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Struggle at the trivial level of everyday existence is, in the final analysis, irrelevant to the philosophies of struggle that came to prevail. For all that is written about war, politics, jihad, struggle, virtue, and every other topic of the sort, the everyday struggles are omitted and invisibilized. Simply dragging oneself out of bed to tolerate the stream of shit from political society and the internecine struggles of humanity is somehow not a real struggle, even though the environment created by that society made life unbearable enough that much of humanity dreads the coming of morning. This is intended, for some reasons I have already elaborated on. We would see struggle then as a contest of authority, which in trivial examples is resolved without any imperious rationale or great hardship. However shitty human society is, we do not ponder for too long the necessity of bringing ourself to social life to carry out what is necessary in this day of human bullshit. Of all the things we will have to struggle over in life, our own laziness should not be one of them. There is perhaps an argument to make about the long-term health of the body, the genuine need of recreation and rebirth to endure existence in such a society, but the answers to those questions are evident if we know ourselves and ask honestly what we are doing in this world. The greater personal and spiritual questions are a matter less of struggle in the philosophical sense, though we are made to struggle within ourselves, in interpersonal relationships, and with the spiritual concepts we deal with in existence. For many reasons, the philosophy of struggle is quite irrelevant to our actual lives. We do not live to endure the job for managers. We endure the job so we can live, and find something for ourselves. We then consider what we are doing in society and in the world, and if we are not fettered by a philosophy which consumes all in struggle for no purpose, we ask what our labors are truly for, and whether the world or human society could be better than the barest minimum. The question of struggle is always present, but it is not always active and pressing, demanding an answer which short-circuits the knowledge process that made any of this possible. The true origins of struggle are not a primordial force in the world nor a cosmic narrative superimposed on reality, and they are not the inevitable emergence of our existence by any means. Life is not meant to be struggle for struggle's sake, nor was it destined to be suffering. Life is aberrant and an anomaly, and so we act in accord with that reality; but there was no reason to suggest life was inherently bad or evil, or that life was destined to struggle in the way that we do. The beginning of serious struggle begins not at the smallest level or at the transcendent level imposed on reality, but in society itself and the institutions it created. Struggle is overwhelmingly a human concern, and the opposing entities in struggle are almost always other humans, rather than non-human life, inanimate objects, or the environment in total. Humans against most animals hold such a ridiculous advantage that a human has to practically make himself vulnerable to an angry bear or lion to lose that struggle, and for the lion or bear, they are not consumed by any political struggle against humanity or an individual human. The bear or lion sees either food or a potential threat, and given the propensity of humans and their generally violent disposition, you can hardly blame the bear for doing something that would make sense if we were in the bear's place. I wish to leave out the very complex interplay of language, technology, symbolic ideas, religion, and so on, and capture the essence of struggle at the level we appreciate the concept; that is, struggle within society, which revolves around the authority we mentioned earlier before it revolves around any other purpose. This distills struggle and thus war to something hardly descriptive of the events we observe, but it allows us to trace why those events are as they are from a simple starting point.

We return then to the three concepts of authority that are most relevant. Struggle is impossible without some sense of authority, if it is to be spoken of as more than an impulse in the world. That more primitive definition of struggle is meaningless for our purposes. Struggle over personal authority - the struggle to define oneself in society, and interpersonal struggles - is often seen by the naive as the basis for society as a whole and all that arises in it. The world and the history of society is portrayed not as it is but as a story of struggles between people and entities granted the characteristics of persons like the supposed "gods". Even when the actions of people are not immediately obvious as struggles, the language of struggle infuses so many of the stories we tell about persons. This arises for a simple reason - in life, competition and struggle is often an easy relationship, whereas cooperation is difficult and necessarily contingent on a mutual understanding. While you can have cooperation without any intermediary step of initial struggle upon contact, life's intent and interests tend to favor territoriality, the eugenic interest which extends to property and history, and numerous instincts which lead life-forms to view other life-forms as potential threats or potential food sources. "Ally" or "friend" implies a familiarity which is not taken for granted. The third relationship would be if the two life-forms simply had little to do with each other, regarding each other as merely a fact of the world. This is entirely possible and is the easiest relation of all, and there is an appeal of doing this to the lizard-brain which did not inherit primitive sociality. Even for a lizard-brained person, it becomes apparent that social contact with other people is nearly inevitable, and attempts to seal oneself away from those interactions may prove difficult. Even in a world where all life-forms follow the loner strategy, humans live in an environment and it would be quite difficult for every human to receive a parcel of land and resources and follow a dictum to never leave that space. Nature is not cleanly divided in any such way, and so even if two or more loners are just trying to get through this day, they will meet. Some protocol will be established so that one or both recognize right-of-way and various customs which we take for granted. While those protocols do not need to escalate to anything we would consider struggle, the very interaction implies that struggle is possible, and it cannot be foreclosed as a possibility within knowledge of the agents in question. Two loners are unlikely to know each other very well at all, but they might have enough understanding of humans generally to sense how these things work. It is not the inevitability of struggle that is important, but the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that exists without perfect information. A reasonable person would see that such "FUD" is highly counterproductive, but it always exists and can be exploited given the correct environmental conditions or interpersonal stimuli. Struggle between persons always remains an unknown until the encounter, and in hindsight we learn how that encounter went. Usually, no elaborate reasoning process to initiate a struggle is undertaken. The impulses of life encourage aggression without any rational purpose for it, even when we are perfectly aware that those instincts are unwarranted and cause us damage. Those impulses are not as fixed in nature as ideology would insist they are, and the instincts of life do not codify struggle in the more elaborate sense, or even in the simplest sense. Our basic impulses exist not for any inherent moral purpose, but because they emerged over time, and the instincts of humans or any other animal are honed throughout life. There is no inherent good to any instinct or impulse in life, such as pleasure, pain, suffering, that warm feeling of familiarity that con men have long exploited with dripping insults, joy, the high of opium, or any other emotion we might conjure, including those that are wordless feelings. Those impulses originated for a reason though. In an environment where interpersonal manipulation is common, and specifically taught as dogma, as they are in the educational regime of the past century, instincts will transform in ways that make them alien to what we were before the regime of manipulation and interventions was imposed. This is intended and deliberate, and the result of this social engineering at such a minute level did not produce beneficial results. As I will attempt to explain in this chapter, there is a reason why social engineering of this sort takes on malevolent characteristics - that is that social engineering is oriented by the same impulses as the human practice of war, and conversely, war is at heart a social engineering activity before it can be anything else. That reality is demonstrated in the 21st century to be an unavoidable reality, for we live in a society dominated by overt social engineering, which has percolated for over a century and produced predictably disastrous results. The disastrous results were foreseen and intended, and efforts of people to correct them would be stymied. Yet, people individually act in accord with what makes sense for them, no matter how invasive pedagogy and institutions can be.

The interpersonal struggles cannot constitute war in of themselves, in the proper sense that the word has meaning. The diplomatic relationships between individuals, the relations of individuals to institutions, and the relations of institutions to each other, are in a perpetual state of flux. "Peace" is never truly peace, particularly in societies where the practice and religion of war dominate the conception of society. The commitment and mobilization implied by war is impossible to internalize in a person or human being, no matter how much ideology is pumped into that person. War to be war is a social activity, rather than a state of mind unto itself. An individual truly at a state of war on his own will realize quickly his position relative to the rest of the world, and to other individuals who are not encumbered by the state of total war in their whole person. Even in the mobilization of war, the participants remain flesh and blood humans and also remain institutional people. War is not fought by abstract forces or indeterminate blobs. However it is conducted, war is waged between social agents only. The tools of war are just that - tools of war. Even when the machinery is so elaborate that it seems to take on a life of its own, that machinery was put into motion by people, for it to be war machinery. If the machines truly broke free from human control and waged a campaign, the activity would cease to be war in the recognizable sense. If the machines were to attack humans in accord with the laws of motion, it may appear to the humans that they are in a state of perpetual war against the social formation they see in those machines. In doing so, the humans grant to the machine the personality of social agents, and the human tendency is to view any personality as a human personality or something relatable to humanity. Even if humans were to encounter an alien intelligence, or has a sense that the social agents they fight are very much not human, the thinking of those aliens may not map onto our concept of "war" as a social engineering activity. We don't consider exterminating an ant colony to be war, but to the ants, their community and many of their numbers are exterminated by entities bringing total death and carnage at what seems to be their whim. What they do in response doesn't conform to our expectations of war at all. War to be war is conducted between thinking agents with a sufficient level of comprehension, and the agents are all at a minimum aware of the nature of war; and the opponents of war are presumed to be, at least in principle, similar such agents, for a state of war to be mutually recognizable. There may be vast differences in culture, philosophy, technology, and the qualities of the agents, but no one in war is truly ignorant that war is an affair that exists in the world, and that they may be entangled in it, or are actively engaged in one. Whether they want to be part of any war is irrelevant, and typically the participants in war are the civilians and commoners who had no investment whatsoever in the practice or the cult surrounding it. War to most of humanity is nothing but a terrible calamity coming and going, and aristocrats since time immemorial delight in telling the masses that war is natural. Aristocrats themselves, naturally, seek to exempt themselves from any consequence of war, and establish the cult of war and many religions to accomplish that end - to set aside a sacred space for them, and pit their subordinates to attack the lower classes. A tacit agreement between aristocrats of all types encourages them to exclude each other from direct conflict, and only attack each other through their proxies. Aristocrats attacking each other never descends into the state of warfare, even when they are willing to fight each other in some internecine struggle. Even going so far as direct combat with each other in a duel is a highly uncommon event. Most duels were fought not by aristocrats but by their subordinates, and many duels were for show or for tournaments rather than the life-or-death struggle or mobilization that war entailed. The major interests of society tend to see conflict within the interest as counter-productive for the same reasons, going all the way down to the workmen, slaves, and the lowest classes of mankind. It can happen for the same reasons humans engage in any squabble, but within an interest, states of total war contained within the interest or within a subsector of society are undesirable. By no means does this mean such conflict is an impossibility, but it is highly discouraged, and those who think about war seriously and without ideological nonsense see that getting out of the war's consequences is highly beneficial. To motivate participants to participate in war at any level beyond a ritual exercise is no easy task. The morale of an army must remain at a level compatible with even bothering to fight, let alone fight an opponent in an uncertain battle.

We see here the formation of interests solidified by the practice of war in some sense. This is not the only way in which interests can be united - far from it, war in the proper sense is not likely to be initiated by societies that are ill-formed and incapable of summoning the collective will to begin the war. War is far from the only disciplinary effect that can unite a society. In most experience, wars are catastrophic to the moral fabric of any society. The veneration of the religion of war is a much different matter than the actual practice of war, which is found by subordinate officers, grunts, and the commoners who are dragged into war without a weapon or any realistic chance of defending themselves. It is very easy for someone to cheer for a war that is abstracted and made into a game, a story, or a thrilling spectacle with cool graphics, especially in a society where war is made fantastical and an echo chamber insists that is totally what war is. Actual fighting of war, or even the grind of fighting a plan "war" or a siege by society against its enemies, produces a strain on all participants. The reasons why are multiple and not always obvious, and this effect is not uniform. War can allow alliances of convenience and presents a personal rationale of necessity to rally to the flag or the legion, but these are one-time gains amidst a persistent grind of struggles, attacks, and tensions that is intended to wear down or eliminate opponents. War is never a clean exercise of statistics or an affair decided by wargames which the grunts mindlessly comply with. It is always fought in the end not by abstracted agents but the flesh and blood those agents represent. The same would be true if the agents were not human or even living in principle - war as a practice is an action and an event that is done, and that event entails the depletion of opposing forces and damage to your own side. War as an activity is never generative of products. The product fed into war is an alien to the war itself. Perhaps the alien product exists because of a state of war, but war will not deposit fresh resources into the Earth as a result of struggle alone. It does leave behind corpses and the residue of war and these might be of some valuable, but war as a practice was not necessary to obtain any of that material. The very core of the war, struggle between societies over temporal authority, is an expenditure that either burns energy and disperses it to nullius caeli, or is spent on an activity which seems to a creature disinterested in war like some autistic screeching given profound meaning. At best, the expenditure of war is a neutral in useful resources, presuming there were some efficiency to reclaim them. The territory or resources acquired as war booty is not a direct consequence of the act of war, but the political affairs which resolve it. No one claims the land in a war zone without presuming attackers will descend upon it, until the state of war is resolved sufficiently to allow for extractive work. That condition does not make war intrinsically "bad" or "useless". The struggle may be waged for purposes that are very important to one or both parties involved, and even if the struggle were a meaningless imposition on those who wanted to stay out of it, there has long been an understanding that war is a reality of human existence and it was going to arrive some day. People have, by some strange condition, lost everything they held dear to a war they did not fight in and were dragged into, lived and found something anew that never would have happened if tranquility did not disturb a humdrum existence of serfdom or slavery.

The consequences of war should not be viewed strictly in economic terms, for war was never a sound economic plan. Economically, war is so disastrous that an argument for free trade would be promotion of peace and cooperation through open markets. This is not an argument that stands up to scrutiny, but by basic economic logic, a capitalist loathes war because it takes precious resources and labor away from anything the capitalist would want and feeds it to interests that are anathema to capital. Even the class struggle that dominates capitalist society is an unwelcome state of affairs. If the capitalist could pay the wretches a pittance and make them go away, if not make them happy, that would be perfectly fine for business, and far cheaper than the police state if the question were purely economic. Capitalism was never a purely economic decision nor a perfect system set up by the factory owner or banker to be the ideal of history. It was a situation, which is to be described in a later writing. For the political aims that capitalism entailed, the class struggle is still an unwelcome imposition if it were intensified. More than anything, the capitalist desired class collaboration. As the capitalist drew from the bourgeois to staff its offices, and the capitalist ranged from a would-be oligarch to a firm of a few bourgeois men trying to make a buck in the world, that collaboration favored the interests of the bourgeois, and it was the interests of the bourgeois rather than an identity or sentiment regarding city life or ideology. The motor of the class struggle was not economic or ideological requirements, nor any genuine social need for such a struggle to exist. The exploitative relationship capitalism entailed would have made confrontation likely, but the capitalist and the worker alike were perfectly aware that the relations of labor were untenable. There is a solution where the capitalist mitigates exploitation to an appropriate minimum or simply envisions a labor scheme that removed exploitation in the form of surplus value^[1]. Both would effectively mean the end of the capitalist situation and work against the modus operandi of the financial actors, but the capitalist is not ideologically wed to this situation, and recognizes it is untenable even from the start. Whether the capitalist cares about ending the struggle is up to him, but if he wishes to win the struggle, it is not driven by any material necessity or even a crass moral philosophy, and it is not driven by a simplistic zeal for war or suffering. The reasons why the capitalist will not repent for the relations he encouraged are not difficult to see for any reasonable adult and many children, but the capitalist in most cases has long been superceded by the manager, the technocrat, and the oligarch who understood his interests were no longer the bourgeois interests and certainly not lust for money tokens.^[2] War itself was not the purpose of the struggle. It is instead a confluence of events, moral sentiments, and a history suggesting to the rulers that the ruled were to be dealt with harshly, and further events where interested parties saw an advantage in intensifying struggles in capitalism for various purposes. The liberal philosophy encouraged individual ambition and did not regard civic virtue as inviolable or a given that will always be followed. There may have come a point where rational self-interest overrides any drive to war or internal conflict, and nothing about liberalism proper suggested that it had to turn into what it became. The war within the liberal world and against the remaining holdouts is beyond pointless for any material goal any actor would hold dear. There are material conditions in which the war can continue, and material means by which the practice and cult of war can perpetuate that limit what is possible, but we see here war involves a moral choice to continue the fight. This does not map onto any concept of justice or the idea that there is a "good war", but rather it means that wars are fought when there is a will to continue, rather than because there was a purpose to the war. The purposes of war may shift because that purpose is decided by the chief participants, and to some extent the willingness of other agents to continue fighting with any sort of effectiveness. Without a will to fight, the partisans of the war cult can only drag others into a fight they didn't want, and this is not a very effective basis for an army, no matter what their logistic superiority and arithmetic may grant them. It may be that both sides of the war are utterly demoralized, and that often is the case, but it would take a special perversion for aristocrats to continue a genuine war with no aims and no real risk.

Such a condition would, if managed, cease to be war in the classical sense, but would carry on the purposes of war and institutionalize war itself in a new way. It is not that war ever ended, but the nature of the war is no longer driven by morale or any purpose. If that is so, then this war can only serve one goal - death and suffering for their own sake. It can only be effective as a social engineering tool by pure negation and destruction, and so it appears not as a war with any objectives, but an incoherent pressing of the nerve. It brays endlessly about power, culminating in the neoconservative hard-on for "power projection" and the bluster of a failed institution. In reality, little power in the meaningful sense is expressed. It is as if a force unlike war at all pervades the society, and it is the aim of such a permanent war to make unmentionable the true nature of the war, until the final moment where its permanence in locked in. This can only result in one goal - a splitting of the society in question into two and only two, with all the neutrals dragged into that segregation, and a third group mysterious walking between the two worlds and directing both. There would be a group selected to live and given every advantage, praise, rigging, and smoke blown up their ass, and a group selected to die whose existence is to be humiliation and the lowest possible state of mankind. In this way, the fratricide and ritual sacrifice that birthed the human race is repeated, and history "ends" for those selected to die. Should war beget war and be nothing else, then this is the only possible state humans can rest in philosophically. The reality of humanity in state society is nothing at all like this, and the construct of a permanent war is no different - and it is that which a third group, however they do so, uses to navigate, cajole, and push history, or pretend to. What I describe here describes the outcome of many things - the origin of the "Eternal War" in the Nineteen-Eighty-Four scenario, the Hegelian conception of historical progress and Marx's inversion of it (which also suggests the third group to those who have a sense of how the philosophy turned out, and suggests also that the entire situation is ridiculous yet continues nonetheless). It describes in essence the three major classes of Plato's Republic and their origin in the fundamental purpose of the republic - "defense" of the city, which is in reality the very pressing of nerves described. It describes the Trinity, ostensibly a Christian doctrine but in reality originating in pagan philosophy and ultimately the ancient Near East. It describes the tripartite splitting of the mind that is very common among humanity, due to its effectiveness in conditions of state societies which wage war more often than develop peace. War in its purest essence could only create such a division, but the reality of the world is much different. No such tripartite division of society is real, and the wiser philosophers understood this and stated that the story of golden, silver, and copper souls was just a story. What we see in our time is the doctrine eugenics imposed on the state and the whole society, while declaring that "God is unknowable", reality is unknowable, and the state is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It is with eugenics that their preferred vision of the world, the highest stage of aristocracy, has sadly become a force unto itself, animating and possessing the eugenic faithful. What results is not so much war or the cult of war, or even spiritual authority or a heightened stage of personal authority. What results, even for the victors selected to live, is nothing at all. If that is the world, we would all have been better off blowing the whole Earth up and sparing us and the world from this abomination. Yet, here we are, despite every warning and sense from the world and our better aspects telling us that this is bad, pointless, not conducive to anything a reasonable person would want out of life. Perhaps the greatest sin of all is that the plan simply will not work, because no one, even the most depraved aristocrat, can continue to carry it out with a straight face, and no one else has any motivation. If that is the world, then money as a motivator is useless. Fear would escalate to a level which makes the motives of war impossible to carry out. Mind control would break down because of the extreme contradiction and futility of the project, and mind control to be realized is not a simple or trivial thing. Shouting "die, die, die!" does not command anyone or anything. It doesn't even create death unless the shouting is granted both mystical authority and a preponderance of material force enclosing the whole world. Anything less and this cult would be a thing kept in its cell, occasionally pushing terrible things into the world but ignored in favor of literally anything else. Of course, such a contraption is a very useful tool, and this is the takeaway of all of the examples mentioned above - that the description of such a world invokes terror because it is not a thing that can be reasoned with, and it abolishes anything real or meaningful. There is something to be said about such a force because it is a thing that can rapidly reproduce, like a material computer worm consuming all memory and disk space. Such a tool would never be the purpose in of itself, but if "die, die, die" can be chanted like a magic spell, that is not an easy thing to give up because it allows death by remote over a large space. It can only truly work by forcing all agents in the society to internalize it.^[3]

The contest for spiritual authority and the meaning of war at the highest level is a complicated matter far beyond the scope of this book, or anything I could possibly write. The more elaborate conceptions of politics entail war, but also much more, and that is something better left for the next book in this series. We can see here that war as a transcendent truth imposed on us is really nonsensical. Wars are fought between people and through the machines they possess, and only in concert do all warring parties form a state of war and a state of affairs regarding it. The motives of warring parties are in the end spiritual ones, and this is not limited to an idea or token or word, or a symbol to be fetishized. I leave the cult of war for another time, but it is not controversial to accept the existence of this cult on faith as a preliminary discovery, and ask what this cult actually is as we proceed.

To differentiate war, struggle for faith, struggle for life, endemic violence, disputes over property, and the various ways humans fight each other, useful knowledge of how mechanisms to fight, oppress, cajole, manipulate, and so on are necessarily deployed. War is not reducible to a few trite sayings, but war is a particular type of violence committed by humanity. The usual formulation of war is that war is politics by other means, and thus the state and state society are the key distinction between war and other states of aggression. States can, and usually do, present war as a thing which can be controlled, planned, and implemented in measured or limited ways. So too do the partisans who favor war present war as a game or a situation which can be controlled, where one generalissimo waves his mighty hand to move armies and change the world. The language of war is omnipresent in modern society, and in particular the technocratic view of the world which became the default during the 20th century, against which all other views of politics, government, society, science, spiritual and temporal authority were compared. The existence of that technocratic view, and how it came about, is a lengthy discussion of the entire breadth of human history, and it would be quite impossible to describe in detail how warbands eventually turned to the city-state, then to empires, and then to institutions that we would recognize today. It is often forgotten that states are, in the end, little more than associations of men and women who formed the state for their own purposes, rather than some ulterior motive that is above human concerns. All activities we call war are conducted by humans, and usually the intended target of war is other humans rather than the world or forms of life considered lesser. While a war against termites may be a useful metaphor, no one is seriously convinced the termites rouse their comrades to arms or view their existence in the same way humans view their existence as driven by war and peace. A war against the weather or a war against a mountain would be sillier still, because non-living natural events are there, doing their thing, without any regard to our conceits. If you wish to hate a mountain for being in your way, you probably shouldn't burden yourself with the belief that the mountain has it out for you. As much as we often say "the game knows" when fortune disfavors us, the game or the computer simulation really doesn't know. Cold reality is a very poor explanation of war, its purpose, and the motives of those who engage in it. Very little of war, in actuality, concerns any real or material objective, even though our material concerns have been made subject to war and its doctrines for as long as humans followed organized spiritual authority. Wars are materially very expensive, never go as planned, and usually the dispute causing the war could have been resolved much earlier if not for human pigheadedness and a certain cult in human society that desires war for its own sake, as they knew from the outset they would bear none of the consequences and saw war itself as life's prime want. Wars are never fought for their stated intention, and every general follows interests that make sense to him. Another trite saying, appropriate to modernity, is that war is business, and war as a business shows to new recruits the horrible truth about what they signed up for, which had nothing to do with the idiotic tales of glory and prestige the talking head on television or radio bragged about. War as business is a terrible model for anything other than job security for the worst of mankind, and the cost of this business is catastrophic to the model itself, let alone anything it would feed off to sustain itself. Only through the splitting of the mind in the past century can the meme of the war business be maintained, as a koan chanted by stupid people that justifies itself. If anyone actually thought about the war business, they would see that it is a construct intended for a purpose which is not business, but social engineering.

References to the cult of war have been present throughout this writing, in describing endemic violence and the likely motives of human actors in that time. I have often defaulted to the perspective of someone like myself, who would not be inducted into any cult of war and had every reason to consider the entire enterprise to be the worst bullshit. Without any filter, human history would appear to an alien as an endless series of outrageous betrayals, lies uttered constantly and in every expression common to the race, ultraviolence towards humankind and a system of organized torture and slaughter of animals that was essential to the definition of human civilization, races towards goals that are childish and vapid if someone thought about them for five minutes, institutions that never do anything except hurt others even though the apparent desire of people is to not do that, and a generally dismal existence that would lead an alien to smite the entire monstrosity and made the destruction of Sodom look like the destruction of an anthill. For all the glorification of war and its continued practice, there is scarcely any justification that would make sense even to those who participate in it. It is doubly ridiculous because, if wars had any resemblance to a game with a victory condition, the ways in which wars are fought are hilariously counterproductive, burning through resources at a prodigious rate. No one in the business of war has any incentive to ever see it end, because if war were fought with a mind to winning it, it would become clear in technocratic society that wars could be neutralized forever and the entire expenditure into its practice could be directed towards something that actually produced a return, or simply stored or used for things we would rather do with our time and wealth. An end to war would be the worst of all worlds to those who made their name and reputation off the glory of service to it, and to the states which were born first and foremost because they were instruments of war. The holders of the state operate in their societies as if they were at war with the ruled, and this is the only way such a society could conceive of order and stability. If our societies were oriented towards non-domination or goals of a purely spiritual or productive nature, none of our theories of government or the types of government yet known would be at all acceptable, and so prevalent is the faith in war that the concept of this world without war imagines either an immaculately perfect world where everyone goosesteps by some natural instict which perpetuates eternally, or some world where people are too stupid to know how to fight. The concept of actually moving past war while retaining some dignity and the option of fighting is anathema to all theories of government currently known. Even when the cost of war is enormous and there is no good reason to undertake such a ruinous enterprise, certain people insist and insinuate that war must continue no matter what, and often these are among the most worthless members of the middle class and the predatory of all classes whose goals have always been selfish and pigheaded. It is concluded that if there is any possibility of violence, then nature's law is that the violence will be expressed and assert dominance. In short, the predatory element's faith in war is premised on a belief that defensive war is totally ineffective. This is why wars continue to be sold as quick, cheap, and easy to win, no matter how ridiculous those claims are to anyone with a functioning brain and connection to reality. Nowhere was this ethos towards war more dominant than in the second world war, as the entire cope of those who did the most to instigate that war is that defensive war was for simps and great generals always won their planned offensive campaigns because they're so much smarter. It's strange because the blitz strategy was only effective in certain political situations. The Nazis themselves praised Hitler for being a great conqueror without actually fighting battles, and that was the Nazi modus operandi for making their war expenditure pay off. The entire thing was engineered to favor a bullycoward strategy and insist that the selected losers had to lose, and so the Nazi victories were possible politically because of a large aristocratic fifth column that agreed with everything the Nazis believed and that they were members of the coming master race. They joined in a global movement to purge the world of the weak who believed in things like democracy, communism, and basic decency like not being a screaming maniacal killer. The actions of the Nazis are only sensical if the Nazis were understood as the vanguard of a global movement, rather than simply the ruling party of a particular national project, seen in isolation in history books as a peculiar example. The cult of war of that time included a strange pseudo-history where nation-states were driven by arbitrary identities, and that different races fought for no particular reason whatsoever, and this was just accepted as if it were totally normal and how it always had been. The entire experience of the first world war and what led to it was whitewashed as soon as it was over, in preparation for the second round.

It is at that time when war no longer became a situation of temporary duration, but the permanent and default state of human societies. Peace was to be sold as a commodity in limited supply, and this peace was always backed by some doomsday weapon pointed at civilian centers as a threat of what happens if too many people do not get with the program. It strains credulity to call this situation peace in the sense that anyone would appreciate it, and woe to those who seek peace and believe the institutions in such a society share that interest! In doing this, war ceased to be war in the sense that the concept was appreciated. For war to be war implied that there was a condition called peace, and that war was the exception rather than the rule.^[4] Everyone in the cult of war implicitly believes that peace is an objective, if their cult is to have any meaning. Whether they actually arrive at peace, or if peace would be good for their true motives, is a different question, but the only leverage a warrior has is that peace is a potential outcome of all war activity. The objective of permanent war is not to make the war absolute, but to place a premium on the promise of peace, and yank it away from people after it is dangled in front of them as a promise. Those who do possess peace are in a limited class, who form islands of humanity where life went on. The enclosure of the world entailed that what we called "life" in free society could no longer be considered life, and all who were outside of this club where peace was possible would be on edge, and put on notice that any seeming peace was an illusion. In most of the world, if you have peace, you merely have not seen the thing that is trying to kill you. It is not a surprise to people that peaceful civilizations do not require threats of nuclear annihilation and extremely violent biological interventions, and the promise of peace through such means is not peace as we originally conceived it. History is revised to suggest that it has always been this way, and what we thought was peace in the past was an illusion. This "enlightenment" about the permanence of war and the ruling institutions ignores entirely the nature of past armies and campaigns, and how the war machine operated from Antiquity up to the turn of the 20th century. War was indeed typical of states and always available as a threat, but the theory of society and the state in practice - whether it was the feudal or liberal model, or some other model imagined - was that society could only be possible under regular order, and this meant that laws and enforcement had to at least appear as if they followed principles understood by all participants in society, or at least all participants that were considered mentally valid. Even if there were distinct classes and political and social inequality was the rule, anyone with a mind lived in the same world, even if they were a slave. For any theory of society to remain in force, and this is true today for it is a rule of nature rather than a rule we made, there must be an assumption that there is a real world where events happen, and that social distinctions were only meaningful because people of different classes would do different things, held different property, and possessed different characteristics in some way that was appreciated by all. War, to be war, entails that a society is under attack. There is no form of "socially acceptable" war that is purely a ritualistic practice, however much idiots like to tell us that such a thing is possible. A ritual war carried out without purpose is not war in any sense that would be appreciated as relevant, and the ritual war could be replaced with some chanting and then marching the intended sacrifices to a death furnace, and believing that this was just totally natural and not at all weird. There may be rituals pertaining to war and a way that is considered normal - that is to say, some code that warriors abide among each other, and that is more or less expected in warriors' behavior towards civilians.

War as a practice is waged by one society against another, and for the purposes of war, the two societies are alien until reconciliation happens. War to be war is a war not against a particular entity, or even initiated by a particular entity like a state, but against society as a concept. War as a practice has long been known to corrode the bonds of a society, forcing members of a society into behaviors they would not normally consider. War as a team-building exercise is a hilarious folly, and anyone suggesting that wars and armies build comraderie is either very naive about how armies operate, or is lying to someone who they want to fear the military. The default attitude of a soldier towards their own army is distrust, and this is expected and serves a very real function. Soldiers who are blind followers and do not know what they are shooting or why they do it are not desirable. A certain level of connection to reality and fidelity to truth is necessary for someone to actually practice war, even if it is a planned war or ritual war and the true motives are far removed from any stated motive. The soldier's level of knowledge does not need to perfect or "100% sane", and usually isn't. Militaries are premised on a control of information at every level, but with the information a soldier is given and with the senses a soldier possesses, he is expected to operate as if he knows his domain, and to know the chain of command, and why he is to follow orders no matter how ridiculous. By no means does this obligate the chain of command to give a shit about making their subordinates useful, or suggest that superior officers would do anything other than ratfuck the lower grunts. The same attitude exists among soldiers of the same rank. Everything necessary to be an effective soldier and fight works against comraderie, trust, and friendship. The breakdown of morale and unit cohesion is something any commander has to think about if they have to actually do something. If you need to go to war to find friends or discover yourself, you are in the worst place possible for that to happen. The war cult does not give you any more order to life than it deems fit to allow you for its purposes.

It should be made clear that war, as a practice, is not intrinsically political, nor is war the essence of politics. The state in any conception could not arise before war as a practice was already in force, and so speaking of war as purely the domain of states or politics is an inaccurate division. We do divide the wars waged by states from wars engaged by organizations of inferior standing, that cannot make the claims a proper state does. There are then organizations waging war which do not conform to states in a sense that states are commonly recognized, but that form governments and armies in their own right. The British East India Company was not a state unto itself in the sense that states were recognized, but the Company's army was larger in numbers than the monarch's official army, and the Company conducted its affairs in its own interest, rather than the Company being purely an extension of the Crown as would be presumed. Increasingly, the Company's influence in the empire grows, and the methods the company employs permeate in the rest of British society, and then societies around the world. This is the birth of the free trade system and the logic of modern capitalism, and brought about modern understanding of class war and what interests and which people were fighting whom. What became a political affair was not at first recognized as political or the affairs of proper war, but would become the default that someone today readily recognizes. There would be some point in human existence where there were no states as such, or even anything that could be passed off as a state except in embyronic form, but there was plenty of war and warbands could form if there were enough men who figured out they could beat up others in the neighborhood to get what they want. At the core, there is a choice of certain people to do this, and then it is on everyone else to defend against that. The state proper, and thus politics as we know it, came about because of people, rather than some impulse in humanity necessitating formal states or formal states being necessarily useful for organizing human effort. Politics involves a great deal else that does not require war, or fighting of any sort. Political entities of any sort have to reckon with a material world and the details of production, and the politician's intervention to ensure this is not something he can resolve by appeals to struggle, as if he can whip farmers to make food grow on a barren rock. Whether a politician deigns to go down to where the ordinary workers live and think about what workers actually do is a choice, but eventually a politician will have to meet his constituents where they are at, rather than what the politician believes others ought to be. At the very least, the politician cajoling or bullying a hated subordinate knows whomever he is attacking will act in defiance of the politician's wishes, and has some idea of how to engineer the situation so the subordinated can't escape, or at least can keep the subordinated at bay. You might think that the state and politicians would see that maybe they could help out, so people don't have to struggle so much over basic things and we'd all be far more efficient. That is not what the state does, though. War has much to do with why states exist as they do, and war at its core is something apart from states, and would exist even if we did not believe states had any legitimacy. Politicians cannot change war or make it into something other than what it is. If war changes, it is changed by those who wage war, rather than changed by those who supply to the people their ideas of what war is. War, and thus its effects on society and the state, changes all of the time, in contradiction of the old saying from Fallout that war never changes. Certain elements that drive the cult of war, and the core convictions of the war cult, are far less likely to change, but those elements do not need to confine themselves to the domain of war, and always seek to infest any practice, including those that never had anything to do with war or peace.

We may recognize war in principle as a game played between two societies. We will call these societies teams, even though "team" is for the reasons mentioned above not a reason to suggest that anyone on these teams likes each other. Societies are understood as human agents, and all that is their property is marked as possessions of those agents in some way or another. The property is distinguished from things in the environment that are not claimed by anything in a society. Both societies have their models to consider what is theirs, what belongs to the enemies, and what is neutral. The objective of both societies is to destroy the integrity of the other society, so that changes may be made that are suitable to the victor. In the ideal example, both societies consider themselves to begin this game as their ideal, or at least, they recognize the conditions of their society as a thing they are defending, and recognize that changes to that society, its values and methods, are a threat to defending that thing. The war is a game played by all members in both societies, regardless of whether they want to play or not. War, to be war, entails the mobilization of the whole society in this effort. Even if this mobilization does not make the fullest use of all agents and property, it is presumed that the society could marshal everything at its disposal in the effort. To do otherwise would limit the essential nature of war to something other than what it would need to be if it were indeed war. War is organized towards a singular goal of destroying the other society, so that it may be restructured as the victor wishes. In principle, total destruction is on the line for both sides, and the warring parties do not agree beforehand the scope of what may and may not be changed in the other society. There may be expectations that some things cannot be changed, but in principle, the plan of war suggests that the other society may be broken and reassembled as the victor wishes. If the victor cannot actually do this, it raises questions of why the victorious party went to war in the first place, unless the victor were aware of what war aims could be accomplished and that they were indeed possible. To suggest an absolute limit to the destruction and reorganization of the enemy would be to place the activity below the proper meaning of "war". The full realization of those limits is not necessary for war to be war, but the game is not war unless that possibility is a part of the game. All of the actors in this game are not, in principle, bound by any law other than natural laws that are outside of the control of any participant. Whatever is materially possible, including self-induced changes to your own team's core convictions, is possible. It is entirely possible for one team to forfeit entirely war at any time, but forfeit means the other team decides whatever terms it desires. Whether the team that is victorious after their opponent's forfeit can affect the other team in the way it desires is not a matter dictated by war as a practice; and so a team that is winning by all metrics may forfeit the war, conceding to the other team a "win", while the "loser", who may present themselves as winners regardless of their forfeit, does whatever they may want, accepting that the outcome of the war for the other team is locked in. Whatever relations exist between the two teams after the war is not strictly speaking the business of war. War, to be war, implies that there is a winner and loser judged by both teams, and by anyone who wants to referee this game. Winning and losing is essential to war, regardless of what someone might consider philosophically the point of it is. If "everyone is a winner", or "war has no winners", then the activity engaged in is not war in any way we would appreciate it as a concept, but some ritual that may appear to be war but is something else entirely. There are in war many sub-games which are called "battles", "skirmishes", or other such events which are of a similar manner, within the domain where they are believed to take place. These sub-games all relate to each other in the overall game of war.

War, then, is at heart a tool for social engineering. It is not a thing that serves a purpose, or accomplishes material motives. Wars are not fought for land, or prizes, or esteem, or for ideology, or for religion. They are not fought for any ulterior motive that must exist. The point of war as a practice is to engineer an enemy society, which is understood to be an enemy, and wars are undertaken by societies that consider their own members friends for the purpose of war. This is the basic Schmittian conception of the political, but it is in reality something particular to the practice of war. Not all conflicts are war, for there can be conflicts within a society or fights between people that aren't part of any war plan. Not all politics is defined by conflict, for the concerns of the state are not solely defined by war. It is through war that societies were engineered to create the state and the political as we know it. Political thinking was not something inherent to mankind in any fixed form, beyond the most basic observations of how human consciousness is constituted and how a man would have to comport himself. We did not reach some critical period where human beings were now and forever political animals, and could be nothing but that. The first political thought is not a thought of war in the sense we have described, nor is the first political thought purely about struggle. Political thought began in the first instance out of a desire in people to claim something, and to establish themselves as something apart from the world and apart from other conscious entities like themselves. How a politician sought to do that could vary. War, on the other hand, did not require political thought to be realized. Warlike behavior can be found in animals, and it is not carried out at a purely instinctive level or for some ulterior motive the animals conceived. We have observed certain members of the ape kingdom engage in battle and coordinate tactics with each other, yet there isn't really a political structure beyond the typical sociality of animals. The political and social are two different concepts, and war at heart is a social behavior, rather than the behavior of political entities or particular institutions.

War is not the only tool for social engineering, but many times the social engineer invokes the language and methods of war, viewing the population that is ruled or experimented on to be an enemy. Mengele's atrocities do not serve any scientific purpose, nor are they necessary conditions for a scientist to conduct social experiments. Social scientists and psychologists have often been able to find lab rats in the wild so to speak, and damaged people are of lesser value for the social and psychological experiments. The methods of certain social engineers to force certain people into these experiments under threat of torture, and a culture which glorifies the immiseration of research subjects as good unto itself, is not necessary for science. It is not even necessary for the destructive aims that this 'social research" is a cover for, because it would be possible to simply exterminate or imprison people without any social experiment, and it has long been known that these social experiments have no actual value that promotes knowledge. The quality of knowledge that is gleaned from social experiments on prisoners and psychiatric slaves is usually determined by the researcher's willingness to view the human lab rats as people, at least in certain regards that would make the experiment proceed smoothly and allow the researcher to gather the information desired. The brutality shown in these Mengele-type atrocities, which would always be advanced by Fabian Society types, was an expression of their ethos which demanded such behavior of a "proper scientist", so that the Fabian technocrat and believer was blooded and did things in the way their ethos insisted it must be. This activity of torturing and humiliating human lab rats is not even an expression of the cult of war, or a use of war for particular social engineering goals. The true intent of these atrocities, and the Fabians' own propaganda showing this torture to the general public, is a declaration of war against the general public, to put normal and decent people on notice that if they don't get with the program, anyone can be tortured and sacrificed. The logic behind this is not difficult to see. Even if you see it for what it is though, it is necessary for the public relations ghoul to push this image in front of the American television watcher, and present this image to them every day, or frequently enough so that it is normalized. The purpose is never to convince someone by rational argument to submit, because most normal people have submitted and know not to transgress an unwritten law. The purpose is to conduct war-like behavior against a general public that is viewed as an enemy, and dare anyone to ignore it or refrain from taking part in it. The general public themselves are seen by such researchers as a mass of lab rats, and the whole country a laboratory, and the seething contempt at the core of their ethos is the point of this "research". None of this research into mass psychology tells the technocrat anything he didn't already know about human behavior, because it was known from the outset that torturing people and using these mechanisms would provoke certain reactions and affect the desired behavioral changes. When the result of the "experiment" comes out the way the torturer wanted, the findings are posted to the world as some grand discovery, and it as if there was no chain of torture to make this real. When the information gathered from observing the masses does not prove what the torturer wanted - when the people refuse to go along with this game - the torturer makes up results that say the experiment actually says what the torturer wanted, and the same celebration of a grand discovery is proclaimed to the public for the same purposes. Somewhere, a researcher compiles volumnious records of the actual state of the people, with every avenue available to them. Data harvesting in the neoliberal period is a gigantic enterprise, and internet users or anyone who must submit to institutions is monitored and probed to see what their tendencies are. This information is not so much used for genuine research purposes, but as part of a command and control mechanism, which relies on a form of social engineering that is entirely warlike.

Social engineering in general entails a division of the society into two - the engineers and the ruled. It may seem conceivable to engineer society without war as such, but in every effort of one group to command another, the two groups presume hostility towards each other. If members of either group are mistaken about the nature of the relationship, the situation asserts that the hostility appears natural and inevitable. This is not because there was a struggle of groups inherent in nature, as if such a conflict were an inexorable law. It is instead the conceit of engineering itself that must assert that one group rules and another is subject to rule. If we were to envision a society-wide compact or agreement, it could not be "engineering" as such. Even if every single participant was an engineer, the very act of social engineering requires splitting the mind and experience into two, and only two - master, and slave. The attitude of each towards the other is a state of war, and the peace of an engineered society is no peace at all.

In practice, a society looking inside itself cannot afford to dwell on the matter for long, as many societies already exist, with institutions and bodies of men ready to go. Their relations, whatever their past struggles, are a real thing rather than a thing imagined in a model. Their bodies are real and their actions occur in a real world, rather than in the imagined world of a theorist or a political conceit. Societies, of course, are never unitary things by some natural law. Their definition is fluid. In the act of war, the two societies are for the purposes of conflict internally united, regardless of any internal relations suggesting division. It is not possible to opt out of war once it is initiated, however much we may try. It is possible for individuals to avoid the war as much as possible, but at no point can the participants pretend the war is not happening.^[5] It must at least be safe to pretend it's not happening, but the more sober analysis of war is to be inured to its happenings so long as a rational expectation is that neither side wants to kill you out of pure hatred for neutrality. That way, the motives of agents in the warring camps may spare you, which is a far better view of the situation than pure ignorance or paranoia about unknowns because the brain has been trained to interrupt the rational process allowing it to navigate a war scenario. It is the aim of eugenics to terminate this possibility for the neutrals so that they can only speak of a vague, inchoate war at indeterminate locales, involving mysterious people and things you are told can't possibly exist, while said things are visible and the warring factions invoke fantastic technologies and capabilities. The ideal is that the eugenist claims science is magic, and that the technology involved is far beyond anything the warring factions actually possess, or is impossible not just by knowledge of nature and physics, but impossible from basic logical analysis. If that is accomplished, then the conditions of eugenics as Galton called them are attained, and it is only in that situation that eugenics worthy of the name is possible. Anything less would be a false prophecy and a very weak "Jehad". It is for that reason that the British doctrines of science associated natural science and empiricism with occultism, wizardly, and magic. This trope is repeated in science fiction and in the new religious movements, in addition to the tropes of space aliens which are an obvious proxy for the most worthless, inbred aristocracy mankind ever produced. The origins of this mystique are not in its appeal to knowledge in the genuine sense, or a machine to manipulate knowledge for its own sake. The habitual lying of the eugenist is necessary because it is necessary to declare that there is no war and there is no God nor Satan, while war, Satan, and increasingly vauge conceptions of God or the gods are prominent throughout the society.^[6]

The practices of war did not arise fully formed, but like anything else, arose from prior conditions to arrive at the organization of societies in this way. The earliest practice of war would be, as mentioned before, nothing more than a few men figuring out that they can do it. They didn't need a cult, or some dark energy telling them to do this. Their actions did not start a grand cycle of spiritual importance, and the drive to violence existed long before them. Part of the mystique of the cult of war, which was always a spiritual authority rather than a true appeal to the unconscious lizard brain, is to essentialize war, and obscure its intent for long enough that others are cowed into submission, without any actual fighting. One lasting legacy of war is to allow for the war party to simply take what they want through tribute, habituating humans to pay up just as the herd of cattle or sheep were habituated by a drover. Every aristocracy that defined itself by its monopoly on the cult of war - that is, the warrior aristocracy - viewed humanity as livestock, and the warriors as the lone exception. The priests a warrior aristocracy aligned with, including the priestly functions warriors themselves filled if the priest and warrior was one and the same, were a thin excuse to cover up this goal, if the excuse would even be given. This or that god, or any particular tenet except those absolutely necessary to perpetuate this use of men as livestock, was not of particular importance. You get the sense with the religion of a warrior aristocracy that they just make up whatever shit works, then forget they did it the next day. Someone could dig through the Vedas and find some myth that suited whatever was in vogue at the time, and since the Vedas were spread by oral tradition and pedagogy was strictly enforced as the sole method to teach them, it's not hard to see that this is the spiritual and religious tradition of people who had a warlike view and did not want information getting out to the wrong people. Such is the way of most religions, which always hide their juicy insights to those who are inducted and can be pulled aside to hear the real plan. Inherent in this approach is not any self-defense, but a contempt for the unbeliever and those who failed the rites of manhood, who would be judged lesser. The practices of sorting the population out usually did not take the form of a war, but the approaches that would be used for war would be activated towards a long-run goal that could be spread by religion and daily practice. The language of war and a particular attitude towards struggle is present in virtually every religious practice mankind knows, and the few exceptions to this rule are never doctrines that can spread far. The only truly pacifistic doctrines that can spread are those which are designed to weaken and degrade men who were already jduged to be cattle.

To build a general understanding of war without its political or spiritual connotations, the first view of war is that it is entirely a concern of social agents. To the world or non-thinking objects, war is a meaningless state. To those who do not participate in the activity, war is something they seek to avoid. It is not a given that all the world is embroiled in the war of two opposing camps, regardless of any claims of the warring parties to the outside world. War, like life itself, is an alien to the world, and war is further an alien to those who are not participants. Only indirectly are people dragged into a war at first. For many who are dragged into war, their participation in the activity is never full commitment or anything close to it. A true "total war", in the meaningful sense of the word, is only possible if the agent's commitment to the practice is lifelong and never departs once war commences. For the true believers, there are no half-measures. All externalities are reduced to one distinction - ally or adversary. This is quite different from the Schmittian political conception of friend and enemy, for friendship and hostility in that sense entails something more than the practice of war, and concerns matters altogether alien. The allies in a war may be your enemies the next day, and never trusted in the first place, but for war to be conducted in any coherent manner, there are two and only two opposing camps in each conflict. A third or fourth party is not entering the same "war" in the technical sense, but opening another war with the participants. We may see war as an activity not as a general state vaguely defined, but as two distinct bodies which must be defined like any society would be defined. It is not waged between institutions, nor is the practice of war in of itself an institution. It is something altogether different, and the warring parties take on the characteristics of single social agents. This is necessary because the practice of war is only coherent if the two opposing sides are united in purpose. If the participants of one side are scattered and command of one society completely breaks down, there is no longer "war" as such - just one society destroying the other, disposing of it like a man would dispose of any possession. No law of war or law of nature governs that disposition. War to be war presumes that such questions of authority are not governed by any higher power necessarily. The participants may believe there is a god or heavenly force regulating the world or compelling war, and no war occurs in a vacuum. For our purposes of isolating war as a social activity, though, the war is fought on its own terms, without any outside interference. If the world is to be described as nothing but a cosmic war between light and darkness, it does not conform to the practice of war among humans, which is a particular deployment in society. There is no war without battles or definite events, or war without agents which regard some authority. However the executive of war is determined, there is an executive function on both sides out of necessity. If none exists, it either becomes necessary to elevate some war chief or for someone to assume authority to mount any defense, or there was some protocol of the defending party in place that suggested collective action of members in case of such an attack, which is put into effect the moment war begins. For practical purposes, that protocol likely entails appointing a war chief, or dictator, or turning to an existing executive, as humans for most of their history only follow the orders of other humans.

The war cannot be separated from a society that wages it, and it will always be waged by a society. If the society is defunct in any recognizable form - if its history is scattered to the winds - then the particular war it was involved in can no longer be considered operative. Whatever situation exists for the remnants would be a new thing, even if the other party's hostility persists. The other party may insist that the war is not over, not because the opposing society remains a threat, but because the land and possessions of the enemy are stil coveted and have yet to be claimed. The reality of the world is that war does not unilaterially dictate the state of a society or of the world. War itself is yet another tool society and its agents use to manipulate the world, or so they believe. It is impossible to speak of a war that "just happens" without deliberation or purpose, and those who would insist war is that commit to a foulness far worse than any war. Such a beast is an altogether different animal, scarcely related to the question we pose here. It is simple to say that there is no war without warriors, no capitalism without capitalists, no communism without cities organized as communes or commonwealths^[7], which are definite entities with distinct definitions.

War is never an activity to unite a fractured society to make it one as a fait accompli. For war to commence, one side, however it is constituted, is united for the practice of war and the practice of war only. If outside agents are subsumed into one faction, those agents are assimilated as they were, rather than as what the mind organizing war wishes them to be, or assigns them to be. This is true of any ally joining the cause, and of the grunts that are conscripted and drilled. If the war was supposed to unify a society of fractured, atomized agents, all the condition of war does is make real an association that would have existed before the war began. Wars cannot draw in people that are too disconnected from a society to realistically integrate into a war formation. They would have been attached enough to the society, in whatever way that was possible, to be considered an agent that could be integrated into war in some way. Serfs and slaves were conditioned to pass from master to master without any interest in the war, serving the new master just as they served the old. The product of the slaves certainly mattered to the war machine, so much that the slaves were value to be captured and became a motivator to continue war. The only way this conditioning can set in is through a tacit admission of the warring parties that slavery is sacrosanct and in the interest of both before war begins. No one can question slavery, or some other institution that is to be captured and controlled. Only in that way do agents which have no reason to personally regard the authority of the warring factions integrate into the war machine, and reliably pass to a new master. This didn't always happen, as general slaughter is a useful expedient to get rid of unsightly people. Usually, though, the reliable agents of a war machine are free men who must at the least be motivated enough to pick up a weapon and follow whatever stupid orders they are given. This is not a trivial ask, however much the ideologists claim that humans are warriors or war is the natural order. In any event, the sides of both wars are set at the moment a war is initiated, and a clear executive on both sides is apparent that can make decisions at the highest level. If people are dragged into a war after it starts, those dragged in will likely see the war as bullshit against their interests, or part of some scheme they might have devised while sitting comfortably apart from the war. The executive leader during war only changes by an orderly and controlled process, and without internal deliberation for long - such an activity as election would undermine command during a crucial period. If the leader is deposed by subterfuge or infighting, this will weaken severely the cohesion of the war effort, and it is expected the new leader is able to maintain loyalty of those fighting for the same cause, or the new leader is there to end the war and escape from the past administration's handling of the situation. These conditions all make it clear that war readiness relies on a cohesive society already extant. The aggressor further must carefully plan the initial attack, stage armies and draw up everything the war will need. No war is entered carelessly or as a reactive measure, and all war actors remain aware of potential threats. Surprise attacks are not too surprising, and where they exist, the response of the defender should be rapid and a thing any polity prepares for against any rival, so much as it is possible to do so. At no point is a whole enemy society a piece of meat to be carved up effortlessly. The war planners usually expect the enemy society to be malleable to the initial attack and must expect the enemy is permeable for their battle plans to work. Those who initiate wars are perpetual optimists, and this is not the result of ignorance or pigheadedness. If war were initiated with a great fear of the outcome of an attack, the war planner must seriously question if the war is a good idea in the first place, if the war is purely a war of choice and the objective is to carve up an enemy. No war plan can afford pessimism when it comes from the attacker. Overconfidence and a blindness to the obvious reality that war is hard must overtake the war planner to make the war appear feasible. For most of human history, this rule was easy enough to believe, because those who plan a war will likely gather knowledge of the enemy's way of life, positions, strategic holdings, and has a reasonable expectation of how the enemy and allied side can fight.

It was never the case that a war planner plunged into a war blindly, as if wars are planned by people dumber than the peasants they cajole and threaten to accept the war - or else. Whatever their reasoning, wars are entered with some deliberation to be wars, and aims are held by those who truly command the war. The aims of war are never the aims announced to the lower classes, for the true aims of war are so foul and pointless to the rest of us that suggesting the truth of war is not palatable for a mass audience. In early times, the common people would be told of glorious victories, rapes, and most of all plunder which the common people might get a piece of if the war goes well. In later times, wars were sold as a matter of security, facing an existential threat, or as a vehicle for social advancement in a eugenic society. The true aims of war are none of those things, but something far more base - that for the aristocracy, war is a game, and the sacrifice of blood and the orgies celebrating victory with lurid sex and women defecting to the conqueror is really the point of this stupid exercise. That's all it ever was. No ulterior motive can be said to be truly worth fighting for, short of a society fighting for its life. Even this fight for a society's life may be questioned by its malcontents, for whom the society was always an alien. The conqueror, whatever shit he may bring, is likely to be the same as the old boss, and no great patriotism can be detected in any time. Even more than that, the commoner and the ruler long despise each other, and the only reason this arrangement exists is because most of mankind was forced at gunpoint and by repeated threats of terror to accept this aristocratic nightmare and all of its humiliations, none of which serve any goal most of mankind would ever have wanted.

We concern ourselves with the practices that constitute war, rather than a diplomatic state recognized between the two societies. War does not have any natural purview where the society can claim unilaterially that a part of it is off-limits to an enemy, nor can an attacker claim that their war is one of limited aims that can be guaranteed or naturalized. When two societies are at peace, there are no warlike acts committed between them whatsoever. Peace as a concept does not mean "you can have a little war sometimes, as a treat". Someone might conduct a raid into enemy territory without any formal declaration, obscuring the actor or making an excuse that an individual acted out of line. These acts are acts of war, and the aggrieved party may react to them in whatever way they like. No diktat of the aggressor may unilaterally declare what someone is allowed to do in retaliation, demand reciprocality, or make demands that are natural and justified. Someone can decide, in principle, that insults or words are acts of war and treat them as such. The important act of war is social engineering, and gossip or informational exchange can be construed as that when conducted for clearly hostile purposes. Whether a formal state of war or any retaliation at all is made does not change that acts of war are seen as such by anyone. Any social actor declaring a unilateral right of aggression, conquest, or absolute impunity from consequence, is declaring an egregious act of war and arrogance. It speaks of the aggressor's intent that war acts are not merely a tool for an end, but a law of nature that is held sacrosanct. In short, the absolute impunity a bully insists to be his natural right would, if war were premised on reciprocality or justice, be seen not just as a war act by declaration alone, but the aggrieved party would see nothing short of extermination of the bully as the only acceptable end state. Such a statement is not one that can be taken back or reformed, for it speaks of something more odious that a simple war act, and suggests the intent of the aggressor to commit to unlimimted terror to defend this intellectual claim. It can be ignored, especially if the bully is unwise to how bullying as a tactic works. All bullies rely on institutions granting this absolute impunity to be effective. Otherwise, the bully can only rely on his personal strength, and this is only possible in a confined space against a much weaker opponent. The war is waged by societies which form the institution of war which allows permission where none is granted. No one will ever give you permission to attack them or permission to defend against them. This, of course, is the language of war, with all of its consequences. The demand for absolute impunity for eugenic institutions constitutes an egregious and act of war, but more than that, it proclaims war is natural and eternal, and insists that this war is some sort of service or help. The thrill of torture can only be maximized if such statements are made, and to even let them be made is itself an egreious act of war made natural. It is something altogether different from war as it was understood. For all of the egregiousness of the eugenic creed, it never is particularly successful. It makes living abortions only at exorbitant cost, using highly ineffective torture to modify behavior. It does so not because this strategy is useful in the sense that war acts are judged to be useful, but because the thrill of making the assertion is what eugenics does. It did not need any justification, any utility, or any demonstrable merit to the act. Since I am still alive, their strategy has not been terribly effective, and the same is true of the torture and thrill of maximial torture that eugenics represents. They do so because they can, and in some way, the eugenist cannot help itself. It is, and always will be, a Satanic ape that insists that humanity be a Satanic race and a failed race, brought to its lowest possible conditions. The utility of driving down the cost of labor in the abstract is not terribly relevant. The utility of the death cult and killing is only partially relevant. There is no version of eugenics which can end, and there is no taking back such an egregious offense against anyone. Therefore, violent attacks against those who advance the eugenic creed, in any way, do not require any remorse or sense that this is "equally wrong" or something to equivocate with the unique, Satanic terror of the eugenist. Ignorance of the law and reality is no excuse. Enablers of eugenics face the same fate as the ultraviolent who live for the thrill of maximal torture.

To keep the religion of war active, it was necessary every now and then to engage in the genuine article. Whether there was anything to be gained was less relevant than a religion of war requiring sacrifices and ritual practice, and after enough games and internecine conflict had been exhausted, the religion of war could only find an external opponent to attack. There was almost never any material cause or benefit from the war, with the most obvious treasure being slaves. Slaves are problematic without an enforcement mechanism to ensure their submission. The typical practice, when it was not just wholesale slaughter, was to kill outright all males except the weakest and the youngest, and to kill any female who was defiant and wouldn't accept the right of conquest - and the "right of conquest" is pure sexual pathology made into a political tenet. The weakest males would become slaves, and the greater the submission, the greater the disdain. The youngest boys would be slaves, raised in the culture of the oppressor, and would be living symbols of victory and the corruption of the loser. It would become common practice for the females to go with conquerors, with the most venal of them lining up to welcome conquering armies, since that is how the great mating game goes. In an era before patriotism or any sense of pride took root, it was war against war, and bitter griping for those on the losing end of war, which was most of humanity. If the cult of war were absolute, this would have been the end of history: a roiling battlefield where the purest Social Darwinism enslaves most of the world in pointless fighting, never progressing beyond a level of war suitable to maintain the status of the losers as livestock, and any movement to suggest that humanity could be something else would be considered retarded, insane, and so anyone suggesting such an idea would be killed on sight. Since there were a great many people who did possess this view, it was and would remain a common sight to do exactly this, and so many visionaries who imagined a peaceful world would be tortured, publicly humiliated, and scorned for suggesting that the cult of war was retarded. You could say war was bad, or mean, or evil, or costly. You could say frankly that war is Hell, because that was undeniable to anyone who thought about war with any sort of clarity, or even put two and two together to figure out what this is. You could never say that the religion of war or the cult of war was "retarded". That was beyond the pale. If war were considered merely stupid, it was always an inferior sort of stupidity that did not have any of the stigma that would be associated with fools. If someone were to say that the cult of war and religious veneration of it was the full, disgusting retardation that it actually is, that person was to be killed on sight and never allowed to suggest that idea. To suggest it and mean it would lead to a number of conclusions that would undo the conspiratorial project that a cult of war engages in to perpetuate itself. To say the cult of war is retarded is to say, without hesitation, that a warrior aristocracy can be and should be exterminated down to the last man, and any such structure should never be allowed to insinuate itself again for any reason. That development could never be allowed to happen, and this was sensed by the earliest ideologues of war, who knew what they possessed and that the great game could never actually end. This dictum that war must never end had to be followed enough of the time to ensure the practice of war never abated, but it could only be enforced for so long and with so much vigor. Few people were so committed to the war cult, and even if they were, they lacked a modern understanding of ideology and its perpetuation, relying mostly on low cunning and the superficial brilliance that is as common as dirt in the human race.

For all the talk today about the eternal struggle for life and the prevalence of war as the default state of mankind, if you look around, you find very few people who are true believers in any cult of war. They have always existed, and have always been able to insinuate themselves in various places. They can be found among the most intelligent of priests, who use all of their intellect devising new ways to torture and mutilate the damned and are the most dangerous of the lot, and they can be found among the ordinary fighting men who were at first not that different from any other man. They can be found among the lowest classes, and among men who are abject failures and would have been laughed out of any proper army. The cult of war does not necessarily entail being good at war in its actual manifestation. Very often, the fiercest believers in the cult of war are terrible at actually fighting, or even the drilling and ritual that conditions men to be useful for anything. War could prevail not because it was natural or inherent, but because war was materially useful for certain objectives. The most obvious is defense. If it takes only a few people to decide they're going to be assholes to the bitter end, there would need to be an awareness in society that this is a possibility, and the most obvious way to contend with this smallest of warbands is to meet them with another warband. War in any form is only countered with war, even if the defending party is a small contingent who see their function as one of security or peacekeeping. Even if the defender's methods are methodically pacifistic and refrain from anything that is seen as unwarranted, illegal, or immoral, those methods are constructed with the same aims as a violent war plan. The cult of war's lack of appeal to a broad base in humanity is not a matter of simple moral sentiment that could be adjusted with education. If that were the case, then the program of instilling this social value through state schooling would have been successful in no more than two generations, and there would not be a surviving man or woman who was not a purely fanatical zealot for the war creed. Any who disagreed would be immediately killed in broad daylight and this would be seen as meritorious and morally correct. This view is what ideologues always allude to and insinuate is the silent majority, and they assume everyone thinks like them at heart.

We should ask why war, either as a cult or the practice itself, is so unpopular. We can overcome our native disgust towards acts like killing or torture, although those are a common demotivator, as is the effort required to kill or torture someone who will avoid that fate, and the risk of retaliation against an opponent who does not regard a state's monopoly on legal violence. Those motives are all very practical reasons to despise war, but if the only argument against a cult of war is that war is hard and costly and risky, in the long run the cult of war would win by removing all of the risks and habituating people to accept terms of living which keep the cost of war down. This is what the cult of war and its advocates pursue as their strategy to continue the game, and so it has been accounted for. Still, the cult of war provokes a certain distaste beyond the obvious, and beyond the mere existence of counter-forces that suggest a moral, ethical, and philosophical stance that works against war. What is the source of that distaste for war, that makes it a bad enough idea that it isn't the first instinct of every human being? If the impulse to join the cult of war was as natural as its ideologues believe, the human race would be very different and it would not be possible to sucker most people into accepting states as we know them, or the moral philosophies that prevail. Obviously, the existence of moral codes that oppose war and its cult had to come from some seed, so at the very least, there would be a tendency in people that avoids the cult of war. There would be multiple tendencies, whereas the tendency for a cult of war is a singular proposition. There are not multiple variants of war, for the essential nature of war is a very particular proposition, and any type of war that is less than the genuine article would be dismissed as irrelevant and falls to the wayside. Any variant conception of war that would claim to be co-equal would be challenged on a number of grounds if someone were to suggest the true nature of war, if war as a practice were stripped of its political or human connotations and were understood as a mechanism in its own right. War as a means to an end has been proven to be counterproductive, when there are many ways to accomplish those ends that don't entail the particular mobilization that war entails. A war mentality is not necessary for social organization to exist in the first place, because most of our existence, even in a war-dominated society, must out of necessity acknowledge a basis other than war if members of that society wish to define themselves as anything other than a thing that fights other societies, in which there is no world outside of this limited social activity, and the warring societies are believed to constitute the entirety of the world. Such a world would not have any basis to exist except pure appropriation, and would exhaust its resources eventually. The ethos of eugenics, as warlike as it is, is not reducible to the war cult alone, and the extensive war cult in eugenic society is only a small part of what eugenism entails. A society dominated by a war cult and war mobilization alone, where all other mobilization is inferior to the war effort, would still be driven by concerns that would be inimical to eugenics, like actually being able to win battles or build something beyond more eugenics. A war cult has to at least appear like it can win battles, while eugenic society has been premised on a pervasive sickness where elaborate war plans are drawn every day but nobody regards anything battleworthy as useful. Eugenics is a level of depravity that even the most pathetic war cult ideologues could not match. I mention the hideousness of eugenics here because one consequence of the eugenic creed in its full horror is that it is one of the few things that would make a warmongering death cult appear positively enlightened by comparison. Eugenics, though, could only proliferate under highly specific conditions which were engineered. The eugenic creed is so unnatural that even its partisans have difficulty following through with its conclusions in full, unless they are in a hardcore cult echo chamber and have entirely given over their minds and souls to it. The war cult, even in its most fanatical forms, isn't particularly difficult to comprehend, and makes enough sense that almost everyone can figure out what it is after a sufficient introduction to such a society. We rule out naivete then as an argument as to why the war cult provokes distaste. Most of us are aware on some level that war is a thing and that it is not the narratives we are told about glory and victory, but something altogether different. Too many people have come back from war and told us it is bullshit, and there is no way to pretend for long that the narrative sops about war's glory are anything more than moonshine. Even the stupidest of us can figure out a few things about the nature of war and why it happens. After all the basic moral sentiments against killing and the typical consequences of war are taken care of - and war as a practice entails a great many things that do not involve killing or maiming - there is still something in war that is distasteful to every sense we possess, such that even the most devout war cultists have to consider how they will sell war in the future.

The true answer is not inherent to the cult of war itself, but a simple truth about the organizations that would wage it. There really is no society, in the sense we are told to believe it exists. When Margaret Thatcher announced that to the world in the 1980s, she hit a chord that resonated with the sense many of us had for a very long time, but that had not truly found its expression as a widely promulgated theory until then. There were philosophers suggesting this all along, when asking questions of what society was, but in all practical experience, nations, tribes, communities, clans, and societies of various sorts were a fact of life. There was no getting around the question of who was with whom, and no amount of individualist ethics could change what people lived through every day. Maggie Thatcher the milk snatcher herself can't change that by declaring it so, and it was not hard to see that there was certainly a society organizing the entire neoliberal project. Put another way, as a contemporary American comedian put it, "it's a big club, and you ain't in it." There would be in neoliberal society a very big and prominent club, which rendered all other social associations irrelevant in the long term. It is a global club, that did not regard nations or governments or the old type of state. Arrayed against it is everyone else, and whatever associations they believed they possessed, none of them would last for long, and it was easy to disrupt each and every bulwark of resistance to what was happening. If you were going to have social life in this very large group that was out of the club, it would only be on the terms those in the big club allowed. Getting to that point was a very, very long project, and the result of so much social engineering and manipulation, with many incentives pointing to it. By no means is the world of neoliberalism a foregone conclusion, or the only way it could have happened. The world of neoliberalism is a very particular phase in global history, and it is not a homogenous phase in which history was arrested. The neoliberal world was defined by spikes in activity, as humanity would be pushed from one crisis to the next, and each spike and collapse was planned with winners and losers in mind. In short, the neoliberal program would be a series of wars waged by one big club against everyone else, who were for the purposes of the big club a large mass opposed to them. From the outset, the attitude of those in the big club would be that democratic society was in reality a disorganized rabble that would run around like headless chickens if enough crises were instigated. This is the position stated outright by Walter Lippmann in his famous work Public Opinion (1922). Whatever the true nature of the disorganized rabble, it would be necessary for members of the big club to see it collectively as one big Other to be dismantled and reshaped. In short, the program not just of neoliberalism but of the technocratic society that came into being with the onset of the first world war, was nothing less than a war of that big club against the whole world. However much the big club members giggle at how easy it is to break up and atomize the little people, the same logic applies in their own camp. Nobody in the club has any reason to trust each other or any native solidarity. It is a club of elites, nobles, cocaine-fueled executives, prostitutes, drug lords, brown-nosers, schemers, and people who got there because they understood that politics at heart was primarily a game of stepping on the weak to get ahead. Even if that was not the full truth of politics, that was the strategy members of the big club adopted to get where they were. The honest who believed the world could be better were the simps and suckers, and the world was given over to a cocaine-fueled orgy that did not require any rationale or excuse any more. Those who made this big club were not always hardened warriors, and most of them knew war was for rubes. So many of them rose with the eugenic creed, and knew that alliance in the eugenics movement was the only thing holding this club together. Again, this will be revisited many times, especially when eugenics itself is examined in proper light. There was something to these people that allowed them to succeed, and it wasn't because they were necessarily good at winning or smarter than the average bear.

A simple truth to the neoliberal victory is that their assertion that there is no society was, at its heart, true and obvious enough that most people instinctively knew it and felt it. The 1970s were a decade of repeated betrayals to anyone who believed in a single socialist idea, who wanted to keep what socialism in the manifestations it was allowed to have created. Even if they didn't like socialism or didn't see what was built as "socialist", the idea that society could be organized for mutual good and benefit had enough appeal to those who saw the obvious benefits of it. This organization was always premised on a social cooperation that was not premised on dire necessity or empty faith that it was possible, and wasn't premised on a theory or intellectual conceit that socialism was smarter and better. Any cooperative society is only built so long as its participants are motivated by something more than slogans or material need or identity with a team. A genuinely solidaristic politics had been attempted, but was under constant attack, with many within the socialist camp no longer seeing anything in a socialism that included most of the human population. The neoliberal reaction was not a bold move that changed the world, but a natural progression of what was inherent in the transformation of human society that began its active phase just before 1914, when the movement leading to the first world war made it an inevitability. The result seen with neoliberalism was not just the end of socialism, or the end of democracy, or the end of liberal ideals in any recognizable form. It was not merely the rollback of the Enlightenment, and it was indeed no rolling back at all. It was not even a full reversion to feudal behaviors, which were very much premised on sociality and transactional relationships. It was not a transformation to slave society like Rome. A few liked to draw superficial comparisons to the ideal republic of Plato and aspired to that, but if that was the goal, what we see is yet another horrible parody of that, of which so many have been made. What happened, and became clear enough to all, was that there really was no society. This was not a victory of ideology over truth, but a transformation of sociality that was now possible. There would of course still be society, in that there was an assemblage of humans interacting with each other, who formed organizations. People would still live next to each other and fear each other, and know that someone is watching them and capable of reporting to some secret police that you weren't supposed to talk about. The conspiracism inherent in society didn't go away, and was more prominent than ever. Despite this, people still had friends and relied on mutual benefit to survive. The logic of capitalist determination did not dictate that people should be selfish. "Greed is good" is not a very smart strategy for any capitalist, and the success stories of Reaganite capitalism were not those who built something or led to any great thing, but the plunderers who held the best parties and had the best drugs. It is not something you would do unless you wanted to destroy as quickly as possible any virtue in a society, and that is exactly what would be promoted. But this, too, was not simply imposed by decree.

For a long time, members of any class would be burdened by the knowledge that society was vast, and organizations were everywhere. For the lower classes, this had been their experience all along, and their own social networks were local and never too reliable, but there were always parties and associations, and even the weak could congregate and chat. It was an expectation that could be believed sometimes that there was a place for anyone, even the lowest of the low, if someone were able to ingratiate themselves with the right people; and even if someone were a loner, it was possible to stay alone and be left alone, and there was a certain respect for loners who did not cause trouble for anyone. For the ruling classes and their functionaries, the sociality of the lower classes always presented a menace that could not be ignored. Mass politics always remained a possibility, if there were anyone to activate it and direct it to action. Even without mass politics, the lower classes would not sit idly while they starved. Memory of revolutions taught the ruling class that peasants and proletarians that are starving will rise in revolt at the first opportunity, and will do whatever is needed to not starve. The rulers further had difficulty trusting each other and conspiracies within their own ranks. Neoliberal society succeeded in atomizing people not because an ideology was accepted, or because some brand new technology or communication method had an effect merely by being known. Neoliberal society was possible because enough inroads had been built to short-circuit any individual who was a threat, and information pertaining to that person, like their location and a detailed record starting from childhood and recorded in school records, was available to anyone who sought to control society at all of its levels. Individually, no man could hope to survive against a society set up to destroy him. This had always been known to be possible and could be done simply by throwing stones at a sinner, but this had to follow the dictate that someone without sin was the first to throw the stones. Now, the stones could be thrown from the shadows, and the question of sin was no longer a concern. Reputations could be destroyed and entered into the official record that followed someone around since birth, and someone selected to die would be marked from an early age, recorded, and hounded anywhere he went. Anyone who was not wanted and was to be thrown away was done, and this could happen to screen out three-year-olds and track them to lives of eternal torment. A living Hell could be enforced, and due to volumnious record-keeping and control over the spaces a human in civilization could enter, it would be truly inescapable. At this stage, the lockouts could only secure a few islands, and so the ruling class still had to contend with society in the open field. A lockout can ensure that someone who is blacklisted will never find work again, and this is where the word "fired" is replaced with "terminated". The linguistic shift to "terminated" was not just a declaration that someone no longer worked at a particular place, but that the entire apparatus of human resources declared someone persona non grata. In institutions that were controlled, there was a wide network of information gathering to determine how far someone was allowed to rise. It was not until the conclusion of the second world war that the construction of this apparatus was undertaken in earnest. Attempts to do this have always been the dream of any manager, but there were too many ways to evade detection, and one great difficulty is that the recordkeeping required human clerks who had no reason to go along with any such program. The new system still allowed for nepotism and the promotion of friends through shady and secret methods. In fact, neoliberal America encouraged that practice, as rampant cronyism would accelerate the rot and lock out the honest, which was the purpose of constructing such an apparatus in the first place. The great sin of the past is that every now and then, honest and decent people would disrupt the well-laid plans of a managerial strata, and no manager could suppress the lower classes without facing revolt or mass refusal to work, and then that lower class seizing whatever they could to hold out until the managers and the upper classes had to bargain. Even in the waning years of the class struggle, there remained bitter resistance to this invasion of private life and encroachment on genuine freedoms still enjoyed and believed in by the common people. For the lower classes, society as something that existed independent of those who held the state was increasingly inconceivable.

The only proper definition of society would be that which is independent of any state, and which does not extend over the whole world in some nebulous sense. Even if society were vast and difficult to leave completely, the correct understanding of society is that if you were alone, you were alone, and it would take some doing for someone to go after you. It was believed that if you kept your head down, paid your taxes, and did all the things you were supposed to do, you could get by, or at least you should expect to if the society was at all tolerable to live in. This was how the better off of the lower classes, which had to be most of them, and the middle class alike understood the world. Whatever the ideology or laws or machines were, it was a safe bet until the late 20th century that you could avoid the worst of society simply by avoiding anything that attracted hostility. This didn't always work, and no one could run away forever, but when it became clear to someone that they really only get what they are allowed to have in this world, it was reassuring to know that there were nooks and crannies to escape to, and there were niches where people could find work or sustenance outside of this one model the ruling institutions presented. The ruling institutions, indeed, had to accept, against their inclinations, that there were ways to live outside of a narrow interpretation of Fordism. The industrial change that came with the neoliberal project would have suggested, by itself, that the variety of ways in which people could live and be accepted would increase rather than decrease. The Fordist model of conformity and massification was not in vogue, and there was no material or intellectual reason why an open, diverse society couldn't work. Indeed, it seemed very practical to just about everyone that cultural conformity was an artifact of a very particular period in human history, and conformism was never as religiously followed as its partisans insisted it was. The 1950s were not this utopia of whitebread suburban families living in luxury and negroes knowing their place and getting their separate but equal treatment that is better than they deserve, and no other period where conservatism was a prominent idea actually conformed to this fantastical, Hitlerian lie that was advanced as the Right's manifesto. When conservatism was ascendant, it was always marked by furious culture wars, intrigues in every sector of society, the promotion of venal bourgeois interests as a counter to liberal reforms or the dreaded communists, and general incompetence in government. Reagan was no exception to the rule of conservative incompetence at governing anything, and gloried in a level of incompetence and criminality that prior conservatives could never attain and would envy forevermore. Bland conformity was little more than a marketing jingle of conservatism, rather than the actual state of affairs. In industry, Ford had his reasons for standardizing production, because that was cheaper and the industrial technique of the time favored this standardization more than later industrial technique would. Standardization was never the ideal, even for Ford. Ford himself was partial to the vision of the fascists, who championed individualism in ways that were acceptable, but in industrial method there was no ideology involved. The same methods would be used in America, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany, because they were effective for building cars and tanks which everyone wanted at the time. The widespread availability of new machines, and then a campaign to make certain technologies a fixture in every home like the television and the home computer when they arrive, was not out of some conformist tendency, but a very particular social engineering project. The goal of this proliferation of consumer goods was not massification or conformity, but the beginning of an invasion of private life by the corporate sector. Far from it, everything about consumer culture favored individual expression, and the only thing that someone did conform to was whatever the thought leaders were really telling them to conform to, which would be uncritically accepted by everyone when the signal was given that conforming was mandatory. In personal expression and ideology, people could be whatever they wanted, and this was encouraged. The loudmouthed, opinionated American is himself a product of social engineering, trained to express his opinions only in a narrow, socially accepted manner and in the right arenas. Whether that loudmouth is a conservative, liberal, progressive, stealth-fascist, socialist, or an acceptable brand of communist, you could be whatever you wanted ideologically and in certain manners. The major thing to conform to was not a superficial identifier, but the expectations of a technocratic society that was set up to first manage people, then invade their lives, and then destroy those who were not suitable for the world desired in the 21st century. Neoliberalism, of course, is part of a larger plan, and only one arc that was planned decades in advance.

In this society, the conception of "society" changed. It was no longer an assemblage of people, or networks of friends. That was unseemly to speak of. Society instead would be interpreted as a vague entity, unmoored from any particular person but represented in media by appointed experts and talking heads. Society would be identified solely with authorities who were presented not just as spiritual authorities, but arbiters of truth who would tell you what your senses were supposed to say. This project was not built overnight and was never a fait accompli, and its description will be revisited throughout this book. The important takeaway is that "society" was now seen as an alien represented solely by these interests, and this was not merely a fascistic political claim, but taken to be a true understanding of what societies were. Societies were presented as mushy blobs, in which human agents were only recognized by experts with privileged access to say who was what. You, the pleb, were not allowed to say who was what, outside of a limited purview permissible for you. It was not your place to question the best and the brightest or any designated thought leader. If you tried, you faced ridicule and a struggle session until you gave up. Since you likely had a job and the thought leader was paid to tell you what to think, you were at a disadvantage in this battle, without any champion to represent you. Civil society, which itself originates more as a myth than a real thing, becomes the only link you have with society in the genuine sense; society is mediated by institutions of selected leaders and gurus, and members without privileged access are only there as cogs to fill their function. You knew on some level that society was just a bunch of people, even if they have bureaucracies and technological advantages over you, but many features in this society would tell you that the experts were virtually godlike in their command of "society", and anything that happened was the result of the experts making it so, engaging the engine of history to move it as they saw fit. On the surface, this makes a lot of sense. You would want smart people making decisions and stupid people to not interject, for all the reasons that would be a good idea. This development was not premised on any actual merit, but on a belief that ordinary people were not to judge society as it was, and could only speak of it as a vague blob. Any analysis of society that went beyond acceptable boundaries, like a thorough critique of the entire technocratic idea that went past "experts are bad because they are mean and I don't like them", could only travel so far before it was suppressed. One way technocratic society did sell itself was because its institutions would, until the Reagan period, operate at a sufficient level of competence that most would agree they were an improvement over what existed before, in the respects that were emphasized in the post-WW2 order. Living standards had generally improved even for the poor, work schedules were not onerous, and the company town was an anomaly rather than the norm. Reagan might appear to the vulgar historian like a retread of the era of robber barons. The robber barons, though, presided over the construction of technology and the rising arc of empire, and made a point of telling everyone that the robber barons built things and made the world go, and this was not backed by nothing. Robber barons built Standard Oil and made the world of the 20th century possible, and while it can be argued there was a much better way, there was an expectation that something had to be built for the robber barons to remain in power. Reagan's crooks did the robber part, but instead of the nobility expected of a baron, all of this robbery went to funding cocaine-fueled orgies and narco gangs and a managerial strata that was tasked with the open liquidation of everyone who was selected to die. That is the only thing they valued, and that is exactly what the world got. There was nothing else whatsoever to this entire project. The drugs and orgies were of course a feature of the robber baron era as well, and the robber barons loved narcostates more than anyone because many built their fortunes off the Opium Wars and its consequences. It is this managerial strata and a machinery that could reach into private life physically and over electronic communications and record-keeping, and the training of technicians and influencers who would be the enforcers of this new fascism, that made Reagan's society a different beast. It was no longer "society" in any sense we appreciated, when we had to speak of what was politically relevant in discussions about society. This went beyond merely annihilating the idea of a democratic society. That was still, at least nominally, an idea holding currency, even if democratic institutions could be ignored whenever needed. It was rather that speaking of society in the way it was formerly constituted became an unmentionable, as if you were speaking of unicorns to conceive of a society that changed without an expert moving history and telling you that history has in fact moved. Generations of technocrats insinuating themselves into every area of social life would have produced this even if there were no Reagan. The same attitudes came to prominence in the communist world, and with it, it was not uncommon to see Communist Party politicians say the same things a Reaganite would say. This change was not the inexorable result of creeping technology just making it happen, but a concerted orientation of social action towards the goal. In short, the ruling oligarchs and their alliance with intellectuals made clear that they were at war with those who were not in this formation, and the only way to get on the lifeboat in this grand lifeboat ethics exercise is to accept the ethos of that formation. The death of the old conception of society was the true beginning of the conditions of Francis Galton's Eugenics, and everything that came to pass was exactly what Galton prescribed as the course of action in the British Eugenics Society, conducted for the reasons Galton wanted and that they got.

This death of society as we knew it, of course, was not just a new development, nor an eternal truth. The myth of society as this technocratic alien we did not belong to was not universal in the past, but it has its antecedents. Its core thinking can be found in political treatises of Antiquity, and there would always be partisans favorable to such a view of society and institutions. Liberals acknowleding the individual as the basis for society were not announcing a new revelation. The concept of states and institutions relating to individuals rather than larger social formations was inherent to the philosophical conception of the state itself, and liberals saying this was basically a "well, duh" statement before they expounded on the meaning of that. There is no conception of society as such without individuals being the principal social agent. An early philosophical erosion of this comes from Marx himself, who discounted the liberal idea of individualism on historical materialist grounds. Marx is confusingly inheriting the political thought of the philosophical state, which always had to contend with its subjects as individuals before it could contend with them collectively. This is a very obvious error that Marx can recognize, but when Marx postulates about the nature of Man, he veers into philosophical beliefs that are sometimes rooted in an assessment of biology, and sometimes bold assertions of a human spirit that conform more to Marx's expectations of what it should be rather than what most humans have been. For Marx, the residuum is not at all relevant and has no place in his world, and visions of the lower classes that suggest the failure of their class would be fixed by simply not letting those lumpenproletariat ruin it with their smelliness. The attitude of later Marxist-Leninist states towards the residuum was to accuse them of political crimes of Being, with the implicit knowledge that what would be regarded as "bad genes" in eugenist society was in of itself a political offense against the state. In this way, political psychology promoted solutions that were more about upholding the Marxist-Leninist institutions and the grand theory than any condition of the residuum. If a member of the residuum could get with the program somehow, then that's great, but this almost never happened, and anyone who was politically insane or politically retarded was shunned from socialist society. The idea was to keep those people, even if they demonstrated some brilliance and an eagerness to work for socialism, in a position where they stayed exactly where they are. There would be in socialist society a quiet marking down of people who were "not supposed" to be in the political class imagined, even if they were faithful followers of the program. This came to many of these people as a shocking betrayal when the Soviet Union was to be dismantled, and within the technical classes, there was a rat race to see who would sink or swim in the world to come. Those who were "not supposed to be there" would be left to the mercy of the market system to sell whatever talents they had, and they could expect to sell those talents at cut-rate prices because this is neoliberalism, and it is a harsh world. So far as socialism existed anywhere in the world, this betrayal was bound to happen, and was seeded in advance. It was inherent in many of the socialist ideas that gained currency, because socialist ideas that would have prevented this would be squelched before a concept that technocracy could be criticized at all was allowed to gain steam. Any socialism that could be critical of technocracy in a serious way would have recognized the threat of a program like eugenics overrode any threat of capitalism as an economic situation, and that could not be tolerated. Those who stood to benefit from eugenics, or believed they would out of sense of their own intelligence, were not going to let some do-gooders interfere with the great working. The war on society required all intellectual trends to turn decisively against the masses, and turn out in favor of the new war - the true war, which did not regard the lines of class or states or any line except the line dividing those selected to live from the many selected to die. Clearly, those in the selected to live camp, who knew what the score really was and how they would stay there, had a lot of work to do in this war, mostly against the residuum but also in their own tent. The selected to live team was comprised of many rival factions and interests that had little to do with each other besides a commitment to this idea of an intelligentsia ruling all, and that they considered themselves members of that club. Dominant in that tent would be the ruling capitalist oligarchs, who had much to do with selecting the criteria for "smart" and who would be allowed to promote in the educational institutions and believe with certainty that they actually were in the club. Not every oligarch was in on the plan, and there was a large oligarchic faction that wanted the usual Nazi horseshit, but everyone in this formation understood that before they could take out each other, they had to contend with a large residuum that had no reason to go along with what was about to be done to them, except the threat of termination and torture compelling submission. The great carrot to offer to the residuum was to feed their worst vices and glorify the rot, and this was the first and most obvious part of the social engineering offensive. Those of the residuum who would do their part to enable eugenics chose their side of the war, often receiving nothing more than a pittance before being thrust back down into abject humiliation. They will always have chosen their side in the war, and should not even be dignified with the lofty title of being a Judas.

The strategy of the eugenists involved, but was not entirely defined by, this understanding of war's purpose as a social engineering project. Those who are familiar with war allude to this purpose of war throughout history. For most of history, war did not require a concept of sociology or social engineering for its purpose to be understood, and because wars were fairly common, it could be accepted that this was the way of the world and the way of Man. The hunters and hersdmen who would become warriors understood at heart why they fought, and that war as a practice was where they would have to prove if they were men or sissies, if they were allowed to be men upon reaching the age of manhood. War, on some level, was an expectation rather than a theory. It did not take much for a warband to form, and none of these warbands spent too long philosophizing about the nature of their game. Such an undertaking was not necessary to appreciate the effect of war. The objective of war did not need to be the killing of people or the destruction of something, nor did it have to be a fight to claim some territory or property. If wars were purely fought for mercantile purposes or what could be construed as that, they are usually a very inefficient way of attaining the goal. There may be an economic or political calculation involved to determine the payoff of a war, and usually there is this consideration, as politics and diplomacy is always a consideration whether there is war or not. Wars are usually fought with the expectation that neither side will be wholly exterminated or disintegrated, but that some victory condition entails domination of one group over another, or at least one group fends off an attempt by another to do that and considers not being dominated to be the value won. In the ancient world, until empires become the norm, tribes and nations would fight, lose, and come back in a matter of years ready to throw off the yoke of domination and fight again. The Romans would have to fight the rest of Italy multiple times before Roman hegemony became a reality, facing periodic revolts from their closest allies as far in as the late republic. Such examples would be the norm, and persistent domination over a large area or a large number of clients was an exceptional case rather than the rule. The usual way in which early and classical empires were sustained was through keeping defeated cities and nations as subjects of the imperial power, often with states remaining clients rather than being annexed. Even when annexed, cultural or racial replacement was rarely imposed in a violent way, and in practice assimilation was never a popular imperial strategy even in the modern era. Cultural homogenity, let alone racial homogenity, was a completely dismal strategy for rule, and the states implementing it did so not to resolve a war, but to maintain a permanent war that was more about social class and exploitation than any contest over identity. The open racial war in the United States towards the ex-slaves was entirely pressed by a certain faction in American society against people who bent over backwards to cooperate with an enemy, that by all of its laws and the stories it told itself should accept this cooperation, and almost everyone else in the world found it boggling that a vocal minority would maintain this war even when it held no material benefit or purpose and was not even fought in a way that would resolve the war. It is important to understand the racial war as a precursor to eugenics, and then as a vehicle to sell the purest eugenic creed to a sector of the American populace, and to recruit many of the white cuckolds who would be faithful, retarded death squads for the creed when the time came. That is all it was really for, and why racism was maintained more than any benefit from exploiting a race or even the exploitative benefits of eugenics for depressing overall wages. The crushing of wages did not require racism, nor benefitted from racism, because maintaining white identity would be a constant expense requiring payoffs and costs to overall security; and in any event, integration could just as easily be used as a tool to reduce the wage fund, and this prong of the war to reduce the wage fund was also used, since the capitalist-eugenist alliance loved the three-pronged assault from left, right, and center, with the center in this case being moderates who normalized a synthesis that was prepared as the solution to a culture war. The culture war was designed to perpetuate indefinitely, so that this desired synthesis and the desired three-prong attack would be created against the desired enemy. This reduction of the wage fund was not itself the motive, but a means to an end of the greater struggle of eugenic social engineering. The wage fund, however large or small, would never allow people to purchase any means that would permit rebellion. The purpose of crushing wages was not a defensive reaction, but an offensive plan to modify the behavior of workers and the lumpenproles. Deprivation would be used both in a general sense to force more people to chase after fewer dollars, and to deprive particular qualities that would have been valuable for the workers' security and development. The former was overt and obvious, while the latter would be conducted in a million subtle ways through social engineering wars and manipulations in every institution Americans interfaced with. Here, the use of war for social engineering is the clear purpose of structuing social problems and crises as war, and the war on drugs and war on poverty, like many social wars, were redresses of a progressive drive that desired eugenics and covered it with humanitarian-seeming goals. Much of the war on poverty consisted of the last bits of the ladder technocracy created to elevate just enough workers to the status necessary to build the machines of neoliberalism, payoffs to fatten and weaken elements of the proletarians while locking them out of social advancement, and propping up institutions that would be necessary like the medical sector. It also was, for its time, a jobs program for the liberal and social democratic intelligentsia who would be tasked with managing their most hated enemy, the welfare recipient. Holding that leverage gave the sadistic social worker glee to watch a desperate lumpen's life destroyed in front of them, which this author can assure you was a common story for welfare recipients. Since all of this money was extracted from the workers and the middle class, and the comfortable middle class received back the indirect social benefit of being in the winning group and granted social privileges that couldn't be valued in money, this was not a problem. Further, it had long been established that any welfare beneficiary was just cycling money back to the bourgeoisie in various ways, since that money would have nowhere to go but the capitalists who provided all services a proletarian would buy, like food or rent. Any money paid out to the lumpen was destined to return to the hands of the bourgeoisie eventually, which is what the smart people in the room were trying to tell the stupid men when the liberals set this thing up. Leave it to conservatives to lack the brainpower to see this very simplistic but highly effective model, and not be able to construct a worthwhile argument against it because their animal brain only comprehends "me wantee" and bullycowardice.

The practice of war would be, throughout human existence, the decisive factor in what social units were possible, and which were desirable. There would be some direction of choice in what a society would do, and in the main, the forms society took were not created by being imposed as a condition of defeat, but were forms that some tribe or nation or city adopted for themselves, and found useful for whatever purpose they had in mind. Social engineering in any time is not easy, and was not always consciously pursued, but in the main, there were men and women who took it upon themselves to be critics of whatever society they lived in, and believed they had a role in changing it into something that suited their wishes as best as they could. War would not be the motivator that prompted anyone to make social reforms as a concession to the practice of war itself, and no society would actually accept that blithely. War, whatever the partisans of its cult may claim, is always a choice for at least one side, and the most aggressive societies in history always made decisions that suited motives other than victory in war. War merely was the final determination of whether a society could survive, and war was not the only way in which societies could be changed by an outside agent. Nearly all of the social forms we have adopted were not adopted because they were truly necessary in war, or because they were imposed naturally. They were adopted out of expedience in the most obvious scenarios, by the whim of those who were in a position to make these reforms, and by social values which favored certain qualities in people, or qualities in the type of labor they did, or qualities of an intellectual or spiritual nature. Many of these social values were desired for spiritual authority rather than the needs of a temporal authority reacting to a situation or a material benefit to them. The value of productivity itself is often desired because a spiritual inclination to praise industriousness, either generally or towards productive aims that feed an ultimately non-productive goal. It should be known that free trade and capitalism are not spiritually inclined to favor any productivity, and capitalism as an arrangement has been allergic to the idea that capitalists exist to produce useful things. It first resisted this by simply rejecting that argument, and then by interpereting "utility" as "the thing which lets me, the capitalist, keep my money against that filthy mob, and nothing else". Finally this transformed into the alliance with the eugenic interest, where "social ends" were interpreted to be eugenic ends, and production for any non-eugenic value was not only viewed as unproductive, but the very thing eugenic society sought to abolish. This has meant eugenic society has been characterized by restricting production both in quantity and in any quality that is inimical to eugenics, and eugenic society has always been careful to measure the quantity of product and line up with existing demand, then with-holding that quantity of product to affect minute behavioral changes in the poor and lock out the residuum. Eugenic society could not survive if it did not in theory possess the means to meet a quantity of product to allow everyone a standard of living. If eugenic society actually could not meet the productive demands to allow that standard of living, it would become known that the threats of a eugenic society to invade private life could not be backed up, and this would motivate all subjects to rebel against such a society because victory would be attainable.

This is not a difficulty in practice, because it has long been known that industrial technique could, if desired, far exceed demand. Eugenic society is premised on throwing large swaths of the population out of work, and little regard is given for genuine efficiency. The incentives of eugenic capitalism discourage too much innovation in production techniques if they would lead to greater production yields, and always seek to produce the barest minimum necessary with the smallest compensation for labor and the smallest number of laborers possible. It is more important to work 6 slaves for 120 hours a week, then it is to work 12 slaves for 60 hours a week, given equality of wages per hour. This is not because the doubled labor time produces twice as much product, because overworked slaves are not as productive during the added 60 hours, and a 120 hour work week would exhaust slaves in short order. Productivity increases that would shorten the work-week, without any effect on wages, would violate an incentive in eugenism to keep workers in as much misery as possible, and so the only efficiency increases allowed are those that would eliminate a need for a worker, rather than efficiencies that would make each worker more efficient. Nearly every production process is designed to eliminate as many workers as possible from the process, and to induce them to work as many hours and chew up as much of their free time and wealth as possible. Getting more out of workers per unit, even if the efficiency increase is put entirely towards paying workers half the wages for half the time invested, is missing the point of eugenic society. The eugenic society is not under actual competitive pressure to reduce wages, since it operates in monopoly conditions, and eugenic society is known to reward nepotism and has a stated goal of paying off favored workers and telling them they should be grateful for any scraps. The "bonus" of working an extra 60 hours of week in wages, which would exhaust the workers, is sold as something the worker should be grateful to accept, even if the work pace were to exhaust the worker utterly and kill him faster. The wider incentives of eugenism see the exhaustion and early death of workers as values of great importance. Extermination through labor is the eugenic plan for humanity, just like a concentration camp. The value of doing this outweighs the tiny benefit of a worker doing more with less time, and if that worker were to have more free time, eugenic society would prompt him to find another job if he wanted to prove his validity and worthiness to continue living, so that the 60 hours would be made up by another form of slavery. Since the basic work week in this eugenic society would be 120 hours, it would be seen as socially necessary and normal to impose this expectation, and if the worker has no standard for comparison or is put under enough pressure to comply with the demand, he won't be able to say no. It is the value of the worker's inability to say no that the eugenist values more than any product of a laborer. If it were possible, the eugenic capitalist would eliminate that worker as soon as his product is no longer necessary for the liquidation of the residuum, and that worker is sent to be reprocessed into glue after his remaining life is exhausted as a medical lab rat. This calculus looks odd if you think capitalism is about productivity and what is cost-effective, but the capitalist isn't a machine to optimize economic inflows and outflows. The capitalist merely has to work in that condition when he is in perfect competition, and as a monopolist, the capitalist is in the exact opposite of that. This is also the reason why a smart capitalist likes extracting rent and tribute and government largesse, so he can go be a "job creator" even though all the jobs are on paper and doled out like it is some sort of reward to be an exploited slave. Any study of the free trade system's origins would tell you that this behavior is expected of capitalists and incentivized, even if to our understanding it is a moral hazard. It was recognized as a moral hazard then, but the rules of the day were clear that workers were there to be exploited and had no rights as such, which is why incoming wage workers in the 19th century were treated as they were - as slaves both on and off the job, with police invading their life and an antagonistic city and state keeping them under control. The degree of freedom they were permitted was little more than an allowance rather than a right they could expect to protect, absent a lawyer and against courts that were stacked by an enemy class and interest that usually, but not always, ruled against workers on any matter, and always upheld the privilege of the bourgeois against the proletarian when the latter trampled on the former. Proletarians only won that fight on terms the bourgeois allowed, after considerable bourgeois assistance. If there are no proletarian lawyers, the proletarian is beholden to his class enemy for representation in any legal matter, which is a lot like slaves beseeching an advocate for whatever mercy they could find.

This transformation of incentives was made possible because the war of classes became not just a figure of speech or an inchoate struggle which was described with poetic narratives, or a grind that was waged against individual workers by a ruling body. Eugenics turned the class war from a figure of speech or an allegory into an actual war, fought by phalanxes of officers against an enemy in organized fashion, as if the whole society that was not in the know were an enemy formation. War expenditures and logistics were prepared to turn the class war into a siege. The ethos of Eugenics appropriated the word "jihad" to describe their struggle, and meant that in the true meaning of the word. No expenditure of the eugenic movement was accidental and the core actors of the creed knew to march in lockstep. They would be drilled in seminar after seminar to know exactly what to say, and to break ranks was not just a moral shame, but treason. Examples would be made of those who broke ranks or did not figure out what this was, and to those who were true believers, they behaved in every way as if they were warriors against the throngs of the residuum. In the manner of war propaganda, the residuum, most of whom were pacifistic to a fault, were portrayed as invariably hostile animals, dripping with disease. The image of a zombie, popularized in eugenic fiction, was the stand-in for the residuum, and depictions of the poor in poornography reveled in describing the residum as zombies, not just in a philosophical sense but in their behavior. The behavior of zombies, dull indolence and a perpetual brain fog, were conditioned into the residuum as much as possible. Once this behavior was conditioned, it would be used as further proof of the necessity of war against the residuum, and the eugenic faithful responded to the image of rotting zombies demanding food. That the rotting zombies were drugged by force, beaten, humiliated, denied any standards of comparison, and conditioned to believe desperate moaning was the only way out, was of course part of the struggle, and on some level the eugenic faithful were aware that they did condition those behaviors, and actively encouraged the residuum's zombie-like traits. To do otherwise would have required breaking ranks and admitting the possibility that either the creed was wrong, or that a follower of the creed was not truly in the elect. Neither was thinkable if someone had committed to the creed and believed themselves to be a true member. Even the useful idiots of the residuum who knew they were doing dirty work for the creed, who had no shame and would gladly make themselves Judas goats, knew that if they were to repent, there would be no mercy, and that what they did could not be undone. Their only hope was to beseech the eugenic creed for what crumbs they would continue to offer, and sometimes those crumbs materialized in exchange for more of the dirty work, while often the crumbs would disappear and their Judas goat would be vivisected like anyone else in the residuum. Since the favorite Judas goats were those who were on the margins of being cast into what is today special education, they would often tell themselves that they would rather be Judases than retarded, and that in the end is a reasonable calculation. There is no Heaven awaiting the retarded, and they would know this if they knew what Christianity taught.

Past transformations of society were not as war-driven as the ongoing transformation. They were not always the result of revolutions or rebellions. Typically, the revolution did not create the social change attributed to it at all. Revolutions are the result of something that formed in many sectors over a long time, and often tied into a worldwide trend of revolutions. The modern revolutions were always inspired by the same conspiracies that brought about the American rebellion and the French calling of the Estates-General, and would look to those two examples of what to do when establishing a new republic, whether it was liberal or socialist. Both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China made the most obvious comparison in their early history not with the French, as would be expected with an ideological reading of history,. but with the Americans. This makes sense given that the Soviets and Chinese faced many of the same initial conditions the Americans did, and effectively consolidated rule under a one-party state. The American way of doing this is complicated, but made clear with any long look at the American party system which is utterly alien to political formations in most elected republics, and it not even a thing Americans in the 19th century denied. There was a ruling party from a very early period in American history, and no political disagreement between parties ever really concerned ideology or core principles. The one period where the country split up was not a split in the party system, but a thing the whole political class save for a few attempted to avoid. The reckless actions of a few and the necessary response of the North at this provocation forced the hand of the slavery interest, which was one of those things considered part of the consensus that couldn't be changed through normal politics. The early history of the communist states was rife with infighting and a need for a ruler to suppress the political wingnuts, and the more overt one-party state of the communist regimes had more to do with their very different geopolitical situation and characteristics of Marxism-Leninism suggesting that it was desirable to rid the socialist republic of any sign of faction. Factional infighting was even more furious in the communist states than the shit-flinging of the Americans during the Articles of Confederation days and the battle between the Democratic-Republicans and Federalists over basically everything. Where all that led to the Federalists being chased out of public view until basically now, the communist infighting entailed an internal war against the kulaks, or capitalist roaders, and then for China things got super heated with the Cultural Revolution and the left's final resurgence as a global force. If revolutions were themselves the changing agent, then the results of revolution are dubious. The French Revolution was rolled back and its democratic reforms were undone beyond a token allowance by the restored monarchy for some representative body, entirely at the mercy of the king. What remained of the revolution was a transformation of France from an autocracy ruled by a glorified warlord backed by the Church to a modern nation-state of citizens, and while that was a very profound transformation and very relevant to our thinking of war as a social engineering project, the revolution itself only provided part of that change, and the same change did not happen everywhere in the same way. Americans never would develop a sense of nationalism in the French or European sense, and attempts to manufacture it have always been horribly misguided and un-American in profound ways. The communist projects relied not on nationalism but internationalism and the role of the Communist Party for their theory of how society would be ordered, and while the national idea from France informed everyone, the relevance of nationalism was not so much because it presented spiritual legitimacy, but because nationalism implied the basis for a mass army, which the French were using to kick astronomical levels of ass during the war with all of Europe that came out of the revolution. The transformations of society through war are not always what the initiators intended when starting the revolution politically, but those embroiled in any war are aware of the consequences and how a wars intent is transformative for both the enemy (they are to be subdued or disintegrated) and for the engaging society tasked with defending itself and adapting to its enemies.

One difficulty with using war as a plan for social engineering is that society, as mentioned, doesn't exist as a nebulous blob that can be taken for granted. It should not surprise anyone that wars, even among the ruling class, are never popular, and finding unanimity on a war of choice is nearly impossible. Wars of clear self-defense are almost obligatory for everyone, and wars to defend against an unforgivable slight to the society that would imply long-term humiliation are likely to find at least ruling class support. For most of the people, war is this horrific nightmare they are dragged into, that has always been nothing but bullshit fought for some aristocratic assholes who were taking their shit out on their own countrymen the previous day. For most of history, the rulers of a society openly laughed at their own people, and on multiple occasions used the war as a pretext to attack their own productive base, not because this was useful for fighting the war, but because the instigators of the war saw the declared war as a game and never gave up the war against their own country that was inherent to any aristocracy. An aristocracy that wasn't fighting that war against its own people would be overthrown the moment they were no longer needed, and that would be recognized very quickly if the war against the underclass truly abated. To maintain the war, aristocracies always resort to threats and ensure the life of the lower classes is never secure for long. Predation is inherent to aristocracy as a concept, and so aristocratic societies - and this definition defines most civilized societies with a developed and organized spiritual authority and a strong temporal authority that aligns with it, which means most societies extant including our own - make war and a cult of war central to their concepts of the political. The deliberate engineering of war and its purpose are obfuscated by the declaration that wars are merely political, and that politics necessitates war as some sort of good. Usually the public rationale is defensive, but no aristocracy conceives of itself defending a line in the sand or honoring any treaty.

Aristocracies do not face the most severe consequences of war and its cult, regardless of what class or combination of classes and which professions form the aristocracy. Normally warrior aristocracies are conceived since their connection to war is obvious. Spiritual aristocracies as a rule make an early alliance with warriors, and turn viciously against their own people. The warriors glorify violence and predation, and the spiritual leaders mollify the people while stealthily increasing the predatory instinct of the warriors and setting conspiracies against the commoners, pitting the commoners against each other in ways warriors cannot. Aristocracies drawn from the common ranks, which only became the norm in modernity, are typically aristocracies of capital or aristocracies premised on intelligence and supposed merit. The link of capital and banks to the old aristocratic order is hard to miss, and does not require too length an explanation. The rise of the aristocracy of capital was not an aristocracy of petty shopkeepers and factory owners who started from nothing. The commoners' rise was only possible because there were large capitalist entities already in existence, and the capitalist enterprise was tied most of all to trading companies that were de facto governments with armies. Without this presence, capitalism as a preferred arrangement is not able to fend off the older interest, and this is one reason capitalism happened in Europe rather than elsewhere. A few oligarchs can see that by pooling the wealth of the bourgeois petty and large, they share between them a majority of the wealth, and many commoners were educated men whose services were most useful to any regime, whether as scientists or lawyers or scholars. Every aristocracy of capital has usually implied that the capitalists possessed merit to acquire that wealth, and the leading capitalist aristocrats understood well that an alliance with science and technology was the surest way to secure that aristocracy, with the scientists and intellectuals being partners with their own interests in the arrangement. The leading aristocrats of capital were men in the new field of oil, railroad builders, industrialists with an eye towards arranging industry not just for a firm but the whole society, weapons manufacturers who now supplied not just guns and artillery, but battleships and tanks and outlandish battle platforms that were still yet dreams but the expectation of anyone who studied military hardware. Joining them would be the growing necessity of an intelligence service, policing functions and private armies that could control very large populations, and a military interest that was no longer aristocratic in its own right but always liked to hobknob with aristocrats and play-act like they were glorious generals of old. It was not the alliance with warriors that corrupted aristocracy to wage an internecine war. Every aristocracy, no matter its claims, rests on an essential difference between the ruler and ruled. This essence need not be hereditary or ordained by some spiritual authority, but it is an abiding characteristic of aristocracies that however they establish themselves, they did so because everyone else was kept down, and mobility into and out of the aristocracy was limited. Aristocracies take great pains not to release one of their own to the ranks of the ruled. When aristocracies eject one of their own, they will do as any smart mafia boss does and eliminate the dissenter. This is an old instinct that makes a lot of sense, because conspiracies don't want to let people with inner knowledge enter the ranks of the ruled and comingle with them. That is one of the worst things an aristocracy could face.

The formation of aristocracies was not a foregone conclusion. Clan societies typically lack a true aristocracy, but are instead ruled by certain families with a lot of wealth. It is possible to have rule without an aristocracy, and for those rulers to be very rich and everyone else to be poor. Tribal chieftains and their cronies are not aristocracies in any meaningful sense of the word, even if some who would be intellectuals would claim to a modern that their intellectualism is just as good as today's intellectual aristocracy. Aristocracy first required a considerable spiritual authority to be established, and then required a religion that dealt in some way with a theory of the state and society in terms that a mass audience could understand. This did not necessitate that the priests themselves rule, or that the priestly function had to be entirely associated with rule; it could be that spiritual thinkers would be present even in the lower classes, or the society allowed for spiritual consciousness of multiple types and permitted people to find their own guru. The important thing is that the spiritual authority of who and what ruled was made clear, and even if people didn't like it, they would be made to abide it. Aristocracy then required a stable, settled population of sufficient size, and a level of material stability such that a group of people were strongly secured from any effect of poverty. This usually meant that aristocrats did not engage in work or petty commerce, and extracted their wealth from various tributes and taxes. The return to the lower orders, if any, is that the aristocracy could share some of its privileges with the lower class, handing out a carrot that was jealously protected by the aristocracy. Aristocracies, in any form, claim they possess some merit, no matter how dubious, to justify their rule. This merit may be by demonstration of strength, or some law proclaiming it so and providing a spurious rational proof, or by claiming wealth was won by merit in a rigged economic order. Aristocracies encourage internal competition beyond the norm. A despotic king often rules with an aristocracy beneath him, but the aristocracy is antagonistic towards the king and vice versa, because every aristocrat wishes to be the king, or the first man in Rome as Caesar did. Aristocracies fear any figure like a Caesar or an Oriental despot like the Chinese emperors, and in the Chinese case, the emperor was explicitly placed above social class altogether to grant him a degree of freedom and authority and legitimacy to all classes. Very often, kings and emperors make a pretense that the sovereign is a check against the aristocracy, since the antagonism between kings and aristocracies is well known. The charge of an aristocracy against a would-be king or Caesar is that the king is a demagogue who wants to give the undeserving free stuff, and the counter-argument of a king is that the aristocrats are misers who only want to see you suffer. It's a great game that kings and aristocrats play, since anything the rest of the people get in such an arrangement are the crumbs of wealth, most of which was produced by labor and the land that was stolen from the common people. Aristocracies abhor work, and export that ethos to the rest of society. Aristocracies in the ideal world are remarkably unproductive, and view productivity in all cases as a thing which must be subordinated to reason and the dictates of military necessity. Given a choice, an aristocrat chooses to destroy prosperity beyond his own, and is miserly towards other aristocrats with whom he competes. All the things that can be said of a foul-hearted tyrant are really the soul of every aristocrat the whole way through. There is no decay of goodness to make the aristocrat a bad tyrant. Aristocracies start out rotten, and make a big spectacle about how they are good and noble. This goodness is defined entirely by comparison to the deprivation of the common folk. Commoners are only allowed dignity so long as they remain workers, and workers are never truly permitted dignity, liberty, or security. Those are the last carrots an aristocrat ever wants to offer a worker, no matter how favored. Even the loyal workers are kept on edge, and an ever-present nervous terror is the default mental state of life in an aristocracy. With how hilariously maladaptive aristocracy has been, whether it is an artificial or elected aristocracy or a natural aristocracy premised on genuine merit, it is a wonder this form of government became the default, and its assumptions were taken for granted. Human history is indeed strange. So ubiquitous is the bias towards aristocracy that political theorists usually simplify the types of possible government to despotisms, monarchies, and republics, the latter two being effectively aristocratic governments in every case but with different pretenses told to the masses and among the rulers. When the only alternative to aristocratic terror is despotism, it's an engineered narrative to convince people that there is no alternative. Unfortunately, humanity is habituated to aristocracy to such an extent that anything else has become inconceivable, except as a reign of terror from below the likes of which would terrify all, including the others of common stock. Aristocracy has always been a work in progress, constantly revising its dogmas.

The further origins of aristocracy will be elaborated in subsequent chapters. It is helpful here to note that a state of war exists between aristocrat and commoner, and the haves and have-nots. All of our economic thinking in monetary society is informed by aristocratic tendencies that dominate the economic order, and usually insist on control of the currency. If the monetary economy were truly free, as an anarcho-capitalist fool believes it ought to be, it would collapse rapidly, because the assumptions of aristocracy are everywhere in our social values and affect economic decision-making of every consumer. The example of the thirsty bourgeois man in the desert discovering marginal utility by fetching the theoretical caravan is the ultimate example of aristocratic "me wantee" thinking at the heart of bourgeois economics. Nowhere in that contrived example is there a concept of work, land, or anything material. It is a very peculiar example if you think about anything in the real world, because in practice even an aristocrat must concede to material reality if he wishes to rule or do anything. Aristocracy does not so much act out of ignorance of material reality, but actively defies it and insists on declaring a falsehood of their essential difference from the rest of us as a necessary political distinction. This is only possible with the implication that work and land itself is subjected to a warlike approach to its management. The aristocratic approach to this is not the only way a state, which at first responded to a general fear, could take shape. Aristocracy is one of the steps a society can take to transfer from an older, gentile constitution more firmly rooted in the natural world, to the philosophical state of today where the question of what type of government we have is written down and the answers promulgated as much as they need to be. Aristocracy was not the only way the war within a society could have been waged. There were many causes for an elite to elevate itself above the norm and assert that because it was that way now, it should be that way in the future, and that it was actually always that way in the past. "He who controls the present controls the past" has a long history, and it is inherent to aristocracy. Ideas contrary to aristocracy may be entertained, like democracy, but they are never implemented in any way which disturbs aristocratic conceits in a significant way. At most, these reforms are permitted as a way to mitigate the ruinous traits of aristocracy, while maintaining the principle that an aristocracy should rule over the ruled. The rationalization becomes more philosophical than premised on the particular qualities an aristocracy might possess, since as mentioned, an aristocracy can be drawn from any class. In theory an aristocracy of skilled labor is possible, and this is what crude technocratic conceits are taught to be, but technocracies always favored those skilled at ruling and management over anything productive. A technocracy where the workers and useful intellectuals actually rule would be something very different from anything that happened, and at best a relatively benevolent aristocracy understood the value of having something that actually produces things over their usual tendencies.

A society at war is very concerned with authority in all ways. It is impossible to conceive of organized fighting without a chain of command or some way to know what is to be done. Since authority is best represented in a singular person, this often means that warlike societies must start as individuals who, aside from the state of war, have no particular reason to be united. Attempts to define the warring society must be able to make a clear delineation between who is in and who is out, and who has access to certain information. A military that does not verify this access risks a saboteur who has no interest in the project, and this is always present even if the warring society were presumed to be united by some material concern, or by an unspoken fear that no one is going to transgress without consideration. War as a practice would contribute further to the human sense of themselves as selves, which was already suggested by human necessity to retain themselves for economic decision making and conduct of their personal affairs. The general fear which formed the state will be acted on by everyone, whether they have the favor of the state or not. States have to account for people in their domain even if they are disloyal and do not submit to the state's authority or comply with record-keeping a bureaucracy would require. As warbands and those with a conceit of telling others what they will do and what they are were able to assert greater authority and do so on a permanent basis, resentment towards this would be the default state of anyone who had no reason to play along with this game. The existence of a great enemy, the nature of which is always nebulous, would be an easy way to draw people who had no reason to enter state society into the affairs of a few people. At first, and for a long time, these people ruled purely through fear, might, superstition, and whatever they could use to manipulate people into obeying instructions that were clearly against their interests. A true aristocracy was not formed immediately, because the concept of aristocracy and its legitimacy in the eyes of the common folk could not survive just because it was declared so. Clan and tribe societies looked to their closer social units for authority rather than any state or aristocracy, and the early states were ruled not by aristocratic conceits, but because one house or an alliance of houses could rule by might. Little effort in Babylon or Egypt was made to suggest that the rulers cared in the slightest about their subjects, or needed their consent for anything at all. Tax and tribute was obligated not by social custom, but because those who ruled had an army and could take your property and your life if you didn't pay up. This principle is still at the root of state authority and why they can collect taxes. You didn't really get a choice in being taxed, and no society could operate if it actually let the people decide their tax rate. "Taxation without representation" was intended to mitigate taxes an aristocracy of capital paid, with the expectation that in the long run, tax and rent would extract anything the common workers acquired. This process was held off until the 20th century, and neoliberalism was premised on maximal rent extraction and a deliberate effort to strip every last penny the workers ever acquired and any lands they managed to claw away from the system. In the days before states related to individuals or considered anything resembling rights or standing a thing, the state's authority was that it would do whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted. This, you may be surprised, often was better than the alternative, because no one was under any illusion that the arrangement was anything else. The ruled and the ruler were purely antagonistic and the ruler had no prestige or theory beyond their ability to do so. A justification may be found in the religion of early states, which proclaimed that the rulers were gods or very close to the gods, but this was just an affirmative statement of a cult of power. It did not need to be legitimized by any theory, and its legitimacy through war was only as strong as the state's ability to win wars. A ruler who couldn't win wars was exposed as a weakling, tossed out, and another ruler stepped into the power vacuum. Most people were never going to participate in the affairs of state, and there was no expectation that they would want to. They knew that the state was an antagonist, and their relation to it was that the state was the thing that came around to collect tax every year, and this tax was usually in requisition of goods. There wasn't a myth that some aristocracy deserved to rule, unelss it could point to some victory and ride that for as long as they could. The religious justifications of the past were not premised on a historical condition or any result, but on a cult and fetishism that glorified the leader and demanded submission. You bowed to the gods of the king, or you were in deep shit. There was no expectation that the gods were anything other than cruel to the weak, and your goal as a commoner was to align yourself with those gods because you feared them or believed it would give you something. It would take a form of education to instill the idea, over time, of an aristocracy with spiritual authority that could pass from state to state, and was a general rule of life. The spiritual authority of priests and wise men before was there for its purpose, but beyond the exhortation to bow and scrape to the king, the state was a temporal authority that simply asserted that it was godly because it was strong. New kings would bring in new cults, sometimes radically different and demanding new rules of worship and submission. It was the worship and self-abasement that kings and conquerors cared about, rather than the state religion pointing to truth or justice or things an aristocracy pretends to value. Aside from the loyalty of his soldiers, a king or warlord cared not about whether his common subjects loved him, feared him, or felt anything. All that was necessary was that the king could kill them if he needed to, and that the rabble kept paying into a protection racket and kept working the fields and industries of the society. A concept of civic duty escapes members of early states entirely, and if mentioned, it is seen as some sort of strange fantasy a rich person or a priest concocted to get them to pay into yet more horseshit.

You can see in this construction that the idea of a warring society all marching in order for the team is not at all how societies conduct war. This image of the entire society drilled and goosestepping for everything is a favorite of fascist ideology, but it never has worked like that, and the fascists themselves are the greatest example of how societies organized around war are never given more stability by being at war. People, who had no reason to go along with state society, are given a number of myths to suggest that the state or the ruling institutions of that society have a right to rule, and that their rule is just and good and all that. That is ostensibly what is defended. The lived experience of most people in the society is that all of those good things are in reality their greatest antagonist, or at best were neutral towards them, and that neutrality was only there out of a need to keep the peace. Neutrality is never the desired attitude of an aristocratic institution or a ruler, and neutrality in war is seen as toxic and seemly. The expectations of war are about whether someone is loyal or disloyal. The apathetics of the American Revolutonary War are heaped with scorn for wanting to stay out of a conflict that was, by all reasonable accounts, a bunch of bullshit so that two factions of rich men got a bunch of poor men and women killed and took more stuff. The patriots may disagree with the war being bullshit since it was their stuff they cared about, and the loyalists defaulted to the king despite King George and his court being pretty damn pathetic during the whole ordeal. No one likes a neutral, and the battle between good and neutral is one a state likes to wage before it enters war. If someone can stay out of a civil war entirely, they are blessed. The evil, or disloyal, are a thing that can be more easily spotted than neutrality, and thus they are often purged or dealt with, and the disloyal seeking to subvert society will understand the need for sneakiness. The disloyal have known for a long time that an appearance of neutrality will not save them. The neutral is despised by all sides, despite the neutral often seeing the stupidity of the entire war effort. The neutral is stuck there because, unless neutral can hold its line against the war cult, their typical behavior is to avoid fighting unless absolutely necessary, which means they are unwilling to take sides unless they can form their own side. Since this would mean the established neutral is fighting a two front war, it would be very difficult unless one side can be convinced that the war drive is bullshit.

Individually, members of society are loathe to involve themselves with any of this. War, for most of them, is not what they live for, and even those who specialize in war are not fond to fight it. The people who fetishize and glorify war are usually those for whom it is an abstract thing, or a thing they can spectate and gamble on like it's a cute game. The sociality that individuals wanted between each other implies that war is a thing to be avoided, and even mutual defense of a social unit is taxing for that unit. A war of aggression is only unifying if they can win, and then that unity comes at the cost of certain commitments. Fighting men have to be capable fighters, which means weeding out anyone who is too soft or can't follow orders or isn't with the program. It might be possible to throw the losers into some penal battalion or bitch work, but wars typically involve men fighting and being at risk of dying. An army of penal battalions is not going to win a war, and if the society at war is run so horribly that its people are unfit for proper service, that is all you will have to fight with. Ultimately, the breakdown of society comes back to how humans educated themselves from a very early point, and how social proof decided who was in and out of social units in the first place. A lame or unsightly child was typically exposed or ritually sacrificed in the old days, and this practice was not just tolerated but encouraged in primitive society as the thing to do. It was a radical change in civilized societies to not do this on occasion, like sparing the weak was some grand mark of virtue even though the mercy towards the weak was the most abject slavery and humiliation that no decent man, even a slave, would tolerate. Slaves of sound mind and standing who were treated this way would either break down mentally, seeing such treatment as one of the most severe punishments and an unbearable shame, or would free themselves by suicide or attack the master out of pure spite. No other response would be acceptable to a man with any shred of dignity. Slaves often talk about how much shit they put up with, but the humiliation of this degradation is something else altogether. To be retarded is worse than slavery, and this has always been known. Better to be a slave, even a slave who was buck broken, than to be a retard. The buck breaking technique was used to impose on the slave the belief that he was retarded, but on some level he knew he was not the retard. Even here, buck breaking was a terror technique against the disobedient slaves, rather than a normal, routing conditioning. The more effective and loyal slaves were shown this fate as a way to keep them from rebelling, but actually doing it en masse would lead to slaves refusing to work out of dire necessity or killing everything in sight. The favored slaves would be encouraged to facilitate the terror among each other and against the weak, thus perpetuating the system. As long as it wasn't them, the strategy of extreme punishments to set an example worked. Consider then that a society at war has been effectively put in slavery, and the ruler himself is obligated to prosecute the war to retain his legitimacy, and so he is in some sense beholden to the needs of war. Slave societies have never been bastions of solidarity, and any manager of slaves has known to punish the weak links to maintain discipline. Even an army that sought to salvage its manpower as much as possible, out of a sense that it had to, is hesitant to tolerate weakness. A deep impulse that led to war in the first place shows immense disgust towards the weak, and the thought of incorporating a retard in any society is more offensive than losing a war to their mind. To allow the retard as an equal would undo anything the war was intended to defend or maintain. That is the foundational rule of human sociality - once retarded, always retarded, and never allowed in the know. The degree of rtardation, or the nature of that retardation, did not have to matter so much. The judgement and need to punish transgressors of this most ancient eugenics was an absolute that would, time and time again, assert itself in all societies, whether they were at war or at peace. The condition of war simply intensified pressures to do this that would, in peacetime, be counterproductive. The war conditions are felt if a society is engaged with an enemy. If a population is enslaved, the master is at war with his slaves at all times, and the strategy of disciplining slaves is like any battle strategy, with engagements called interventions to modify slave behavior. The conquest and torture of slaves is itself a victory in the great war against the slaves, and a legitimation of the entire institution that is necessary for its continuation. There will never be a benign slavery, because if it is too benign, the slaves could suggest with good reason that they would gladly agree to conditions of free labor, and that such a carrot would be very welcome. The freeing of slaves has usually been present in slaveries, even in the scientific chattel slavery of America, so there was an admission that slavery wasn't absolute. That changed when Galton's Eugenics came to the world and proclaimed not just a total slavery, but a natural slavery that became the sole law and spiritual authority, displacing all others.

Human society was never what it was purported to be, and because war became a key organizing principle for societies, organic sociality could only exist in reduced forms and at a local level. Genuine connections between people in a nation were discouraged, and it remains the defining trait of a nation that it is an imagined grouping of people rather than something held together by meaningful bonds. It is not realistic for a million people to know each other personally, and mass behavior is conditioned primarily by thought leaders and mesmerists, to take advantage of certain principles in human psychology when humans are arranged in a mass crowd, and when humans are arranged in formations and drilled to behave in particular ways. Meaningful society would have entailed a level of communication that was not possible with any technology, and would not be possible even today. Theoretically, we are connected to an internet that brings us in contact with many millions of other people, but there is no realistic way we are going to know who we're talking to, and the internet brings many questions about whether what we read is authentic, and how much of the internet is comprised of bots or shills or powerusers with a disproportionate amount of time and energy to influence discussion. These problems are not unique to electronic communication, for trust and verification in a world of deception is always problematic. What is known is that organic sociality usually was necessary for survival, and early states could not intervene in private life the way classical states did. States did not relate so much to individual subjects except in isolated cases, and the clan and tribe was part of the constitution of early societies. Extended family networks and connections that were not mediated by any state were normal and expected features of society, and the state kept a lid on this purely for its claim to land and tax. This organic sociality did not exist for nothing, and was not present in the state of nature. Social bonds in an earlier society usually didn't recognize authority beyond that which was expedient, or the authority of parents over their children. That authority over children did not exist in the same way it does in any state society, where an expectation is placed on children to conform to antagonistic relations in close quarters. There is nothing "more natural" about tribal society over state society or a society of individuals managed by the state, because the tribal formation itself was formed by deliberate actors rather than by some instinct inherent in mankind. Tribes themselves were not political units or even direct associations of people, but social constructions we applied in hindsight to describe groups of people who shared characteristics, like a language or an economic system. There is a whole construction of economic systems, where in earlier society they are local and price-setting markets are not at all a thing. Nomadic society did not tend to understand "exchange value" except as an ad hoc arrangement, or certain expectations that were particular to people who lived off of herds. The typical exchange was not in money but in livestock, while industrial products such as they existed were not considered typical trade objects. Barter of such objects was less common than just manufacturing tools or pottery for yourself or your associates and giving them as needed, and practices of barter in nomadic society for industrial goods were often more about side deals between men, which had a shady character to most in society but were understood as a mark between manly men. There would not be a market of industrial goods in nomadic society that was large, and the products from butchering animals would be like so many other tools that were constructed. A whole science to use every part of the livestock had been developed and understood in those societies, and it would have been more convenient to trade the livestock than to trade the products from dismantling the corpse as-is. The hunt to acquire livestock involved herding live animals, and then breeding them whole and confining them. The construction of economic life was never solely about exchange in markets, and even today, market exchange does not account for all or even most of the exchange between humans. How markets actually function in the 21st century, and how logistics is managed today, is another broad topic that many an economist do not even acknowledge. There is a great effort to mystify operations and logistics with the use of money tokens, even though we know the money tokens are fiat currency that can be printed at will by the Federal Reserve, and monetary policy is used openly to manipulate mass behavior rather than any need to do so, or any incentive that would be considered productive. This fiat currency system exists because capitalism in the older sense would be laughable if it were expected to compete with planned industrial operations, and the firms which actually coordinate industry and distribution are monopolies which will never have to compete as if they were a struggling business. Amazon could lose money year after year, but the value of its operations is so great that this cost is borne. If there were not this money flooding into Amazon, the market incentives would not construct what Amazon does today, and there were existing incentives of the smaller capitalists to prevent this from happening as it would mean the end of retail business models. The retail apocalypse, always 10 years into the future, is really something else entirely, but it is known to any retail peon that retail outlets are the industry of not giving a fuck about anything and operating at the barest minimum possible to prevent shortages and riots.

This economic discursion does not relate directly to war, but it suggests that our thinking of natural, materially necessary sociality is unfounded. Society in its organic form did not regard the state as necessary, and states have been from the start an alien imposition on things most of us would have wanted. The beneficiaries of the state are conscious that they use this institution to rule, and that it is an alien. There is no way to bring people into the state without a fight, and this has meant that the intellectual theorists of the state are always given over to lies and scams to strip people of that native sociality, and the thing they wanted in the first place, which was to associate with other humans as they would prefer and to keep their liberty and security. None of those goals in society suggested any particular form society must take, other than that people generally would talk to each other. If everyone were loners, humanity would be a very hostile place and difficult to survive in, and it would be expedient for some of the loners to talk to each other eventually. There was never a null state where humans started out as loners. Even a savage would be raised by their mother long enough to suckle from her breast, if the mother did not kill the child or leave it to die before then. Savage man would still have understood other creatures like himself and figured out that they were much like him, and that some understanding was possible. This would not be much of a society, but there would be an awareness of a world and that social units were possible. Since sociality already existed from the forebears of humans, this time of solitude was not necessary, but communication itself suggested that humans would be more individualistic than their animal forebears, and would see more the situation they inherited as an unpleasant one. The composition of early society is likely informed by a desire in men to be free of domination, as would have existed in the world of apes and monkeys. That freedom was not about a love for liberty as an idea, but because it was the most basic condition of security, as domination in the savage world meant torture and death and a lot of suffering that served no purpose. It is sad that we live under a modern ethos that glorifies the worst of the ape kingdom and tells us this is what civilization is supposed to be, where freedom is reduced to an empty token and the only ideas are how to make others suffer for the pleasure of a few sadists, who tell us they are brilliant but who we know to be the worst retards of all.

The war game entails taking a society, however imagined, and organizing each of its human agents towards the task. Whatever our theories of government or the organizational chart that exists for economic or political purposes, it is well known that individual people are the agents that do things, in war or in any management of work activity. War as a practice requires the planner to view these agents as individuals, before it can rearrange them in formations, units, and allocations towards a shared task. This is different from the organic social cooperation that might be found, where people associate with each other because there is a coincidence of wants that is only possible through continuous interaction. The arrangement in war is dictated by whomever the war chief is, or at least it would have to be acknowledged if war is to be conducted by any plan that is appropriate to its task. War, to be war, is fought against another society doing the same thing. Therefore, there is a psychological game and analysis inherent to war in the meaningful sense. Wars are fought in the end with one man against another man, and whatever organization those men are in is built from the foundation that one man shall fight another. The organization of units in a warlike society is premised on individual competition and initiative, before the unit can form and an artificial cohesion can be taught. This cohesion of the unit is not a natural thing, but an artificial construct imposed by the commander, and conditioned on the premise that the commander is an alien to his subordinates. Even if the leader is selected from the group and is merely the most senior of equals, that leader is expected to impose his authority over the unit and guide it to do things which were not natural or in the interest of individuals. It is usually expedient that the collective aim of a unit be understandable to each individual, or at least that each individual has his place and role and executes it as needed. The more individuals in the unit can figure out the operation of the whole unit, and then the function of the whole army and society, the better that individual will understand why he is doing what he does. Any army that teaches and encourages ignorance of its soldiers, even the lowest of grunts, is sacrificing something that would make a man effective at fighting. Scared, cowardly, ignorant men will, like sissies, shoot everything in sight if they are given a gun and don't know what to do. If they manage to avoid the impulse to shoot things, they often revert to avoiding any battle as much as possible, and eventually avoid doing anything at all. Men who don't know what they're doing or why they're doing it tend to turn to self-abuse, indulge in their vices and self-soothe. This is the sign that someone's usefulness as a soldier is depleting. Normally, a commander with limited manpower would want to mitigate this if it can be done, especially in a society where replenishment of manpower is not easy. In eugenist society, militaries are organized to exhaust low-level grunts on purpose, while the useful fighting and purpose of war is conducted by elite specialists more and more. Since the army of a eugenist society exists primarily for a eugenic purpose, where the soldier is typically a lab rat for some Mengele-type experiments or social or psychological experiments, it is acceptable to indulge this ignorance and failure and encourage it. Scared and cowardly men make terrible soldiers, but they are useful enough as Einsatzgruppen to turn against their own ostensible "team", which is what the eugenic creed wants its military to be, fed with a diet of drugs and unaware of why they are following orders to shoot their former family and friends. This tendency was built into the methods of war and the philosophical theory of the state, which was premised on severing organic sociality, and eventually breaking down the individual subject and reconstructing him as a tool. The methods to break down and reassemble a human would remain, for most of history, an arcane science and only followed sometimes. Drill instructors preparing to fight did not have time to individualize instruction, preferring to teach by the numbers. The psychological breakdown would instead be a matter of state education, that terrible beast that doomed us to this. Actually reconstructing people beyond a bare minimum is too much work for them, but the state school, and most forms of education, are designed to degrade and humiliate anyone passing through it, and this curse afflicts humanity in some way or another. Its proliferation, and the invasion of education into the rest of our lives, has dumbed down and destroyed the psychological state of any society where the cult of education and cult of war were deployed for a purely eugenic purpose. This characteristic is common to state societies that embrace philosophies totally alien to a society that would work, which is to say every philosophy and theory that has currency in modernity save a few obscure ones. In eugenic society, the deleterious effects of education cults and war are deliberately maximized and encouraged, because that is the path of least resistance, so long as the eugenic creed is taken for granted and instilled in children as the most core value and the last spiritual authority.

We can see, and will see further on, that such a war machine will never do what it purports to do, even when doing so would make the war very simple and winnable. We will continue this work with the understanding that in some way or another, the mentality of war has been used for this effect of social engineering, in a way that should be clear to anyone looking at their life and history with this mind.

Far better men than me - and for many reasons the overwhelming majority of literature pertaining to war has come from males - have expounded on the details of war, the formation of units, squads, legions, armies, and the command of generals and princes. For any sophisticated undertaking, the core practices of war are guided by politics and spiritual authority, which is something beyond the core mechanisms of war and a thing apart from it altogether. War is not infused into politics in the way a naive grunt might be taught, and in practice, the grunts conscripted to fight know such a view of war and the institution is bullshit. It is a story told to the rubes who are expected to fear any military confrontation, or any free man granted the explicit right and duty of violence against the unfree. There is no necessary "economic" logic to the organization of war, nor is there a spiritual guide that suggests a fixed strategy of war. Those who lead armies have long understood that technology and the conditions they operate in necessitate new tactics and straegies. This is undertaken not because war is a singular motor to guide social development or the path of technology, but it is a necessity that anyone leading an army abides whether they like it or not. War as a practice does not create on its own power any new technology, nor unleash potentials that did not exist in people before. There is no such thing as "creative destruction", no matter how much Germanic braying suggests that is a thing. None of the empires that were effective at war suggested that war was in of itself a moral purpose. This did not stop them from suggesting a militarized society was ideal, or that martial prowess was a legitimating force. The language of war suggests, at a basic level, meritocracy as a necessity, and there are many who see a genuine meritocracy as worthwhile for all of the reasons that makes sense. In all cases, the effective war machines understood war not as a religious practice all on its own, but as a tool like any other tool empires use to shape the environment. It was never the primary or foundational tool, since the very existence of an effective army was premised on a productive base and the labor of many people. Effective war-making requires intelligence-gathering and utilizes people who are not seen as soldiers in uniform. Torturers, prostitutes-turned-spies, comfort women, the cheerleaders of the war cult and the cheerleaders of empire, slave traders, loyal slaves serving multifarious functions for the war effort, and very large support staffs are obligatory for any proper war machine. The idiotic braying of a science fiction fascist like Heinlein does not resemble any army that has functioned in the real world, and could not do so. Such an army would either destroy itself, or it would be governed by men and women behind the curtain, which is the implication of the world Starship Troopers suggested.^[8] The reality of war is not that it serves economic or spiritual causes, nor that war guides those as the true master. War and the people tasked with fighting are another interest in society to be placated, and war is fought not by idealized minds devoted to the cult of war, but by people who are in the end motivated by all of the things a non-combatant would be. They would need to be so if they are to be constituted as useful soldiers, or even machines deployed for a purpose. The technocratic conceit that soldiers will be operated like machines, pushed like any button to execute managerial will, produces a sickly and ineffective war machine. This is intended, because the war machine of technocratic society isn't intended to fight conventional armies of other polities. It is intended instead to fight the greater eugenic war against the ruled, and sees the producers of society as their chief enemy. The interest of the producers is wildly at odds with the military meritocracy and the aims of any aristocracy that claimed the throne, and this alone guides all decisions of the national security state. The enemies of the true ruling power of the United States, and the chief threats that would dislodge the new aristocracy, are named by Eisenhower - the military and industry. The military's interests are to procure new weapons and maintain their fiefdoms, drug cartels, and the regular abuses that are enjoyed by the victors of the war cult and imposed on the population. Industry's interest is not to produce for the masters, but to produce for themselves and break free of the permanent aristocratic tyranny. The aristocracy hopes to channel the vices of these two groups and control them, so that they see the partnership as frayed and those wise enough to rise will be selected by the true ruling power, which knew the military and industry to be a ruse the whole way. The alliance between militarists and industrialists had a corrosive effect on democratic society and despised democracy, but saw correctly their chief rival being the ruling power. The aim of the alliance is not to destroy the ideas of the aristocrats, but to supplant the aristocrats and promote a degraded and degenerated form of the eugenic religion, and insist that they are the real master race rather than the present victors. Eugenics itself promotes this internecine conflict, as the whole system of society relies on habitual lying, backstabbing, and assassination. In that way, the values of the aristocracy are reproduced, even if the holders of high office change. The eugenists at the top will gladly turn on each other like jackals and enforce discipline of their clique to the hilt, and seek to select from the military and industry those traits which are amenable to full eugenism. The aristocrats then claim that eugenics was the idea of the soldiers and the industrialists themselves, and the holders of noble privilege can say that they are the stabilizing force that will protect the little guy, while infantilizing the little guy and degrading his condition in every way possible. The lower two classes - labor and the residuum - always know all of this is a sick joke, and they are completely frozen out of any class mobility. The small mobility that was permitted under capitalist society would be cut off completely, as all who share the aristocratic core beliefs lock ranks. That was allowed to go on for a century, and in 2020 that aristocracy could enact what they always wanted to do. And so, this is Hell, and there is no way to reason with it.

This pattern is not unique to our moment in history. It is inherent in the core practices of war itself, when war is seen as a function of society rather than the story of men in conflict for their own purposes, or empires with any reason to exist beyond mere rule. It is not a given that rulers of the past would do the exact same thing today's aristocracy does, and there are many reasons to suggest past aristocracies would see the past century as an abomination to be prevented at all costs. Today's aristocracy cannot even say to themselves, let alone to the world, what any of this is or why anyone should go along with it. It is only because the most venal and disgusting of humanity could select for each other, and made it illegal to tell them no or even passively resist them so that we live some sort of life, that we face this sorry impasse in the 21st century. The core spiritual authority and ideology is not reducible to war itself, for the drive to war and its cult was dependent on an evil that preceded it, and evils that moved far beyond the purview of war proper. It is conceivable that the eugenic religion could exist without war at all. It is indeed the philosophy of "perfected society" that war in any recognizable sense would no longer exist, even as a psychological motivator pressing people with material or violent hardship. The miltiarization of society, to the aristocratic mind, is nothing more than an abstraction, removed from their daily experience. The war is seen by the comfortable as something far away and detached from their daily life, delegated to other people who are tainted and declared monstrous for doing the bidding of the eugenic creed. Eugenics revels in this torture and the purity of their favored classes, as they always did. Even the depravity of aristocracy recognizes that the situation is only possible because there is a productive class building anything useful, and a class of men tasked with fighting to defend the strongholds of aristocracy. Aristocracy has to cajole and lie in everything it does to defend every institution it builds, and disdains the grubby business of fighting. The aim of aristocracy is to rule forever. How they do so varies. Warrior aristocracies reveled in continuous conflict and blood cults, and picked among them leaders who prized the appearance of merit and strength but who knew to leave actual fighting to the simps. Technocratic aristocracies, such as the one we live under today, presume aristocracy can engineer all of the world as a giant machine, and for this machine to work, certain assumptions must be made about human agents that reduce them to points of light and information. If there were a world where labor aristocracies ruled in their own right, it would envision the democratic force as a giant mass of flesh and willpower to be directed deor the lowest cunning that feels good. Such a view of society is suggested by various means, but it is far removed from anything that would actually command society because it is based on all of the conceits of traditional aristocracies, imposed on laborers who have found it alien to everything they ever knew. The "aristocracy of the lowest class", which as a rule would never win power, envisions endless abolition of a world of shit and a drive for revenge that would make the worst of the worst seem tame. For the lowest class, the world was already destroyed for the cause of others, and while many of us down here would rather see the world go on for sentimental purposes and because the world was never the problem, aristocracy as a force when it comes down here imposes an ultraviolent and terrible view of the world. This view is ascribed to "the world" or to captial-N Nature, rather than its proper source in human society and its institutions. It is something internalized, or something adopted by those of the residuum who are useful vectors and inclined by something in their nature or upbringing to serve aristocrats like the most craven bootlickers. It is highly necessary in the aristocracy of the residuum to advance concepts of society, politics, and reality that are deliberate and profuse lies. This has an appeal to those who might believe they would seize power to changethe world, but most of the time, this alien ideology is delivered by influencers, who collect their paycheck and slink away once the carnage is seeded. So long as no genuine knowledge is permitted for the lowest class, and any expression of intellect is punished by all other classes as the greatest social obligation, the grinding down of society and a race to the bottom is guaranteed. Society would be reduced to nothing more than the thrill of torture, conducted by aristocrats who willfully cannibalized the instruments of rule. Those instruments of rule were now not only unnecessary, but a danger to the aristocrats if they were left unattended.

The war is fought for purposes other than aristocracy - those who participate will see, on some level, a reason to fight, that does not need to comport with the ruling ideas in any way. There are those who see the war as a job and a paycheck, or an opportunity for looting and a piece of the action. It is always the case that aristocracies can initiate war and conduct diplomacy at the high levels. No one else is credible, and aristocrats of various sorts recognize each other and their shared interest in maintianing the philosophy of rule, more than war for its own sake or some productive goal of human society. Everyone else is made to accept the terms of society aristocracy left us with, so far as aristocracy can impose its vision of the world and society on the world and the agents that comprise society. If wars were initiated by meritocratic soldiers or the mere interests of money, it would not be hard to see that these motives are not worth the risk and damage to their interest that war entails. It is a rule of those who have to fight and pay for the war that war should be avoided as much as possible, and only after considerable damage to prestige can the lower orders countenance war on their own. Long before that happens, aristocrats who are distant from the consequences of war have poked the rival societies and pushed the ruled of both societies to this outcome, knowing that aristocrats on all sides are safe, and that the chief aim of war is to uphold the aristocratic values and their perpetuation throughout the society. But, for the soldiers to actually throw their lives away for this idiocy, for the men with money to throw their wealth into a giant bonfire, for the sweat and blood of labor to be expended on such a wasteful activity, the cause to fight must be evident to all of them. Only the lowest class of the residuum has no buy-in with the war in most cases - and yet, the venal and depraved of the residuum are given a choice to be the worst enablers of war, in exchange for a pittance that the higher orders give them in a rare moment of inclusion. In the main, the true targets of war are the residuum. The men of the residuum must be culled, and war is among the mechanisms to accomplish this. The women of the residuum must be prostituted and used for the base pleasures of the higher classes. War is presented as creative because it enslaves those who were thrown away and, out of desperation, make themselves go along with some slavery because the alternative allowed for them is worse. In some way, war or a social engineering project conducted like war is necessary to impose the condition in society that can fully police the residuum. Policing the residuum purely through aristocratic conceits, or rejection from the world of the producers, or the enforcement of labor proper to disallow cretins in their ranks, will always be fickle because it will not resort to coherent and organized violence to accomplish the task. If the policing of the residuum were left to individual virtue and motive, it would be apparent to many in society, including the warriors, that a war against the weak is pointless for their interests. War does not unite the society in the way the cult suggests, but the act of war produces a chilling effect and makes clear the true aim of humanity - to wage endless war against the lowest class. To the lowest class, all of the stories of history seem like some sick joke. History for the residuum is an endless series of atrocities, humiliations, betrayals, lies, and viciousness towards their race, carried out for no reason other than the thrill of those who impose it. It did not serve any goal necessary for the society to survive, and it did not make a significant difference on the outcome of war between two parties where the outcome was consequential. The residuum as a rule avoid any entanglement in conflict, and it is too expensive to carry out a competitive war while disposing of the residuum. Yet, the aim of aristocracy in initiating war is to attack the class they despise most of all, and strangely the class which most closely resembles the aristocracy in function.

The regimentation of society into functions is most evident in a struggle for survival against another society - that is, when two societies are at war and compare themselves against each other. Just as two combatants in an arranged fight or a game will assess each other, so do the combatants in war. It is necessary to retain a sobering influence of what the other side brings to bear, and even the most degraded opponent will remember what they are fighting, even if their memory and thoughts are so vague and the damned can only make aspersions and attack phantoms. Those at the receiving end of today's social engineering see the language of war infused in every institution and in every action of the valid towards the invalid. The militarization of society and the stone wall of shame and rejection is nothing less than an absolute and total war against the invalid, carried out with full malice intended. Even despite the seeming victory of the valid, the war is pressed entirely by the valid, as no humiliation of the invalid is enough. If the state of war implied by eugenic social engineering ever abated for a moment, the eugenic society and its institutions would be undone. The fake friendships and sacchrine propaganda of the Fabians are transparent in their contempt for the lower classes, and also in their contempt for each other, for the Fabians are at heart a lot of stupid men and women tasked with this horrific eugenic duty. They can't pretend kindness, and the thrill of fake "kindness" is itself a mark of victory over the damned. If one iota of kindness were allowed to seep through, even an expression of kindness intended to deceive, it is anathema to the values of Fabianism. Should there be a genuine need of deception to entrap a victim, it is only intended towards other valids who are to be shunted down to invalid status. "Once retarded, always retarded." Even if the "retard" were willing to join with the oppressor as a Judas, and wasn't actually retarded in the formal psychological or even political sense, the Fabian and the eugenist can never let go of such a judgement. It is the only judgement which is meaningful in the eugenic creed, for all other judgements - political insanity, the wrongdoing of deeds in particular, or any independent assessment of someone's moral probity - revolve around this one word, "retarded", which is the most sacred word in all of eugenics. Once judged, the judgement is never to be lifted under any circumstances. If the system is ever wrong, then history must be edited such that there is no record of the system ever making a false adjudication. Since there would be in actuality enough memory of a declaration of retardation, in practice "false judgements" are corrected by extermination of the retard who forgets his place in society, or the retard whose existence offends the sensibilities and sense of themselves the eugenists foster. It is more important to defend the creed and its legacy than for the creed to be meaningfully right, and it is more important to recapitulate the eternal creed above all.

This, for any practical purpose of war, is absurd if warriors wish to operate in the realm of reality and the limitations of men. Yet, the process of war cannot forgive cowardice, incompetence, and above all failure. The warrior must regard genuine merit if the war is to be a proper war. Whatever the genuine purpose of war, and however poorly the generals conduct it, the conduct of warriors is judged by merit rather than pure conceit. There is no rule to suggest that merit would be adjudicated honestly, or that the favoritism typical of human societies wouldn't rise to the top. War, even the war of eugenic social engineering, has to bend to the real situation, and so the ability to lie about merit is constrained. The awards and status of merit, which are more properly functions of aristocracy - a cookie granted by the aristocrats to cajole and motivate soldiers from the grunts to the generals - are something different from recognition of genuine merit. Somewhere in the war machine, the functions of war must be carried out adequately enough for the project to continue. This means that administrators cannot be too lax, and a bare minimum of competence of soldiers and communication between them must be maintained. Militaries have long imposed artificial constraints and stupid regulations, because at heart aristocrats decide the outcome of wars and are the judges of merit. Yet, even in the planned war of eugenic social engineering, the aristocrats are beholden to a world where their officers must be effective. Mere obedience is never enough. The solution of eugenic social engineering has been to poison and degrade as much as possible all classes but their faithful soldiers, so that the soldiers themselves do not have to fight at anything more than a minimum of ability and can be in the long term kept in line with drugs, terror, and fear. The idea eugenist soldier is a coward who can be pushed like a machine to commit any atrocity, any depravity, and who by the sheer quantity of his numbers and the machines at his disposal confuses and scatteres the lower classes. Cowardice, of course, is anathema to the most basic conduct of fighting. The aristocrat desires as much as possible for the warrior to resemble him, while the warrior - if sober - sees the cult of war as an unwelcome imposition. The warrior at the end of the day does not believe in empty duty. Soldiers and generals must be paid and recognize their value, regardless of their ability to bargain or threaten or the situation they must accept in the end. A meritocracy exists, but the meritocracy is rigged to be as unfair as it can be, and the warriors themselves are not under any obligation to reward merit of individuals or merit at all. The meritocracy exists not because of an intent of warriors, but a necessity for their function to be fulfilled. Otherwise, wars would be entirely fake and performative, like some student protests intended to be a display of democratic impotence.

In many cases, the societies that go to war would already have been regimented. The attacker stages not just the fighting men, but the whole society in preparation for the war effort. Even in societies that are primitive, where the lower classes are only driven by a crude patriotism or fear of impending doom, the society is set up for war. The defender, having learned of organized society, considers all potential rivals. Nowhere are the two societies ignorant of what war is, based on their knowledge of the past. This applies to the most primitive of societies, before "society" in the form of state society is evident. Nowhere in the practice of war are participants convinced that humans are singular agents moving around randomly, or that humans are merely confined to a few social units. When two tribes go to war, the war chief - who may have been elevated specifically for the purpose of leading the war effort - would assess what he has to work with, based on who showed up to elevate him for this task. The allies and enemies are no great mystery, even when warmaking is mystified and obfuscated to keep individual participants in the dark. Out of necessity, humans who think at all about war and its meaning will see an organized society, even if that organization is loose. War as a practice has a sobering effect on human societies, even if there were a condition of universal peace that was recognized around the world. The mere threat of war, by whatever name it calls itself, suggests that human societies would be organized to consider war as a possibility. War is not the sole possibility for human society, or even the chief aim of society. Human beings individually and in their social behavior have many priorities, and war is not the sole form struggle would take. War is a particular type of struggle in which two societies are mobilized in total for the effort. Whether the participants individually want that mobilization does not change that when war is initiated, the members of society are obligated to acknowledge it, and the whole of society is in principle a thing that can be requisitioned. This practice of war precedes the state or any spiritual authority willing it to be so. It is instead of logical consequence of considering war in the first place; that is, that all wars are in principle total. Only by custom or an expectation of warmaking that is established in history do we consider that wars can be limited, or that there are certain sectors of society that would be off-limits to the war cause, or that the participants choose not to disturb. War is not reducible to struggle, nor are all struggles war. Nor is the mobilization of a society inherently warlike. Societies can be mobilized for productive aims, for the generation of wealth and opulence or knowledge of such, or for spiritual aims of various sorts, and these mobilizations can be just as totalizing or make claims to the world beyond the society and its traditional domains. War as a practice cannot make claims beyond the societies that wage it, and the objects subsumed in it. Even the territories and things to be claimed in war are in some sense outside of the war. War as a practice and condition is a particularly human one, for it to be considered war in the proper sense. War implies symbolic language and recognition in communication that this indeed a state of affairs. It relies on social information that can be communicated and abstracted. The endemic conflict in the animal kingdom, even when organized, can only be war of a limited sort. War implies enough knowledge for deliberation and an understanding of its consequences, for it to be war in the sense humans regard it as that. When two tribes in barbarous conditions face each other in war, there is not ambiguity about the nature of the activity they are engaged in, because the tribesmen exist in a society where this information is communicable, and they comprehend the authority of war chiefs, a chain of command, and so on. We may consider that there are parllels in the behavior of apes, who may have a sense of leadership and demonstrate tactics for battle, and we should not be too quick to judge if there is a thought process among them that suggests they have some overarching objective. War properly speaking though suggests that peace and diplomatic relations are an outcome, and even the most primitive groupings of humanity comprehend peaceful relations. War to be war is defined by pitched battles and elevated hostility, carried out with sufficient deliberation and towards this aim of social engineering. The engineering is intended to affect an alien society, but those who participate in war are aware of the effect war has on their own society as it happens. Never are the warring parties fixed in a preferred form, as if they are oblivious to the reality that war entails meaningful actions to be war in an appreciable sense.

Humanity goes to war with the societies, institutions, machines, and things they have on hand, rather than what they would prefer their society to be in an ideal model. The war is conducted similarly. After all of the game theory, drilling, and practice, victory is decided not by the judgement of knowledge or fact, but by the real outcome and meaningful interpretation of the events. There is, contrary to the aristocratic koan that "no one wins war", winners and losers, and the winners and losers do not correspond entirely to the societies that were pit against each other. Rarely does one society completely overrun the other. Often, extermination of the enemy society's members is not even the goal, nor is it a goal to enslave or subdue entirely the alien. The stated aims of war do not correspond to the games aristocrats play, or the objectives of participants who are brought into the war. They are, though, necessarily fought by two societies which must be united in an effort. Failure to maintain cohesion of the society means defeat and inability to form a useful effort. And so, warriors over time consider the optimal deployment of their people and resources, as the war requires command to remain intact most of all. That deployment is always informed by the conditions of the society which exist outside of war, rather than a model suggested by nature as the "correct" war formation. We may imagine a war in the future waged not just with exotic weapons, but waged by people who do not think like us at all, and whose social structure and communication and moral philsoophy is unlike anything we have known to now. Imagine for a moment if space aliens from another planet encountered Earth, and the type of society that would be necessary for such an undertaking to reach us. It is highly unlikely the aliens would recognize humans as thinking animals on their level, or that the aliens would waste effort speaking at our level or regard our conceits of society, politics, war, religion, and so on. The strategy of the aliens, if they choose to subdue Earth, would appear alien to much of our sense of what war is, and because I cannot know the true history of these aliens, it could very well conform to their own biases and sentiments and purposes of coming to Earth in the first place. Very likely, the aliens would see that humanity is easily corrupted and cajoled by their own moral failings, and the aliens would find many ready compradors who would be their effective face and army. It would be far easier for aliens to turn human malice into their primary weapon, rather than send a single ground troop or waste effort with orbital bombardment. A view of humanity from afar, without our biases, would tell the alien that humans will believe anything and are impressed by symbols and crass ambitions. The fortitude of the human race is feeble at the present time, and the aliens could very well consider working in time-frames beyond our life span. It has long been known that humans in a century would lose contact with living memory of the time before, given our present lifespans and institutional knowledge. All an alien would need to do is provide to the compradors whatever intelligence from afar is needed, and arrange for conspirators who will secure the vanguard. The aliens, likely possessing mechanical knowledge far beyond our own, could deliver specifications and guide their compradors. It is well known that the intellectual and aristocratic traditions are amenable to being compradors and would treasure this received wisdom, because the aristocrats and intellectuals have long considered themselves to be the same sort of alien race lording over the world, apart from the world and conventional, base thought or matter. But, perhaps the aliens will either lack the interest in such a program, or simply find humans to be so loathsome that the only reason they came to Earth is to exterminate the filth once and for all, rather than any ulterior motive. After all, the conduct of war is primiarily this social engineering, rather than any material motive. If the space aliens wanted resources, most of the universe is dead and many planets are larger than Earth, richer in rare resources that they would value. Assuming the aliens relied on agriculture, which is very likely not the case, it would be far cheaper to build an artificial farm in ideal conditions than the farming in natural conditions we have lived with, assuming the aliens have enough sense to understand why plants are nutritious and do not forget that science concerns a meaningful world rather than ideology or institutions.

The conduct of warriors is more than mere technology, but in some sense, all of the drilling, culture, warrior codes, and so on is a form of technology. So are the techniques of propaganda, motivation, and so on aristocrats hone. If we are to describe war as an event in the world with scientific language, all of the aims of the eugenic and basic interest of life are things which can be abstracted and described as technology or the outcome of labor. And so, those who would be technocrats in our time, and those who would be laborers in our time, understand war in those terms, more than they would appreciate the warrior's craft or his purpose and interests. The aristocrat sees war as a grand game or a nuisance, but in any event it is a tool that the aristocrat constructs for his purposes, without regard to technology or reality. Aristocrats always see war as something they can shape and control in purpose, rather than war as a truly natural event. They may be forced to bend to technology and labor, but the aristocrat will always return to their preferred vision of war as a great game, which they create to change the world and make it abide by their thought-forms. There is then the fifth and lowest class of humanity, which is the only class completely removed from this practice in principle. The lowest class, who are the class most despised by all who favor war, sometimes join the war effort as saboteurs, torturers, and feeders. To the lowest class, all of human existence appears as a series of wars and depredations against their race, and they see correctly that their true war is with humanity and empire itself. Very often, the removal of the residuum is among the purposes of the war practice, understood by the other classes as a check on their numbers and a thrill delivered to those who repeat a tradition that separated the human race from apes. If the war were fought too obviously towards that purpose, instead of presenting two societies in conflict to alter each other, war as a practice would cease to be meaningful, and it could not be conducted in any way appropriate to the mission. The aim of aristocracy has always been to declare a war against the weak alone, and obviate any war between rival nations, rival aristocrats, or any material center of force that would be organized. For this, the aristocracy must make common cause with the productive and meritorious elements of their society, which do not have any intrinsic reason to go along with this, and who do not intrinsially see the residuum as the same dire threat that aristocracy does. Far from it, the residuum as a force is nearly impotent in relevant militaristic output, and often does not register as technologically or laboriously significant. The residuum as a rule lives on nearly nothing, and the pittance they are allowed to live on is considered an exorbitant expense. All of the charity given to the residuum is only ever a temporary measure to facilitate the herding of the true enemy. The chief aims of war then - aristocrats using the war as a great game and a way to cull their true enemies - are at odds with all of the means by which war is fought. The residuum alone sees correctly that the war, and all such practices, are abominations that serve little purpose in the world, because their contribution to the war practice and its cult is meager. Naturally, the resdiuum are continually blamed for the malady of war, as if it were their poor moral fiber that "made" aristocrats declare war against an enemy. Invariably, when wars are lost, the residuum are the preferred scapegoat. Never in their history has aristocracy ask themselves if their entire project and conceit is the root of the problem, for if they did, they would violate every sense of themselves they ever held. An aristocrat losing their heart and appetite for the game would be exposed as little better, if not exactly the same, as the residuum he despises. And so, if the aristocratic aims of war are removed by some distillation process, we would see war as a practice as something driven by technological advance and its realization through labor. The men who fight recognize the necessity of machines and labor for their effort, and live and die from this logistical task. The warriors must cover all of their technological bases before they can consider the so-called higher virtues of war and glory, and many a warrior can figure out that the glory of war is all moonshine.

Far from an obsession with technology, the warrior is careful in selecting which technology and which tasks are appropriate to the soldiers, and which tasks are to be left to subordinates. This does not immediately conform to an aristocratic conceit of prestige or civic worth, but to practicality. The tasks of industry, hard labor, and the humiliation of menial work like janitorial duties, are seen as degrading to the qualities desired of fighting men. In the latter case, the humiliation of menial work is not a given of nature, but a condition of society that preceded war and even preceded aristocratic conceits. It is, for many reasons, well known that the lowest class of labor is disciplined by ritual suffering. Even in tolerant societies where the humiliation gives way to necessity of letting the lowest class do their job, denigration of labor is necessary lest the slaves forget their place. Most of all, the lowest class of labor is typically judged as retarded or incompetent in some way, and the most ancient dictum of the human race is, as we have said before, "once retarded, always retarded". If that is ever violated, humanity as a project is undone, and naturally the stupid do not like living in such a society. Stupid slaves are likely to rebel, fail to follow orders, or receive beatings simply because their superiors find them annoying and unsightly. The hatred of the retard is the most ancient sentiment of the human race. Aristocracy only amplified it when seeking the primordial substance that defines their class. Stupidity itself as a function is rooted out in the practice of war when it interferes with the objective. War to be war has demonstrable results. Those results, the things that are judged meritorious, do not need to line up with the conceits of victory defined beforehand. In fact, usually the warrior's sense of merit is entirely eugenic and concerns defending the favoritism of the institution that fights. Gladhanding, so long as it does not interfere with the substantive victory aimed for, is rewarded. Honesty and forthrightness are not - they are seen instead as marks of a fool to be punished. Deception is among the virtues required for any war machine, and in this, the lowest class may find some function as purveyors of crude lies, or something to screen the advance of the actual army, or fodder to be thrown away before the veteran and valued soldiers are able to march in triumph and take credit and glory. With technology, the fetish of the technocrat for knowledge, or the aristocrat for conceits, is something the warrior and the laborer have to adjudicate. The laborer sees the war as an imposition that sucks away his vitality for a dubious cause, but because war has been an accepted practice since time immemorial, the aim of the laborer is simply to not be a retard. The warrior approaches technology with a managerial mindset. The manager does not like technology in of itself and does not buy natively into any ideology. So far as the warrior sinks to the level of the muck of production, the warrior adopts all of the mannerisms of a manager - the barking of contradictory orders to confuse and stonewall, the double-speak that dominates the past century of human society, the rampant lying, are all carried out for a eugenic purpose of sorting out which technology the warrior desires for the purpose of winning battles. Which battles the warrior actually fights do not need to line up with any story of what the war actually is for. Wars are not fought for ideology, or material necessity. They are fought, from the warrior's point of view, to win glory and honor and secure his position in society. The aristocrats need warriors to defend the luxury of aristocracy, and the warriors are paid with some of that luxury for themselves when they are off-duty. The warrior might believe in a cause outside of his task as a warrior, and usually has to. Mere self-interest or material incentive are never great motivators, and are always in question if someone else can pay more, or the toil of fighting is not worth the luxury paid. The warrior is also aware that any material thing can be snatched away, and possession changes hands at the end of a sword. How much of the law possession may be is quite irrelevant when the law is the sword alone, and property deeds can be rewritten by those who hold swords. And so, subordinating the aims of warriors to material incentives, or the conceits of technocrats or the duty of labor, is never a possibility. Violence and the practices of war can be, but are not the sole, source of legitimacy. In every event, legitimacy derives from empire and the establishment of force, before it is possible to speak of justice or why a state would exist. No law can persist without weapons and men to enforce it, and this is self-evident.^[9]

The impulse of the warrior is the same impulse of the proprietor, whose origins were always in the feudal nobility and its offshoots rather than the producers and commerce. The proprietor in technocratic society gives way to the manager, from petty-managers to the administrators of bureaucracies. The military in turn becomes bureaucratic and uses the language of property and management more than the language of direct fighting, for property abhors labor beyond that which is useful for its purpose. The warrior at a basic level does not have the same impulse - for the warrior and the practice of war, what other classes do is irrelevant. The warrior would see any entity that challenges war as another warrior, an enemy to be confronted, and so the aims of other classes would be understood in the end as something which must defend itself in battle. Struggle and battle or war, I repeat to make clear, are different conceptually. The other classes can and do see themselves in struggles that do not entail the practices of war or battle, and the warrior understands the specific purview of war and what a battle is. A game of football is not war. A jumped up maniac obsessed with technocratic vanity will get hyped over a game, but anyone who thinks about war for five minutes knows that a game is just a game. Economic competitors do not, intrinsically, view each other as rival capitals seeking battle. For one, capitals will always prefer collusion over direct combat, and prefer indirect use and abuse of law over turning coin to warfare. The more capable of the capitalists understood that their function was never purely as machines to produce, and this had always been the case. No capitalist was under any illusion of what the relationship truly was, or why he sought money. Only petty-managers of the venal sort use this language to cajole, and this cajoling is only applied to laborers whose wages were to be stripped down, who were to be subjected to the humiliation of service work during the neoliberal depopulation campaign. The petty-managers of neoliberalism were more aware of their drive to war against the weak than past capitalists, who were interested - for good reason - in projects other than the eugenic creed and its filth. All of the things money can buy can be subsumed in competition, struggle, war, or can be conceived by a kinder mind in a different world as tools of cooperation, where humanity did not do what it has done in the past century. Money itself is issued not because it was the producers' idea, but is issued by states and treasuries to provision their armies and bureaucracies. It has been the small capitalist's dream to smash the bank and smash finance, so that he will not be in hock to the bank ever again, and in doing so, the petty bourgeois merchant would be freed of that onerous institution and its debt collectors. The large capitalist did not see the bank as friendly, but saw himself as the bank and had enough sense to understand that the bank can be malicious and the bank can through its command of the currency influence policy far more than ordinary politics. For various reasons, the battle against the bank rarely can escalate to a war of men who would exterminate the banker and the repo man, and this is not because the bank is an abstraction or a story. The names of bankers and their buildings are well known, and bank robbers would be listed not as villains but legends, heroes. The greatest of all bank robbers, as you might know, is one who would be known by history as Josef Stalin. In all of this, the idea of conquering the bank by military means could not be done, nor was desirable. The Fascist language suggesting to do this was no such thing at all, and as the Italians and Germans became fascist, their central banks conducted new finance schemes just as onerous as the old, turning to liquidation and privatization to cannibalize industry.^[10]

The boundaries of war proper are not defined by thought leaders or assertions, nor by the codes warriors may abide that derive from their past experience. It is often believed by naive students of war that "generals fight the last war", as if warriors just played out a program given to them by history. The reality is that anyone planning to prosecute a war is not lurching behind the world, in the way aristocrats insist. The boundaries of war are determined not by any eugenic or aristocratic conceit, but by the real conditions they are fought in, and concern at a basic level the mechanical actions of war. The use of war as a metaphor for things which are not war or battles is a terrible conceit, which detracts from useful study of the phenomenon. There is an effort of many, particularly technocrats, to circumscribe the definition of war processes to suggest that war itself is an impossibility, or abides the conceits of knowledge or planners. No warrior believes war is decided by plans alone, or believes the soldier is at heart a very simplified or abstracted machine. Behind every uniform and piece of armor there is a flesh and blood human, and however much the human is stripped of free will when he becomes a grunt, humans are a versatile machine which defies this reduction to managerial conceits. If war is to be conducted by proprietors and managers in developed society - if generals are to dispose of their men like so much fodder - they would do well to remember the processes to make men into machines of violence, and to recognize the qualities of men that make them effective for the task. This is not trivial and never something taken for granted. From birth, the boys of humanity are induced to glorify the cult of war, and the girls are induced to reward this behavior if not participate themselves. Mothers have long selected which of their sons will be selected to live, and threw away the boys they didn't want, and did so because their task was understood as the production of new soldiers, or producers who would be disciplined by the needs of martial society. This practice was not eugenic as such, but instead informed by the reality that warlike institutions imposed this condition. Kindness was never a trait of the human race that could last long, and where it exists, it is always something that must be hidden away. The vicious of the human race, who have always found each other and conspired to make us all as vicious as them, revel in torturing the kind. In the past, this viciousness had to be constrained long enough to allow a productive economy to exist. It was long understood that war's purview had to be limited, for a state of general war all over was not tenable. Without the mechanisms of today's technocratic polities, a society perpetually at total war would face immediate revolt, for none of the producers or slaves have any reason to go along with it. Many of the manangers, proprietors, feudal lords, equestrians, and the aristocrats who tire of the war drive, would reject the call for such a society, for the same reason. Such a total war required a monolithic entity imposed on reality itself, and that was only possible with technology in the 20th century. Even then, such a state was an imperfect creation, rife with corruption and failures high and low that would be inexcusable in a serious war. It is only because the war of the 20th century was fought on spurious pretexts, and the eugenic creed pushed and cajoled men to fight each other for nothing, that today's state of natural and eternal war is plausible. In a past time, such screaming maniacs would have been rejected, and if insistent, they would have been dragged out and killed for such insolence, so that the general peace may be maintained. It is only the prevalence of the eugenic creed and its insanity that allowed this cult of war to persist. There is a version of technocratic society which did not do this, and in practice, technocratic societies do not actually engage in such a total war of all against all. Far from it, the tendency of technocratic society would have, in a better world, suggested social units that negated the war drive. In other words, it would have suggested socialism were not snuffed in its cradle, and did not take the perverse forms that Nazism, fascism, communism, and liberal bourgeois socialism took. It would instead have been a socialism that overcame ideology from the outset and remained true to any socialism that was worth pursuing, and there would be politicians who saw that overbearing managerialism would choke humanity if it was allowed to build. It is the eugenic creed which locked in for good the bureaucratic nightmare in technocratic society where no institution works and every machine, every deed, and every person is to be the most venal monster they can be. Eugenics as a religion regresses to a primordial state of mankind, with full knowledge that the true origin of the human race is fratricide, ritual sacrifice, a thrill for violence and cruelty, and the flinging of shit that a Galtonite partakes in and pushes on to the "retarded" as an inborn behavioral trait. The Galtonite's obsession with sexual perversion brings him to elevate all fetishes, and among them is his scat fetish which he immediate imposed on the "retarded", even though the stupidest human like many animals would want to defecate in the cleanest way possible. Only by caging, torturing, and humiliating the "retard" in institutions did the habit of smearing shit begin. This habit would be reinforced specifically because the warden of the institution denied bathrooms to the institutionalized^[11], and laughed as the condemned, beatem and living in fear, in a cage where his brain was to be cut up and his body to be degraded, reverted to the responses of a fearful animal.

The functions of war suggest what warriors really are and do so far as their conduct pertains to the act. Anyone suggesting there is something more to war than that, or that war is something else entirely, are engaged with something entirely different which is of little importance. The culture of war and the cult of war is a type of knowledge or moral claim which has no bearing on the final result. Those dragged into fighting without being blooded as warriors are forced to conduct themselves no differently in the essential act. No matter how much philosophy suggests the non-warriors are passive, humans have a tendency to not like being killed or tortured. The error largely stems from a belief that war pertains primarily to violence or killing. The power of life and death is attributed to war and placed at the center, but the power of life and death is not limited to war or even primarily decided by war's existence. Imperium - the power of life and death - can exist and often does exist without an active war. When a criminal is hanged, there is no "war" that put him to death. That is the orderly procession of society, by laws which are understood by all. The criminal is aware that his death will not be seen as any sort of battle. Violence and war are not one and the same, and often war entails acts that have nothing to do with violence. So too does torture and humiliation not pertain to war, since both are present in acts which are not war and both are practices in vogue with many institutions, for various purposes. The chief aim of war can only be the engineering of a rival society by any means necessary. In a well-regulated society prepared for war, fears of internal failure are only considered briefly, while the enemy's condition is constantly assessed. It would be necessary for a combatant to occasionally check for his own integrity and the condition of allies, which is very different from the vigiliance of one army guarding against another or engaging the enemy in combat. The aim of war is then social engineering of a particular type.

While social engineering implies a warlike stance, societies are engineered by means other than war, and the peaceful incentives for social reform are considered - for example, extending carrots or rewards to suggest behavior, or shame or legal punishment for the same. The engineering conducted by war is a particular sort, in which the niceties of dialogue are abandoned. Outside of war, two societies that would be constituted in preparation for war can engage in diplomatic relations and exchanges. It could be for the members of the societies involved that the two societies are not alien at all. In no case are two societies truly alienated, even during a state of war. It is entirely possible for participants to ignore the injunction of their commanders to see the enemy as an enemy. It is not necessary for one society at war with another to view the enemy as morally evil or worthy of any sentiment like hatred or fear. Far from it, the conduct of effective warriors disdains such emotional investment in the enemy, where fickle emotions override what a warrior would find reasonable or useful in judging their opponent. Nor would a warrior need to have any justification or negative view of the enemy's morality. The enemy can and often is someone like himself, fighting for similar reasons and likely disgusted that he has to take orders from an aristocrat. There are usually differences between the two societies that were irreconcilable by other means to lead to war, and two societies at war would sense the sharp distinction between them on top of the hostility war entails. If the judgement of combatants, or those dragged into war, is colored by false moral posturing or manipulation of emotion, it works to the disadvantage of someone lying to themselves about the nature of the enemy, or the nature of themselves. The emotional and moral state most relevant to war is recognition of one's own emotion, and the morale of one's own team. The true morale and state of an enemy would have to be judged by someone placing himself in the enemy's position and imagining himself if he lived in and was raised in the enemy's society. The emotional and moral condition of both sides is relevant, since wars require that moral sentiment. Nowhere is the warrior an automaton in the way a technocrat imagines in his simulation. If the warrior is so degraded that it is nothing more than a robot, then it is the morale of his operator that is relevant; but robots, for a variety of reasons, make terrible soldiers. They are even more terrible at fighting with the maladaptive managerial technique of poor technocrats. Smarter technocrats are aware that the soldiers they send to die for bullshit are humans who possess a sense of smell detecting bullshit, and public relations and deception to elide the purpose of war only works for so long. If there is a soldier who believes in the propaganda that they are fighting for the just cause or any such stupidity, there is a fool who will not be useful for much except a ritual sacrifice. Soldiers to be effective cannot be that degraded. They need not be conscientious or moral in the sense a philosopher would appreciate, and usually soldiers are a disgusting lot motivated by nothing more than their off-time to get drunk and fuck something. A recognition of bullshit and the idiotic orders of their commanders, to say nothing of the politicians, is necessary for soldiers to function with the desired qualities. If soldiers really are robots, they don't truly fight, and very often their function is to be used as lab rats for some eugenic test, which the soldier understands to be yet more bullshit that will probably destroy him mentally and physically for dubious "research".

The eugenic purpose of militaries is a war of its own within the society waging war, and a theater of the greatest war of all - the war of those selected to live and enjoy the fruits of victory against those selected to die, for whom the entire enterprise is some sort of joke. The promise that some day the soldier selected to die will be able to live again is often not granted. Even if the soldier comes home, those selected to live in the eugenic war were able to attain position so that they never have to risk death or suffering at all. From the outset of war, those selected to live recognize each other and promote each other, waging the greater war of eugenics because that is the war they were born into and the war that has endured since humanity began. The state of war that is particular to two societies in a model is for the eugenic interest a sideshow that the people selected to die are tasked with fighting. Only in rare cases do those selected to live face an existential threat from an enemy, when the plunder machine no longer functions or the war aims of one side override temporarily the greater eugenic war for some purpose. The eugenic war of humanity's existence is understood to be active at all times, but the sides are never clearly defined for all to see. That war, which is never fully understood as a war and usually takes the form of something very different, is still in principle conducted with the language of war and the purpose of social engineering. Where the set-piece wars in a model are defined by battles with sides that are clear enough for actionable plans to be drawn, the eugenic war of all mankind is a war of deception, backstabbing, assassinations, humiliations, and numerous steps up the great ladder for the fortunate. In practice, the eugenic war was not fought throughout the lifetime of a man, where old men may yet find redemption. It is not fought in the mere struggle for life, for the struggle for life is not a war in that sense and does not serve this eugenic function. The struggle for life is something greater and yet simpler, and has nothing to do with society beyond the reality social relations produce. The eugenic war is waged from birth to adulthood, and it is fought in the schoolhouse, in the family, and in the internecine conflict that humanity has in some way promoted for no good reason. Victory in the eugenic war is primarily decided by the test of adulthood, and those who fail that test are selected to die in all things, regardless of war or peace. If a male passes that test, he goes to the war of the moment or some struggle meant to be a war, and begins the great game of backstabbing and human viciousness that is the race's genesis and core function up to today. Usually, drill instructors or the local commander decide within moments whether a new recruit is selected to die or not. To be selected to live is to play a much different game, the rules of which are never given to everyone, but those who are selected to die will see very clearly their position once it happens. There are then those who muddle through life between those worlds, suspecting that they have been selected to die but hoping to retain enough dignity to be allowed to live with a little more than the retards, the most hated race of all mankind. To be retarded is a malady worse than merely being selected to die. Many are selected to die, simply because the viciousness of the human race finds its niche. That selection of death is often forestalled because the condemned are temporarily useful for something, but those who know they are selected to die do not forget it and do not show great enthusiasm for anything this wretched society and this failed race of Satanic apes has to offer.

Those selected to live, who always recognize the social proof that selection brings, are never under any illusions about what they won and what must be done to protect it in such an environment. They may feign kindness, or may demonstrate kindness out of some sense that it would not hurt them or would help their long-term goals, but never will those selected to live doubt on their own accord the legitimacy of that status. The behavior of those selected to live only changes when that status is in jeopardy from an outside force, whether it comes from others selected to live or from the multitude selected to die. Of those in the middle, who have some doubt of their status but recognize the social proof they are afforded compared to those selected to die, they are always pressed between the two, and because those selected to live will possess the material and moral advantage in all cases, their allegiance will always be to those selected to live. The "middle class" so to speak will see those selected to die as a bulwark, because the predation of humanity has taught them that once those selected to die are truly dead, the middle class is immediately at the bottom and faces the predation humanity institutionalized long, long ago. Aside from that, the middle class here is never afforded the grand luxury of those selected to live, and so one of the ways for that middle class to endure is to employ labor towards some aim, and that labor may and likely will come from those selected to die. Those selected to die will never be convinced seriously that they were actually selected to live, and no religion and nothing else in the world will change that conviction. We have always known, once the line has been crossed, that there is no going back, however deep we are in the shit and however we have chosen to endure in this world. Those selected to die are not under the impressions that those in the middle would keep, where the middle believes that salvation in some way is possible. What motivates those selected to die is purely a bitter determination to endure in a world gone horribly wrong, that was shit up by these Satanic apes. Those selected to die would behoove themselves to remember that it was the Satanic apes that did this, rather than "the world" or any force of nature. It is far easier for the middle group to accept the view that the world or nature was the problem, because faith in such koans is one of the ways the middle group might "fake it until they make it" and find their way into the club at some late age. Those selected to die only blame the world as a whole when they have truly given up and became vectors of the eugenic disease, and there are many such people. For those selected to die who wish to go out with some semblance of dignity, the world has been one of the few things preventing those selected to live from making this worse, for the world places limits on life and this is good. Those selected to live by the law of the eugenic interest and by the will of mankind's collective efforts still die by the law of the world. All of us do, and while we may question the goodness of final death, it is one of the great equalizers the true god of this world granted to all of us. It produces a sobering influence on all, no matter what the status of any war, and that sobering influence is one we would do well not to forget.

These things inform much of the formations that appear in set-piece wars, for they are informed by social engineering practices that are warlike and the influences on society that are not directly warlike, but can be harnessed by those with an aim towards some victory. They inform the tools that would be used, beyond the mere recognition of physics and material science, or beyond the nature of communication and knowledge itself which forms the intellectual weaponry of war. It is for that reason that wars rarely involved general slaughter or democide, or even full slavery of the enemy. As bloody as the spoils of war have been - and it is the spoils of war in the form of slavery that did the most to increase the death toll war brings - the war rarely ends in total destruction or disintegration of the enemy society. Even in unconditional surrender, the defeated enemy continues on in some form, now paying tribute to their new lord and master. It would only be possible to truly disintegrate an enemy society with time and peaceful social engineering, in which the occupied nation is corrupted and put through humiliations worse than mere defeat. Because it is expected at some point that the conquered would be ruled or assimilated into the victorious society, some lenience may be expedient towards the goal. The victorious society, after all, is not some pure essence, and did not fight purely for a eugenic mission. Very often, the societies that fight are empires seeking to defeat other empires or nascent formations that present an opposition to empire. Empires rarely conform to the Nazi conceit of ineffable race essences, but are multi-national and would have been constructed by hegemons who successful subdued rival societies and formed a larger polity. Formations like tribes often wage war not as their essential race, for tribes often merge, adopt foreigners, make alliances, intermarry, and so on. Tribes that seek to engage in significant war formed confederations, especially when they waged war against city-states and empires, or war against settlers from such societies. The Germanic myth and narrative about war falls apart if one thinks of the basic constitution of any war-worthy society for five minutes, and it is a narrative created by failures, for failures. The Nazi strategy, as mentioned before, only worked because of fifth columns who identified with German race-theory and desired a war against their own lower classes. It took place in a world where the true contest of the world wars was not national glory, but position within the global empire that had effectively ruled the world from the dawn of the 20th century. The reality of 20th century war and war today is only comprehensible if the nature of empire is correctly acknowledged, and that the empire of the world market had overtaken prior conceits of empire for all intents and purposes. The smart men of recent history understood that wars were not about patriotism, nationalism, ideology, land, or any resource or material incentive. They certainly weren't about money, which could always have been fabricated or abandoned when money was no longer a useful token. Wars in our time were about position in the global system and the interest of parties who saw the conduct of war was amenable to their social engineering goals, and these wars would be initiated by men and women who believed war was a great game which they were not only secured from, but that would established their interest and class as the dominant partner in any alliance. That interest is not hard to see, and it was seen when this demonic crusade started. That interest is very simple - it is eugenics, now given a name and faces and preparing its "Jehad" against the rest of the world. It is eugenics which pushed the nations of the world to fight, and it is eugenics that dictated the terms on which war would cease and continue. It is eugenics which intensified all internecine wars and created the siege of all nations, and eugenics which upheld the myth of nation-states which were no longer operative as real political units. The transformation of nation-states into human resources departments, which is in the early 21st visible and increasingly acknowledged, had always been the intent of the eugenic creed, among many other intents. The eugenist does this not out of some high-minded goal of internationalism, and it is the eugenist which supplies the false story that national identity, bereft of history or meaning, is somehow worth fighting for, after the national identity and the state representing it has been completely stripped from the actual nation, turned into a parody beyond that of the capitalist empires of old. The former nation-states were by and large fronts for a bourgeois interest, but the states were comprised almost entirely of bourgeois from the nations in question, who understood their projects only worked when mass armies and mass labor were mobilized. The bourgeois nation-state implied mass politics was a condition they had to accept, and in many cases had no difficulty accepting. It did not make inherent sense for the bourgeois petty-capitalist to see his interest contradicted labor or even the residuum. The smaller capitalist had always seen correctly that the greatest threat to him came not from below but from the commanding heights and from aristocracy. Regardless of the capitalist's tendency to side with power and legitimacy, the capitalist understood that by this submission to oligarchy, he was doomed unless the oligarchy selected him to live in the world to come. The overwhelming majority of petty bourgeois literature concerned not a dread of workers' movements, but a dread of oligarchy in various forms. The workers' rebellions were certainly not welcome to capitalists, but they were almost always seen as conspiracies launched by would-be oligarchs rather than organic uprisings from the workers, when the view of labor was hostile.^[12] Very often, struggling capitalists would make signals suggesting favored workers join them, and though this right-populism rarely won over workers due to the odious associations they would make to cuckold themselves and betray their class, there was no intrinsic reason for an industrialist to drive down his workers' wages. Ford, for instance, made a point of suggesting privileged status for favored or essential workers, while depreciating the workers he didn't need. Oligarchy and aristocracy had a view of not just the workers but the whole population as useless eaters, but the struggling capitalist often suggested, however dishonestly, that he favored growth, because economic growth was in some way an indicator that his industry would remain relevant and hold a chip to bargain with oligarchy. It would not last long, as oligarchy held all of the relevant and useful levers, but the alliance would in the late 20th century draw more workers to the cuckoldry of aligning with capitalists, especially as the options were reduced to right oligarchs and "center" oligarchs, with the left reduced to nothing more than a grift bereft of history or purpose.

This chapter has dealt very little with actual fighting, and that of course is something better people than me know well. What is important here are the motives for war and battle in particular, which are distinct aims from the cult of war or how war is morally valued, or the moral values that operate outside of a war situation. By no means is this chapter a complete accounting of those mechanisms, and such an accounting is better left for another time and another author. I mention this part of it here because the war practice is a significant contributor to economic and political thought. It would be the claim of every state that the primary duty of the state is defense of the city, or defense of the polity. In other words, the ideal city-state is presented as if it were in a constant war with the whole of the world, unrelenting and turned inward to discipline the members of society. The true defense of the city is not a condition it reluctantly accepts, but a pressing of the nerve of power which never ceases. That is the true nature of the philosophical republic, and the particular enemy it faces is of little relevance. The enemy could change from Eurasia to Eastasia in the same sentence and back again, and it would make little different in the conduct of a republic. The reality of a republic, and what would be necessary for such an entity to meaningfully exist, is entirely at odds with the philosophical model of one. The philosophical model presents at core a militarization of the entity in total, where it exists in a state of perpetual war against everything outside of it. If this sounds like fascism to you, then gold star for you - nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. Where the fascist regresses to the primordial light, even the earliest examples of this construct are perfectly aware that societies and states do not actually function this way, and the true purpose of the model suggests not that this model of society is ingrained in nature, but that it arises from education. The educator, then, conducts teaching as if it were the true war, and that war is carried out in the rest of the world. Only those brainwashed by this pedagogy are told they have contact with the genuine world, and the native sense of all outsiders is severed forever. It is this that creates something more foul than the fascist's simplified braying about the state, which we in the 21st century can no longer escape.

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