtue of providing labor if permitted. The lowest class, indeed, works under the worst conditions and creates the greatest profitability simply by virtue of their miserable compensation, and the lowest class accepts this because they have nowhere else to go. Only once their bodies have degraded significantly and they are no longer suitable for work do they give up, and being caged animals with nowhere to go, they do not survive long. Capitalism is no friend of beggars, but it sure likes keeping them around as the best scapegoat, and convinces the working class to turn on them whenever possible with the most spurious moral philosophy. The same mentality of exploitation and contempt for labor is then transposed onto the entire working class and the lower grades of bourgeois subordinates. Work is for the simps and the retards, and the true value of society is in exploitation and malice alone. Politically, this makes sense to a certain logic. Realistically, this is a disaster. If such a society were faced with a genuine external danger that required genuine qualities and quantities for survival, it would fail. Interally, the logic works not as a productive enterprise but as a disciplinary machine, choking the life out of the country and insisting that this predation is the true fount of production and wisdom. The logic predates capitalism, and is seen in many versions of socialism, however enlightened and however much they are aware of the problem. The logic is rarely ever seen in purified form. The classical liberals were aware that this logic gone amok would destroy society, and warn specifically against this outcome. It would be presumed that reasonable men facing an existential crisis or the outcome of a world enveloped in senseless struggle and malice would recognize such a society as irrevocably failed, and that in the long run it would strip bare the very resource that allowed it to continue - labor, both in the lowest forms and in the more developed forms that would police it. In the long run, the drivers and managers of the workers required the product of workers. This aim is not felt among the comfortable aristocracy, who saw all other classes and interests as enemies, and internalized not an economic or martial logic, but the logic of aristocracy since time immemorial. That logic forms the true seed of humanity's fall and demise, rather than this or that economic system or practice. Even the advocates of slave society recognized the failures of such an arrangement, and could not seriously present a philosophical defense of slavery as good in its own right. It took the perversion of the Austrian School to begin such a crusade, and Galton's Eugenics to turn that drive into his overriding "Jehad".
Struggle begins not at the cosmic or transcendental level, where such a concept is superfluous, but at the basic process of knowledge. Struggle is only truly carried out by knowing entities, for whom the concept holds any relevance. It begins not as war or the highest stage of conflict, but as a nudging or impulse in entities which can conceive of it and act in accord with that struggle. It is only appreciably struggle for entities which are capable of grasping and holding the concept - and so, the eugenic interest of life described prior is often the true catalyst, rather than any material necessity or a genuine inevitability of conflict over resources, or a difficulty in allocating the pool of limited resources in a given area. No such inevitability is evident in the natural world or any process contained within. We have seen that humans, like any animals, will avoid struggle to the point of refusing to live, if they are so inclined or they sense that they are incapable of any appreciable resistance to something that works against them. Struggle is, on some level, a choice of some knowing entity to make it so. Why they do so is ultimately a matter for the individual in question. The struggle does not exist as a built-in antagonism between the two agents, when speaking of its genuine origins. We may identify two mututally exclusive conditions of being that meet and cannot be resolved by any other process, but this in of itself does not initiate the struggle. If neither could overpower the other or the cost of struggle outweighed every other thing the parties could do, it is far more likely they two parties elect to ignore each other. They could studiously avoid conflict and engage in a standoff if their contact cannot be avoided, and do so until one party flinches or both exhaust their resources without any struggle taking place. They could even agree to a formal duel or limited struggle, just to get it over with, without the struggle becoming general or escaping a defined purview. Economic competitors, for example, are not intrinsically involved in any struggle. Those in business may see their affairs as purely a competition for resources, demonstrate their superiority, and hold that the results be judged not by a pitched struggle in the meaningful sense, but by adjudication of the outcome and the surrender of the loser by whatever terms were set. There is a struggle implied in the competition, but the struggle would never spill over into the concepts of struggle or open war or violence, and would scarcely seem like a great struggle at all. Two parties have a disagreement, resolve it competitively, and that is that. This is not a struggle at all, but absent a sobering influence, this non-struggle is granted the qualities of a "jihad" and carried out with destructive zeal just the same, while pretending that what is happening isn't actually happening. In a technical sense, this is the case. No formal war or state of conflict is entered or acknowledged, and for all of the destruction caused by this competition, to the competing parties this is "just business" and is not conducted as if it were a true struggle or war in the sense humans regard the concept. A war may break out between the subordinates, but this war is for the instigators an invisible thing or externality, which they dismiss in their own judgements of the world and what they see as relevant.
We see here the seeds for the present-day environment of unlimited transgression from above - that it is premised on an understanding that authority can be disrupted, so long as control over an environment is total, or perceived to be such by a member of society. This is not a trivial thing, and in the past similar concepts were operative to discipline social actors. At its root, authority does not truly rise from below in total. It only originates there to describe a world that preceded us, where authorities were long established and captured another soul. Man is "born free" in some sense, in that there is no hobgoblin intrinsically moving it, but in all of the senses that truly matter, humans recognize as soon as they can that they are beholden to a much larger world, against which they are individually defenseless. This was implicit in the formation of the liberal idea - it did not entail a naive and infantile belief that some inner light summoned goodness that was inviolable. It was instead a theory suggesting the origin of institutions, rights, and why those who rule could rule. It did not merely apply to human institutions, as if humans were a special type of matter that was sacrosanct and granted privilege in the natural order of the world. The only reasonable interpretation of the liberal understanding is that spiritual authority, and thus that which we would put in the place of a godhead or Heaven, is something we ascertained, rather than something pushed into us constantly from above. None of that is inconsistent with theories of the self that predated liberalism, and can be found in many religious traditions. It has long been known that human beings can choose to reject "God" or any imperious authority. Kings and temporal authorities were not made of magic, and spiritual authorities did not invoke a just-so story to rule, but a long history and understanding that made the institutions of religion and education viable. The story of how absolute rulers commanded slaves, serfs, soldiers, and everything else is a long one that was condensed into a theory of divine right or the theories of monarchical government that prevailed before liberalism. These people were not stupid and understood the meaning of a republic and despotism, and did not necessarily value republics in the way we are told was inevitable.[5] The important takeaway from this is not that the chicken came before the egg or vice versa - which is a koan a child should learn to see through - but that states and societies can only persist through active measures. The seeming passivity of the state is preferred only when it is possible to elide struggle or re-define struggle as something other than it is, but it is only through violent ideological imposition that the members of society were forced to disregard what their senses told them about modernity. The final step was to suggest an unbreakable "dialogue" between ruler and ruled - the famous "dialectic" as an abstraction divorced from the intent of such a thing - and that this dialogue was foundational to existence and immune to distance, proximity, or occulting. Those in the know of what this really was possessed a weapon they could use with impunity. They would then insinuate to those out of the know, through various means, that this "dialogue", which was always one-directional, was inescapable and functioned to create an inchoate blob which cannot be comprehended, except through sing-song metaphors and slogans. To make this work required a vast educational undertaking which sought to distort all sense of perspective and imposed an alien judgement on that which existed before. In other words, human beings were to be transformed, and this transformation in reality was never intended to be universal or equal.
At a basic level, this germ that recognizes authority is equal in one sense - that all are participants in the same world. The key to distorting reality was to eliminate barriers of distance and substance. This is where modern technology proved instrumental, and the full accounting of this process is beyond the scope of the present chapter. It does not take a great mind to see that this is what has happened. As modern technology advanced, and this advance did not follow a world-historical mission that was unknowable, communication could first travel by telegraph and telephone wires, and then through the internet and through a machine which could automatically filter information and report it to temporal authorities like the state.[6] At a basic level, all of these communications and transfers of material operate by laws which can be understood by even the simplest human. Communication of ideas alone, or the transport of material by automobile or plane or any other locomotion, does not possess any intrinsic power to change the ideas, McLuhan's wisdom notwithstanding. To truly seal this form of reality control required a preponderance of both physical force - assembled in the machinery built during the 20th and early 21st century - and the establishment of informational and knowledge authorities whose capacities were consolidated and too vast for a single human subject to possibly adapt to. Once established, the native sociality of humans could be systematically destroyed by a campaign of unlimited terror, purges, biological warfare, moral degradation, and all of the hallmarks of neoliberal society.
I have, in skipping to the endgame, shown where this problem of authority truly originated - that human beings, far from being "pure points of light" or "black boxes", are nothing of the sort. This concept of the "black box" is not the traditional understanding of the human mind or soul, and it is not something ingrained in Christian theology or any other religious tradition. Far from it, a reading of the Bible and most religious traditions would warn against any such interpretation, and deem it heretical. The flesh and brain of Man, a type of animal, was what it was, and securing that flesh was among the commandments delivered to adherents. The spiritual conception that defined "human", or any prior concept, was an altogether different sense of self. In the older society, biopolitics was not the default assumption that violently asserted itself through technological means. Those means did not yet exist. The drive to do this was latent in the major religions, and very much present in the formation of Christianity. At the same time, both Christianity and its Greco-Roman philosophical forebears warned against precisely this devaluation of the experience of life, and similar warnings can be found in religious traditions around the world, and in folk wisdom of even primitive tribes. It took the maximal depravity of people like Galton to lie so brazenly about things that made native sense to many people, that allowed them to navigate the world. The foul "Jehad" of Galton was not a singular departure point, and Galton did not act alone, but it is with eugenics that the program of habitual lying and imperious invasion found its first modern expression, and it is that program which inspired every other program of habitual lying and cheating seen since, from German eugenics to the New Age death cults. The charge of the Galtonites is that if Man is just an animal, than Man's place in the world is automatically dictated by imperious authorities and just-so stories. In doing so, the Galtonites invoke a temporary hypocrisy, where they declare that they are alone one with Nature and God, that they are the beginning and end. Such a tenet is in line with every other lie of the eugenic creed, repeated violently and with ever-intensifying screaming. And so, eugenics required not merely technological or educational means to perpetuate it, but a willingness to commit to absolute impunity and the thrill of torture for its own sake. It is for this reason that the atrocities of Mengele and fellow travelers are not merely allowed, but encouraged and glorified as good in of themselves.
Where did it originate then? It originated not in a material condition mandating struggle, or a reasoned impulse of knowledge, but a thrill shouting for it, somewhere in the recesses of animal nature. Humans, like any animal, did not arise as blank slates, nor did they arise in an environment that was sterile. The ugliness of the animal kingdom, both that which was inborn and that which was acquired through animal sociality, passes to the human race. The human race is born not with wisdom or a gift of fire, but with fratricide, ritual sacrifice, orgies, and rampant cruelty. Even the story of Prometheus or Lucifer granting Man dubious gifts does not stand up to any scrutiny. The men who discovered fire, and this likely was reproduced independently many times and communicated outside of the channels of predatory spiritual authority, did so because knowledge of heat was available to man even without language, and someone seeing fire-making would look at the example and reverse-engineer it. In primitive society, the imperious authority beating the child and telling him or her "you can't, you can't, you can't" could not be enforced too rigorously, and even with such an apparatus, it takes immense pressure to truly destroy a child in the way Germanic education does to us. Those who endured that may, if allowed to live any sort of life, crawl out of the ruin and assemble something of their own. People with severe damage, both inborn and from the cruelty of the human race, manage to reassemble enough functioning to pick up language, do some chores, and build whatever knowledge they can. It is the thrill of imperious torture which comes to those people, kicks them down to remind them "once retarded, always retarded", and resets the cycle. That is the most evident origin of struggle for us today, and it is so dominant that it overrides the other basic impulses that might have inspired struggle, such as the passions, lust, envy, fickle greed, or an aspiration to change the world for some goal that was deeply felt in the soul.
The passions generally are too broad a topic, and describing the passions in volumnious detail produces too many vagaries to be reliable, even now. We can ascertain that those passions still exist and exert considerable control over the impulses of mankind, and those passions can drive two parties into a genuine struggle. So too can struggles be waged over ideas or sentiments which are very meaningful and valued by both sides, without degenerated into the hedonistic torture cult of Galtonism and its forebears. A proper description of the passions requires some experience of the world to know what they are, and visible examples of them. One way to destroy the passions is to equate their expression with failure and retardation, and to present degenerated "virtues" suggesting that expressing stupid sentiments is superior to the raw passions of old or expressions of concepts like love or tenderness. And so, any sign of kindness in males is "gay", and the hunt for homosexuals is more concerned with upholding and insane and sadistic image of predatory males above all others, then anything homosexuals did. Naturally, homosexual men have a long history of predatory and violent behavior, which is directed to support the eugenic creed, creating many filthy Satanic shock troops whose remaining decencies are destroyed.[7] Even the nature of the homosexual purge is obfuscated by ideology, primitive conceits, visceral disgust, and a fear of internal policing suggesting any reason why this crusade was undertaken. If it were described with dispassionate language and without the general fear of the present society, all of the production made about male homosexuality is rather ridiculous, and exists very obviously to uphold the eugenic creed rather than any other purpose or even a desire to stamp out the homosexual. The proliferation of homosexuality in the past century shows that the rulers have no intention of fixing anyone, and desire to make all sexual behavior as disgusting as possible, so that the bastards can push their artificial insemination and torture cult sex and say this is the only permissible "love", rationed out by the masters. When that is laid bare, it really makes the obsession of individual sexual acts seem strange, given the long history of known perversion in the human race and how disinteresting it is compared to anything else we would do with our time. The same process plays out with every other passion or sentiment. "Fun" is rebranded as a saccharine exercise of smiling in public with a psychopath grin. "Love" is a commodity doled out only by masters to slaves. Any passion, even a mild one, suggesting deviation from this screaming Satanic mass is to be ruthlessly attacked, without any apparent rationale and at great expense. This is intended.
The passions, whatever they are, are not the sole instigator of this germ of struggle or authority. We may develop some primitive reasoning or sense telling us to fight or flee, which would be expected for life that had long existed in such an environment. There is no passion involved in that instinct, but a quick check of whether someone can win or lose, and assessment of options that takes place without formal rational deliberation. These habits can be honed and modified, but they always serve some purpose of life that isn't really rational. Again, the overriding aim of the present regime is to debilitate our judgements of such instincts, and replace the behaviors not with something better, but with an incessant shouting - "die! die! die!" - that paralyzes the cattle and prepares them for slaughter. This is the ultimate goal of Galtonism - to have a weapon to deploy which allows them to shout "die!" and kill with unlimited, absolute, and total impunity. That is their thrill and sole purpose. There is nothing else to them, no hidden mystery or purpose behind the lies. It feeds itself and recognizes no other master, and if there is some purpose to it, it hasn't worked and does not secure anything. All that is good in the world exists in spite of such a demonic doctrine.
With all of that done, the struggle serves very little genuine purpose. It is an inducement to give up struggle until the last possible moment that the predatory hold dear. In this way, the state's monopoly on legal force can have the most effect for the lowest cost. This is not the true motive for why states do this, for the machine to impose these conditions is extremely expensive in labor, resources, and human toil. Yet, for the purposes of a state ruling, it appears on paper to be inviolable and perfected. The only problem with such an apparatus is that it has to operate in a real world, with actual flesh and blood humans who have no reason whatsoever to go along with such a program. If humans were points of light pursuing imaginary hedonism points, and this were reduced to its basest possible form, then all life dies screaming forever and all of our efforts are a waste of time. That is not what humans actually are or how any society can exist. Instead of struggles happening at the uttermost end of necessity, or because of a constant thrill for doing so, struggles are instead rooted in the decisions of real actors for whatever purposes they hold. They are, at least for one party, a choice. That choice may be the result of some interplay or conditions that the actor did not fully understand or conceive, but there is no struggle without deliberation and intent. A struggle "in nature" is no struggle at all, and a state of permanent "natural struggle" is a non-sequitur that evades any guilt associated with the struggle.
Return to Table of Contents | Next Chapter
[1] Idealism and materialism are of course monist ontologies, and it is an abiding trait of monism that all is made subordinated to the One. How this is approached depends on what is conditioned into a subject, such that their choice really doesn't matter. People could only have made the choices that were sensical to the overmind. I maintain that we can only speak of one world in which all things happen, and in that sense, the view I present is in line with monism, in that there will be an overmind of sorts - in this case, the world itself, which doesn't actually "think" but is nonetheless a singular entity which all must reckon with. Because monism is a useful ontology for describing authority and political society, I have kept it intact. The "oneness" of the universe only exists in our conception of it, rather than any genuinely uniting force or principle other than existence itself. The systems concept should allow authority to be recognized not merely as a principle we can follow but something which can stem from particular things, each with their own history and emerging in their own way. What has been purposed as a mechanism for totalizing control can be claimed by us to reverse that process, so that we might be able to live. It is highly unlikely, for eugenism was allowed to go on for too long, but perhaps some future society would at least recall that what was done in this time was an unforgivable abomination, and it would be enough to know that such abominations will be defeated in the future, if only for a time. What eugenics did to us will never be undone, even if somehow decency can survive. The point here is to be able to break the monistic conceits about the soul or society, without giving up the useful knowledge of authority, for even if the world isn't really like this, many who aspire to rule will think monistically and have given themselves over to that view completely and with all of its implications. Eugenics created a very parodic form of anti-monism which does not allow connections to be made specifically to advance its psychological pseudoscience and the categories of thoughtcrimes it decreed into existence, all of which were "obviously" hereditary and things that the absolutely perfect perverts like Galton could never be. I can tell from my experience and reading Galton that the man is a crazed pervert, and in many ways he resembles me, and I know the teaching methods of his class and society were designed to produce monsters just like him. I at least have the good sense to recognize that perversion is not something to cherish, let alone place at the center of a political idea, and this humble author can tell you eroticism is a dead end. It is no surprise that the Right always goes back to it, since its genuine program is so obviously abominable, and they only possess enough low cunning to make the rest of us suffer, all for their masters to whom they supplicate by some dark force in the human race.
[2] The anarchist drivel obsesses with hierarchy as a clever substitute for their real mission of usurping and abrogating authority, conflating authority with hierarchy which is bad, yet at the same time presuming a natural "just-so" ordering of the world creates a natural aristocracy and a thorough hierarchy that no one is allowed to question. In other words, "Oceania has no law". Authority has nothing to do with social values. Social ranks can be, but are not necessarily, informed by authoritative knowledge, but there is no prescription to say which of these are justified in a legalistic sense. At the heart of this is an obsessive invasion of personal authority and the means by which an individual would be aware of the constantly changing rules of anarchism, which are always rigged in favor of an aristocracy that is taboo to acknowledge. Anarchism could only exist by exploiting republican sentiments and institutions and making them into mockeries. We will have much reason to continue describing this stupid "philosophy" throughout our later writings. The key act is to sever authority from its genuine fount and claim it entirely for the eugenic interest of certain people - in effect, those who claim authority is unknowable shout "die, die, die!" in various forms. At the same time, the counterpoint of the fascist "authoritarian" is given, who is a similar sort of pissant who sees performance as more important than authoritative knowledge. Above all, the conflation of authority with rule, economics, and purely human conceits, and then reducing those conceits to a symbolic form that is disconnected from genuine knowledge or the very processes knowledge relies upon, is necessary for such foulness to perpetuate. Authority in the sense I describe is not a ruling idea, but a condition which can allow rule. It is not limited to the purpose of rule, but rulers value authority for the same reason others value it - because rulers are beholden to the same world as the rest of us scum, no matter how grotesque the rigging is.
[3] Here we might visualize the scene from The Matrix, where Neo is taught Kung-Fu by a machine uploading the knowledge to his brain, and the faux-profound statement "I know Kung-Fu" becoming a sad piece of American culture. Such a machine is not inconceivable in principle, but it is very clear the showrunners referenced a faith that ideas can be fed uncritically into the brain like so much digital information and will be processed instantaneously. Both Neo and the audience have been primed to believe this is how knowledge can be transferred, and this is not a trivial process. Today we are familiar with the computer and its workings, and so the transfer of files and information and analyzing them for meaning can appear trivial. It is in the ideology and bad philosophy presented in the movie that the errors of this thinking become evident, rather than the suggestion that it is possible. We could, if we established both trust and a faith in our internal workings, transfer knowledge very rapidly, and we could assimilate meaningful connections with that knowledge. When the transfer of information cannot be contested, the ideologue insists ad nauseum that the pupil doesn't really "know" the information handed to them, no matter what demonstration of knowledge the pupil shows. In this way, the pupil is taught that any process in his or her mind is not consequential, and the process of knowing itself is monopolized by the institution. The reality is that such a process, even if it seems trivial, is still a process. We can question it as much as we like, but the resolution of questioning does not come with the pedagogue's imposition but whether we continue to give a shit about this question. It is here where indolence, fear, apathy, avarice, indulgence in fetishes, and various stoppers are used to stunt further connections, to induce the pupil to give up at precisely the correct moment where an illegal connection of meaning is made.
[4] The Holocaust is still a taboo, due to the prevalence of revisionist histories, but in short: if the Nazis' goal were purely extermination, fewer political enemies would have survived and fewer qualms would be made about the doing this. The true purpose of the camps, aside from removing political enemies from society which was obvious, was to provide the Nazis slave labor and, more importantly, medical research subjects. The chief activity in the camps was to measure and analyze every aspect of the inmates, a prelude to the mass state institutions that were already a feature of industrial society. This feature would continue unabated after the war, and it is what happens to psychiatric inmates today, which far more social acceptance and far more lurid rituals and tortures envisioned. The Nazi camps should not be considered "just another example", for the political aims of the camps were unique and produced an expected death toll. The imprisoned had no reason to ever accept this slavery, and among the games Nazi sadists loved was to tell the inmates to kill other inmates, thus following the habit of blooding that was inherent to the Nazi and Germanic religion at work. In the later psychiatric slavery, there was still in principle a society of laws governing the treatment of slaves, and while the underclass would never again know freedom, many cases allowed the underclass to return to civilian life. The death toll of psychiatric slavery remains hidden, since it is not politically convenient to acknowledge eugenic purges in the millions after the Nazi period. Under neoliberal barbarism, the killing of the underclass would be carried out not in the institutions directly, but through soft-kill tactics, through the criminal prison system - ritualistic torture and kill stories would be printed with relish from Fabian-esque reporters pretending to care, as a warning to us if we transgress the unwritten law - and through economic deprivation and the total lockout of the underclass from any social activity. That was something the Nazis could never engineer, for it was contrary to the war and political aims they had to abide during their reign. The heirs of Nazism are, naturally, the vanguard for neoliberalism and the nightmare that came out starting in 1970, and the aims of Nazism would be fully rehabilitated by the start of the 21st century.
I do not wish to question numbers or compare which is worse than the other, since the two refer to distinct aims and governments under different situations, but it is important to see what eugenics can do in war, without any regard for civil society or the presumption of law. The Nazis were by design a lawless regime that reveled in torture and humiliation for its own sake, but faced realistic limits on their activities. Their aims with medical experimentation were funded by their fellow travelers outside of Germany, who looked at the torture and humiliation of the camps as a desirable quality in of itself and a scientific experiment to be repeated around the world. The pseudoscience and viciousness of their class would indeed be reproduced in psychiatric slavery and the social experiments of post-war society, all indicating their plan to do to the majority of humanity what the Nazis did to a minority political enemy. That is the number I truly dread, rather than numbers in the past. What we have seen since 2008 is an indicator of humanity in total freefall, in which the thrill of torture exceeds anything the Nazis ever accomplished, and their Satanic religion can operate more openly than it ever did before. With that in mind, it is only a matter of time before transgression leads to the death of millions, if not billions, and this time the fanatics march with greater purpose than they ever could before. They walk among us and enjoy the thrill of torture, spreading it in all aspects of 21st century society, and demand absolute impunity for their actions. Those who attempt to stop them are ruthlessly stamped out and the thrill of torture finds its next target. We are made today to tolerate the intolerable, when a reasonable society would see the only solution is to do to them what they would do to us and no less. Moral equivalence does not apply here.
Of course, such an end could be averted if the bastards just, you know, didn't do this. It seems simple enough, from reading this chapter. The philosophy of struggle explains some of why this happened. The naturalization of struggle, such that it becomes an unmentionable feature of the landscape, makes this total carnage and absolute terror appear like the air, and makes honesty and decency unseemly. That is a part of the true horror of Galtonism.
[5] The true value of republicanism is not a naive and simpering belief in human goodness, as you probably gathered, but a belief in the role of the state and the political class that was peculiar to European civilization, due to a number of historical factors. To most of the world, despotic government was the only government, and it becomes clear that all of the true forms of human government are despotic. Even during the imperial and monarchical regimes, republican ideas were present in European civilization, and they are found throughout Christianity. In so many ways, Christianity encoded the republican virtues into its theology, and granted to them a religious veneer and numerous metaphors that would be understood to students. All of the European liberals operated with considerable knowledge of Christianity and its intent, and were not plagued by the same ignorance which rules today and is imposed through violent intercession of institutions. The meaning in Christianity not only suggests republican virtues, but notes the true nature of such a beast - absolute depravity, and the reality that men are not good creatures at all. It is here where the contradictory cosmological models in Christian thought, encouraged to keep the rubes in line, erode understanding of the religion's true purpose, if they are not acquainted with the education the better of the priests would have received. It should not surprise the reader that, far from a narrative of pure-hearted outsiders challenging an ignorant church, many key players in the liberal revolutions were knowledgeable Christians, if not priests. Among the players of the French Revolution were members of the priesthood who became master diplomats and political fixers, and there would be dissident radicals from the priesthood. Famously, Talleyrand the priest was a suspected atheist who scoffed at the traditions of the Church, and Seyes the priest encouraged both the rise of revolution and the conclusion placing Napoleon at its head. Regardless of affiliation, spiritual zeal from a religious tradition was found in both the French and American revolutions, and none of them subscribed to the infantile "religion of science" of Galtonism, which was understood immediately as the true closing of revolutionary thought. Even hardline de-Christianizers who espoused atheism suggested not a turbo-liberal idiocy of the sort we know today, but cults which sought to actively displace Christian institutions. The use of this is clear when considering an aim of the revolutionaries was to seize and distribute Church properties, and specifically the religious functions which tended to the poor and needy. It is especially strange then that the narrative of lumpens favoring revolution gains traction, because the historical experience of the lumpens is that revolutions are when they are purged by the millions and the thrill of killing them is encouraged. Revolution is despised by the lowest classes not because of their fickle nature, but because they do recognize history and the sadism of their social betters. By encouraging such expressions, the middle class technocrats who aspired to revolution actively encouraged the recruitment of the lower classes to oppose them. This could be encouraged if the aim of the technocrats was to reconcile with the ruling interest as capitalism consolidated into unfettered oligarchy, but was fatal to any technocrat who envisioned a future other than the one we got. The past century merely accelerated the worst of those tendencies, and in doing so, the technocratic apparatus would be overtaken fully by the eugenic interest and the ideology of Galton's Eugenics. It is only now that we see the final results, intended long in advance and kept afloat by lies and more lies. The "good republic" myth was helpful in facilitating this debilitation of anything that would stall such a movement, and it is only through the determination of the vast majority that want nothing to do with this program that we have anything to call our own in this time.
[6] And of course, the private sector. A great mystification is that the private sector was somehow separate from the public sector, when in reality "the public" had been claimed long ago by the oligarchs. The public in the sense of a democratic commons had been attacked in principle by the mere suggestion of eugenics and its violent purges killing millions and starting world wars.
[7] Example: one Ernst Röhm, a notorious example of Nazi homosexualism. I leave it to the reader to dig up that biography and Adolf Hitler's personal fondness. Many such cases are the norm of Nazism and its ilk.