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Intelligence regarding moral values and judgements forms the basis for economic decision making. Those moral values pertain to a world outside of people altogether, rather than the values we would prefer to create. We also recognize people in their genuine condition as real humans who will represent values which change with their individual qualities, wants, and plans. Economic decisions are not seriously made alone. Even when we are alone against a natural world, we operate with the presumption that other humans are a possibility. If we didn't, then our sense of economic value is very different as a solitary agent in nature, then it would be in a society where the chief values involve other humans. The particular materials exchanged in society are ultimately less relevant than what we do in social economic behavior - manage people, conduct politics in society, and operate through institutions, one of those institutions being our own legal person which is a very different construct policing the behaviors our flesh and blood bodies, brains, and minds would want. Even if we were to have security in society, we would be locked into a sense of ourselves not as the fully formed animal with a mind that we are, but as a legal person who would be nothing outside of membership in society and its institutions. The institutional representation is more important than the flesh and blood. Property in any form we would regard as meaningful is held not by flesh and blood humans but institutional persons. In the flesh, humans can only possess, which lasts for as long as any force is exerted on the possession, or there is no competing entity that can challenge possession and it is safe for us to treat the possession as owned whenever we felt like accessing it. The nature of this economic thought as a realized system to approach the world is explored in the next chapter and the remainder of this book. If this thought is active, then the "economic problem" is just one of many problems in human society. All that humans do with their intelligence in learning is subject to economic management in principle, whether we see it as "economic" or not. So too is everything humans do in economy a matter that can be judged by science, and by struggle for merit and rank. This happens not because any one is foundational or takes precedence as the explanation, but because economic actors are moral actors. We do not have the moral values of anything stamped on their representation, in a way that obviates this problem. In principle, all moral values in society are knowable. In addition to our difficulty in explaining the world with language - and this is the only consistent way we are able to write about morality or explain it to each other beyond gesticulating or insinuation - human societies are dynamic in three ways. The individual humans adapt to their environment rather than being fixed points of light or genetic essences. The society itself involves people who come and go, and who interact with a real environment rather than a virtual mass of people equidistant from each other with nothing between them. Because humans are aware of society itself as the chief danger and benefit in their lives - because humans understand that without society and institutions, their position in the world would be perilous against other such entities - these both conspire to form our most common value judgements. Humans cannot help but be affected by the machines they build, and society itself is the greatest and most terrible of these machines. It would be impossible to construe society as a "just-so" fact, because the moment humans refuse to participate in a society to the bitter end, all of the moral persuasion leaders of men rely upon is meaningless. Society only exists because of the active labor of participants to realize what began as merely an informational fact that there are other people and acts between them that constitute society. That information never just happened to exist, but was actively sought, and the information itself would be valued. If the information pertaining to social agents and particular things circulating in society because morally valuable, there is thought pertaining to how those things circulate, how they are occulted, and why this is done. It is not the mere fact of society that makes it relevant, but that society brings the prospects of competition, cooperation, truth, and the lying that is habitual in the human race. Humans are liars, born and confirmed time and time again, and no new technology or ethics suggests that this will ever change at a fundamental level. Humans are engaged in a situation where they operate with limited information. This limitation is not just about the things themselves or symbols humans use, but limited knowledge of moral values and intents of social actors. The intents and purposes of people, the machines and products they build, and the ways in which natural forces are harnessed, are more relevant to our task in society than the mere existence of physical objects or abstract ideas. It is that which is the objective of economic decision making at the level of society, rather than the much smaller managerial task to regulate the affairs of the house, as the name "economy" - Greek for "management of the house" - indicates. The household is managed not for its own sake but in accord with the demands of the dominant forces in society. The informational composition of society has already been described. What happens when all that we have expounded on about life, spiritual authority, and moral value are inserted into that society?
We begin with two concepts of intelligence. The first is the faculties allowing learning and the establishment of mind itself, which are in any entity fixed at a given moment. Those faculties are not extensible by assertion that they are, but are only honed like any other muscle or tool in the possession of intelligence. The second is the accumulated learning and methods of recalling learned information. This is a different question than the physical mechanisms that comprise knowledge, the brain, and so on, describing the "hardware" so to speak of conscious, knowing entities. Intelligence, then, concerns what is ultimately a simulated version of reality more than something which exists "as-is", in a way that is regarded as some substance or an informational entity co-equal with the physical world. Unlike knowledge, which has no intrinsic moral orientation or ability to make decisions, what intelligence learns and acts on is a very moral decision. Intelligence chooses not the conditions of its being or to do whatever it pleases, for intelligence by itself has no inherent moral orientation providing a teleology. Intelligence instead learns of moral qualities and develops a way to compare them as values, which itself is learning about metaphysics and questions about the world that are not immediately evident. This task is carried out in earnest not as the simplest assertion of what it means to "think". Many entities think and act on thought without "intelligence" in this sense, or their intelligence only acts on cruder models of the world that are sensical to animals. Humans themselves do not know purely through this intellectual faculty, for much of what humans do has nothing to do with intellectual learning or the deployment of this limited resource. We do not learn anything new by following a daily routine of consuming meals, going to work, and proceeding through life, nor is this learning necessarily an imperative to follow at all times. Intelligence in its active utilization is not an inexorable force, and this is true of humans who regulate their intelligence for moral reasons of their own, and computers whose intelligence is an extension of the programmer's thought process. The computer is powered by electricity and cannot conduct its task without that energetic input, and the computer's operations regulate that energy by means of a negative feedback loop to allow the automation of governance. It is not a moral claim about the virtue of intelligence to say that computers don't think, as if I were merely repeating a self-serving koan about the sanctity of humans or organic life. Computers do not think as we do because we specifically designed them not to mimic the processes that comprise proper knowledge and sense. What humans do by commanding the rational faculties is itself discipline of its knowledge - in effect, when we set ourselves to the task of study and becoming rational subjects, we are gimping the abilities humans are good at, regulating that knowledge and its energetic inputs, to produce the outcome of learning and mind that we covey. This faculty was not ordained by any germ or seed, where "rational mind" is concrete and eternal yet an ephermeal biological and physical thing that popped into existence. We may argue that once established, rational mind becomes a going concern of its own, and the brain, human beings, and the tools in their use mutate and morph into something acclimated to the dominance of rational mind over the base processes of life and knowledge. This, though, is something different from the declaration of an essence which is inexplicable and "just-so". We can ask very easily how rational mind came to exist, just as we engineer the digital computer by utilizing scientific principles towards this task of automating governance. In constructing the computer, it was seen beforehand that this tool was in some sense an extension of humanity's moral direction of learning, rather than just a machine to automate rote mental tasks. The reasons why are not reducible to the philosophical image of an idealized subject, a point of Luciferian light that is often invoked for the crass political purposes of cajolers and those who declared themselves leaders and made the public ratify that declaration in a farcical process they call an election.[1] Computers exist most of all to command and control humans in society and in their environment, rather than as a mere extension of rational information processing. The direct function of the tool was utilized for a wider moral purpose even before mechanical computers were at all effective for the task, and before business machines were wholly reliable. The business machine, far from obviating the need of bureaucracy right away, led to an explosion of bureaucratic oversight. The reasons for the computer were not a crass drive for efficiency, but because the function of the tool expanded the abilities of those who managed in ways that were not just an extension of the rational task. It did not take long, and was envisioned beforehand by social engineers[2], for computation itself to be marked in the division of labor. Factories and social units were to be fused to their animal nature, under the command and control of managers. In this way, socialism would be defeated conceptually, and the long run goal of a philosophical state can proceed. Humans would be both atomized in the purest sense, and yet society is total, inescapable, and without meaningful description. It does this in the name of socialism and human progress, as if it were the only possible world, despite being clearly artificial and the intent of a few willful actors. It is here where the older moral sense of humanity, where one subject was construed as holding virtue and obligations, would be supplanted by information and moral sentiment and value itself as a force stalking the world, congealed in some abstract-yet-hyperreal beast.[3]
We didn't always exist like this, nor was it a teleological direction. It is not now as absolute as its ideology insists it is. People in the 21st century still think like the humans of old, however much this thought is affected by institutions and the machines deployed. It is too difficult to change thinking radically in a way that is singular. It is further a feature of 21st century society that subcultures are segregated off to think in ways appropriate to them, and this is encouraged as a way to manage people. No "homogenity" of the sort implied by the ruling ideas and all political ideas permitted exists, or is even actively encouraged as a real condition. Everything about the ruling ideas presents the homogenized "normal" not as a real condition with evidence, but as an artifice intentionally divorced from anything a single person lives in. It exists in fantastical entertainment programming and pseudo-scientific literature of the worst kind. Any worthwhile view of 21st century society does not regard any such singular thought-form uniting the people, neither globally, within a nation, within a race, or even in an organization. Such homogenization has always been a disciplinary tool to grind a given race down to its lowest possible condition - and the Germanic conceit of racial eugenics is the reference most often evoked when this tool is deployed, rather than industrial homogenization of products which never followed from a philosophical or spiritual intent that this is the ideal state for industry. Far from it, as this ideological conceit of homogenization is spread in schools, industrial product moves from production of commodities to production of machines for specific qualities, that favored the aforementioned command and control the computer entailed. Vertical integration in industry did not rely on a spooky homogenization that is the result of a failed Germanic philosophy that was intended to forestall any genuine science, so that a democratic idea could be derailed. Said philosophy never actually suggested that people were homogenous, but instead that they were differentiated by caste and by the dictates of aristocracy. Vertical integration and the needs of industry in the 20th century should have made clear both the futility of such an idiotic philosophy, and the futility of the eugenic creed which asserted its political dominance around the same time. The ruling ideas did not just conflict with the material base of reality. The ruling ideas were utterly alien to anything that actually happened in the base or the superstructure, to use the Marxist sense of these things. The true governing ideas, which were published and circulated enough, suggested a miserable fate for mankind and that the only homogeny in the human race was its primordial origin in ritual sacrifice and viciousness. Those traits exemplied the aristocracy that came to rule, and were unmentionable as what they truly entailed. To say what was to be done to us would make clear the dire necessity to root out all such persons as soon as possible, and when that was indeed what some people decided, the institutions had their fallback ready to facilitate the eugenic creed's ascent - the final ascent, intended to mire the whole world but the elect in the purest depravity yet known. None of the rot and filth of the eugenic creed is a true condition of the human race in its present moment, and it is not merely a recapitulation of the race's genesis. It is a totalizing view where all that exists regresses to something foul and progresses to something foul, and in doing so, the true faith of the eugenic creed makes itself known. It is this which provides one of the greatest mystifications clouding judgement of distance, time, and the genuine reality we live in. It was never the world that was illusory, as the gnostic heresy declared. It was knowledge itself that was the trap, and in particular the faculties of intelligence that were befuddled by tripping over themselves, led into one lie after another to bombard the senses and exhaust this faculty.
It never began in one unified place, as the origin myth of the creed recapitulates without any convincing evidence that we should "return to source". The storage of knowledge and technology in media is such that knowledge in the broadest sense continues to circulate and will be reproduced, such that technology is never "lost" for long. If society were viewed as a gigantic organism, it could lose nearly all of its functioning capacity, and within a couple of generations, knowledge accumulated from the past will be rediscovered, even with media technology and a political situation making this knowledge difficult to disseminate. It is learning and the conceits of the mind that are destroyed frequently, and the state of learning and intelligence in society that rises and falls with every empire. This is very strange because realized technology and developed knowledge would be far more expensive in resources to produce, while intelligence and learning as a concept should be trivial to reproduce given any moral incentive to do so. This happens because the conceits of mind and the conceits of empire and the political are tied together. Institutions do not reference intelligence or learning out of a sense that learning is good or fun or something morally worthwhile for its own sake. What institutions regard as legitimate intelligence is that which conforms to its moral expectations, and they concern themselves with their institutional wants alone. If institutions served learning and intelligence in the genuine sense, their conduct in education and dissemination of learning methods is not just woefully out of line with the goal. The institutions, and human beings, have every incentive to NOT teach, to NOT allow learning to arise indepedent of the institution's aims. Intellectualism and the conceits of mind are an intrinsically individualist view of knowledge and thought. It is for this reason that technocratic government, which appeared superficially to possess an inexorable tendency towards socialism and collectivization, turned on itself almost immediately. There is not genuine reason of intellect or knowledge to not ameliorate this problem, as if intelligence were cursed to glorify the ego or some preferred institution. It is rather because the moral values that prevail in human society are dishonesty, avarice, cruelty, and a thrill that is native to the race when it deceives another human, and the thrill of felling a beast in the hunt. History and facts confirm this - the human race, so far as it has a natural moral inclination, is evil and abominably so, and they always knew what they were and they always knew the good. Intelligence would see this for what it is, but rather than attempt anything different, the tendency of intelligence without any sobering influence is to embrace the evil, as this instinct serves the needs of genius. Intelligence and learning sabotage themselves, yet would be the only way out of this morass. Individually, this is trivial to overcome. It is in society and the communication of intelligence and learning methods that this is reinforced, by some shriveled and decrepit invisible hand compelling submission. It does not take any great intelligence for this to perpetuate, but it was never the case that a good intelligence was corrupted by the material world. The material world gave enough warnings about what would happen, whether life heeded them or not. The truly foul evil existed because humans chose it and chose to keep doing it, because there was nothing in the world to tell them they couldn't and no good reason for them to choose anything other than what they did. It is still a choice, and it is a choice many humans manage to make in the other direction, for various reasons. The justifications for the primordial evil of the race always revert to the same few koans, and are pathologies well documented by now. They were never individual pathologies, but pathologies reinforced by institutions and the agents of society. The predatory, the venal, and all enablers, among the other malevolent persons in society, could conspire more or less freely. The honest and decent would be dissuaded from conspiracy, and if they did conspire, the strategies of conspiracy themselves favored predation and cruelty over a conspiracy of equals or a conspiracy of the kind. Only in the smallest cells does a conspiracy of the decent survive. The predatory conspiracies possess attributes allowing them to spread and corrupt, and this germ is an intellectual conceit rather than any natural law. The law of nature has made it clear time and time again that these conspiracies only exhaust human effort for vanity, but intelligence does not need to regard that. It only regards the world on its terms, and so very intelligent people destroy themselves and those around them and believe this itself is what makes them intelligent. Why would it be any other way, when history made by these men and women made it so?[4]
Societies do not possess "intelligence" in the sense that our native faculties allow, for they do not know anything nor integrate any sense that intelligence would require. The apparent intelligence only exists because individual people are agents in communication. It is "people" rather than the genuine humans that constitute this intelligence in the main. The reasons for this is that human beings, in the flesh, rarely communicate with each other without the institutional filter of personhood. The status of the person is always a concern in human societies, and the status of the person is something different from the status of the actual body. Intrinsically, the social and institutional person is at odds with the flesh that person refers to. At this stage, there is no political expectation of personhood, or even many rituals suggesting the person is sacred and the human being is to be abolished. Members of society are aware of this distinction, and it is even now a custom of humanity to allow persons to relax, reverting to their native connection with nature. Only when the eugenic creed imposes its Satanic fatwa does the shouting chorus for ritual sacrifice become an institutional obligation of all persons. The demand for ritual sacrifice is not new, as we are sadly familiar with by now. Ritual sacrifice was among the first of humanity's institutional rites, conducted before there were even fully formed persons as such. Humans natively sense that their person or social identity is a thing removed from their true existence, and to know the name of something is to hold power over it as the old aphorism goes. Ritual sacrifice and the viciousness of the race reinforce that distinction, but it did not have to be solely this that made the person and our sense of ourselves what it is. Ritual sacrifice could never have been the sole foundation of humanity that made us from a blank slate of vague biological matter. Something real that existed before the lurid ritual was to be sacrificed, and those joining to stone the undesirable and the retard were real flesh and perfectly aware of what they were doing and all of its implications. There is no true blindness at all in the ritual, and among the claims of the eugenic creed are that its lurid rituals and the filth of their mysteries, like all other such mysteries, are forbidden knowledge for non-initiates. It does not take any great genius to see this ritual for what it is, and hold it and the race that revels in it in the contempt it deserves. Such contempt will always be absolute, and there is nothing mankind or any successor of it can do to wipe it away. What is said cannot be unsaid, what is done cannot be undone, and ritual sacrifice would not be a ritual if it were any other way. The permanence of sacrifice is "realer than real". That it was all for a lie does not matter, and that it amounts to piss and shit violates the holy of holies. It's not difficult to see this, but intellectually humans learn that to go against the group is certain death and humiliation. It is a lesson humans re-learn every time they think they would do something different. It is not because of an axiomatic law of nature, but because of the difficulty of propagating a better way. The genesis of humanity and perpetuation of this cycle of sacrifice and viciousness spreads easily and is inherited. It is not difficult to reconstruct what happened and why it happened based on sufficient experience with human behavior and their noted proclivity towards viciousness. Even if humans stamped out the worst excesses of that viciousness, the birthmarks of this much ritual sacrifice are evident. It is a tendency of humans to investigate their past to the genesis and draw what conclusions they must, and if we wish to be honest when investigating history, we cannot hide what started this. It is not that humans cannot improve. Knowledge of any sort is difficult to remove from circulation, and enough knowledge of sacrifice and history has indeed circulated. It would be possible to reconstuct a history much like our present state of knowledge even with large gaps in the historical record, simply by asking questions as we would ask about our own origin. While many details will be difficult to fill in and a poor methodology will lead to spurious historical models by omitted information, the history of ritual sacrifice and its impact on every other custom of humanity would be reconstructed sufficiently. It is the intellectual and learning failure of humans, and an intellectual proclivity to embrace lies and learn the art of lying, that creates confusion where none had to exist. Humans only learn with the limited faculties and reverse engineer existing technology, records, and knowledge only as well as their intelligence allows. When a human learns how to lie about history far more than any method that would value historical truth or intellectual integrity, it is possible to cover up something that is plain as day to us, who have no investment in the lying of this failed race. It is not that the historical record disappears, or that there is even a concerted effort to literally "rewrite history". Often, regimes which engage in reality control leave a historical record intact, and when it is necessary to acknowledge material history, the truth can be told by the right people, and then discarded as intellectually meaningless or "crimethink", returning to the realm of unmentionable things. The valve of truth is allowed only so far as it does not impede with the "greater truth" of the lies mystics tell. The truth will not set anyone free. Far from it, fidelity to truth is to the intellectual a trap they lay. Power laughs at material truth, the truth of the world that we would actually value. Intelligence and the art of lying creates its own reality, and can do so for far more mundane reasons than a ritual of importance to the foulest of the race. I use one of the most alarming and shocking examples to make clear the failure of intelligence. Intelligence is not morally neutral, but seeks to learn that which is most impressive to its sense of what is valuable. Survival and learning of politics is far more valuable than learning about esoteric natural history or the workings of small things. It is not the curse of intelligence that it must do this, but put yourself in this situation. Are you going to stick your neck out for nothing more than the feeling that the truth is good? That is stupid and futile. The truth of the world is valued not because it is strong or mighty, but because the truth of the world comes out in so many ways no matter what we would prefer reality to be. Intelligence has no built-in mechanism to stop this. The intelligent of humanity have also been the most eager to accept lies and construct alternative realities. This is heightened when intellectuals are themselves the aristocrats who direct the ritual sacrifices most of all, where the greater intellects are expended to glorify the lie and material history is "retarded" and deemed something for slave morality. The greater the dominance of aristocratic intellectualism, the greater the disconnect from a reality that would be very simple to learn - if only there were a will to care about that learning.
The learning of intelligence is directed towards that which is morally valued. In society, what is valued is contingent on recognition of a simple truth - that humans and institutions are the chief influence on us, and all other information is of far less importance. We may then view the information hierarchically based on order of precedence from least to most:
-Information of no direct social relevance. This is intrinsically interesting to us and may tell us something about the world, but from the point of view of political intelligence and what is morally valued, it is not just irrelevant but actively harmful as a guide to learning. This, of course, is the basis for all other information, and so by ignoring this, intelligence and mind is guided away from the actual world.
-Information of importance to laborious tasks, such as science, engineering, and the arts and crafts of labor. This also includes things such as common sense or the cruder awareness of social customs that are commonplace. The customs of one institution and its associated social class or distinction may differ; and so there are differing expectations which mark high society from low society, and mark subcultures. The customs of the residuum who are cast out of society are especially noted, and this knowledge is carried on to all other moral incentives. These tasks govern most of our actual behaviors day to day, and are too multifarious to list here.
-Information of importance to management of money or markers of common moral value. In effect, this is the proclivity to "truck and barter" understood as a product of rational thought instead of the instincts and capacities of humans. It entails much of what we consider a basic level of education to function in any society, and the particulars vary depending on educational norms. A society without money or settled cities would still value this information, as it marks the distinction between "grunt" labor of a lower sort from labor that possesses bargaining power due to its skill or qualities that are demanded.
-Information about the customs of higher society, the mannerism that project authority and impressions. The stock and trade of the proprietor class and the warriors, whose interest is in establishing worldly force more than the mundane details of commerce or labor.
-Information about human psychology, the nature of society as a whole, religion, and efforts to answer "big questions" that are morally worthwhile with regards to the greatest threat humans face - other humans. In short, these are the arts of rule which are concealed as mysteries, requiring initiation. Those who "know too much" and violate the mysteries are suppressed, destroyed, and threatened with fates worse than death if they persist. This is the domain of aristocratic knowledge.
Based on the schema of knowledge that has been the format I chose for explaining what this is, the information that intelligence favors is a complete inversion of the ranks of society to whom they are attibruted from the genuine content they pertain to. The information of no social relevance, which is the basis for all others, is assigned the most desultory role where it is declared trivial and stupid, a thing for slow people to do and that is stupid for educated people to learn. Anyone who thinks that this irrelevant learning is worthwhile is deemed a fool and treated accordingly. Yet, everyone must engage with this information not merely as a precondition of the others, but because the real world does not conform to the conceits intelligence would learn to value. Our real need for knowledge and our desire which finds learning intrinsically interesting on some level is more attuned to these "diversions", which constitute most of the learning we would actually want to do. In a world gone right, it would be this learning that we invest in, for it contains access to the actually useful mysteries of the world, and ultimately ourselves, that make the "highest" form of learning in the university most valuable. There is a strange connection between the highest and lowest class, and one might see it as an affinity if it were not for the aristocracy's visceral hatred of that which is most cast out. The laboring task is understood not as labor in its own right and for its own purpose, but as something to be managed and disciplined. This corresponds to the knowledge the proprietor and the officers of the army take all credit for, but all of the useful work is managed by base laborers in the field, foremen in the factory, recruits in the plantoon, and sergeants to issue most useful battle commands to subordinates. As a general rule, the more desultory a man's intellectual standing in social worth, the more that is demanded of him, and the worse his pay. This inversion of what we would consider economically fair is natural for intellect and learning to embrace, and it is a rule of managers to give to the workers as little as possible and demand the most from those treated the worse. It is typical under management for the lowest workers, who are barely alive and too immiserated to resist imperious managers, to do much of the grunt work, while favored and smarter employees laugh and make jokes about those who are retarded and thus must be assigned the tasks least desired. If the retard does offer more labor than the bare minimum, this is purely a gratuity of the worker to their superiors, and the workers themselves encourage this venal behavior because intellectually the values of the human race align with it. The only thing that abates this is the reality which contradicts the conceits of intellectualism - that workers so abused will eventually cease to be productive and have no motive to continue this arrangement. So, workers commit suicide, or retaliate violently, which is intellectually the appropriate thing to do. This is understood intellectually as necessary, but the moral conceits of intelligence tell workers, absent any compelling reason to do otherwise, to repeat the cycle that has long been learned and re-learned by the human race. When humans circumvent that cycle, it does not last long, because the values higher in the chain of priority assert themselves on the laborious tasks. This would happen whether there are managers of the higher orders to dictate to workers the conditions, or if workers managed themselves and each other. Even when the clear interests of the workers should tell them not to do this, they lapse into doing this, as if some demonic force insisted on its expression. The demon, of course, is that the workers are not isolated as workers at all. Every worker, even the lowest of the class, can only tolerate this condition because there is a life outside of work, and they hold in whatever way they can the generative force of labor, in any free time they possess. The only way for a master to truly deprive a slave of his own body's labor is to watch over the slave at all times, even in the slave's most private moments. This level of invasion into a slave's life becomes so obsessive that it is counterproductive, once again because reality asserts itself over the instincts intellect would deem morally valuable. No goodness, no matter how evident and how many times it is learned, overrides a tendency of intellect to seek the shortest route to victory, and recapitulate what it would prefer the world to be based on the moral values intellect holds for itself. The middle group is given over to neuroticism and infighting, readily adopting identity groupings and venal office whenever it is offered. This middle group has enough force to contest its position in the social order, enough learning and intelligence to realize the trap it is in, but is too given over to an illusion of becoming aristocrats to ever countenance an end to the cycle altogether. It is an abiding trait of the middle class to render all other classes invisible, and they more than anyone are vulnerable to false egalitarianism among their own, and the most visceral disgust towards the workers and lowest class. One would think the middle class would align with producers and thus labor, but historically it has not merely been the exact opposite. The needs of commerce and social advancement were won by exploitation, and intellectually this made perfect sense. When modernity arrived and this middle class asserted much more force than it historically could, the bourgeois commoners did not merely join aristocracy readily and embrace the martial virtues as supplicants. The vanguard of bourgeois thought moved above and beyond the aristocracy's native hatred of the lowest class, which was already seething, and nowhere else does the visceral thrill of fascism and victory of symbolic identity hold such an appeal. The thinking of the officer corps and high level managers, which would correspond to martial virtues and the higher talents of generalship, is at a basic level given over to the worst attributes one attributes to democratic society and labor. The generals are, for all of their pretenses, glorified gangsters, and the best they aspire to in their learning is to become warlords or slightly smarter gangsters with a compelling system to work their grift. As much as possible, generals leave any actual labor of fighting to the grunts or technocrats, which includes a laundry list of pseudo-technocratic functions assigned either to slaves - a fixture of the staff for any general of ancient times - or to harried subordinates who are the grunts of the higher rungs of military life, if not just promoted non-commissioned officers from the ranks. The aristocrats, for all of their prestige and the fear they evoke, are really just beggars living entirely of the largesse of the other classes, yet claim by this foul manipulation that aristocracy alone holds the crown of all wisdom, sucking vampirically the intellect, life-force, and everything in the world to feed their hideaway. This particular construct will be investigated later, as it relates to the higher three classes. I recount this here to establish from the outset that what intellect finds morally valuable is a near-perfect inversion of the world and knowledge proper would find morally valuable, if it were not fettered by society's proclivity to promote the rotten and venal.
Why would it go so wrong? It is not difficult to see why if one is not blinded by ideology or a desperate hope that humanity didn't have to be this. Intelligence and learning seek the shortest possible route to success. While this works individually in a complex way, in all of the ways that learning can be communciated, pedagogy favored laziness and neglect, passivity and the eugenic interest over the labor that was morally valuable. Intelligence does not consider itself in debt to labor, because intelligence and learning are not beholden to any law of nature that would compel the moral worth of labor to be stamped on everything that is learned. Far from it, the smart thing would be to do what humans figured out - to herd animals rather than consider the hunt a fair game between Man and the beasts. If it was easy enough to learn how to herd animals, then why would this practice exempt humans? It is far more likely that the herding and humiliation of humans, learned in all of the games humans played to established social rank, were the origin of strategies to herd animals, rather than a fruitful intellectual solidarity between primitive mankind that would be at odds with their actual conditions in primitive society. Primitive society was rife with intercine conflict and nothing other than personal honor to enforce such cooperation. While that personal honor was often enough, and there were many incentives to not engage in overwrought intercine conflict, it did not favor the kind of intellectual communion a technocrat might wish to impose on history. This also explains the zeal of the middle class to embrace all of the worst conceits intelligence would lead them to. This middle class, by and large oppressed by the conditions of monopoly capitalism, would be hungrier and less given over to minor avarice that would distract other interests. They instead hunger for world-historical missions and grand narratives to cajole history, in ways that aristocrats knew to be a fools' errand from their experience. Before capitalism, this middle group steadily attained leverage, from a starting condition that placed them either as castoffs of the nobility or little different from common serfs. Very rarely, though they would never admit it, members from the lowest class could promote as high as this, or sire or carry children who would be able to rise by some good fortune. The technocrat more than anyone understood the value of freezing social mobility, to prevent others from doing what they did to rise in the 20th century.
This of course is the impulse of society if it were imagined as a total and self-contained system, which it never is. We do not live in such an enclosed space, no matter the efforts of men to enforce it or natural barriers that pin humanity on one planet, or in a particular country. There is a world outside of society where none of this thinking is appropriate, and all classes recognize the monomania such a view of socially propaganda intelligence creates. There is a reason education is persistently bemoaned by humans regardless of the society it occurs in. Only relative to other educational regimes can the education of any nation be defended, and it never given the adulation and self-abasement the institution's true believers insist it deserves. This is true of technocratic society, imperial society, the parochial education of villages, and what education tribes offer to their members. A sense of identity and patriotism is never so natural as ideologues presume it to be, and this identity does not disguise the reality of society. The only way such totalizing societies can maintain their ideology is to play the most infantile mind games and use violence to make everyone believe in it - or else. Clearly this hasn't worked so well, and so the tendencies of intellect are just that - tendencies that would be overcome if there were a single sobering influence.
The secrets of human beings and how to rule them do not isolate in a vacuum, nor do they ignore distance or the real limitations of technology in communication and projection of any force, or any labor. And so, labor once again becomes valuable, but it is labor of varying sorts. This division of labor conforms not to any conceit we would imagine, but by the real conditions which allow specialization of human beings. These specializations are recorded in the record of persons and cannot be obviated by any preferred model. Before human labor is divided as an imagined mass available in the abstract, human labor is divided into units that are relevant for the purpose of social information. That is to say, we are concerned with valuing what is morally necessary, and valuing that. This may be the whole body of a person, or the person, deeds, machines, and things in society may be divided into any morally valued system. Organizations of people and any institutions are valued only when they are realized, rather than a model of society that we imagine to be operative at the level of the state or the polity. This is not to say that the state or polity level of social awareness is irrelevant. Far from it, thinking on the state is inherent even in small societies, where the state and politics are far removed from daily life, and the most politically relevant labors - so far as politics can be construed as operative with force - are those close to home, where the state or what counts as the state is distant and disinterested in the daily affairs. This disinterest is never a choice of the state in principle, and willful restraint of the state is uncommon without compelling causes of the state's agents. The disinterest of the state in private life instead arises from two sources - that such an invasion of privacy is highly counterproductive or mechanically impossible with the resources state institutions possess, or the state's temporary restraint is conditioned on the principle that freer subjects would be more productive or motivated to fight for their society, produce for society, or accept the rule of those who govern society. There is a world, existing more in fantasy, that the aristocracy or political elite as such is the majority of the population, if not inclusive of every single human on the Earth. There is no reason why this couldn't exist while maintaining the political philosophy guiding humanity thus far. There are many reasons why the political thought in force works feverishly to prevent this, and no reason why the political thought would ever allow such a state of affairs. What is known, and this is confirmed since Antiquity by the admission of the ancient political thinkers, is that such an idealized society - and indeed, the very aristocratic ideal that was upheld by them - is not stable and proceeds through regular decay, or regular cycles of rise and fall, depending on which philosopher you ask and how their work is interpreted.
Here we see the origin of "contradiction" becoming morally and politically relevant. First, the incentives of intelligence are exactly opposite of what would make sense if humans were good-natured and this economic task were driven by an honest desire to resolve our differences. Second, the society intelligence presumes to be operative if it imagined an ideal model society is contrary to any society that actually exists, and any network where learning could take place between humans, primarily through their communciation. The way this has been resolved is simple - humans had an existence "outside of society" that informed all of their moral values, and this was not a political or economic interest, nor should it have been. It was not even a matter of finding the correct spiritual authority and following it. Many different spiritual authorities respond to the same world and all are tasked with knowledge of the genuine world, rather than the model of reality one authority would prefer. It is pigheadedness of the mind and the conceits of education and learning which convince someone that their spiritual authority is the One True God, which is strange because any religion worth its salt is careful to explain why the One True God is true. Today's neoliberal death cult, where the Christians or what call themselves such chant Jesus' name ad nauseum and bullbait everyone into submission, would be seen as something designed to be as disgusting as possible, to lock in eugenist screamers - which always was the heart of the new, positive Christianity of the late 20th century. We would see this as foul if we retain moral sense and our native connection to the world. The intellectual contagion works because it gets believers in by making the world a torture chamber, projecting it on infidels, and then convincing people with the familiar Satanic snideness that they can join the winning team and get in with a cheap imitation of the Christ, packaged as an entertainment product for the low, low price of $99.95, one soul, and shipping and handling. It is that sort of contemptuousness that the koan of "contradiction" invokes, recapitulated in various ways, and the contempt dripping from the mouth of a bad Hegeloid is difficult to not detect.[5] It is not merely bad moral fiber which brings this about. By the incentives intelligence follows, it would do this unless a better way were both known and widely distributed, and could obviate the need for bad philosophy as a tool to rule people.
The simple reality of this information is that, without genuine knowledge that would be attained from science, society only "exists" so far as the knowledge of any agent in a given society. This means the true form of social life and political life has nothing to do with these models of the state as a total entity, and such a construct is primarily a mental image that can be constructed, but that has no effective force without knowing its constitutent parts. The constitutent parts never conform to any preferred model or pedagogy, for the true acts of learning cannot be corraled in the way that might be imagined, and no moral philosophy can eliminate the reality that humans learn to adapt to clearly intolerable situations. A simple way to tolerate the intolerable is to simply turn away from the political and economic as much as possible, and this is indeed what happens. It is not that a laziness is Man's nature. Far from it, humans in their native lives are industrious towards the moral goals that summon both passions and higher sense of right and wrong. Absent those reasons, the curiosity of humans endures despite all of the rot in the race. Humans never fully "grow up" in the sense that obligates them to abandon that curiosity, no matter how many times they are exhorted to sever themselves from their native sense, which is what such exhortations actually accomplish rather than a rightful abandonment of infantile sentiments or wrong directions. Even men who are serious and devoted to political life will make time to learn or find some hobby of interest. The life of a purely political animal is a dreadful one, even if someone has a perverse affinity for the art of politics and bullshitting and can make this terrible job interesting for himself. The truly smart politicians are aware of politics in the genuine sense, rather than the grand narratives or theories that are sold as ideology. Before any such thing can exist, the links between social agents form political and economic life in miniature. The aforementioned model is most useful not because it explains politics in miniature, but because it explains how learned knowledge can disrupt genuine sociality before it forms, and nip in the bud potential trouble before it rises to annoy the state. Because institutions are the entities which conduct economics rather than flesh and blood humans - it is persons who must manage resources in this way, which does not make much sense to our native faculties which would not let an economic logic override what they would regard as necessary to live - it is helpful to know how they form beyond the person. The person's defintion, beyond the most basic sense of self-identify, is reinforced by the society a person resides in. If we lived alone, economics as a thought experiment would be subsumed entirely in a struggle which is a political and scientific matter, and no moral thought or obligation to others would be relevant. We do live in a society though, and if we were in purely antagonistic relations with no communication, our sense of personhood would be very different. Very likely, a market would never form if we did not have some cooperative sense already established. That cooperation can never be taken for granted, for there are too many examples of disconnection, alienation, and rejection from society, and rejection from society is one of the threats leveled against those who transgress the ruling power of any society. I do not concern myself with political thought in this book, for that is properly covered in the next book of this series after a basis for economics is established. Politics and economics, at the most basic level, have nothing to do with each other and are inherently antagonistic towards each other. What is politically useful is at odds with an economic sense where people, whatever our moral views, are there to be managed or dealt with in this detached and cold manner. There is no way to speak of an economics that is wholly passionate or human, for economic management is anathema to such a value predominating in exchange. In such a society where economic management is a trivial task or the chokehold on material wealth is no longer a severe barrier, political thought has nothing to do with economics, since the basic needs of life and security in resources is attained, and economics for avarice alone is a far less attractive propositon for political matters.
For most of humanity, grand world-historical missions and narratives of total power are not the draw they are for the true believers. What is their true orientation? It is their interests. This is not reducible to a preferred interest they "ought" to hold, but the interests that are proximate to their actual lives, which they are usually aware of. Even with imperfect information, the aim of survival and the basic labor of life is a necessary precondition of any other aim. Even if one has some grand mission, that mission is impossible without attending to the genuine conditions of life and the world. The grand mission is not inherently paramount, and any such mission would be a mission of life. If we wish death or self-abasement, that goal can be attained without any rigamarole where we pretend to do something else. If the goal is this contradiction in which the thrill of torture is maximized, that goal has obvious consequences a child sees past, but that the violence of a failed race imposes to ensure the child is "normalized". The objective of people individually is to live, but it is only actual humans who are integrated in their flesh to become persons. Societies do not have this sobering influence or a collective interest that can be taken for granted. That only exists in institutions. The social relation itself is just information. However much two minds may meet, so long as they do remain separate they must be so. Where they do genuinely connect, the relationship is understood and only after the fact is it reduced to social information that would be the subject of economic management. The social relation in its genuine, laborious form does not need to be categorized and classified by an imperious third party, and so a relationship like "slave", "wife", "husband', and all such obligations are of little relevance. They provide at most an indicator to us about what genuine relations between human beings are like, but they are not in of themselves a substitute for our real relations. The relation between a mother and son is not reducible to an ideal form which is to be replicated as if by machine. We could do this, but the results eliminate every substantive and real thing in the relation. The beneficiary of such a construct are not the mother or son, but a third party which decided to intervene in the relation; and this is something carried out repeatedly, internalized in those who are subject to this intervention, who become vectors for the alien. Ideally, the ideologue seeks to make its presence in the relations invisible and unmentionable. We know better and are constantly wary of such interference. But, institutions are always premised on this happening and becoming an unmentionable, as if it were just-so and natural for third parties to hijack what was inherently a bilateral communciation. Even if we imagine a group of people in a circle that is an institution chosen by its members, one voice speaks at a time if we are to speak of rational communication. Collectively, the circle only has a consciousness through the acceptance of the institution. The collective has a force that is greater than the sum of bilateral relations or the relation of individuals to the group, and can do things as an organization that none of them could individually replicate. It works this way at any period of historical development, because it is inherent to the very concept of what it means to be a social entity. If we were integrated as a collective "mind", we would think very differently. The model of ants abased to the queen by some mind control is not a genuine collectivity in that sense, but this is the model persistently invoked. If we were integrated as such a fixed social unit by natural laws, as the ideologues claim, it would entail something very different from the models of society and institutional force that those ideologues impose. Through individual violence and imperious will, institutions do not create a genuine collectivity simply by being institutions. They certainly do not create collectivity by exhorting members to abase themselves to a symbol, something that is not even a proper idea but a token or a mystification given to fool members, who play a game of backstabbing and conniving and call that socially well-adjusted behavior. The institutional dogmas create the exact opposite of the collectivity they pretend to impose. They create institutions where individuals are severed from each other, except through mediators who are in spirit and deed alien to the membership.
This habit of interference preceded the state or any formal institution making it so, and it was never inborn in natural laws in some way that requires us to respect it. It existed because cajolers and influencers learned over time that they can do this, and with no one to stop them, all they needed was to make their subordinates dependent on this learning. By placing a premium on intelligence and mind and declaring that some humans are retarded - "once retarded, ALWAYS retarded" - institutional society as we know it can begin. The society where we did not do this, or a society where this is mitigated, does not abide any of the institutional shibboleths that became standard tools of the cajoler, the ruler, and the aristocrat, or some human who aspired to those conceits in the back of its foul brain. It was only possible to lock people into these institutions as institutions because intelligence and learning would be limited. It is less about the limitation of information, for information is difficult to conceal forever. It is more about reaching inside the brain and pushing the right buttons to habituate members of institutions to believe that this abasement to institutions was either intrinsic to themselves, intrinsic to nature, or a divine order from Heaven. There was no other way for the institutions we live under to form. Where we are united by genuine sociality, it is always understood that this sociality, in our present stage of existence, is between individual humans and the machines they have built. We are aware of this and do not need to play any mind-game to insinuate that society is anything other than what it is, and it would be profoundly insulting to suggest such cajoling is even to be tolerated. Such insolence would be met with necessary violence. It is indeed the case that members of society in good standing will enforce this, and will purge anyone who is so insolent to impose a false society by cajoling and lying. The corrupting influence of cajolers can only be kept at bay for so long, for no natural law will stop cajolers, and so proper society is always maintained by vigilance of its agents, who detest such influences on their genuine lives and interactions with others.
All institutions form as understandings that entail information that is learned. No institution can be said to exist without being recognized as information that is learned. There are natural tendencies of people in relating to other people and the world, but all such tendencies are recognized and learned, for them to be considered relevant to our concept of institutions. We may note the relationship between parents and offspring, and conclude there is naturally a relationship we call family. When understood as a general rule, and elaborate to establish taboos against incest and inappropriate behaviors, all of that information is learned, and can only be learned by people. No such learning is inborn, and even if the tendency were inborn to the point where it is nearly inconceivable to expect humans to do anything else, we would each learn of this tendency. It would never be an unmentionable. It is the aim of imperious people who wish to cajole institutions to lie about all information pertaining to them, and this is the start of the downfall of these institutions. The institution persists only so long as labor maintains it, and the institution - down to the person itself - disdains the very thing that allows it to be a realized force. The genuine representation of the institution, if it were to be viewed as a system in its own right, is attacked by that which binds it, because it was too much for persons to reckon with a world outside of society, that did not care for any such conceit.
The ultimate definition of institutions is then not what they do, but what they leave behind. This is the origin of the residuum and the lowest class. Before the institutions could exist, humans were differentiated by ability but this did not have any intrinsic merit or sense of moral or civic worth. However low or high a human was, life itself needed no justification. It existed because it could, and it seemed to the naive that there was nothing wrong with this. The stupid and ugly were no real danger to anyone, and if by some chance the stupid lashed out and forgot their deficit in ability, it was trivial to suppress them or eliminate them. No law protected them, and so it did indeed happen, without any institution or ritual sacrifice that would become glorious in of itself. Necessity never was the purpose of the ritual sacrifice, for none of that was ever necessary. The victors of ritual sacrifice never had to glorify what they were doing, but it didn't occur to them to do otherwise. The logic behind institutions themselves explains why. Institutions are defined most of all by exclusivity and locking out those who are not welcome, and once locked out, they would be locked out forever. The faculty of intelligence, which did not possess any intrinsic moral authority or value suggesting it take on this role, would become the dividing line between who is in and who is out of institutions. It would not be intelligence in a general sense, that conformed to merit that was independently verified or by any standard science confirmed. The intelligence filter required that institutions alone adjudicate who is and is not smart, and who does and does not know. Institutions to retain their existence do not hold any information, but secret information against all other institutions and all that exists outside of them. They can't do anything else, or else the institution is imperiled. This would not be a problem if we accepted institutions only exist to serve a function, and this is how many institutions can be approached. Families are not ideas held above the world, but exist because parents make children and this was an arrangement that worked well for the participants. The family of biological parents and children persists not because the idea is too compelling or foundational to society, but because all alternatives produce perverse incentives, and true to form, humans have made every other arrangement of integration into society intentionally terrible, so that the eugenic and hereditary advantages of elites are preserved. They do this at the expense of the greater society or other institutions. The institutions of the state become nothing more than the holdings of elite families, who violently impose their personal wants on other families. The "abolition of the family" that the leading institutions always desired does not abolish elite families, and is entirely a war against families of the lower orders, to deny them the security a family implied. All throughout this, the institutions are defined entirely by who is cast out, rather than anything the institutions actually do. This is because the institutions were built not as machines to generate anything, but to exploit labor in one way or another, in line with imperious leaders who wanted to cajole the world to fit their delusions. None of this "Jehad" served any purpose other than to make others suffer. We learn, though, that the moral incentives of humanity were oriented towards exactly that goal. And so, institutional society could only have ended in one outcome - that the purpose of life would be suffering and suffering alone, with no reprieve conceivable for one moment.
Institutions, from the smallest to the largest, live off of suffering. This is not the rule for life as a process, which was not born to suffer and die. That has always been a conceit of institutions imposed on the world. Absent institutions, the force of such a tenet would be nothing but an absurd thought in the mind of someone who foolishly thought they said something profound when speaking of a great cycle of life and death as a cosmic rule. No such rule exists in nature or even in the definition of life. Life, as we have written, was an aberration without any clear basis in natural law. By nature, nothing about life and death is relevant, and nature provides many examples of life cut short, life suddenly destroyed by events outside of its procession, and deaths of various natures which are morally valued by us, in society or not. Institutions can recognize this, but they cannot change a persistent tendency in human institutions to alienate the actual human being and its native thought from the institutional thought-forms which utter such a koan. Morally, a story of a great cycle of life and death would mean nothing, and tell us nothing. The sacrifice cult and rituals are less than worthless. They are an utterance of filth from a failed race that revels in failure, rather than doing the barest thing that would allow for moral values to exist. Without those moral values, the institution which speaks such stupidities would be even more futile than the stupid human who actually believes such a statement is profound. Yet, it persists, because it is a useful koan to continue a cycle which is destructive to any institution and to the humans who operate them; yet the conceits of intelligence insist on doing this, and that doing this is morally beneficial to the interest of the institution and those who hold it. Without such stupidities, those who see institutions as a tool to manipulate would not feed the institution the vitality of members. Without that, institutions would come and go, and we would not value them above the actual human beings, who are the true engine of institutions and of society. If the aim of someone is to arrest the world for some design - if the aim is management of a resource, rather than the genuine uses of the world's wealth and energy for our genuine moral aims - then such circular reasoning is sacrosanct, and thus, sacrifice becomes the life and death of institutions, imposed on the world. If the aim of someone was to build an institution that did what they purport to accomplish, other than institutions of a purely predatory nature, then we would not regard the alien institution as anything other than a tool. It was not, as the dumber of the technocrats said, that machines came to resemble men and men resembled machines. It was always about the institutions themselves, and a need of imperious agents to occupy them and cajole the world for its cause. In doing so, institutions could be transformed by the will of the worst of humanity, stripping them of any meaning they once held.
This is not merely an ideological technique or a consequence that just-so happened to exist. Antecedents of this go all the way back to the first ritual sacrifices. Had it not been for such stupidity, ritual sacrifice would not have been a glorious act, and it is not the case that killing a child would be surrounded with any such ritual. The ritual sacrifice did not begin because it served some purpose, or that killing itself was a self-evident goal for a cruder eugenic purpose in the human race. The ritual sacrifice began as a ritual that took on a life of its own, and the ritual had to consume lives for no real purpose other than the perpetuation of the thought-form of ritual sacrifice. The same impulse exists in many institutions, for good or ill. Institutions take on an existence independent of their members, but it is a curious existence far removed from the existence of a genuine corporeal human. The corporation, the preferred technocratic conceit of government, takes on the appearance of a perfected man with his parts in working order and good health - the very model of the human race. The actual existence of the corporation is a dreadful, slobbering beast, which escapes the command of its officers and compels them to do things that weren't in anyone's interest, or even in the interest of the corporation. The corporation becomes nothing more than a symbol, a parody of whatever it purported to be. Even the thrill of ritual sacrifice, the primordial pressing of the nerve of power, becomes stale. It is never enough for such an institution to remain stable, even when it claims it has arrested history. It must seek ever-escalating levels of "pleasure" as it sees it. The intensity of the sacrifices must grow stronger. More lives, more land, must be subsumed into it. If the institution ever stops expanding, it would die. This impulse is mis-attributed to some ulterior material incentive, as if institutions were pure and it was the human beings who corrupted them by their ugly existence. It is the other way around. Institutions are born rotten, many times understood as compromises between the men who found them, and only become worse from there. No one chose their family from an ideal state of affairs, like they were children in the fantasy version of a candy shop when picking their parents or their offspring. By placing alienation into the realm of spooky forces or ulterior motives, rather than the institutions themselves, a great misdirect becomes another shibboleth of the institutions, jumping in front of what has been clear to us. The contrast between institutions and the men who are members of them or subjected to them is intensified until it is maximized. The human being can be distilled to its rawest form, and the institution hopes to shape the human into a vessel of the gods. This is why the ritual sacrifices began, rather than any real reason why it "had" to happen, or any obvious benefit ritual sacrifice served. If the goal of ritual sacrifice were to remove excess population, or get rid of undesirable children, the killing would be done without great fanfare. Death would be clean, or as clean as such things can be. It is not too difficult to prepare someone for death, even if they are petulant and whining, if only there were an interest in doing this. It is not just that the call for death did not care about the condemned. It is that the ritual thrill of not caring was itself a value the ritual sacrifice intensified. Ritual sacrifice did not just serve a eugenic function of life. It served a primary psychological function that the grand cajolers of the human race wished to maximize, because the ritual of torture and sacrifice was itself a thing they wished to reproduce and naturalize as the human essence. Eugenism in the modern world simply isolated this ritual's mechanism and, through some small brilliance this author must acknowledge in them, built institutions which were conscious from the outset of their new goal, unfettered by past expectations of normalizing anything and the material weakness of prior states.
It was not intrinsic in "human nature" that institutions had to be this, or even that institutions ought to be this way because of a failure many in humanity could see without any great education. It is rather that there were those of the human race who saw what they held, and that the only way to keep it was to lie, lie, and keep lying in perpetuity. This lying is not an act of cowardice, but a mark of pride that they revel in. Humans are liars, and that is more or less hardcoded into everything humans are and do. Humans are also aware that this lying leads to consequences. We may morally value humans who figure out that there are limits to lying, and that in the end this lying is not an end unto itself. There would be something at the other end of our labors, which are the true content of our existence and tell us much about what we really are. That moral value doesn't compute to those who chose an interest of survival and rationalized that the art of lying was not just acceptable, but that the biggest of all lies was a reality greater than that which native sense was connected to. And so, institutions failed because the malevolent discovered over much learning every tool to construct them for predatory purposes, deconstruct anything that worked in them, and disallowed anyone to say no to this process. With the Big Lie comes the Great Fear, or a parody thereof. There is of course a greater fear at work that stalks all of mankind - that if the damned ever decided enough was enough, and found some way to seek retribution, there was no moral reason whatosever for the damned to destroy all that exists to spite the liars. After enough of this existence, the damned are far past giving any fucks about the sanctity of life, a sop given to the slaves while the predatory revel in gratuitous death and sacrifice, throwing their violations of all decency in the face of the damned for generation after generation and maximizing the thrill of the imposition. If this thrill of torture were for any ulterior motive, that motive is not apparent. It was not present in the past, and it is not present today or foreseen at some future time. We know this because men in the ancient past knew that the lurid rituals of sacrifice were not a uniform good unto themselves, even when they partake in them. Sacrifice and its cult is a double-edged sword, scarcely ever good in purpose and always unseemly. For all that is said about the vileness of the Romans, Roman writers were perfectly aware that their cruel streak was a liability and not a marker of strength in of itself. Romans were strong and virtuous not because of their nastiness, but because their nastiness would be overcome by strength that did not rely on pure posturing and impression. It is the same with many nations and civilizations. All of them had concepts of good, evil, bad, and a history of how these things worked in a real world, and these can be found all over the world, believing in various creeds. So too did the Americans, who were never constituted as a nation or carried any of the trappings of old world society, understand these concepts very well. Even the Nazis could be found to possess some moral sense beyond "me wantee". There is only one creed which glorifies this perversion, which lurked in every civilization and tribe it could inhabit - the eugenic creed, which maximized and purified its doctrine during the past century, with the Nazis as an imperfect vanguard of the creed's continuing mission. The eugenic creed does this because it isolated a tendency that was once seen as highly maladaptive and that leaders of institutions attempted to stall, or manipulated in cruder ways to stack the institutions with criminals. The stacking of the institutions in late 20th century neoliberalism was seen as yet another round of filling the government with criminals, but the autocannibalism of institutions was something more than criminal. It was planned, methodical, total, and introduced in every vector that could be used towards the aims of the eugenic creed. In the decades of neoliberalism, anyone who believed the institutions could be salvaged would learn the hard way that this was far more thoroughgoing than mere criminality, or even wholesale stripping of public property to place it into the hands of oligarchs. Eugenism intends something far more absolute, and at the least intends to take all of the property.
We may tell ourselves that "good institutions" are corrupted by malevolent actors, but institutions inherit the thoughts and labors of those who construct them and construct the very idea of them. Families did not arise out of an ideal form, but a real human male and human female producing an offspring, each of which had their reasons for mating. None of that occurred "just so", as if the father were blissfully unaware of his act or the mother was unaware that she carried a child for many months, or the child does not identify his parents by more than a sense impression, but by affinities and meanings that even an toddler assembles. The conditions of birth and infancy are never uniform, as if children roll off an assembly line and their genetic "code" - and "code" is another eugenic conceit suggesting life as a computer program, which is idiotic - produces a uniform outcome in all environments. Those facts are not corrupting of "the institution", because the family as an institution does not suggest an ideal form imposed on reality. All of the other child-producing unions in humanity are the obvious model to compare against, absent an idea of the family written down and codified. That codification itself was written by people who had seen many families and finally wrote down what this construct was in principle, and variations of the family institution are common. If the family were an ideal form, its format would be far more regular and natural than it is. The family as an institution had to consider conditions that are not normal, like a missing parent, adoption, orphanage. The family as an institution does not exist apart from everything else, and the family as an institution existed for purposes beyond merely existing. This arrangement exists because it was beneficial to someone, and it was obligatory as a way to produce more children and bring them into wider society. If children were lizard-people left to their own devices, they would surely die, and if the elements or starvation didn't do it, it was a ritual among the human race to make sure "nature did it right" by sending someone to kill the exposed child - ritualistically and sadistically, as is the eugenic habit of the race. There was never once the ideal form of a family or any institution. They are created by people in the conditions that allowed them to exist. So too did people themselves arise because they could. There was no natural law and certainly no teleology suggesting flesh and blood humans had to exist at all, or that they would become "persons" in a very particular sense. That human beings would adopt a self and personality, a representation of themselves in society, is expected. That personhood would be granted and revoked by an elite, adjudicated by education, and unpersons would be ritualistically tortured for the thrill of the institution itself, was never natural or inevitable. It was not a tendency of life that is universal. If it were, ritual sacrifice would be a common animal practice, and it would be far more prevalent in humans. Naturalizing and essentializing ritual sacrifice can only happen when the eugenic creed in its foulest form asserts its total dominance of institutions, and sets about re-writing history to make any other concept inadmissible. If their theory of institutions were true - and their theory is not based on any sound reasoning or past political thought but on the purest form of the eugenic insanity - then it would have precluded any human society existing, and institutions would be so loathsome that it would obligatory for humans to never speak to another human or allow such institutions to exist. This is intended, because in secret the eugenists want the sole "real" institutions, and to make all else that exists parodies. Even this eugenic institution could only exist because, for the first time, it was allowed to exist. Such people would, if they moved too openly in their "Jehad", be ruthlessly exterminated to the last man, woman, and child, and there would be no moral argument to make and the most divine and resolute sense of justice mankind ever knew - the first true justice in a long, long time for this sad race. The eugenists understood that this would be the only way they were stopped, and so did not even bother with a single argument for why this creed was necessary or should be allowed to go on. Fear is the only language they know, and they set about building a machine to make it appear natural. It never was.
All institutions are themselves living in a sense, but it is not like the conceits of life we normally contend with in biology. Originally, life was considered organic and understood as a result of its functions in realized, laboring organs and their composite organisms. This would be supplanted by a view of life as information, "code", symbolic and corporate in the legal sense. The body is reimagined as a technocratic polity unto itself, regulated by entities within it which police for eugenic purity. The institutional invasion of the body itself long preceded the official declaration of this state of affairs in 2020, when the eugenic "Jehad" truly began and launched the worst thing humanity has ever known. Like life, institutions are aberrations. Unlike life, which has persistent interests and going concerns, institutions are flimsy things whose members come and go. They are presented to the world as machines or devices for individual profit, or abasement to a symbol.
It is fitting here to note that the Darwinian thought on natural selection, which inherited political economic principles and applied them to nature, more accurately describes the life of institutions than the life of organisms. Institutions, once formed, are purely informational constructs, and they are intended to resist change to their forms unless needed. Institutions respond to selective pressures attacking them, and attack other institutions. They are never passive things and cannot be, if they wish to be viable institutions. They present as fixed forms, just as life stubbornly persists in its lifecycle. Unlike life, institutions do not have a natural life-cycle or sense of maturation. Their life is instead one of struggle from creation to dissolution, not even given a proper birth and death as we would expect of organic life. Institutions are rife with internal struggles because they are primarily comprised of the human beings that project worldly force, and their constitution is purely informational and reliant on communication to exist. Institutions once formed are by definition stable in their name and stated purpose. For an institution to be adaptive like biological life to its environment defeats the purpose of it. For biological life, the struggle for life is carried out not by information but a real organism that operates in physical space. Its selection for survival is not purely defined by the reaper of natural selection, since proper life does not exist purely to survive and is not consumed entirely by this struggle for life. Institutions, viewed in the abstract as potential threats, do exist purely to survive. They do not contain any built-in termination mechanism if they are to be stable and recurring institutions. While an institution can be an ad hoc measure intended for a limited time, the stable institutions will, once produced, take on a life of their own and become establishments. They adopt new members generation after generation, reproduce their forms in line with the information that went into them rather than what they would prefer to be, and adapt only under dire necessity. Biological life changes in accord with its whims before natural selection culls the population, and natural selection is a purely negative eugenics. In Darwin's theory, natural selection applies to life treated as if it were not aware of life as a political struggle, hence the "natural" part of it - it would not work if life were conscious of this struggle and highly adaptive to it, or it would be a far less effective principle. Natural selection was not the sole motor in Darwin's theory of natural life. Institutions, on the other hand, are made by deliberate actors, but institutions have no independent deliberation of their own. Institutions can only "think" or do what the bylaws of the institution suggest, if they are to be stable institutions. Institutions may allow their officers a wide range of versatility in their individual acts, but they do not change their core laws and purpose without becoming something entirely different. Even when subverted and turned into parodic forms as is the case now, the parody cannot adopt the new. It only mimics the old. A significantly new institution would be like declaring a new person. If we did allow the person redemption, the person cannot erase its past identity as if history were truly malleable. Institutionally, a new record begins and the old is dead, and the new bears the birthmarks of the old. In institutions, the circle of life and death is sensical, with nothing in between except the predictable motion of the institution and its pertubations, which are always learned behaviors rather than genuine reactions as life does. Institutions are built around the rules and more rules and nothing else, rather than the organic knowledge of a biological life-form. Institutions do not deviate from their programming - their "genetic code" so to speak - if they are to be what they purport to be. If institutions break their own rules, it is because their members acted outside of the institution's intent in an effort to make a broken machine work against the laws of Reason, or because the institution prescribed calculated violations of its public dogmas while holding an esoteric, private dogma for true believers. While a living brain and body is not a contradictory creature, institutions are built with contradiction in mind, both to resolve it by reason where our faculties would be confused, and to make use of contradiction as a brain-obliterating weapon. The result is that negative eugenics works very well on institutions, which live and die ultimately by their merit to survive rather than any other concern. The institution has no genuine will of its own, but exerts a thought-form on its members, and in this, it matches the concept of the self and ideology Malthus, Darwin, and the imperialists believed natural in the human mind. Institutions, absent any evidence, cannot be placed at particular locales or environments, and to tie an institution to some place requires an imposition of thought. Human beings are in some sense bound to their environment by their physical mobility, regardless of where they would want to go. They are never caged by ideas alone; all ideas that would confine a human are only appreciated if there is some force backing those ideas. "Positive eugenics", or the willful selection of mates or arranged pairings by institutional force that reduces the subject to livestock, only operates on living entities, but no such eugenics applies to institutional persons or institutions themselves. There is only negative eugenics so far as institutions are concerned, and it is negative eugenics that is the only meaningful form eugenics as a realized doctrine ever took. Institutions do not acquire beneficial traits from marriage or even reproduce in the sense biological life does. They only disintegrate when their time has expired, whether it is a person, a family, or the high institutions of states.
We may, in noting transfers of information in communication, see an institution or the appearance of one. This "quasi-institution" may be inferred by our learning, and it may have a genuine uniting principle we can deduce or guess exists based on that evidence. Communication of symbols alone is a poor indicator of an institution's true presence, for institutions are not purely comprised of the pretenses they make. To be a meaningful institution implies there are members and machines which have a physical presense, at least so far as we concern ourselves with the life we typically live. Even if institutions were virtual, populated by AI agents, we would still look for meaningful purpose in the information we gather suggesting that institution exists. Institutions have an exoteric and esoteric aspect, while human beings do not natively possess this sense in their genuine being. The levels of access for a human being's body and existence are variable and based on some material lockout or mechanism. The levels of access for an institution are secured by secret information, passwords, and the information of key centers of institutional legitimacy, and their connection to machinery that would constitute force. Human beings do not operate on the occult secrecy of a password protection or codeword, or find the occult arts native to their biological faculties. The occult knowledge institutions desire most is something that must be learned, and often is designed to not be a thing reverse-engineered. We reverse-engineer our own bodies and thoughts every day to better understand us and what we are doing, to hone and improve ourselevs. Institutions do not have that work ethic to improve themselves or a native connection to their health. Many institutions revert to degraded forms of themselves, barely functional even in the true core tasks of perpetuating themselves. Institutions imagine struggle as the struggle of identities and national essences, for the institution in some sense sees itself as an artificial nation. This, of course, is the liberal ideologue's concept of the nation, for the liberal detests any nationalism contrary to their own institutional nation. This makes great sense to the liberal - the institutions they inhabit are a much more coherent nation than the assumption of national brotherhood and democracy that existed in natural nations and societies. Those outside of the institutions saw the nation as an understanding that, at the least, provided common experience and reference points other humans in the nation might understand. The nationalism of the masses remained a primitive sort, never leading to the sort of patriotism that a liberal presumed he could rely on to herd the cattle to work and exploitation. It instead suggested an understanding that was dynamic, for nations rise, merge, and fall as looser organizations than the institutional laws which constituted the liberal brotherhood. The nation-state prioritized the state for the liberal, and sought from the outset to drag the nation it was tied to into economic integration. This required a level of democratization in the genuine sense, despite the political thought that had any legitimacy being in favor of aristocratic republics, monarchies, despotism, or colonial compradors. Not one political idea suggested with seriousness that democracy was anything more than an aspiration. This was true of the socialists without any compunction. It was very true of Marx, who did not believe political equality was a worthwhile goal at all or relevant to communism. The closest thing to a democratic movement held political thought that was in many ways skeptical or outright hostile to democratization, even when sympathy for the masses was genuine. The point here is that we should be careful in assessing where institutions exist if those institutions do not have an overt facing, which is difficult when dealing with the occultism common to institutional thought. Useful analysis of conspiracy was of course a key shibboleth the empire knew had to be circumvented. This moves beyond the subject of this chapter and is better left for another book.
So far, institutions have been presented as information of use to persons, expressed through their personal authority and efforts to establish temporal authority through institutions. We have scarcely concerned ourselves with temporal authority, which is a matter of politics and thus outside the scope of this book. The labor that comprises the useful expression of institutions beyond the fact of their existence is already a thing responding to spiritual authority, but this has thus far operated at the level of the individual. Spiritual authority in human society, where communication is common and institutions take on a greater life than they ever could before, is often judged by institutions with many members, to which most people are beholden in one way or another. Individually, every person has their opinions and their will, and brings those to the institutions. Inside the institutions, groupthink regarding spiritual authority becomes the most obvious method of uniting institutions, rather than merely the assertion of individuals by some merit. This operates even for the smallest and most innocuous of institutions close at hand like the family, where the role of the members takes on spiritual importance that was not truly mandated by anyone. Parents are the models for children, and the most likely guardians. Where there are missing parents, some guardians take the place of this spiritual center. Lineage and a natural affinity for it grant to biological parents a prestige beyond something that would be genetically determined. Even if someone hates their biological parents or the parents are lousy, and even if another adult would be the spiritual parent who raised the child, the eugenic interest of life and the truth that children were born to real parents conceived in a real sex act will remain relevant, and would be the way children perpetuate themselves when they grow up. It is almost standard for young children to learn where they came from around the age of seven, and if a child is denied this knowledge, it is an extreme degradation. Even being given this knowledge late marks the child as deficient and left behind, even though there should be no great secret to this and it is trivial to explain what sex is and the great game around it at any age past reasonable development where this is expected. At a basic level, the sex act appears simple enough, and the incentives of the man and woman have little to do with institutions or their commandments. A man and a woman make a baby, and presumably they would have to like each other before anything else is considered. That would be a minimum, or at least the arrangement has to be agreeable enough that the spouses do not want to destroy each other, or the situation that would be intolerable is ameliorated by outside friendships or institutional escape hatches. This commitment is not just a matter of moral sentiments or the labors themselves, as if the family participants were pure agents. They are united by the family head because of spiritual authority invested in that, and this is a model that exists in other families that provide a standard of comparison. It may be that there is a state already formed, or a dominant clan. The family as "the family" is very different in tribal or band society, where the bands usually were an extended family, clan, or a few families traveling together with hangers-on as needed. Parents knew who their children were, and children could figure out if they weren't told who their parents were. Incest taboos are found among every grouping of humanity in one form or another, which made tracing this lineage not merely a selfish want but an institutionalized practice and an expectation in wider society. The biological lineage is not a just-so fact, as if children were born stamped with "property of mother" on them in plain text. The parents, grandparents, and kin are all understood by roles which derive from somewhere. Without a ready-made theory of biology or science to say this, someone looks for an authority which can adjudicate this, and since genetics or anything like it doesn't exist and it isn't trivial to take samples of all potential kin, this is usually understood by hearing the story of who was whose parents, and then someone asks themselves if the story checks out. Without that, if a child is uncertain, he or she only has what guesses are available, and humans being humans aren't going to be forthcoming or trustworthy, especially when a propensity to lie about parentage is reinforced by adoptive parents, or the state wishes to sever the connection between parent and child for its purposes.
There is in human society much that begs for spiritual authority. Humans cannot easily reproduce science indepedently or spread it without any overall system that makes it digestible or something trivial to reverse-engineer. Human reverse-engineering is very effective at learning about objects here and now, but it does not deal with history, political ideas, and especially institutional secrets. When those institutional secrets are the most valuable information to learn, the need for spiritual authority is often filled not by something obvious or trustworthy in nature, but by particular people who operate with institutional fronts granted such status that allow them to command that spiritual authority, and suggest to the impressionable that they should believe their elders, their parents, the priests, or themselves if the institutions of such authority are clearly bad and malevolent. There is a reason why everyone follows some spiritual authority, but this is hardly an informed or rational decision made with full deliberation of the facts. A child with no secret knowlege against a whole society that has done this for generations is not going to challenge that which is much older and bigger and expect to live. It is a testament to the failure of institutions that individuals have to assert what claims they do about spiritual authority, since religion not only fails to answer this adequately, but goes out of its way to not answer things which we would think to be basic, or shows outrageous disdain and neglect for the conditions of life. This isn't so much about religion as a series of rituals and cults being bad compared to some better institution that is evident to us, because no institution has ever superceded the same functions religion fulfills, and often the replacements for religion prove to be even more outrageous failures. We are left with ourselves primarily because humans are too filthy and disgusting to get over themselves to allow this society to be livable beyond a point that is good enough to at least live. Fortunately, humans and the religions they form have enough sense to remember that they are comprised of individuals, not because persons are sacred but because institutions have a noted failure to accomplish what we do out of a much better moral sense than any codified construct would keep. The best religion aspired to was to work with human beings in a way that made them a little better, and in turn those individuals aspired to make the religion, or something in society, better. This was hardly a positive feedback loop with great returns, since religions are very scarce with goodness and human beings are starting from a poor position, living in conditions that preclude too much moral probity from them, and often are shitty people who refuse to do good even when that would have made this existence a lot easier.
Where does superstition and cruder worked-out systems to divine spiritual authority turn into a religion? We operate here with the loosest definition of "religion" we can as a precursor, rather than call up images of institutions long in force. We call religion a system which present thorough examples of spiritual authority to answer questions about transcendent values in the world, such as theories of knowledge or metaphysics, cosmology, society, and concepts of what things are through a spiritual view. This is a less than adequate definition, but in short, religion is the unique institution that can fill this niche. There is only religion which adequately answers those questions for us, and substitutes like ideology or pseudoscience fail to answer those questions or suggest an answer is possible. There is, ultimately, no particular "religion" that is distinct from each other in the questions it must answer. Any religion to be religion is answering the same question and would be cognizant of other religions doing likewise. Many formal religions will borrow from each other, and these religions arise as the union of many cults and practices. Religion answers these questions for individuals alone, because it is individuals who pray, labor in rituals, read the holy texts and see meaning in them, and do all of the things religion entails. Societies in the collective have no use of religion. The state not only has no use for religion, but sees religion as an impediment to its functioning. Institutions all hold their biases as it suitsthem. I do not retrace the steps where various cults and superstititons became religions proper. If no established religion exists, it is possible to make up a personal religion or something that answers the questions enough for the purpose of living. There is, in the main, just "religion". The particular name of the establishment does not change that religions greatly resemble each other, often praying to the same gods or godhead and comparing references to deities and finding they are the same thing. This is not to say that all religions "say the same thing". The particulars of each religion, down to personal religion, say very different things about the nature of those gods, which ones should be worshipped, their relevance to the world and the lives of mortals, their theories of knowledge which all differ considerably, and so on. What is not mistaken is that every religion holds overt and hidden information, and in the hidden information, the true nature of the beast is far different and far more cognizant of the real world. The ideological version of religion is not just a false religion, but a contemptuous lie that is so uncomfortable that this version of the godhead can only appeal to fear to convince others that the "god" is good. Usually, the poor adherents, who never had much use for religion or the aristocratic gods, do as little as they have to in paying fealty to the alien god. Very often, the poor continue praying to the gods and traditions they held, muttering in secret that all of this organized religion is just political. Maybe the tenents or rites of the religion speak to something for all of the adherents, and usually they would have to speak to something if a religion is to mollify the flock. Typically, fealty to the gods has nothing to do with fervent belief, and everything to do with deference to the ruling power of the day. Few ever gave a single shit about Saturn, Jupiter, and their ilk, or their equivalents in any polytheist arrangement. Those were the lord's gods, to be abided because the rest of us had to. Refusal to sacrifice to the aristocrats' gods meant exile and death, if the gods decided it was your turn for this season's round of Satanic ritual sacrifices. By "the gods", we of course refer to the lurid cults that have always found this to be a bully pulpit. Even in the form of folk religion, religion answers the same questions and has to pertain to the same world. There is never a number of distinct religions or a "new religion" as such, for every new religion inherits the priesthood and situation that preceded it. There is just "religion", and all of the institutions of religion point to the same thing - the world as a whole, and how to answer it for the adherents. Religion is a particularly human construct, and not all humans are religious in that sense. We have interests other than religion, and labor for things other than it. Religion exists and would always be present in one form or another, and with it comes a priesthood and lines of succession to establish it. There is never truly a "new priesthood", because religious mysteries are passed in some way by adoption and the communication of knowledge that is occult and particular to people. Religion would not be reproduced or synthesized from natural elements once established. As religion becomes a force with appreciable meaning in human existence, any such synthesis would only reform the same knowledge that religion pertained to in the past. If there is anything new in religion, the new joins this gigantic smorgasboard that is "religion", as yet another deity or concept in the pantheon, which may be channeled like anything else in religion by the adherents.
In religion, the first sense in humans can exist of a thoroughgoing plan regarding the world in total, rather than humans living in their environment and in the society they know of. It would of course be a reality that humans live in a world where they are not intrinsically confined or ignorant that there is a world, regardless of their adherence to religion or any concept of such. Humans can have a sense of the world without religion in any way, and construct elaborate theories of the world in general on some make-shift assembly of knowledge from smaller parts to arrive at general rules. Science, at a basic level, concerns the labors of people at a local level, rather than any grand unified theory or image of the universe as a clockwork of systems. The systems thought of a scientist, however it is worked out, is always something for the scientist to approach a world that precedes anything the scientist thought about it. Religion is very different, in that the theories of the world are established and laid down in the institutions of religion. Practice of religion does not intrinsically involve any scientific view, and the attitude of religion towards science, labor, property, wealth, industry, and so on can vary based on which particular tenets a religious person holds. Religion operates not in the world of material things, but in the world of institutions and the ideas constructed in them. Outside of the institutions, religion has little sway, and a religious thinker outside of the institutions would intuitively sense the need for a religious construct, or some answer to the very presence of religion in the world. Whatever thought constitutes "religion" is not as important as what religion does for this purpose. We could envision a "religion of science" in the genuine sense, where theories of science and reason are at the very heart of the religion's tenets and rituals. That has never existed in a state that is genuinely appreciative of science. The attitude of religion towards science is never wholly antagonistic, as if religion were an opposing pole to "the science". Yet, religion and science are never reconciled into being one and the same. The labor and practice of science, which preceded institutions, is at odds with the tendencies of institutions and societies to occult knowledge and work against any effort to discover truth. Religion of course portends to truths that are very difficult to attain except through received wisdom - and so, the guru and the pedagogue displace our native sense and the human's proclivity of reverse-engineering and reconstituting itself. It is as if history did not move until a thought leader declares that it has in fact moved, and this makes perfect sense for religion. At the same time, any religion worthwhile is aware of this deficit in its thinking, and considers how it must resolve the disconnect between its institutional wants and the world it encounters and must survive in, if the religion is to be a going concern.
To speak of religion as a superficial thing misses the purpose of the practice and its institutions. When there is a shift within the priesthood, where the mask comes off and a new dogma replaces the old, it appears as if it was all a lie, and the new cult supplants the old. There are many reasons why this model of religion is advanced, and it works on religions at the highest level and religions pertaining to something smaller, like a civic religion or a cult of some practice that becomes a mystic secret, or a school of thought or philosophy. The religion itself does not move history. The religion instead points to many things in the world which are integrated into a system that religion suggests, and only religion in one form or another adequately serves this goal. Many institutions only exist within a limited space, but for institutions to survive on their own in the world, they take on the characteristics of religion or subordinate themselves to an existing religion. "The family" as an institution is not a neutral form that is trans-historical. There are Christian families, families inherited witchcraft or occult mysteries, communist families inheriting revolution and the Party, noble families with a special morality for their class, and each family suggests a different set of priorities and loyalties. A family as the chief political and spiritual authority would need to adopt rituals suggesting it could compete with families that associate with such a wider view of the world. In of itself, the family is just a way in which humans relate to each other, and has no intrinsic authority over members simply by virtue of existing. Many parents did not want the obligation of raising children, and did not want to subordinate their children to a wider society in the way that was demanded of them. Naturally and biologically, mothers would nurse their offspring, and much of their socialization came not from the home - which for much of humanity's existence did not exist beyond a temporary campsite or familiar stomping grounds - but from their interactions with peers and leaders in the community, such as they were. The law of the father or the mother did not have any natural reason to exist and often wasn't even sought, in the sense that civilized states pass property and legitimacy from father to son or adopt heirs. The family doesn't realistically form the basis for religious society, as states rely on adoptive institutions and find existing families and clans to be a hostile entity disrupting the aims of rulers. The family has no intrinsic right to be more than what it is, and sons are expected to venture to the world and find something outside of that environment. Mothers and fathers have lives outside of this role assigned to them in family life, and were themselves daughters and sons of someone with the same obligations their children were expected to take on. The genetic legacy does not create any unbroken line of spiritual authority. Family trees become too cumbersome after three generations for the family to stay together, and branches of the family split off. The same is true of any nation or tribe; they are never associations fixed in form, and unlike the family which is a definite institution, nations and tribes are associations of persons who recognize nationality without any necessary institutionalization of the concept beyond its name. The members of a nation understand that their nation exists not on the basis of an ideology or institutional law, but because those members are in genuine social interactions of some sort which would unite or divide them. Religion is one institution that unites disparate agents and suggests a home more persistent than typical institutions. Often, cults and religions begin as national religions, such as the worship of YHWH starting as the national cult of the Israelites. Civic cults became mysteries and secret societies, which formed the spiritual bedrock of the ancient world, rather than anything we would presume productive or natural. A practice of witchcraft and sorcery and various professions of ill repute endures to the present day, though today's "witchcraft" is often a bowdlerized form, and there remains sorcery and magic-like practices in the dominant religions, civic cults, and institutions of today. Those mystifications may be given a pseudo-scientific veneer, but they are religious acts through and through; it is indeed the case of the eugenic creed that its zealots are far more given over to religious kookery, ritual, and mystification than their Christian counterparts, and those Christians who hold to ritualistic practices fervently have almost uniformly sided with the eugenic creed that was implied in the religion's teachings and practices. The true believing Christians either hold to a variant of eugenism and long ago dropped whatever mask they wore to fool the rubes, have gone over to eugenism completely and actively destroy the institutional facade of Christianity to make way for the new Satan, or find that their church has gone sour and abandoned them, leaving them behind - a trope in today's millennarianism, as seen in many Christian writings about the rising world order - and leaving them with the ideas and symbols of religion, but none of the spiritual authority or legitimacy that was taken by those behind the curtain. Christianity may be near death, and may yet find new life in divergent forms, but the genuine content of Christianity belongs to a much earlier time, and was never uniquely Christian to begin with. The Christians inherit religious tradition generally, rather than a few definite roots, as any religion must. It answers not a specific question of its time and place, but the questions that have been present since humans could speak of them and create institutional knowledge and learning. But, religion is not confined to knowledge, and knowledge has little to do with the functions of religion. The knowledge of religion is specifically occulted and intended to be so. The practices of religion are cloaked in mystery and superstititon to ward off infidels and those who are not members.
It is this which grants to religion the veneer that obligates it to escape its purview, and subsume other institutions. It never succeeds at this goal, nor would such a thing even be desirable to religion generally. Religion concerns itself with a collection of occult knowledge that pertains to spiritual authority, rather than knowledge in the genuine sense, and this is expected. Education typically conforms to religion or the needs of the state, which are one and the same for most of human history. Even when church and state are separated, which was a recent conception of religion, they are never actually severed. It is rather that religion and state are assigned complementary roles and the growing concept of "the people" has to be acknowledged on the terms religion and the state allowed. Past society did not conceive of "the people" in the way religious civilization did with the establishment of organized religion and theology. In the past, "the people" were subjects under imperium, whose life and death were entirely at the mercy of the state in principle. Religion facilitated that and had no interest whatsoever in establishing a world religion or a mass base of believers. The ordinary people were largely left to whatever superstition suited them, so long as they paid fealty to the aristocrats' gods. This was no longer acceptable as civilization advanced. Religions suggest something living in institutions which are in their essence very un-living, and that entail death. And so, "death leads to life" is a koan of institutions and frequent in religious thought. It is also why the tendency exists in religion to subsume things which have nothing to do with religion. It is with religion that aristocracy as a tendency exists, and it is there that aristocracy reigns. In short, the path to rule, beyond the most trivial, is always spiritual authority, and for Man, a type of animal, to rule, Man is a spiritual animal before it can be a political animal or just another animal in the kingdom of nature. Religion is where we can finally speak of humanity in the form we recognize, rather than the human as a collective of impulses, psychological traits, material conditions, or the institutional fronts that it commonly presents. It is for this reason that the quest for knowledge is never pure, and labors are always suspect morally rather than morally positive. It is why property is defined less by the will of its holder than by negation of those who are excluded from property. It is why life, which is implicitly held as sacrosanct due to its role in spiritual authority, is exemplified by the class that has the most to do with death and suffering, whose existence is very committed to something un-living like an institution, a godhead, or a conceit of knowledge. The genuine life, which began as an innocent and harmless aberration even if its birth is marred by the nature of such creatures' needs, is told that it is worthless and shunted to the lowest class. It is the lowest class that "truly lives", and yet they are everywhere "life unworthy of life", and constantly under the threat of pressure from an aristocratic death cult. That death cult must assert reality. Religion is aware of all of this, and can choose how it navigates this, for religion is not purely a creature of aristocracy. The lowest class is no less inclined to spiritual pursuits than the highest, and no class is truly immortal or trans-historical. There is no rule that someone from the lowest class could not become an aristocrat or vice versa, or that the tendencies in humanity are fixed by any natural law necessitating a particular distribution of the classes, or that humanity must accept class immobility. It could be that religion was benign, and class, such as it existed, would become a relatively minor social distinction rather than something that confers property and prestige beyond anything it should have ever been allowed to mean. It is possible to consider the effective abolition of class, and it would only be through religion that such a program would be instituted, whatever the guise religion may take. It would still be religion beholden to its origins in religious thought generally, for religion cannot re-write history or control reality. That is anathema to a worthwhile religious establishment that anyone would care to follow, or that would present the spiritual authority that unites religions, and would allow any institution to be guided as something other than informational flotsam.
Religion conforms not to any particular establishment, idea, or the presentation of a godhead. I think the reader has figured out by now that there is no God, in the sense of a bearded man in the sky throwing thunderbolts or imperiously dictating metaphysical reality. Such a god is very clearly a stand-in for humans and idolatry of the highest order, and is anathema to religion in any useful sense. There are gods and in some sense there is a godhead, or a way in which these things operate. Religion always begins with the adherent, and it is only through adherents that the representation of religion in institutions can spread. Gods are powerless without men acting in their stead, or forces of the world that are associated with said gods. Religion is most useful because it tells through stories something about the world and spiritual authority, through metaphors and concepts that are understood by the reader of holy texts, and by practitioners of the religion in their deeds. Much can be learned of a religion by observing its adherents' behavior, as the old adage "monkey see, monkey do" is what so many of us learn by most reliably. Pedagogy through cajoling is notoriously ineffective, and those who are eager for the written word or explanations from above do so because a thirst for this information is attractive to them, for various reasons. It is difficult to force young people to comply with that pedagogy no matter how much force is used to make it so, and it is insulting to tell young people to believe in the dogmas through lies and sleight-of-hand tricks. Adherents of religion join because, on some level, religion answers something substantive for them. Religion as an opiate of the masses has no staying power and that was never the purpose of religion. If it is an opiate, it is not a very effective one, and this saying on religion arises when the actual opium trading of the East India Company is a pillar of the Empire, and its culture is widespread and becomes a moral hazard that it could never have been in the past. Industrial cities and the grind of capitalism are breeding groups for actual opium, and religion was never really the opiate of choice for peasants. By and large, the working classes never really believed in gods, and so far as they did, it was because Christianity or some other religion suggested something about the world that was sensical or explanatory of what rulers did and thought. The people of 18th and 19th century Europe and America were known to take a keen interest in Christian teaching, which was now so widespread that Christian families would find the Bible almost obligatory, and Biblical metaphors were part of the common language for Christians and non-Christians alike. So too was Islam and its teachings widespread where it ruled, and the Islamic form of education remained institutionalized and intrinsic to the religion. This had less to do with identification with the institutional church, and more to do with the religion explaining a great many things about humanity and the thought that prevailed. It remains an influence to this day, even as Christianity as an institution is a perverted shadow of itself, and always was perverse. This was not news to Christians and certainly not news to non-Christians in the Christian world. Very often the religion of the common people was only nominally Christian, and like in many cultures, the working class assembled their personal religion from the parts available to them. Dogmatism held an allure only to those who were comfortable enough to hold to the hypocrisies inherent in their faith, or those who saw through dogma a vehicle of strength that was far removed form anything the religion actually taught. It is no surprise that many in the church are not praying to the same god, and the prevalence of secret societies was established in Christian society, most of all in the domains the British Empire could influence and in the Americas.
It is important to keep in mind that in practice, religions are assembled at the level of individuals. Institutions, however much their thought processes are construed as living entities, are fixed in place and easy to shatter. Ideology and the tactics it spawned are destructive and never creative, and ideology itself is an institutional beast. It is a very effective tool for destroying institutions, so that their reform can be engineered. Ideology operates with the language of war and militarization, and so it creates the environment of a permanent siege, regardless of any ulterior motive for the siege. The siege becomes life itself. It is for that reason that the ideologies of the 20th century proceeded as they did, even though the only ideology that was ever truly an "ideology" was fascism. This ideology is the purest form of such a beast, and it is here where the real movement to abolish the present state of things showed its face and just what this was. It has been the eternal cope of the philosophers, or a sickening habit they chose to perpetuate, to pretend that fascism was not this, or that it was a temporary thing. All of this pretending was to obscure the true governing germ - the eugenic creed - which dominated in liberal, socialist, and fascist societies, and asserted that it alone was the true "Jehad", the one true religion to eliminate all others. It is this mind virus which is the imperial virus of choice, and which took over all other trajectories humanity could have taken. That, though, is for another time, and it is the dominance of the eugenic creed which does the most to obscure our understanding of institutions and their occulting.
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[1] I say this not to disdain the concept of an election itself, as is often the reduced argument aristocrats use to brag about the theft they conducted. An election, even if it exists to produce aristocracy, suggests public input and approval is considered, and for this election to be meaningful, it implies a public interest already exists and there is a sufficient grouping of persons who already desired to join this interest. The aristocracy sees an election as something internal to its class, and the lower orders do not have any serious input in the process. This is accomplished by establishing an unwritten rule such as "electability", which mimics the appearance of virtue but is really the guise to let people know that they will only be allowed to pick aristocrats or people who are approved by aristocracy as acceptable figureheads. In practice, aristocracy reviles the idea of new men joining their ranks, even when it would serve their interest to make the club bigger to defend their shared interest.
[2] Most pointedly, in the Soviet Union. The visionary of note sensing this was one Alexander Bogdanov, who made a forerunner of systems thinking his philosophical cause. We will have cause to revisit Bogdanov in the final chapter of this book.
[3] This, if you haven't figured out already, is what Nick Land is summoning in his drug-fueled neoreactionary delusions, haphazardly constructing a bastardized version of systems synthesis which makes analysis impossible; because the amoral philosophy of the eugenic creed became itself a pressing that overwhelmed all other thought. As I said, all life dies screaming - forever.
[4] I will never grow tired of smashing to bits Marx's disdain for "great men", used to obfuscate the conspiratorial nature of history and politics that was once upon a time the standard for any serious history. The worship of "great men" was never the cargo cult Germanic sing-song idiocy insisted. Roman and Greek histories suggested rulers and those who fought were every bit as nasty as the ruled, and had no reason to pretend otherwise. The histories are written by the aristocracy and for the aristocracy, and the lower classes took limited interest in them even when the materials were available for reading. If the lower classes did read these histories, they likely concluded as was standard at the time that the goal was to be an aristocrat or as close as possible. Without any concept that public opinion in the modern sense could be manipulated or should be controlled, what counted as ideological propaganda was aimed towards the elite and functionaries, who made no secret of their cynical view of society and disdain for the entire process. The leaders of history were portrayed, regardless of their aura, as bad men without serious reservations, and what virtue they possessed was something for the subjects of history and those who followed them to judge. There was not a history where the leading men were proclaimed to be men of the people until, strangely enough, the era of democratic revolutions that just came into being. It is here where stories of both glory and the goodness of leaders to the people are traded as if they were serious. The men who led in democratic societies, however little they were actually "democratic", were not significantly different from those who were led, in that everyone recognized that the leaders were not made of magic or any ideology permitting them a right to rule. They could be both "great" and the same sort of low men that were governed. This could not be permitted, and so the German philosophers hit upon an idea of showering effusive praise not only on the rulers, but on the favored groups of the lower orders, all the way down the line. The manipulative and vicious practices of the state school were the first time such "great men" were able to insinuate their greatness in the way Marx imagined, and so Marx had his strawman to attack, to mystify how the bourgeois and aristocracy actually viewed historical actors. This of course hid Marx's own conspiratorial actions among the working class, and he was not alone in this. It was very important to eliminate reference to specific actors, and this was an old Masonic trick that worked very well to facilitate the changes in modernity. Because ordinary people were largely disconnected from history until they were dragged into modernity, it was simple enough to pull the wool over the eyes of those who were conscripted into state education. The impressionable would be told from a young age the fictitious glories of modern heroes, which would become even more profuse and self-abasing lies as technocratic society became the norm. The skeptical would be led to a pseudo-critique in which there are no great men, and would be convinced as cloistered fools that they were "really" in charge, without naming any genuine conspiracy. The elite and their chosen followers could then be pulled aside and learn of how this really works, with a head start over the rest of society. As all classes entered the workforce or the misery of begging, they would gradually pick up what their education, designed to stunt their brains, denied them, but with imperfect models of history and thought drilled into them by the fear and terror state schooling entailed. The soldiers would be given a stripped down version of reality that was just attached enough to merit to let them know what is to be done and to figure out the chain of command and unwritten hierarchy, and this could in time move the target of their fear arbitrarily at the whim of thought leaders - exactly as Hegel would like. The outcome came to a head in the 20th century, and we got what we got. Those who specialized in conspiracy would be relevated to the fifth and lowest class. Those who were adept at the grubby existence of the proletarian would be given this degraded form of democratic thought, which comes to American English as "street smarts", or the low cunning that has long been used to align the working masses with aristocratic corruption and all the venality that makes them accomplices. This habitual backstabbing and drunkenness would be sold as a strange sort of "intelligence", which then builds into the "Delta caste" programming of our time which exhorts the workers to be as vicious and animalistic as possible, the aristocracy's preferred vision of the workers that will attack the lowest class when triggered. What a failed race. The conspiratorial sing-song story that there are no conspiracies begins by denying that men make history, while denying any useful understanding of "material conditions" except through a spurious pseudoscience that historical materialists had already debunked when it arose. We should give Marx some credit though - he assumed, and those who study Marx would know, that nothing in politics should be believed until it is officially denied. By stating the claim so bluntly, the wiser student would pick up that conspiracy was THE mode of political thought, and Marxists true to their teaching were the most adept at picking apart conspiracies and constructing many such conspiracies of their own. In the end they fell victim to the conceits intellectuals often do, confusing their genius for the truth in various ways. The comedy of errors continues to this day, and not just among communists.
[5] I am being harsh on old Hegel here, because really the point is not to say that this sort of lying ought to exist or is the Truth, but that this sort of lying is possible and nothing really stops it. Still, I don't think someone in the early 19th century could conceive of this scale of lying, where the power of pure Lie is forceful enough to eat away at the brain and produce a degraded excuse of a man. You would think students of philosophy would see how much damage this habit of contemptuous lying, carried out more or less instinctively without serious thought, does to society as a whole. If the goal is the shut up us undesirables who aren't part of the world to come, it hasn't worked, and in doing so, many who would have tolerated the rise of this alien doctrine are put off purely by its pigheaded stupidity and insistence on maintaining a failed system. The allure of tenure and the cash that comes with it does much to discipline this message, but too many of these people go above and beyond to enable the lying without any real incentive, moral or coercive, to force their hand. This sort of contempt comes from something deeper, and by now they certainly have to realize this sort of thing fucks over the liar more than those who are lied to. Those lied to will find alternatives, eventually. The committed liars are locked into this cycle.