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The exact history of what happened when to bring hunter-gatherers to pastoral society is only vaguely understood. What is known is when this transition happened, where the familiar hunt and gathering was displaced with herding animals, and this herding of animals facilitated the development of the agricultural strategy. These two activities at first displace the hunting with herding and gathering with agriculture, and should not be thought of as entirely oppositional strategies. What is clearer is that while herding appears in many places, agriculture only originates in a few areas of the world that are well-suited for the strategy, before agriculture is developed and exported throughout the world as a more general strategy. The growth of cereals and livestock produces both surpluses and a means to store the surplus in facilities. Earlier society certainly had the concept of a surplus, but mobile bands could not build or maintain institutions and centers around which the surplus could be stored, and the accumulation of surplus would have been recognized as a danger. Almost certainly, the pastoral and agricultural society was not a choice, as if technological development made this obvious and inevitable. No technological development in human history is purely incidental and "just so" happens. If it was possible to catalogue the behavior of animals and perfect the hunt to the point of making it the herding, it is not a great stretch to extend that and ask the question if humans can be herded too. It is not simply a matter of primitive man finally discovering that agriculture was possible and then the process was immediately adopted. Organization of society into farming activities is not as simple as the knowledge that putting seeds into the ground will allow them to grow. The far more likely case is that chiefs formed their domains by means of warmaking technology before the question of a surplus being produced was something to be appropriated. The bow and arrow, the spear, and primitive warcraft increasingly meant that professional fighting men would fight better than ordinary hunter-gatherer warriors, and the early chiefdoms would be the first hierarchical society. It would not at first take the civilized form of antagonistic relationships in close quarters, but rather than agricultural surplus gathering in a granary controlled by a village chief, it is likely that early agriculture developed either as an offshoot of the mobile band, or the early agricultural villages were paying tribute to the warriors who lived outside of the city. The implements of war did advance, but they were still made of stone and could be constructed out of simple tools. The formation of settled society into city-states coincides with the working of copper and then bronze, where organized mining operations, the expertise of forging, and the accumulation of knowledge of what could be built in settled society occurred in the towns rather than among the nomadic herders. This working of metals, too, did not "just happen", but was something discovered over centuries of seeking advantages in warmaking and control. There is a naive tendency to portray this early technological development as purely happenstance, like "random" genetic mutations in genes that are considered ineffable expressions of biological destiny. The thinking goes that you simply cannot change genes, and thus, the answers to natural history are inscrutable except as the result of random processes. This thinking is carried over from views of natural selection in evolution, particularly in the modern synthesis which enshrined genetics, and it is little more than a just-so story of why things are the way they are as the result of something random and ineffable. Deliberation on the part of the actors involved is entirely removed, as if the people of this primitive society were just evolutionary flotsam that happened to collide with a piece of metal. We have no reason to believe that someone 12,000 years ago was markedly less clever than someone today, or that their brains simply couldn't process the idea of dominating other life. Combined with this thinking is the "noble savage" myth, in which primitives are seen as creatures in the Garden of Eden, untouched by the wickedness of knowledge. They couldn't possibly know what they were doing without the guiding hand of modern scientific institutions, the story goes, until civilized Wisdom came to conquer the savage, as if Wisdom descended from Heaven to affect change in the world. The far more likely explanation is that cruder metal-working was known as a possibility, but there was no easy way to get people herded into the cities. It would take the development of slavery and the foundations of a more elaborate economy to make real the ambitions of those who sought to make the rule of a few men stronger than ever. It would take an insight into how human beings could be ruled and managed, and this insight likely had its forebears in far more primitive states of mankind. The new development of settlements meant that there was an opportunity for the greatest swindle humanity ever developed.

So far in this text, I have explained mechanisms that constitute society, knowledge, life conceptually, and authority. These mechanisms operate at such a level that they are evident by the very conception of those things, which is a trivial matter. They have thus far been viewed as mechanisms in their own right, which were not intrinsically beholden to anything but themselves. Those mechanisms could be active without any necessary great plan guiding world events, or any aspiration to command the world in a grand way. Even if such designs were held, primitive society and society for a long time to come would lack any way to impose that vision on the world. Because the imposition is strongly informed by politics rather than economics, a full view is beyond the scope of this book. We can easily see though that economic decision making is implied not by the mere existence of mechanisms or society, as if economics, politics, philosophy, and so on are trans-historical. We make decisions regarding our life that are not really "economic" decisions, even when they are subsumed into our concepts of economy. Even where economy develops conceptually, it is never the driving motivator. Economics originated not in science or reason, but in moral philosophy. I elaborated enough on a belief that moral actions are necessarily laborious rather than ideological or scientific. Therefore, ethics has little to say about genuine economic decisions. So too does speculation about finance for the purposes of this book. Finance is properly understood as a tool whose implications have always been political at the least. Money has little to do with anyone's motivation for economic behavior, except as a token of exchange which acquired its value because there was a moral cause to conduct business in this way. The exchange of money and commodities is, in the main, of less relevance than the utility money and the labors in question create. Strictly speaking, once a product is constructed, it is, as with Socrates' wisdom on what happens to written philosophy, a dead product. The labor that went into it is gone forever, stripped from the human being that built it regardless of exploitation or social relations. Such is the nature of labor expended. There is no moral law to suggest labor has any intrinsic value whatsoever, or that the employers of labor have any inherent interest in keeping labor alive. This operates not merely due to class antagonisms, but at the level of the institutional person him or herself. Class struggles merely intensify a condition of antagonism that existed in civilization conceptually to make it civilization. There was a time before classes where humans struggled, knowing well the consequences. Class struggles never conform neatly to any preferred narrative, and only take recognizable shape in political society. The actors in class struggle are aware that their struggle is predominantly a political one, rather than the economic and social transformation socialism originally answered as a thinking on human life. It was not even an aim of socialism to "abolish class", or sublate it as philosophy often invokes in their common re-directs. The class struggle is not waged arbitrarily, but over definite propositions that don't go away by decree or any political act alone. Since class struggle is political and often spiritual, entailing a much more sophisticated matter than its economic base, it is beyond the scope of this book, and its origins tell us more about the history I wished to write about originally. If we go back to our image of primitive society, religious thinking on spiritual authority is the true breaking point where two things became apparent to awakened humans. The first is that they could, in a thoroughgoing way, affect the world around them with intent that was previously guessed at. The second, felt more ominously, is that many other humans could do the same to them. Whatever their original sociality, religious thought operated at the level of individual humans and institutions, and spread through communication that was at heart a real event rather than a story or a preferred model of thought. This would not immediately destroy the older Man, a type of animal, and replace it with the human, neither living nor dead and driven primarily by the conceits of mind or the received wisdom that religion suggested. Far from it, religious thought led to humans associating in larger groups than their predecessors did, and communication that was previously unheard of. The drive to reject and shame, which was the genesis of the human race, preceded formal religious thought of the sort we would appreciate. It was indeed known, but none of the ritual sacrifice or lurid practices of the human race could say with a straight face that any of it led to anything but a behavior that was not to be questioned. Religious thought suggested for the first time not only that this was pointless but that there was in principle an end to the cycle, and also a way this cycle could be harnessed as a general rule. It is here where we can properly speak of economics as a thorough practice, rather than ad hoc knowledge assembled for a local situation a human might encounter. The religious thought does not begin as formal political thought. Most humans do not involve themselves in any great political affair, and politicians after their work have lives to return to and something to protect that drove them to enter politics in the first place.

The reasons for the emphasis on religious thought, as opposed to material conditions, as the driver of economic life, are too numerous to count. At its root, economics at a large scale is not about the mere management of resource inflows and outflows. If that were the case, the problem is trivial in any era, and no line of reasoning could dispute that. Those who work and toil, or even think for five minutes about where their benefits come from, think every day about when the hand that feeds them will show the hand of rejection, the first of oppression, and the smirk designating shame to the conquered. It is nearly impossible not to, and throughout the history of spiritual thought, such things were the experience of the vast majority of humanity. The favored classes were themselves beholden to a world where their ability to drive events by will was limited. They had to fear rivalry with peers and the institutions of rule which were small and limited in the number of seats they allowed. Competition for merits and glory were established early and remain a persistent force in human affairs. It is not merely a political matter or the incentives of the state that created this competitive impulse which turns warrior against warrior, and convinces priests to tear each other down to win position. It is not an unnatural impulse which brings men of commerce to fight each other, and the smarter commercial interests understood from the outset that the deployment of grand wealth had less to do with any theory of free trade. The leading capitalists who knew what they inherited understood that to truly survive, the true path to victory was to command the bank, and then command the genuine fount of political and intellectual legitimacy. This was on the mind of the victors of capitalism who rose in the late 19th century, many of them after victory in the American Civil War. Certain ideologues, and there are many variants of this, must assert that the rule of commerce was unnatural or corrupting in some way. If not that, then they must grant to commerce and money itself powers it does not actually possess, and encourage a fetishistic thinking about money. The truth is that those who hold the banks and the commanding heights of commerce, going back to Antiquity at the least, were not convinced money or Mammon had any such powers beyond the purview of what money and commerce actually did. The height of capitalist prestige was not just the same, but far more aware of what they could accomplish with technology. It was technology and education rather than the power of money that fascinated the truly capable capitalists, and that they identified as the true motor of their class and their true interest. The money was just a way to attain command of the bank, and the bank a stepping stone to command the true machinery that money would buy. Even the most basic understanding of banking establishments will make clear that the banker is not a producer, nor do their fortunes survive off of blind usury from a vacuum. The banker and the man of commerce are not creatures defined by their function, like Malthus' mindless breeders. From the start, those who command finance understand that this is a means to an end. The use of money in any form we appreciate begins not with cowry shells in primitive society, but state-issued coinage which rulers used to provision the state by commerce rather than through the old method of requisition. The coinage also obligated subjects to pay tax, and through this their connection to the state and ruling interest would be measured in coin and entries on a ledger. The past society was dominated by clans and the gentile arrangement, which was at heart an assembly of tribes rather than the city-state. The city-state itself does not appear in perfect form, ruling over individuals already atomized and sorted into their preferred social rank and position. It arises atop a society of tribes and families, and the tribes of Greek and Roman society are represented in popular assemblies. Family life and the lines of both aristocrats and plebians continues and remains the vehicle of state intervention into private life. The patriarch is obligated to uphold values by the state, not because the state believed patriarchy was ideal or a chosen condition, but because the sort of atomization and feminization that modern society entailed would have led to an immediate revolt of the free men. The point here is that no society was ever formed in perfect conditions, and no society could be. Modernity is no different, no matter how thoroughgoing social engineering may be. Every society inherits the conditions and sins of its predecessors, as the Americans are learning so tragically as I write.

At the center of every economic scheme is not political machination carried out for crass purposes, but a spiritual thought that suggests wealth is morally valuable or an objective to covet. This does not merely concern a quantity of wealth, but the qualities of wealth - that is, what is produced must be useful and is planned to prefer outcomes. So too is restraint of wealth necessary for proper economic thinking.^[1] No economic activity is carried out mindlessly or by some impulse which is truly unknownable or not commanded. Labor to be labor implies either a will performing it, or a will commanding it or harnessing it. If humans were to be viewed as mindless livestock, bred to suffer and die for their intellectual superiors and damned to the slavery of the lowest class if they are fortunate, the economic thought is a foregone conclusion, and the solution is trivial in any era just as it would be for the imagined resource calculation problem. Politics is, in principle, something born not out of desire, but necessity. Most of humanity detests politics for perfectly sensical reasons, including politicians themselves who would rather not have to do all of the things politicians do, which require no introduction if we are at all familiar with their activity. The consequences of a society dominated utterly by the political are explored in the next book I intend to write in this series. That world, unsurprisingly, is a disaster and can only be so, and it becomes even worse given the political thought that dominates in the past century and a half. Politics or not, the chief driver of economic thought is the same as the chief driver of labor - moral thinking that is informed by a worthwhile spiritual authority suggesting that we should follow it. This entails not just that religion guides economics by decree, or a just-so story. These institutions only survive if they meet the aims that spiritual authority answers. The needs of life itself, the need to survive war and social engineering efforts, the faculties of learning and education and the spread of knowledge generally, and the development of moral authority and truth are questions to answer is we seriously consider economic thought. No religion or anything like it could survive if it did not answer these questions, and they derive not from myths or stories but from the conditions religion would survive in. An atheist society has to answer the same questions and explain to its people the same things a god-fearing society does, and atheism strictly speaking does not entail a denial of spiritual authority altogether. Today's science fiction cultism and bizarre rituals around technology demonstrate that the "atheist" is a far more superstitious and brazen creature than many who adhere nominally to religion, however weak their faith.

This is not to say that economics concerns "good" or "justice", but rather than that economics concerns a religious view of the world, and the subject of economics is really a treatment of the cult practices surrounding wealth, exchange, sacrifice, and a sense of balance in the world. The material world in economic thought is something to be exploited. So long as humans concern themselves with exploitation, in any form it takes, economics will be the relevant science. Calling economics a pseudoscience will not change that, in one way or another, an economic rationale is asserted when these practices of exchange, sacrifice, debt, and force are presented to humans as a problem to resolve at the highest level of society. This would exist even if we did not regard economy as a political matter that was any business of the state or a ruling interest. We would have an economic problem even if we agreed that economics and the lives of human beings was off-limits to politics, the state, or any private actor that would behave much as states do to command other people through force. Those who live in the imagined ideal society with no such influence would still be vigiliant for anything that would disrupt this status quo - and the very assertion of that ideal society or model presupposes a status quo which constitutes a state, without recognizing any particular of the state and without recognizing any boundary on the state's imperium whatsoever. Economics to be more than management of resources implies that it is open-ended, and all that exists is in principle relevant to the question it poses. This includes the human beings, their wants, and so on which are not in of themselves economic, but that affect all decisions that would be made. This primarily entails the command of labor, rather than any other baseline such as utility. The reasons for this are simple - human labor is at the core of economy's moral consideration, and it is with regards to other humans that we conduct commerce. To the world itself, we do not engage in commerce. Economics absent the existence of other people would instead be a game against the world, or a game we play against ourselves. Since our internal parts are not economic competitors with each other in that way, much of what we write about economics would not apply to the integration of a person and a singular body. This image of singularity is the fascist, corporatist, and eugenist shibboleth to make absoltue the dogma of competition, which is really competition between institutions rather than competition in life itself, for the reasons described in earlier chapters. Economic thought predominantly concerns the labor of people, rather than the claims to land or property they make, or finance which is only relevant with a productive economy to manage and exploit. Property and higher institutions set themselves apart from capital or productive wealth intentionally, to shield themselves from the influence of something more base than their concerns. We may contest whether this is right or good, but if the society consisted only of producers and the proprietors' interests were neglected in favor of labor, economic thought would consider exploitation very counterproductive for reasons that do not require a grand theory. A society set against itself in aimless struggle cannot produce anything in principle, rather than by some alchemy that happens behind the backs of the producers. That was never the purpose of economics, though, and the producers and those who rule were always aware of what happened in their firms and in the world generally. However imperfect their knowledge, it does not take a great genius to figure out that information itself is valuable for any purpose of management, whether that comes from a professional manager or from labor itself. That would be unavoidable. And so, the aims of economics appear to take on religious significance, because the practices of economic life entailed sacrifice, among other things. At the same time, what economics concerns itself with - management - is a very crass pursuit of information. The information sought is not a substance of indiscriminate value, but information that pertains to the objects economics would covet. This includes not just the material things, but human beings and their motives. They always meet at labor, and all that occurs in economic life is some sort of laborious process and judged by deeds rather than Being. Money, commodities, or and product of that labor is only relevant in active use, whatever that use may be. Absent a use, it may as well be removed from economic circulation. The mere presence of large concentrations of money or wealth will do, due to the fear that others would rightly hold due to the presence of it, something merely by being known. The tricks to hide the centers of wealth or legitimacy only work for so long, and are never believed as earnest truths. Humans are liars, and when dealing with money, humans expect far more lying than is standard for the race, because economic activity rewards this deception absent anything that would police against it. A sense of fairness or right does not correspond to the sense of justice that those who rule and hold property would regard - it is the exact opposite. Yet, fairness and right have economic value, if there are forces in society that will fight for them explicitly, rather than the aristocracy's preferred concept of right and justice. The independent judgement of personal authority, or a spiritual authority that derives from the world itself or the sense of men such as science, cannot establish an economic order that does not reduce to arbitrary pricing and infighting. To claim that there is such a thing as economic behavior beyond the most local interactions between people is to invoke an institutional authority that is religious, or something that will reckon with religion directly. A moral code outside of a religion regarding the rituals of exchange becomes unenforceable by anything but the laws of men - which ultimately either derive from force, or suggest that the laws of men are in line with spiritual authority. Typically this means that economic life is of interest to the law and the state that imposes law. The obvious interest of the state is that it has economic needs and must extract wealth to equip all of its functionaries. While the state can leave the economic sphere to its devices and pay the tax, the state would leave luck to heaven and rely on a religious understanding to have faith that economic life will feed it, and won't become a threat to it. The most obvious threat to a state is the reality of the world that economics suggests - that individual people are moral actors and, if they wished it, they would not bother with state society or politics in any form hitherto known.

Information generally - that is, information in the world that is the domain of science and sense - is not intrinsically of value just by being information. However limited human faculties are, we know that distance and our genuine failures of understanding natural phenomena are overcome for most relevant matters, given enough time and awareness. We would by default possess "perfect information" for a given space, if not for human error and the mystifications humans engage in. Even if we accepted imperfect information were standard, and we acknowledge that no information about the natural world will be "100% perfect", errors due to pure "natural" ignorance are either in principle correctable if it is merely a logistical difficulty of connecting dots, happen due to irreconcilable flawed models we use to know the natural world in which case the problem is us instead of the world, or the state of scientific knowledge in theory would know all there is to know with some dedication of learning and intelligence towards the task and the correct confluence of matching material events to speak of that missing information. In any event, incomplete information by natural ignorance is a problem for us, rather than the world we model and covet, and so it would be our own stupidity and inadequacy occulting knowledge. What is of value to us is specifically occulted information, or non-trivial information. This may include knowledge of things and their location, when our knowledge of nature is incomplete and we know we are missing things that are of interest for us to know. By "occulted", I do not refer merely to our ignorance of the thing that is occulted. I refer instead to artificial constraints on our appropriation of value that are a result of human effort to deny that value to members of society. For example, we place a price tag on something at the supermarket. No physical force directly compels us to not take the object from the shelf, and no intellectual principle in law or moral authority intrinsically tells us we cannot take the object. We are aware of all of those consequences that result from theft if we are rational agents. There is no force of existence itself commanding the commodity stay on the shelf or conform to the laws of exchange, because nature does not regard our exchanges as intriniscally meaningful in this regard. In some sense, that which exists is valued "in-of-itself" - the existence of the commodity itself is not deniable if it is something tangible or something understandable, freely reproducible, and so on. This value in of itself, though, only means something based on the utility of that thing, which itself is information which may be occulted.

We would have no reason to believe the list price is arrived at by any natural law. If that were the case, haggling, theft, and various other "abnormal" exchanges would not be possible, or there would be a prescription for everything that happens. If there were "perfect information in perfect markets" for all agents, then economics and exchange would be obviated, even with limited political information. If we supposed economics were contained to a sphere of interest to us, like the distribution of food or electricity, we possess that information here and now and public disclosure would trivialize that knowledge. It is common enough knowledge what foodstuffs exist in society, the contents of food, how food is grown, and all scientific knowledge of agriculture. There are books written to reference this, and in principle, it would not be difficult to track everything that is grown. Even without total information of all food on Earth, we can track and distribute enough food from what is produce such that "economy" would be unnecessary in food production, save for some obvious realities. Electricity is dominated by natural monopolies, and as one would expect, the price of electricity and many utilities is set by those monopolies, which are often in league with municipal and state governments. There is no ambiguity about what is on the utility bill, and in a public society, this knowledge is available to all. The exceptions lead to notorious abuses, as seen with Pacific Gas and Electric^[2] in the early 2000s. There is no rule to ever say that markets are inexorable or absolute. Their very existence is only allowed to exist because a society with laws and stable currency exists. Price-setting markets exist nowhere in nature and cannot be established as a law equal in all places. What happens in markets is a confluence of exchanges, which are always limited in number, involving a limited number of firms and limited number of agents. However large or small the extent of the market is, there is a limit and all interactions and agents are definite propositions, if economics is to be studied with any seriousness. Vagaries involving uncertainty of who is in the market are of no use to us for the same reason that a lack of scientific information is irrelevant. Human motives may be less scrutable than we would presume, but the deeds of exchange and the ugly side of trucking and bartering, to say nothing of loan sharking and the more terrible consequences of commercial society, are there to be seen, and always known to happen to some extent unless they are either policed out of existence or are not possible given the conditions of the society in a way that is regularly profitable. For example, there is not a flourishing drug trade among pastoral nomads, especially when there are no civilized neighbors that can grow opium in the desired quantities; nor are the habits of drug cartels and their alliance with aristocracy possible in such a society. We might find drugs and what could be called the gang activity of such a society, if "gangsterism" doesn't describe such nomadic societies as their general mode of operation towards aliens and in their internal politics. We do not find exact matches in different societies for the same activities rooted in economic activity. What we find instead are values of different qualities that are, in some sense, relatable. The relation is not a mathematical one, where value is a substance. Money itself gives no guarantee that an exchange will take place, or that it can command all goods universally. Many goods in society are explicitly off-limits to money alone, no matter how much someone possesses. Winning the lottery does not bring someone into high society - of course, the payouts of the lottery are to fictitious persons, because no reasonable person would spend significant winnings with nothing to show for it. A situation where equilibrium prices in money exists is contingent on a number of conditions which are never wholly true and cannot be. If the qualities for sale are identical or similar enough that comparison is trivial, then equilibrium might be observed, but it is only observed and ultimately comes from a sense of merchants who constant conspire to fix prices and undercut rivals with temporary schemes. For example, many common goods at a marketplace are products of labor, which is paid with wages and bought with money, and these are trivial enough that they are beneath the notice of property. They would be worth nothing and the expectation is that all of those commodities are consumed in short order in some task. There is little use in attaching to them more meaning to say they are monetarily valuable, even if the commodity is your childhood stuffed bear.

To best understand the construct of a market of any size, its germ - the exchange between buyer and seller - must be understood. From the start, the market exchange is not between equals in their function. The seller is the holder of some good, which means the buyer approaches the seller as an aggressor or intruder. In principle, buyer and seller are antagonists, though this antagonism for our purposes is stripped of its social and political context. If the arrangement of exchange were truly cooperative, no such argument over dickering and dealing with trade would be so elaborate, or contain the political and human elements. For the moral purposes of the good, it is not a given that any such exchange of value would exist, or take on the antagonistic characteristics of property of any sort. It would be conceivable for two agents in cooperation to consider their exchange part of a shared project between them - and this exchange is at core between two social agents, rather than the agent relating to a vague mass of people or an institution without definition. The exchange is communicative, rather than broadcast into the ether without a recipient. The act of exchange with nature is not truly economic in this sense, for nature is null as a social agent in its own right. The exchanges with the natural world, including the material contingencies required for the market to exist, are not directly relevant to the ritual of exchange between people. To the world, exchange is some quaint human thing that is not relevant. When humans make an observation of some quantity exchanged in the natural world as a scientific observation, it is entirely for our purposes of understanding, rather than something spiritually important from the world's perspective. And so, in markets, the externalities of exchange are temporarily irrelevant. Those consequences only come to light when the natural world presents something that market actors assess, and then that natural consequence too is subsumed into the logic of market exchange as something to be appropriated and managed. The goods that are marked with a price tag are occulted from their natural origin, and when presented at the market, they are something alien from their origin. This is no mere illusion of human beings. By entering market exchange, goods and the people who exchange become different in ways, as this habit insinuates that it will be a thing. This, of course, means nothing more than what is implied by the act of exchange and the rituals which surround it. How we conduct market activity is not trans-historical or fixed in a particular origin story. What happens between two market actors is not reducible to an abstract value or manna that would constitute something substantive in the universe at any point as just what it is. The participants in the market are aware that market exchange is a ritual or a game between them, and that the market exchange can be voided, refunded, or overcome with that old favorite of humanity, brute force and taking whatever they please. The entire practice that allows us to speak of exchange of like for like is contingent on a faith that exchange is equitable. This is at odds with the very real disparity between buyer and seller. The seller is inhernetly defending property and has the say in a free market whether to allow or reject the sale. Nothing the buyer projects with property can intrinsically change this - in the market, buyers are beggars, and the holder of property holds every relevant advantage.

From the outset, the market is premised on inequality of its participants. This is not a hierarchical inequality, but an inequality of wants and inequality in the essential nature of what participants do. At a basic level, social class or institutional holdings are not relevant. Any social agent can engage in the act of exchange, regardless of whether they are recognized as agents to a particular actor's conceit of what humans are. An artificial intelligence is no different than a human intelligence in the essential act of exchange. If humans were to attribute to natural forces or very inhuman entities the qualities of a social agent which exchanges - to make the inhuman into something equal with human - they can do so. At the other end, the inhuman and unthinking entity continues on, blissfully unaware of the conceits and rituals of knowledge, but in some sense, the situation - for example, taking from an environment materials in situ - has an economically appreciable effect. By the exploitation of the land, the market actor is aware of where wealth arises, even if the land is not granted the legal status of agency as living participants would be. Nature remains a dead thing, and the only way a pure ideologue can process this is to grant to nature the qualities of sapience. This usually means the ideologue substitutes himself for nature, taking on the title of capital-N "Nature" in a fit of extreme arrogance. But, among the qualities of the land and nature is a reality that the things extracted from it are living things, like crops or soil rich in life-forms which promote the cycle allowing the land to bear those crops. The chemical substances that life leaves behind as a result of its processes are dead, but the small entities that are agents of the natural system are granted the properties of substances in of themselves. The cargo cultist then invokes a koan of "life-energy", "sentience-energy", and various other nonsensical claims about what is actually happening, as a way of granting to their religious conceit worldly power, as if it were co-equal with nature and commanded nature in its own right. Such conceits must be treated with the contempt they deserve, so we can best assess what actually happens in a market setting. Failure to do this is the mark of a rube.

Humans enter exchange because of a coincidence of wants, and those wants are unequal. Both possess something the other covets or would like to add to their possessions. The material substances are not really what is contested, in the sense that the wants could only be obtained through exchange. All of the material things that are understood with science are in principle freely reproduceable, extracted from the world. There is nothing in principle stopping us from growing our own crops, building our own industrial products, and so on. For a long time, this is indeed what happens. Human beings largely operate to be as self-sufficient as they can be, because exchange of any sort represents a risk. As a seller, you have many buyers and must keep them at bay. As a buyer, the seller hoards things. It is from the outset not a desirable condition for either. The seller does not exist to sell you things out of some sense that selling is the purpose of existence, as if the seller were a valet in the proverbial desert there to fetch the bourgeois buyer some water. We know that in principle, material things are not truly enclosed by natural laws. If there is an alternative to the market, we would be aware of it. Either the market is imposed forcibly to make us comply, or the market is an alternative that is easier for both participants than going to the world to extract something. The aim of the seller is to want for nothing, and the aim for the buyer is to save every penny possible. The best situation for both is to simply not exchange where no exchange was truly needed, which would work out best for both. It is for this reason that the extent of the market is always limited by the practicality of such an arrangement, regardless of any religious tenet suggesting that "human behavior is economic behavior", where the logic of trade is ingrained in the most minute process we do. If human behavior is economic behavior, then the restraint of trade is the general rule. Participants only enter the market in definite conditions, where there are a limited number of such trades that are significant enough for coin to change hands, or accounts to shift in any way that is appreciated. A world of chaotic market activity with ups and downs may as well not be a definable thing at all, and it would appear as if the market were a force of nature that happened to exist, rather than the deliberate exchange that made exchange of value a worthwhile proposition in the first place. It would cease to refer to anything real, and become far more cumbersome to maintain the situation. It is here where many of the market activities are simplified and generalized, reduced to a few trends that are deemed significant, and the market becomes something very different from the network of exchanges that it was once premised on to exist as a useful institution. Regardless of how value is judged, what is done in exchange is always kept in mind as the point of doing any of this. That takes precedence over the particular object of interest in the market in a given situation.

The coincidence of wants is both a choice - exchanges happen ultimately because they are allowed to happen by both parties - and not a choice, in that the conditions creating those wants were never chosen by the participants by their willful insistence. We want things for reasons that are not asserted freely, as if we could make ourselves want something other than what the needs of life, knowledge, and existence would want. What happens in the middle of this is where the trick of modern religious koans about money and economy takes place. It happened not due to some inexplicable Demiurge compelling wants, but because all possibilities of what happens between the motion of the world and the mind's model of willful existence were eliminated, save a third option that is singular - that historical progress moved forward as a singular force, compelling the world to act. The complexity of the world would be mutated into something amenable towards those who would cajole history to change the world, for whatever purpose they might hold. This at heart is a conceit of knowledge and of utility that a technocrat would presume, rather than some nefarious ideology that is particular to one guru or some force apart from the world. Many men are blinded by their own assertion of will not towards the objects they desire, but towards the world generally, taken as a whole. In effect, the economic religion of modernity relied on placing humans in the role of gods, before any market exchanges were considered. All of our activity in the market was viewed in that light, with all of the presumptions and biases inherited by the present civilization. One of the results is an obsessive need to impose modernity on the past, such that economic history is arrested. This is a terrible approach to history, yet it became the great obsession of ideology. It is trivial to disprove many of these koans about what money is, but if we do, then we cease asking a question about money or value in the conventional sense, where value is a substance we presume to be freely exchangeable. How we truly arrived at tokens of value that are effectively universal is not a simple story, and I cannot give a full explanation no matter how long I make this chapter. I will do my best to explain the underlying mechanisms, and the reader may seek out relevant writings. A further investigation of modes of production is something I wish to write in a later book in this series. This situation is not a thing going on behind the backs of participants, as if they were too dumb to see anything. The participants in the market, in some way, act on this, even if imperfectly aware of its implications. Nobody thought going to the market was in of itself a great idea unless they were snorting some hardcore ideology. The situation is largely one imposed by the most clear danger humans ever faced in nature - other humans. One party has an advantage of choice over another, and this is the objective any competent merchant holds to be good at their job. The coincidence of wants is intrinsically reliant on unequal exchange, and can only appear just after mental contortions to pretend that what is happening is not actually happening.

We see in economics a vehicle to introduce "contradictions in nature". This is not unique to economics or the symbols therein, as if economy and finance uniquely possess the power to create bullshit where none had to be crated. It is there where we pick up where this chapter started, where humanity coalesces into settled society. What happens says less about the origin of money or exchange and more about the conditions of society. Form of exchange are so basic to existence that they would be seen in animals and are explicable without any great theory to suggest why we would value anything in that way. It is the conditions of society which allow exchange and money to take on the role that it does.

Natively, exchange begins as something humans occasionally do, while the main objective of their economic life is extractive, either from the land or from animal life - or, if humans figure out conquest and slavery, extraction from other humans. The political economic of nomadic societies is very unlike that of civilization, and drawing comparisons is difficult without appreciating the very different niches these societies occupy. The barbarian formations openly disdain economy as a concept, and will tell you the reasons why. The barbarian society is often portrayed as a blank slate, in which men are heroes and noble savages opposed to the decadence of civilization, but this is a conceit of cloistered retards with a peculiar need to assert reality is what suits them. The barbarians themselves are not dummies and not incapable of grasping the overall orientation of their civilized opponents. There is an environment inherent to nomadic societies, and an understanding reached between its members, and no uniform prescription for such a society exists. It is the same of civilized nations, where the elders ruling every city construct their city as a social experiment, rather than a uniform type that is interchangeable with any other city. What the nomadic society lacks are institutions of formal education, large storehouses of literature, and rituals that would be specific to temples and require summoning participants into an urban environment for the rituals to be meaningful. It is unsurprising that among the earliest urban rituals is ritual prostitution, or the luring of marks to whores who manipulate the witless and lead them into the maw of the beast. It is such a ritual which creates in the cloistered fool a false contrast between urban and rural life, where the latter is a simpler and purer existence. That the ruralites, and barbarian tribes of old, had their own lurid sex rituals, is either taken as an anomaly or evidence to naturalize the perversions of particular cults. They are of a different sort, though. The sex rituals, and many other rituals, were intended to habituate subjects to the values social engineers wanted to encourage. The prostitutes induce failed men to be reduced to degraded workers and slavish followers of sick rituals, where their souls can be sucked dry in the earliest cities. In the barbarous society, the harem belonging to powerful men is glorified, rape is expected, and the women are instructed to facilitate this for their own advancement. In either case, these societies are overwhelmingly patriarchal, and the engineering is almost entirely encouraged by the demands of the men. So far as female-dominated societies exist, they are almost always the flip-side driven by the wishes of elite males against the failed men, who are numerous in humanity. The veneer of female dignity typically obscures a selection of favored males, and while the women in any society participate in this social engineering and foul game, these things are never as they appear to the naive. The lurid rituals would not be effective if their true outcome and intent were understood. At present, it is not necessary for me to explain this, since it detracts from my point. What is clear is that rituals long taken for granted are first of all never as simple as just-so stories, and second the rituals are things that arise for reasons, and are instituted because there are people who see the ritual as beneficial. So too did the habits of trade and exchange arise because people chose them to meet their conditions, and the centers of economic influence never arised by accident but because there were people who saw what they held and chose to drive the changes their influence allowed them to make.

I reference the ugly side of society because, by and large, humans are motivated not by bright visions of a future, but by the fear that their existence created. The vulgar economists purport this to be a natural law, fused with nature itself and glorified by some idiotic logic. All of the ugliness of humanity is, and will always be, a choice. We could end it tomorrow - all of it - and we could finally live. Yet, we don't, because the motives of human beings, for reasons beyond the scope of this writing, return to what humans have always done when they no longer need to pretend they have a shred of goodness in them. Humans did not form their societies as if they were children seeking friends. The associations were united by shared self-interest and some goal that would be attained by collectivity. It should be clear then that the associations are never "the tribe", "the city", or "the nation", imagined as an unbreakable whole. That thinking is only conceivable with a developed political consciousness that is not at all natural. The earliest cities were established not by honest invitation but by drawing slaves into submission, and enforcing that with repeated lurid rituals. The manner by which barbaric, tribal society would do this is not the same, but in both cases, human malice and cruelty unite the race more than any kindness. It did not have to be this way, but it was this way, because malice and cruelty could command through fear what cooperation would only establish with understanding. Once established, the malice of the human race and the associations that formed around it were more aware of what they held and what could be done with such an ingenious device as the cult. If we wanted it to be different, and so many have, we would first renounce the original malice of the human race, rather than return to it or presume the political thought that malice entailed was natural or the only possible world. Since the political is beyond the scope of this book, I leave it to the reader to ponder that as we continue.

In loose bands and in associations where the interest is shared and understood - where the participants overcome the human propensity for lying and malice long enough to truly cooperate - the formation of proper social units is found. No sociality would occur just-so in a way that suggests a society any human would want to be a part of. Free associations that resemble the brotherhood alluded to by secret societies are always deliberate associations, and cannot persist on the basis of any lie or convenient fiction that can be reified. It cannot persist simply because it is, or by exhorting loyalty to a symbol, a truth, or a history. Those who associate with each other in a genuinely free association do so because they either actually like each other, or the terms of the arrangement are understood and any transgression of the decencies required is grossly improper. In a looser society, without settlements or commitments to property or territory that are well established and command armies, this decency is what allows the political unity that can exist, more than any appeal to family, blood, or an idea or ritual. Whether anyone values that is their choice - they can choose to reject friendship or question the level of trust they have in another person. Free associations do not require absolute abasement to the group or to others, in the way that the most disgusting Nazi insists in their typical mode of busybodying and transgression. The members may not actually like each other, or even live with a general loathing of the human race and its members. Emotion would not override an understanding between people that there are decencies to be kept, and certain values that cannot be allowed free reign, let alone the absolute impunity a Hitlerite insists and whines for until it is affirmed by authority. The actions of a Nazi are calculated specifically to make this free association impossible - to make the basis of a democratic society impossible, which was by the Nazis' own words their chief enemy above all others. That is often forgotten in ideological narratives, which must despise any mention of democracy in its genuine meaning. The most basic condition for free agency in society is security, and it is precisely that which is attacked on all sides.

In settled society, the predominant condition of society is antagonistic relations in close quarters. The relations are in conventional history broken down into class struggles of this or that group, or certain institutions, which are manipulated by social agents in a great game that keeps the institutions essentially intact from government to government. Those who play this great game have no interest in ever ending the struggle, because if the struggle truly ends, politics as we know it no longer exists. Civic virtue as they understand it would no longer exist, and those who benefit from the situation would no longer be able to reap rewards. The true origin of this antagonism is simpler. Settled society dragged most of its members into civilization by foul means, deception, malice, and all of the worst qualities of the human race. As settled society was established, vagabonds and escaped slaves would come to the cities to begin a new life, because no one else would willingly come to the new city. Almost always, the city was a raw deal for newcomers who arrived hoping to start a new life, as the local elites were already established and getting in the club was designed as an impossibility. The city, in other words, is nothing more than a facility for human livestock, planned to be such by the elders of a city who saw exactly what they held and wished to keep it for as long as possible. There is no other explanation. Once established, the city holds a knife at the throat of every subject, telling them that if they leave, they will surely die, for there will be no food, and those who obtain food outside of the ruling system are guilty of theft and treason, and shall be hunted down. It was like this from the inception of cities atop hill-forts or at crucial trading hubs. There was never a time where a city was established on the principles of forthright decency and moral probity, compared to the far more attractive establishment of slavery, exploitation, malice, and human rituals which were present in the genesis of the race and never abated except when necessary to prevent total collapse. The institutions of civic life are either premised on false friendship and betrayal, or establish in no uncertain terms that the basis for civic virtue is distrust and the person and alien institution being at odds with the citadel and those who command the city. In one way or another, cities cannot escape this. The model of settled society without obvious centers of authority or institutions of note did not last long, and where it existed, it was dependent on an authority outside of the city, as if it were a suburb or exurb of the metropole. In the main, denizens of settled society acknowledge they have no reason to trust each other, even if their malice were abated. The truly ideal city, from the view of labor and the residuum, is a city where people by and large do not talk to each other and the conspiracy inherent to humanity is mitigated. This attitude is not alien to the other classes, including aristocrats themselves who see class struggle as a threat to their position unless they control it. We do not ask why this antagonism spawned in cities, as if it were created ex nihilo. Just like the true original sin of the human race, those who came into the city were never convinced the city was a place of promise and dreams, and the malice of the human race had been long established. No one came to the city believing that the promised land would end that malice, or really considered redemption a motive for entering city life. More often than not, people were dragged to the city in chains outright, with no say in the matter. Others were drawn by the promise of wealth which concentrated in civic life, or came to the city for business with the intent of retiring to a plot of land away from this malicious and demonic race, some day. Very often, though, entry into city life only happened because all other possibilities to live outside of such environments were denied. Land was enclosed, and so too would the lives of those who entered civic life be enclosed. It was only a matter of time, and from the moment this process began, civilization entailed a persistent enclosure and pressing. It was not in the interest of those with a stake in enclosure to ever stop this process, and in various ways, labor would be made to comply with this. Only the lowest class ever wanted this to truly change, for it is they who bear the worst consequences of civic life, and the worst consequences are beyond mere death or suffering. They are something much different, which is beyond the scope of the present writing.

It is in this environment that merchants arise, rather than the imagined story where a random man decides with some spark of wisdom that he will now trade and this is a completely just and equal arrangement. The exchanges are a choice given the conditions humanity began with that led to city life, rather than something the city imposed on the world from an alien condition where men were pure and untainted by commerce. Commerce as such merely assigned to a token habits long in force in society, and gave to those who held that token what was really an occult authority, rather than something valuable in its own right. Those habits would change not just from the introduction of money, but the establishment of city life. What we call money originates not as the value token we regard today, nor as the imagined classical ideal of a coin stamped with the icon of a state issuer. It is first documented as commodity-money, where a measure of some precious metal is equivalent to a commodity, typically a crop grown by farmers, which tells us what this commodity money was used for. It was a way of bringing farmers into society, since their activities could not be managed in the city proper with overseers and tight enclosure being the life of industrial counterparts. The use of precious metal made sense to the states of the time, who were at heart nothing more than glorified warlords with an associated cult demanding submission and terror, utilizing every foul trick religion can impose. Precious metal was not a choice of the merchants themselves, who have long chafed on any standard that would prohibit the velocity of money. The ideal of the merchants and the bourgeois generally was not commodity money or anything backed by a physical substance at all. When the bourgeois or the technocrat sits at the apex of the state, their vision is either to be able to issue money tokens out of nothing - fiat money - or for the necessity of money to be obviated altogether, in favor of what they really wanted which was command and control of useful articles. Those useful articles include the other people of society, who they are antagonistic towards, but the interest of money is hostile to the very existence of labor, as we will see, without any necessary substance to the class struggle that gave the merchant and the laborer any reason to see themselves as irreconcilable enemies. The merchant does not live in the world chosen for them, and never fully can. Merchants arise to fill a niche that settled society allows, and operate within that niche, rather than in line with the preferred role of another interest. The command of commerce in particular is more relevant to the merchant than command of property. If the merchants had sufficient property for their purposes, they would have the choice of becoming proprietors whose interests are not commercial or productive, but the same as the claims to property of warlords, kings, and temples. The money very often is not uniquely the interest of a class of merchants, for the financial centers of pre-classical civilization are noted as temples and noble houses. There are not banks in the sense that merchant banks were established in the past millennium, as a growing trend where merchants as a class were separated from the classes of overt rule and institutional authority saw merchants both as suspect of fomenting revolution and as allies for new imperial projects. The classical banker and commercial interest is very often working with the nobility rather than someone with independent interests as a class. The reasons why are a complicated matter, but in short, both institutions and the material basis for economic activity did not escape the interests of the nobility and priesthood. The fusion of state and religion had much to do with cutting out commercial interests, and where men of commerce held sway, they operated in a world where empires and priesthoods were the institutional front of power, rather than corporations or trading companies or cartels. The basis of economic life was predominantly agricultural, and industry concerned low-level goods that were simple to reproduce. The primary assembly for industry involved few complex machines, and industrial labor was often slave labor, or treated with as much disdain as slave labor as would be the case for the later proletarian. There was no particular injunction against usury for the classical aristocracy, nor any expectation of mass religion or anything that would question the state or the dominance of slavery. When going back further, before the establishment of state-issue coinage, there is evidence of large storehouses controlled directly by those who ruled or religious functions, where sacrifice was demanded for an existence of daily bread, toil, and no end in sight. This is the cult of Sumer and Babylon and Egypt, referenced often enough to establish the record of a society dominated by slavery and nothing that would conceive that humanity was ever anything other than that.

We speak of the merchant in the abstract, rather than as a definite person. A distinct class may be recognized by its interests and existing institutions. The mercantile function is not particular to a given class, but describes something humans do that allows the merchant to exist, even if that merchant were a tribesman, a noble, a priest, a worker, a town-dweller, or some lowlife selling snake oil to make an extra buck. No one yet is defined by what what they do or what they "are" in essence. The rise of the merchants would happen without specialized "merchants" as such, and in many cases, mercantile interests were attached to some other interest for their money to mean anything. Finance as an independent force could only arise in the modern sense after many inventions, and was never really about the might or allure of money, or money actually consisting of magic. What is really happening is the emergence of a society where transactions make more sense, and where transactions can be compelled through enclosure, forcing others into socialization, and conscripting children to accept the rule of the market.^[3] These interactions happen for reasons that are not economic or driven by any material necessity, but occur because humans on some level view other humans as both their primary threat and only realistic ally. The reasons why are one part political, one part an expectation that if humans are unaccounted for then potential enemies lurk everywhere, and one part spiritual mission to suggest what humans want out of this life, which usually entails seeking other humans as guides or allies, or at the least potential mates so that more humans may carry on. So far as the material necessity exists, it is because all of those behaviors, particularly the need for mates, are more or less ingrained in human psychology, and obviously if no new humans exist or humans have no way to communicate with or navigate society, there would be no humans to develop a theory of society or why they would trade at all. To be able to ask the question of why we have a society presupposes the society existed, and its unity came primarily out of antagonism rather than any benefit to large-scale human interaction. Outside of a few humans regarded as friends, mates, or family, humans would have little to do with each other if not for a general fear that has nothing to do with a true necessity of life. The necessity that spurs economic decision making is fear of other humans and their associations. Simply put, when humans are close together, absent a faith that those humans are not a threat, it will become evident that malevolent actors can destroy any peace. It further becomes clear by a cursory examination of history that those malevolent actors are the reason the city exists, who conspire with each other to ensure those out of the know are kept in the dark and humiliated forever. The rulers then have the gall to claim it is not personal, until the ruled were to reciprocate the same transgression that rulers have always relied on, the moment it becomes materially possible for the damned to strike back. When the rules of the great game are violated, suddenly the "passive actions" of society are very personal offenses, while gratuitous depravity is thrown in the face of the ruled as a matter of course. Human society cannot persist in any other way, and never has. This, of course, is hostile to any society in which trade and commerce can be seen as anything other than a menace to be avoided at all costs. And so, the mercantile function arises as a way of regulating this distrust between hostile parties. What humans are paying for with their money is not merely a claim to products, or labor, or utility, or property in land. The tokens of money are symbolic of this antagonistic relationship which must be navigated and bought off with credits, rather than relying on good faith or direct struggle. Money is not the only mechanism other than the major ones often cited, and money is never "just money". Its existence is always contingent on institutional acceptance that money exists, and laws regarding commerce and trade exist in some form. If there is no law or custom, money cannot be valued as anything other than the commodity's material truth, which is to say, it would be worth nothing and has no value whatsoever for the moral purposes we assign to it. We may envision some ad hoc system of accounting that is much like money, as has happened in the past when the money is no longer any good, or the use of money might persist out of some inertia that it would be worth something, some day. Without stable systems of exchange, like laws protecting against foul play in trade and things like murder and plunder which make trade problematic, the money is only worth whatever people are willing to honor, and that monetary economy entails much less in conditions of such strife, where nothing is at all secure. Price-setting markets imply a stability that is never a given or free in material costs. If nothing else, irregularity of exchanges outside of peace would make all the presumptions of a free market woefully inadequate. Siege and war would distort prices in localities, and if siege became a general condition, bizarre contortions of value are deliberate and normal, while the value money once pointed towards would be meaningless regardless of any soundness of the currency.

The imagined "perfect state" of peace allowing for the market's smooth operation does not exist anywhere - not in nomadic life or in the city. If it existed, it would obviate the need of market exchanges, since such conditions are conducive to cooperative production rather than mercantile conflict. Where money arises is purely due to the conflict that existed before the introduction of money. Money introduces new conflicts, and can resolve some old ones. Money presents an incentive to cooperate in this way only, and a motive for predation that wouldn't exist if rituals of exchange were not a norm of the society. At no point does the merchant enter exchange as a purely neutral agent. For one, the merchant is not by nature tied to this function, and anyone with money or some equivalent for barter would have to see that function the same as a merchant would. Everyone in the society has reason to concern him or herself with money, because of what money represents in that society. The dedicated merchant does so not for lust of money, but for ulterior motives allowing that money to translate to security or position in society. The merchant performs through their activities a number of material functions, where multifarious goods are available at the store rather than by extracting so much cotton, so much timber, etc. and processing them through home manufacture or direct appropriation of a slave's product. The greatest asset a merchant would deal with, as you probably guessed, are the very slaves that till the fields and work in industry. The influence of slavery comes and goes with the condition of war in society, but the most valuable asset to plunder and resell is human livestock and labor-power. The merchant doesn't exist to provide this slavery or facilitate its existence simply because slavery was seen as a natural good. It really makes little difference to a merchant whether his trade is in slaves or precious metal or crops, or if labor is obtained through slavery, wage labor, or conscription into industrial armies under state or social control. It wouldn't make any difference if labor as something to appropriate or exploit was off the table completely, if humanity ever advanced far enough to rid itself of this institution in all of its expressions. The merchant's role has more to do with human relations than the goods themselves, whose utility is in reality a thing that cares little for economic rituals. The goods in-kind are useful not in the context of an imagined great game, but for games of our design which are limited. It is only when considering economic life as something other than a game, that cannot be avoided, that it becomes real, and we perceive of any ritual pertaining to trade that is transcendent and acts outside of history. It would act even before we exist, for such rituals and cults must answer the question of how we came about. The economics of the present are suggested by the past, and the future is understood as a continuation of the past necessarily. The reasons why have nothing to do with natural laws at all, but an understanding humans developed about progress and management, which was a product of the mind and intelligence rather than mere knowledge or the world itself. The world itself did not care one bit about our economic task, as if it were designed for us. We conform to the world and decided, for whatever reason, to make war with it - which really turned into a war against each other to parcel out parts of the world. The war precedes economics and exists outside of it. Political actors do something much different than economics, which properly speaking is the domain of the mercantile and technological interests. Politicians and aristocrats must see mercantile activity as a potential threat, for they all seek to command the world. The workers and those cast out by mercantile and technological aims, who are the true engine allowing economic value to exist in any appreciable form, see money as a threat, even when they must covet it and understand economics as something to secure their piece of property so that they may continue to live.

If the merchant and technocrat must exist in that world, their acts will conform not to any natural law or ideal market, but the practices of struggle and war. This, naturally, is generally bad for the merchant, who has nothing but money to express his civic worth. The technocrat is not so encumbered, for he or she has transformed this capital into useful machinery. This machinery is not limited to production or empty luxury, as an aristocrat would have it. All of a merchant's endeavors are means to an end. The concept of mindlessly expanding capital is a nonsequitur. Where economic growth was pursued in capitalist society, it was always towards the development of nations, rather than any humanitarian goal or sense of historical progress. Economic growth correlated to a rise of industrial output and population, which allowed states to field larger armies. It also gave those armies their most natural enemy - the very nation they were ostensibly there to defend. The merchant is not the origin of this malice, but is a facilitator granting to it new mechanisms that take on a life of their own. The merchant's role in the end is not necessarily malicious, but since the value of coin is primarily a token of this toil and struggle, merchants are obligated to do things that we would consider bad. So too does the technocrat, whose tools and purpose is much different but who occupies the same rough strata of society.

The long period between the murky origins of man and the highest form of pastoral society would only have progressed as slowly as it did because humanity's internecine conflict took central position, for no other reason than the race's malicious intent being its most enduring quality. Yet, there is only so much time for malice, and sustaining it over too long a period was costly. Every warband and celebration of the malice inherent to the race from its inception was an expenditure that wasn't gathering food or building what luxuries and recreation would have been preferable on a good day. The internecine war is justified even at this early stage with the pretext that remains the true purpose of war up to now - to cull those deemed weak not by any fair metric, but by whichever sadistic ape manages to get the upper hand and scam his or her way to power. Where did it begin, then? It began with the ritual sacrifice of undesirables, who were the most hated enemy of all. Human malice cranks up to its maximum when it encounters those who were chosen to die yet allowed to live, violating their sense of the natural order. Mercy is not a quality inborn to the race, and even when it is developed, mercy is always qualified and associated with subservience. None of this sacrifice or violence serves any purpose worth keeping, and it is only for that reason that humanity manages not to kill itself and remain at this miserable stage of development up to now. There was not one thing in human nature that was good enough to stop the cycle. What stops the cycle was not any goodness or kindness at all, but enough humans figuring out what is to a child obvious, but which for those who glorify war is a great scholarly discovery. It is a very simple discovery - if the malice of humanity is stayed for one day, it will provide a greater opportunity for malice tomorrow. In this way, humanity slowly masked its general hostility to the world and towards each other, and now that they were able to communicate with each other, at long last language could develop in some way that allowed humans to somehow like each others' company. You may ask though, if a child can see through this - and if children are taught manners simply as a matter of being able to survive in a hostile world - why it takes so long for wider associations to develop? The simple answer is that the malice of humanity is reproduced in the family itself. Something so malicious as charging money or rent would be highly counterproductive and pointless, but every family establishes who does all the miserable work, who is to be mocked, who is to be thrown away, who is to be praised, and who in the end actually is valued in this society. The same process has played out in every human social unit and every institution humans have developed. It is not a singular or uniform tendency, since the competitive aim is ultimately contrary to any economic life, but it is always present and it is this which economy must navigate, more than utility itself.

Utility as a general law is found nowhere in nature - not in scientific laws or the material world, and not in the human beings who would view the world scientifically or in any appreciable moral philosophy. Utility only exists in the intellectual task and in scenarios at the local level. Of the world and of society generally, there is no inherent utility to seek, nor a general sense of "utility" that would be universally appreciated. That development only occurs further along, when society is established and general laws governing society and politics allow us to properly ask questions of the motives of human beings, who are the agents that regard utility as morally worthwhile. So far as we can regard utility as relevant, it only regards things in-kind and all potential uses we have for them, each of which are understood as distinct outcomes. Similar outcomes are still distinct in some quality that is detectable, and for the purposes of science, no two outcomes would be exactly alike. In our models of reality, all things being equal, the outcome will be exactly alike; but a distinction in outcome that is minute will be qualitatively measured as something different. In judging utility, we would reduce and flatten these smaller variants in outcomes, so that the effects of any given cause are distinguishable only when the distinction is significant enough for a qualitative different in outcome. The difference between enough water for the body to function and not enough is qualitative, and there is a quantity of water that is superfluous for any purpose of consumption. The same would be true of any given population in aggregate, or the aggregate of all entities in an environment that consume water. The particulars of every member of that population do not intrinsically care about the utility of the whole. Each member is, in this utilitarian thinking, out for themselves, and will not make any connection between their fate and the fate of the whole population. For one, the members of any given population do not see each other as "ally" by any law of nature, or recognize a shared identity as significant towards any utility. Second, the natural utilitarian thinking leads to a crass value of the individual unless members of the population use each other for some ulterior motive. In of itself, no utilitarian argument can be made to speak of the needs of the many, for "the many" are from the outset seen as not just alien to each other, but competitors over a fixed quantity of water. For the purposes of utility, all members of the population are consumers and produce a quantity of water that is taken as fixed in nature. This, of course, does not compel the members of the population to think about coveting others' water to starve out their opponents by any law of nature, either. The optimal answer to this is simple - to meet the needs of survival and life. Individually, members of the population understand this if they are rational agents or even knowing agents that operate on some principle that allowed cooperation. If there is an excess of water for that purpose, then there is no struggle to speak of. If there is less than abundance, the management of scarcity cannot be resolved by any utilitarian calculus. "Not enough" will be the same regardless of ethics, and no one can say one agent is worth more than another without invoking something that does not concern itself with the utility of things, and instead speaks of a political or eugenic interest that has no utility whatsoever. Since none of these agents have any reason to trust one another or concern themselves with the conceits of a greater good, the only utilitarian answer to any scarcity is struggle for the sake of struggle. It is, therefore, a retarded ideology and not worth considering. If the answer is death, then we can find moral causes and purposes that do not denigrate the name and purpose of science or anything we should care about. Those who bray about utility and conduct the lifeboat exercise should not only be the first killed in any crisis, but they should probably have been killed simply for being abomination. But, we are getting ahead of ourselves.

We see here an autistic and Satanic thinking about utility overtakes what our scientific judgement of the thing would tell us. The answer would be the same with or without the human factor. We are not here to suffer, and we are not here to stand and die over a question of utility. Utility to be relevant implies that we would consider the tasks utility refer to as useful for purposes which are not reducible to utility; that is, that we have a moral value to attain that overrides utility. For the eugenic creed, eugenism and its religion of civic worth becomes the only acceptable override, and uses spurious ethics to demand that all other objectives are inadmissible. The full implications of this require us to view political concepts long in force which make clear that eugenism was intended long ago from antecedents of a predatory thought-form which found its modern expression. For those of us who are not fucktarded, we are left to judge utility in terms that we would appreciate. We can presume that at the least, humans like living enough to care about their life functions continuing. It is the functions of life which make any other utility possible, and so utility is beholden to life until such a time that we are non-living and adopt different imperatives. However we advance ourselves and whatever excuses we make, life remains life and as a result it is locked into its functions. This is a problem not of the world or a law of nature, but a law of life, this strange aberration that was imposed on nature for reasons unknown. Life's purposes are not naturally useful, for life can be useless and an unwelcome experience, particularly the life dominated by torture.

If money is a tool, it refers to not merely a symbol of some other political matter or some reduced essence. Like any tool, it takes on a life of its own once forged, and the user relates to it symbiotically. If money is not a tool, then it would not exist at all, and could not take on the characteristics it does; it would instead be seen correctly as a useless intermediary, and we would discard it. Threats alone do not allow that tool to be imposed violently on the unwilling, and even if they did, money would never be able to develop except as a recapitulation of threats, which would be seen for what they are. Yet, money represents not just a threat or its inverse of the carrot to the stick. It suggests something altogether different - that money is commanded by intellect and the learning of human beings, to make sense of exchanges that would otherwise be dealt with logically, with in-kind treatment of the objects in question, or by ad hoc arrangements which never stabilize. Money presents something that is more stable than ad hoc arrangements, which abides certain expectations of exchange, practices of usury, debt, and so on. We would not wish a society where we have to dispute whether the money means what it purports to mean, yet that does indeed happen and it is intrinsic to what money is. If money did not serve a stabilizing function, it would be ever more malicious towards our genuine wants and useful articles. The peculiars of money as a tool are not of interest here. What is of interest is the development of tools and operations generally. This tool development is both a faculty of knoweldge and of learning, and assimilates raw material to make some useful product, which in turn makes more products, and so on. The feedback loop for tool development has realistic limits, after which no expenditure of intellect or resources significantly improves a tool. New tools develop iteratively from the old, and new inventions arise from developements that are disparate. Never is this development of technology, and thus the deployment of money or any tool, accidental or purely reactive. Even if the initiative of the tool user was made to react to a condition, tool-users prepare for all contingences and learn of the forces of nature. Among the forces of nature, absent a proper view of what life is, would be the historical reality we learned from, that brought us into existence into the first place and is an obvious source to suggest what the future would be. We would not expect the future to be too different from the past without an obvious event suggesting some epoch had passed into another, and this never is as clear as we would see it in hindsight. A drastic change to create a hitherto unknown quality in the future is likely to be something that shocks our familiar and orderly procession through life. Money does not merely represent intelligence or learning as a static quantity, but something which can motivate it towards particular ends. It is a very poor tool of managing knowledge, but it was the tool that was evident since no managerial science existed, and money suggested a link to the productive industry and agriculture that society relied upon for any technological endeavor. Capital then is not just human genius ill-defined, but a drive towards technology and the realization of whatever conceits human genius holds. The issuance of money itself is held by banks and treasuries rather than capital itself. To speak of capital is to speak of something productive or extractive - that is, to speak of the raw materials, lands, machines men build, and the men themselves who are either slaves or wage labor pressed into service by starvation. Without pressing wage labor into service by deprivation, capital has no tool to suggest the workers won't piss off if made to work under onerous conditions for no benefit to them.

What is truly valued is not money, nor human labor for its own sake, nor land or anything just to hold it. The value that economic thought pertains to is technological before it can be anything else. All that is purchased with value is understood to be a tool to be used by intellect and the mind, rather than something that is valuable for its own sake. This may be technology in the form of physical machines, or abstract machines, but it is always something technological and mechanistic in its actions. It has to be for it to be an object of utility in the genuine sense. All that is valued is a machine, in order for it to be something of worth. This applies to a market setting or any other exchange that might be imagined, so far as value is construed as utility. In economic management, there is no concept other than utility, but utility is in any scientific sense that would be universally appreciated broken down to technology alone. The crops that are sown and grown, the materials extracted from the Earth, are all understood as tools which are fashioned into technology, and are in of themselves a type of technology. So too are abstractions such as ideology, institutions, or concepts like honor. They are, for the purposes of economics, subsumed into this concept of technology, which we may treat in various ways. In of itself, all that exists is not reducible to technology, and all of the machines we value have an existence outside of utility altogether. Behind the conceits mind learns about things are the genuine articles, which have an existence apart from anything we value. To speak of economic value then is to speak of appropriating that tool, that technology, that land. Land itself is less about the actual dirt or space, and more the claims on it which are enforced by men and their machines to do so. In nature, the land sits there, terra nullius and unclaimed for any utility. Yet, as soon as humans have a mind to do so, unclaimed land becomes territory or turf of one sort or another, and it would be impossible to avoid this. Humans will have a sense of their surroundings and assess the overall status of a parcel of land, which in this utilitarian thinking exists to be exploited, with life existing on top of it.

There is a need of the mind to arrest this technology and control it, and claim it as the domain of some mind, whether it is an actual human or an institutional front obscuring the humanity of its members. The technology in actuality takes on its own existence regardless of our conceits about it or any ability to control it. A tool in one hand cannot be controlled in its uses by other hands. And so, technology becomes property and a thing to be contested in one way or another. Technology has its history and genesis, and there was a cause to every technological advance. Any development of technology "in nature" - outside of society - is considered null for the purposes of mind, a gift nature granted for society to exploit. Without any clear boundaries demarcating society, society presumes all of the world and everything in it is fair game for its technological assessment, and even if the social units are far from each other and live in entirely different cultures, it is understood that all technology is either the work of humans, or brought into society in some way by humans. That which is unclaimed technology might as well not exist so far as society is concerned. By establishing economy as a general practice, the technological interest of life is asserting its claim to spiritual authority and, if it can manage it, temporal authority, in a way that it could not accomplish in earlier epochs. The mind understands that technology's utility is variable, but can only attempt to plan for every potential outcome that is qualitatively relevant. Naively the approach would be like a giant decision tree, out of the giant clockwork technocracy envisions the world and society to be. This is not very effective if we think about how an artificial intelligence would navigate that much information, but it is the model a technocrat must accept for general utility to make sense. Otherwise, the utility would be confined to a particular tool for a particular game, in the hands of particular persons, where no comparison of utility would be sensical. In principle, for utility to be sensical as value in the economic sense, the comparison of utilities must be possible by logical comparisons, and the assumptions of spiritual goals outside of utility must be presumed natural. This establishes the natural alliance a technocrat is inclined to, but knows instinctively to be a threat. That alliance is with the property holders and their genetic legacy, which in our time is demonstrated through the religion of eugenics. The alliance is a threat because the proprietors will always maintain the upper hand, and would make technology and knowledge itself wholly proprietary. It would mean that even one's own thoughts and every iota of being would be enclosed, transformed into a tool, and the grand clockwork model would consume the very people who believed themselves masters of the tool. This, of course, is delusional and does not resemble what actually happens as technocratic society develops. No tool is functional without its master, even if the master if itself reduced to a tool. The master still has the agency of a human being and cannot deny this. Yet, this is at the center of every technocratic mystification regarding technology, science, and explains why we are left at this sorry impasse in the 21st century. The technocrat must hold these truths to be self-evident - that all men are created unequal, burdened by their Creator with certain unalienable responsibilities, that among them are death, slavery, and property's dominion. Even if the technocrat sees the trap, and most do, the cargo cult presses against the senses because it will always be the path of least resistance to utility, and the society itself is imagined as a tool rather than what it actually is and what it actually can be. Eugenics ensured that the victory of the proprietor would end any other use of the tool, and with it end technology itself as anything other than a primordial screaming. It is contradictory in nature, and revels in that above all. All it would need to do is preclude any concept that there is anything other than self-evident utility and the progress of science. It must do this violently, which the technocrat understands to be a direct threat against the very thing allowing this to exist - unless the technocrat believes there is some clever plan to betray the proprietors at the correct moment and liquidate them all, after which the men and women of science stand alone as the last proprietors, commanding all that exists in the most abject slavery. Other than that, the only way this ends is by struggle or willful dissolution of the ruling ideas, due to the obvious destruction for no real purpose it would bring. All that would be required would be to create a technology which made it impossible to say no to this, and that would become the grand obsession of the proprietors, and eventually the scientists who understood what side of the war they were on this whole time.

If the world is to be some grand clockwork, under natural law, some imagined Demiurge, the Satan or God (which in this example would effectively amount to the same thing seen differently whether one praises Man or holds Man in contempt), or something assumed to exist for a vague reason we never quite recall, it becomes clear that the chief object of utility is labor itself. Labor, in this view, is too a type of technology. It can be built from raw materials - the mating of a male and female human and all of the resources to upkeep it - and it is honed like any other machine. It is in principle perfectly acceptable to view labor, in all of its variations, as a very elaborate tool with a few unique properties. The unique properties do not entail any technological uniqueness to humans, that allow humans and humans alone a substance of thought or make the human inscrutable to all but the gods. What makes humans relevant is very important to us, but means nothing for technology, utility, or the great games money plays. It's not even that the human essence has any value to us. It is because labor to be labor is intrinsically a moral act, for some purpose that does not correspond to any interest of life that must be upheld. What we do with labor is really our choice, until the labor of another decides to constrain that. Of course, this makes clear what has been clear from the start - that the greatest threat to humans and society is other humans and society itself. It is because we are laboring that any of our deeds have utility and worth in the first place, beyond merely noting that something exists in the world. It does make all of our games seem pitiful, but for whatever reason there were humans who imposed a game on people who by and large had no reason to ever play, and who never benefit one iota from the entire sad affair. We cannot say here what would have solved this, as if the problem were one solved by technological means or some clever idea. Humans would have to want to do something different, and in everything humans do, the fate we have been set on has been resisted and even those who bring us to this can't help but feel disgust towards the enterprise we were made to undertake. The true believers who actually think the internecine struggle for its own sake was a worthwhile endeavor never have anything to show for it, and can't say in the end their existence was worth much except the point of saying a word, which means nothing except petulant whining when their great struggle inevitably fails. The particular moral purposes of labor are not immediately important, for they entail a spiritual and political understanding that is not reducible to or answerable to the economic problem. What can be done is to describe this machine, labor, as a lump of utility to be managed and how that management happens, and this tells us something about human psychology.

Labor and its source are almost never equal in ability, qualities appreciated in the output, or any quantity that could be ascribed to it. Humans will do different things, and possess different technology built into their body and possess different histories, different tools they would come ready to work with, and so on. All humans possess some property beyond their own body, and their own bodies are also property with distinct qualities. It would appear then that no equality of labors is at all possible, and technocratic society would default to dickering over every distinction in humans and sort them into hierarchical grades of civic worth, worst from best. Naturally, "the best" were considered worthy of the most political prestige and rights. This idea fails on so many levels, and the reasons why are obvious if they are considered for five minutes. If we acknowledge the utilitarian argument from earlier, though, the naive solution is the only possible one, and any "greater utility" beneath the visage of different labors is irrelevant. This arises from a very basic failure - a willful failure - to acknowledge that humans are both self-interested and do not like being told where they fit in some thought leader's hierarchy without fighting for position. The consequences of that are numerous and will be treated further throughout this and future books of this series. More than that, if one follows through the consequences of internecine conflict over a lump of horseflesh, the distinctions of qualities is overwrought compared to any moral value the distinction would confer. From the start, qualitative distinctions of relevance to the moral question are compressed to that which is significant to the question. For most of the labor humans execute, nearly any human can do them and is willing to do them, so long as they see a purpose sufficiently motivating. Of the skilled labors, it is known that with adequate learning and acquisition of material health, which amount to the same thing, many of them would be widely available. This requires both the motive to learn and the motive to take on the added risk of being notable compared to peers. Realistically, no amount of learning is infinite and cannot compensate for existing disparities. The crass technocrat essentializes this in the person, in one way or another, because the technocrat has no interest in negotiating with the fickle educational habits of the human race, or the actual humans who encounter a largely hostile world that disdains any display of non-martial merit. In principle, though, the moral worth of different labors is questionable because much of what is actually done has little to do with scientifically provable merits or values that can be generally appreciated. Politicians and lawyers, for example, produce nothing, and would in an ideal world not exist. Many professions humans engage in would be in a productive sense actively harmful in value, but are in society highly valued - often the most valued specifically because of the harm inflicted on other humans. The moral imperatives of the human race disdain industry, kindness, and nearly anything we would unviersally consider a good to exchange or consume for moral improvement. They value malice selectively, since malice serves not any sense of general good but specific aims for a momentary advantage, and is directed at specific human targets. The value of general malice is particular to states and directed towards purposes that suit it, barring eugenism where general malice becomes the chief and only true value of the human race. With such distortions of value in general, which are all laboriously carried out and given moral praise beyond money, the value of utility, money, and technology from before, which would seem natural, is already suspect. The distortion is not so absolute that it overrides all else. Whatever ideology may say about it, at the end of the day, nothing good is produced unless someone, eventually, is willing to do the sucker's task of working.

What is valued in labor is the cost of commanding it more than the quality of labor itself. It is less a matter of labor in the abstract, which can be taken as a given equivalent to so many units of value. The cost is not merely a commitment of coin, but the cost to command the will of people. This command is shortened to a concept of virtue, which is vaguely defined as a meritorious virtue. What is it really, if all of these merits are reduced to utilities we would wish to manage? It is nothing less than that which allows the labor to be harnessed towards deliberate ends of the mind. It is, in other words, the ability of intelligence to command the faculties of human beings, and all of the tools to do so are managed by nothing other than intelligence, or the learning faculty that is a small part of knowledge. It is, therefore, a conceit of human knowledge from the outset, but it abides a reality that exists outside of it. We may speak of the genuine existence of humans requiring something more than a conceit of intelligence, but for management and thus economics, all of the genuine labors and moral wishes of the master of labor are subordinated to this one faculty. It is not intelligence as some substance, but the active utilization of that intelligence towards this end of management and the command of humans alone. In a society dominated by the mindset of the technocrat, this becomes effectively the marker of intelligence that is politically and morally relevant in society, rather than learning about anything else we would want to do. The aims of commanding labor are only to do so without regard to any barrier or externality that is a consequence of it. When those externalities exist, they must be rendered invisible by a magic trick. So too is the absurdity of doing this masked by a division where one thing is economically real and valued, and another - which has a very real existence - must be made invisible. How far this is taken is dependent only on the needs of management, rather than any fidelity to the world or a sense of goodness outside of this conception of virtue. We are aware of the dangers of doing this, but by the logic of commanding men - by enslaving them, essentially - we are not allowed to think of any other way labor is managed. This applies to the labor of our own person. We are set against our own existence in pursuit of this goal, and it makes perfect sense for us to do this, for labor indeed must be commanded if we are to do anything other than aimless wandering. There then is the trap of both the management of labor and the management of technology. All of our efforts are expended on command and control, and all of our learning is subordinated to a crass goal of changing the world rather than understanding what it is we are changing. Those who set themselves apart from this rat race do so by securing themselves against all other actors, and that has been the true goal of political economy from the outset. Certain people must be sacrosanct and granted "unlimited freedom" in this abstract sense, and those outside of that group will have no freedom and no security by definition. Any security they hold is a temporary fiction. This, of course, is a very bad deal for anyone who must actually work, but it is carried out and replicated within every class, and within every person. The enclosure of the mind itself is the first step to enclosing the world, and reproducing the tripartite structure in the person made the exploitation of labor conceivable in this way. It sets itself apart against two great classes - the men and women whose genuine labor is necessary for any of the structure to function, and that which is outside of use for this goal, who are to become the residuum and declared absolutely retarded, insane, and irrelevant. It is those two groups who are the object of virtue - to define which of the laborers are good and which are bad, and to eliminate all other distinctions. The lower two classes are beholden to this, and the good laborers, who have some stake to defend, turn against the bad, who have nothing but a fool's hope that it could be different, in a different world. The bad then turn on each other, and are given every inducement to do so, as if the entire nightmare were a series of just-so facts thrown in their faces to cajole them. The objective is not destruction, but suffering itself, and can only be that.

If that is the case, then what is it really for? Command of labor is not a neutral value. If the moral objective is to command labor for its own sake, and life exists for its own sake, then the result is eventual regression to a primordial state. The arrest of human history is only possible by pressing constantly the image of humanity in chains forever, to make it clear that it will never be different, and that all other worlds are a lie. That is not why we have commanded labor, even at the nadir of the human race's depravity. If that was the point of life, we should have slit our own throats and spared the world this abomination, and there is no possible moral objection to this that isn't a selfish pissant's whining. Anyone who has thought for five minutes about this, and this can occur to savage man just as it occurs to us, can see this was not why we woke up to do any of this. It is not that humans are immune to this thinking, for the human often regresses to its preferred mode of action for reasons that we can divine rather easily. It is that, after thinking enough, something new must develop if the machine is to continue producing anything of moral worth to our genuine existence. It is those values which management would seek to meet, which are things we do not regard as economic values in the same sense that our daily affairs are. When the new value judgements are to be asserted, they encounter a world that had already proceeded, which has a history we can know to explain why it was this way and what can be changed for us. We are, ultimately, changing ourselves rather than the world as a whole. Humans can modify the environment only by constructing machines atop it, rather than changing fundamentally the being of anything in the world or the world as a whole. We convince ourselves our magickal workings with labor actually cause transubstantiation, where water turns to wine or some other neat trick that alludes to a lurid ritual of cannibalism. What really changes is that which is built atop past knowledge and learning. We learn of new things, and conceive of something novel for purposes that are our own. The world itself allows for the new to exist and we may encounter the new from outside of ourselves. We may collaboratively build the new. The new is not intrinsically good, but it is necessary to suggest that anything different from the past is possible. We have no inherent moral bias towards the past, future, or present, in a way that suggests we must be fixed on any trajectory by a natural law. There is no way to prove that through a pseudoscience that asserts "science" is fused with nature in the abstract. The new exists not out of some impulse of the universe or as an inexorable trend, nor as a reaction to the cajoling of forces in the world, nor as an imperious will of us. It exists because something in the world is abomination, and that cannot be disguised or mystified. The world itself does not abide human malice, and we ourselves are agents who recognize that. It was never the world asserting human malice. That was entirely something humans generate on their own, for reasons that are particular to them, and could easily be ameliorated if we so chose. The will of humans is, in the end, too fickle to do this out of goodness, and so the world in some way creates a sobering influence. That sobering influence may be little more than the necessary reaction of humans to the viciousness of other humans, which would lead us to ask what so many have asked - "what was it all for?" If it became general in humanity to embrace that malice and suggest nothing else was possible, then the world will in some way damn the whole race. Humanity may then do something different, either by its will or when the world inevitably makes the wages of sin apparent in a way that forces their hand. If humanity insists to the bitter end that it really was malice for malice's sake, then the endgame of such a world is so obvious a child can foresee it. Why this is too much for other humans, this author will never know, and he knows most of humanity is perfectly aware of the trap and couldn't be otherwise, whatever their attitude towards it. In the main, it isn't too much for other humans. Even in terrible societies, humans only tolerate so much rot, if only because depravity produces obviously mal-adaptive outcomes. We frequently must work against all hitherto established order just for humanity's existence to continue, only to find our work undone like Sisyphus' eternal task with the rock. Labor is not genuinely reproduced, as if it were designed in some natural scheme to fit manager's expectations. It is always produced anew, exhausted, destroyed, and new labor is born to be commanded. So too is new virtue taken from the world, as it is the world from which all of that virtue was taken, and reproduced with each new commander of labor.

In principle, the command of labor is not limited to human labor in this sense, for virtue requires command of things in the environment. Virtue always relates to particular things, rather than a general sense of the world that is vaguely defined. Human labor predominates because it is the most proximate cause of anything that we consider socially relevant. The commander of labor concerns himself as much with machines as men, for labor itself is a type of machine, which itself employs machines it must command with the same virtue one acquires to command humans. There is no barrier between machine and man that virtue would appreciate. There is a natural barrier in the sense that humans are not created as tools in the same way, and could not be commanded like robots. If we created machines that were truly knowing and rational, we would not be creating machines that are naturally slaves, due to a retarded managerial conceit about the mind. Such machines would be functionally no different from humans. This of course requires us to assess what the human as a machine actually is, and why we know anything in the first place. Here is where eugenics stepped in to ensure that such an understanding was not admissible in the public. Privately, the human has been dissected so many times, physically and psychologically. It must become a holy shibboleth to deny that there is a human, at least for those selected to die. The utility of doing this is clear - by unpersoning the damned, their suffering can be maximized, and this is the only thing that eugenics can conceive. It is less about suffering for some ulterior motive, but suffering as the point unto itself becoming life's prime want. Because this virtue is ultimately a form of property, it is tied to past record, rather than the present or potential future. It always owes more to its genesis than its full nature, and will always reduce to that, no matter how much this works against the objective virtue seeks. The virtuous, for perfectly understandable reasons, want the future to resemble the past, or the future to be an improvement on past glories, and here we see a tendency to believe in Whig History, where historical progress is an inexorable rise of imperial greatness. It was not a malevolence that inclined people to believe this story, for there are a lot of reasons why the past should be regarded as the source of future glories. The malevolence is to presume that the system is perfect and invariably decays, and this is a conceit intelligence must make of any system it establishes and any law or institution it lays down. The new and vital does not concern itself with institutions at all, but must always question the legitimacy of those institutions. We could overcome this weakness in our thinking by regarding the world as what it does and what it is in the present moment, rather than continuing as if history only moves when thought declares it has in fact moved. To do this, though, invites many demons lurking in the mud, which came out to hatch in the 20th century - where, for the first time, widespread participation in knowledge was not only possible but mandated and forced on the people. It is at this point where conventional thought on virtue, which served mankind mostly well, would be inverted, with full knowledge that the intent was to destroy all virtue outside of a limited aristocratic caste. This was really inherent in virtue conceptually, unless the concept itself could transform into something to govern human beings by more than impression and the appearance of merits. This would not be easy, if it is possible at all.

So far the parts of economic life have been described, but they appear to us not as the things they are but as symbols. We only can see the superficial, or impose a superficial model on the things we see. Either way, the world we observe and manage is a symbolic one, from which we glean information we believe to be useful. We do not know in full the qualities of men or machines without learning about them. We do not even know the location in order to claim it as ours without learning of it, and learning of ways to guard all property and deny it to others. It is not the quantity of things that is important so much as the knowledge of what exists and its entry into possession. The productive acts are carried out not for economic incentives, but for moral aims that are quite apart from economic necessity. This is because economic necessity does not have any impulse to build more products at all, because the most useful thing for managing economic life is to not produce anything at all. Far from it, deprivation and constraint are constant in economic thought, whether it is capitalist or socialist. Productivism doesn't produce the quality of command, and creates a liability. Anything that is produced must be guarded and kept out of the hands of those who have no reason to be commanded and many reasons to resent those who wish that goal. So far as production has a purpose in economic life, it is always towards definite aims that can be predicted, rather than vague aims that are only guessed at. The drive for empires or competition within society is not carried out without knowledge of rivals, as if men were blind to the world. Only the fools are so blind that they do not see who rules them. Anyone with a stake in the game recognizes what rules, or what appears to rule, without the fetter of believing lies. The lying is never comfortable, and has always been the interest of cajolers who press the lie aggressively from the moment ideology is discovered. No one likes to tell themselves lies and actually believe them, and once that cycle starts, he who would be a master is undone before he sets out to the task of rule. The race for industrial product is carried out not on a blank slate against an infinite number of undefined firms and nations, but in a world where notable players are already known or can be known by their prominence. The rise of industry begins when the domains of the Earth are thoroughly charted, with records of who lives where and what can be exploited from the land and the people on those lands. Industry was never carried out as if we produced like Malthus' mindless breeders, for those who commanded industry were on the same side as Malthus when it came to the jobless wretches. Those who commanded industry were more aware than anyone that if industrial product entered unapproved hands and the conditions of workers improved, their command of industry would be challenged from all directions. The industrialist knew to play his hand carefully, for he was caught between the lower strata of bourgeois who would revolt to take his factory, and the existing upper strata who saw new rivals as things to be co-opted, acquired, destroyed, or feared if they were uncontrollable by the dominant interests.

If we are to see the chief aim of economics as valued learning, then you may ask - how does learning matter when we know there is no condition producing more products, and a noted scarcity exists? To answer this, it must be clear that in principle, there is no natural "limit to growth" which knowledge can ascertain with universal certainty. All of the conditions of production - the land, resources available, labor and all of its qualities, and the virtue to command all of them - are things learned, and this information is never automatic or a given. It may be common sense or impossible to hide something that is obvious for long, given what we know about human knowledge, but all of these conditions are only assessed because we learn that there are boundaries in the world that cannot be changed by any labor or force we can harness. We would, in a seemingly intractable resource problem, seek a way out of the trap by some stroke of genius, however hopeless that seems. Only after that has been exhausted sufficiently do we ask the next thing - how we learned to manage scarcity. This can happen at the individual level, but humans being aware of other humans, they will possess a sense that this learning goes on for everyone else in whatever way they can, and humans learn from each other. Humans share interests, affinities for each other, and moral inclinations that suggest friendship or an alliance of convenience towards some shared aim. There are ways in which humans learn to manage scarcity without resorting to the worst of all worlds, and this can be settled without any political intervention necessarily. Very often, disputes over some economic condition are resolved without even the exchange of coin, simply by the restraint of all in society suggesting certain acts are off-limits and certain standards are to be kept. In this way, shortfalls need not result in an immediate crisis where the people must run around like headless chickens in confusion. Perhaps this does not work, and humans being humans, they are not going to lay down and rot or accept death. How is this struggle resolved? Humans learn who their true friends are, who can be relied on in the struggle over limited resources, and the real merits and demerits of their potential opponents. The struggle over resources at this point ceases to be about a hypothetical where new resources will appear by some unexpected genius or a last-minute resolution. Once begun, the struggle becomes the chief value, and it has a way of persisting long after the crisis is no longer about productivity. Instead, the conditions of siege suggest a very different sense of merits and values that are relevant. Weapons which would be an economic waste in another time become precious technology. Strange values become apparent either because these are conducive to a state of war, or because the salve of opiates is worth more than life itself or the presumptions of a just world. Perhaps, somewhere in there, there were humans who never cared for a moment about a just world, and always presumed predation, theft, begging, or some other demerit by reasonable standards was their modus operandi. All strategies a human would use to struggle, grift, bargain, or compete as individuals or as members of institutions are things which must be learned, and knowing who knows what becomes the chief value in that struggle. The knowledge of the natural world takes a back seat to a need to know humans in the condition of struggle. This struggle has limits, but it will be present so long as the danger exists, and that danger will exist unless we learn that humans have moved on from their genesis. We cannot learn to make new material goods by magic, but if we were to face genuine scarcity, the resource shortfall is an intractable problem. The new values would be the struggle, and there is no rule to suggest the outcome of the struggle conforms to justice, natural law, or any conceit we hold to plan the struggle in advance. Many will prepare for this struggle, so much that the struggle becomes their chief concern regardless of scarcity or abundance. And so, the facile argument of scarcity is irrelevant to the game that we play in economic decision making. Scarcity and abundance are acknowledged in one way or another, and never "just-so" happen, as the stupider philosophers insist it happens. We learn by studying history and using our sense that scarcity was never the driver of crisis, when considering what was known to be possible technologically if the leadership were truly interested in letting people live. It is far more evident that crises and famines are almost always choices of actors with the ability to engineer them, or the result of deliberate disregard for consequences of political decisions. Very often famines in history are never just famines, but come with wars and plagues and the internecine violence of humanity making itself known. That is what happens when people are starved - they do not stand and die, but struggle for life and often turn against each other for a place on the lifeboat.

It is this game itself rather than any element it reduces to that is the interest of economic decisions and any value assigned to it. We can choose not to play, and in what space we claim, we set the rules of that game within the limits we can. We cannot change our bodies, and the very body and spirit of humans are alien to the mind and its constructs. The mind sets itself against the world and the body it feeds off to exist, and so economics from the outset concerns an absurd goal. It is still the case that the mind reckons with the world as a whole, and that includes the other humans and intelligences it encounters. We cannot privilege the intelligence of humans over any other event in nature when concerned with economics, for economics concerns precisely alienation between mind and matter, and the alienable labors of human beings. We can regard other intelligences as the chief economic concern rather than the genuine conditions of the world or things in it, but it is only the chief concern, and all intelligences rely on a world allowing them to exist. Intelligence recognizes this trap readily, and can choose to avoid it. It can do so at a remarkably simple cost. The cost of sustenance, in a physical sense, is not much at all, and excess product beyond that is not particularly interesting. The whims of life to learn for no ulterior motive can be fed with simple products, and we have to question exorbitant cost for any such recreation. The chief threat in the world, once the difficulties of nature are overcome, are other life-forms and other intelligences that pose a threat merely by their existence. That threat can only be overcome when two minds contact each other and can sense friendship that obviates economic competition as a concern of both, and this contact forms a network of minds that would all understand the situation. It seems simple enough, but the sort of contact envisioned that would truly allow trust is not common and implies a tie between social actors that is both difficult to maintain and an opening for great danger. We would not need to presume the intrinsic and inborn hostility of humans towards each other as some sort of mystic koan to see that difficulty of establishing economic cooperation. We would then need to maintain that contact frequently enough and hold confidence in the processes of the world that a friend today can remain a friend tomorrow. By this process of learning, we would quickly find there are too many uncertainties, and the more information the mind must learn, the greater the potential for danger. There is no way by learning to negate the threat the mind and knowledge pose, as if there were a master key that would reduce learning while keeping the genuine knowledge base intact and arrested. It is the nature of the mind to be unstable because the conditions allowing it to exist are under imagined threats, and so all of the efforts to think or learn its way out of its self-created conundrum can only make it worse. This is contrary to our sense that we are reliant on that faculty to do anything significant, which we are. The integrity of the mind becomes a going concern beyond the mere endurance of life or a principle suggesting that mind should exist. The risk of going mad or being too stupid to live is worse than the cessation of life functions. Those who would enclose the world know to never, ever allow clean death to be thinkable.

Any particular aspect of the great game - psychology, natural science, human political behavior, and the arts of war - cannot be placed at the forefront. They all work together to create the environment, and any conventional virtue is doomed in one way or another to fail spectacularly. These things are in principle comparable by logical reasoning, with the caveat that higher moral purposes are not things we can pin down with purely rational approaches. There are meanings to what we do that are never arrested in the knowledge process, making any precise calculation that can arrest history impossible. This should be expected based on everything we know about what history actually is, rather than the stories and facts that are our sole tool to convey historical knowledge. The magical thinking asserts that because history cannot be arrested in this way, that history itself is unknowable or nonexistent, and it aggressively destroys any understanding that would allow rationality to be a useful explanation for the world. We know enough to adjust for this error in our thinking, so that our reason is almost perfectly in line with the world, when we choose to concern ourselves with the world. The dual system of habitual and contemptuous lying would only be sensical as an imposition carried out because the thrill of lying serves some great utility, but this is purely something humans manipulate in other humans. The cost of imposing the Big Lie is much more than the cost of communicating information, for without the support structures to allow it, something so contemptuous would have been put down from the start and human society would be a far better place. We can in our reasonable calculations omit entirely the mind games of the Big Lie, regarding instead the immense cost in maintaining the violent structure that upholds it, which is very real - and where the Big Lie rules, the violence is itself the point, which befits the alliance of proprietors and technocrats. All of the mystifications, however alluring they are to humans, are things that can be accounted for in our measurement, until reaching the minute details which we either approximate or ignore in those calculations. We are able to calculate every system reasonably well and assess the logical connections between them. In so doing, we arrive at a more useful measure of virtue for a given imperative or reason for us - or any institution - to exist. This doesn't resolve the problems inherent in virtue, but it allows us to consider comparable qualities that allow mathematical calculation to be possible. We do not possess a virtue that can bypass certain constraints of the systems we view in the world. Systems of thought and learning are not comparable mathematically to physical systems, because they become things that are alien to the physical world and intend to be so. Knowledge connects to the physical world not from a black box or ancient mysteries, but through the mediation that the world's properties allow. We know the conditions allowing any knowledge process to be conceivable, for this process is not contained within the body or any preferred vessel, but in all the tools and machines knowledge can utilize towards this task. This includes other people, so long as we remain aware of what society actually is and do not devolve into cultish conceits about society. For the most part, we still remain sober about society, until the Big Lie version of sociology is advanced, where society is interrupted in communciation and replaced with the mediation of a few thought leaders. All such thought leaders are in principle identifiable, and there are always telltale signs of public relations.^[4] We would not reduce our concepts of the world to information in the crass sense, but understand information as a component of our knowledge process. Which objectives we hold are only comparable because all of these objectives exist in the world, rather than any unit of mathematical comparison like a "util" linking all things, and so if we are thinking of what is good for battle, we are asking a very different question from "what is good for prosperity", which itself can be measured by industrial production, quality of life indicators, population, and so on. All of these systems are seen in light of other systems that may exist, and the knowledge that there are minds whose objectives are alien to our own. We all live in the same world, and so those of us who would want to prosper in our lives and environment have to contend with conquerors, cajolers, priests demanding sacrifice and offering either false hope or some guide to the world, the scum of humanity who never had a reason to care, and people who are just plain stupid and do foolish things for whatever reasons they had. The idea of a universal goal that all are obligated to follow is always a conceit of educators and those who see the whole human race as cattle to herd, just as animals were herded long ago with the same thinking - the exact same thinking, for in the drover's mind, they registered the human flock as livestock long ago and never thought differently for a single moment. False egalitarianism with such people is one of the most vicious lies ever told, and until the rise of the eugenic creed, no one ever spoke of that false egalitarianism in the sense we encounter it today.

What this means is that social life does not necessitate economic life, and economic life entails not just humans but the world they live in and all of the machines they interface with. The machines are not merely possessions to be animated by imperious will, and the proper understanding of free trade is not an understanding of psychology, but an understanding of operations and the subordination of the mind to those operations. This was understood, albeit imperfectly, in the very formulation of the idea, and was never refuted. By science and any philosophy, it couldn't be refuted, so long as economics were regarded as a behavior of human beings. Since humans do indeed manage their resources, the only question is in particulars. Something which had lurked in humanity in prior forms could only lead to exploitation, no matter what developments came from knowledge and reason alone. Reason alone was never the true motivator of human beings, of course. At the moment that something new was on the horizon, the familiar imperious force of humanity decided that no such thing would be allowed to exist for long, and that is in the end a political decision and, once politics is obviated, a spiritual decision that reflects what humanity always was at heart. The only way this is reconciled is a religious revival. The new religion that was created was eugenics, and eugenics represents the foul heart of the human spirit and the true nature of its religious institutions hitherto known. Since no new religion is possible without a line of succession from the elder tradition, this made the appeal to reason, emotion, apparent merit, and every other thing we value produce the same kind of society - highly stratified and protecting an aristocracy, which had always been the goal of those who wrote economic treatises in one way or another. We are then told that anything deviating from this objective, which always favors politicians and internecine struggle, is impossible, and because resistance is impossible, the struggle can only become total, thus reverting to an imagined state of nature which never existed, where all struggles against all. Since this is not desirable for most people, social life under management, regardless of the particular thoughts regarding management, reverts to that struggle, and the chief interest of people is not an imagine imperious idea of "freedom" but winning security so that they may live tomorrow. Anything beyond that security has nothing to do with economics as such, and is only beholden to economic management so far as any of our goals would have to be secured. We could conclude that we simply refuse to play, terminate our life, and wash our hands clean of such a pointless struggle, but most of us have already considered there is something worth living for - and we do not live for "society" as an abstraction or for the self-abasement that has been demanded of the ruled. We would live for something in the world beyond ourselves, and a condition of that is that human beings would need to remain in working condition in their genuine facutlies. It is precisely that which allows us to continue existing as human which is under attack and must be defended, and that is all humans can aspire to through the human spirit - to defend what was always theirs if they lived in a world that simply allowed them to exist at all. It is for that reason that the imperious do not blindly view value as some mana that is indistiguishable, but seek to attack specifically those values which are compatible with a free society and life.

The aim of imperious economics is not to create general poverty, but to impoverish living standards specifically that would allow resistance to exist, and to reduce as much as possible the wages of the condemned, including any upkeep of slaves. It is those conditions of living that are sought most of all, and if specifically deprived, humans will be induced to pay exorbitant prices for bread, while they are inundated with lavish technology, while tempting food is presented in storefronts, on advertisements plastered everywhere in the society, specifically to remind the damned what they will never, ever have. If the needs of life, including our reasonable want for security and small luxuries which amount to no real burden on nature's resources, were met, we would not have an economic problem. The cost of security is entirely a gigantic inflation of the cost of living, purely caused by humans choosing to make other humans miserable. The choice is indeed a choice, but immense pressure is applied to ensure that the correct choices are made, which always value immiseration and projection onto a hated class. It is this that economics chiefly concerns itself with - who is made to suffer, and how they will suffer. In principle this suffering is not bound to any particular person or even total suffering. By elevating mind to sacrosanctity and abolishing all barriers to it, the only outcome is the splitting of the race into two - those selected to live and hoard all of the virtue, and those selected to die whose suffering must be absolute. This repeats the cycle of the human race since its genesis, and humanity has chosen once again to do what it always did. The new claim of the eugenists is that they are making a new race, superior to humans who are now relegated to the status not of animals or even slaves, but living abortions whose torture must be maximized. The reality is that none of this transformation made a new race, or could make anything of quality. The victors remain not merely human, but a purely Satanic and failed race, stripping out whatever decency may exist, as their god commands of them. So too do the damned remain essentially human, for the call of their god has always been for human sacrifice rather than animal sacrifice or mere death.

It is the threat to security in such a way that amplifies perverse incentives, creating extremely skewed priorities that make no rational sense from a productive or meritorious view, but which make sense if one believes the impression of security allows for the genuine article. Sex, which is a small part of the body's functions and does not constitute a true biological need for the individual, becomes something to fight and die over, and the sale of prostitutes and brides makes or breaks economic life. The prestige of an imagined social proof suggests that winning desirable mates is security, even though by rational sense, any man or woman will do for the reproductive act and often women will sleep with whatever male suits them for the true reproductive act. The man, in turn, sees the entire business of sex as a sordid affair that only brings him suffering, and he descends into addiction, perversion, and foul play as a result with alarming regularity. Even the better off of men are under the threat of insinuations and accusations, and men and women both expend vast resources to protect their sexual virtue. To do otherwise would be very nonsensical given the nature of the game as it has been established. Yet, all of this expense regarding sex is a gigantic expenditure of labor for something which would be trivial without the rituals and filth surrounding the act, and none of that expense makes anyone happier or offspring healthier. Far from it, the entire game exists to protect people who would in a decent world be the last who should reproduce, exhausting anyone who is honest and unwilling to comply with the lurid rituals. Habitual self-"pleasure", which a reasonable society would educate men to see correctly as a loss of quality of life that quickly loses any satisfaction it brings, is both actively encouraged, and passively encouraged by treating men like caged animals and denying them even the smallest human comfort. Men are then denied any image of themselves which suggests celibacy, life as a eunuch without the associated shame, or simply disregarding the excess of addiction and contenting himself with a simpler form of self-abuse, are possible outcomes. The rot of the act is maximized in every way, and all incentives in society suggest that doing this is rational to the ruling interest. It is further made clear that men who wish to maintain their dignity, to say nothing of what the women are put through in order to promote in the neoliberal workplace, are suspect. The meritorious benefit of doing this is clear to those who manage humans and those who rule, who would never give up this inquisition that turns a reproductive function into a living nightmare. Even without eugenism as such, this curse has afflicted humanity in various forms, so much that there has not been a single tribe or culture where general sexual probity was encouraged beyond a few hypocritical dictums. Those who wanted some decency in the world have to wait for some heavenly force to smite Sodom and Gomorrah and pray for more where that came from, which is an asset the priesthood would love to keep as their property. Anyone with the temerity to insist they just not do this - since this is all the deliberate act of humans, with nearly all of the initiative to impose this coming from the haves who succeeded laughing at the misery of the have-nots - is denounced more than the most abject failure in the great sexual game. Perverse incentives around drugs and alcohol as are old as civilization, actively encouraged by priesthoods and rulers to keep their subordinates drunk and fearful of their spurious and usually contradictory authority. Even the simplest temperance, or even accurate information pertaining to drugs and foodstuffs, is occulted, because doing this makes people fearful and grants to experts and charlatans a healthy business of selling spurious "health advice" or systems of pure myth. One need not ask for absolute abstention to consider the toxicity of the food and drugs we consume, asking if this is something we would want. Even if we regard the benefits of, say, alcohol or tobacco, as something good for a purpose of ours, the culture surrounding any drug is designed to protect criminal elements, and this alliance was always encouraged by aristocracy. These perverse incentives do not exist because of mere ignorance or guilt of those who lack probity, as if each were an individual occurrence. Many of the addicts beg to leave their addiction, only to be kicked down if they ever rise, as the game necessitates this behavior, which itself is an addiction and vice that is glorified and valued. The effects of all of this have always been known to be deleterious to society as a whole, and beneficial only to people who would in a saner world either be suppressed or put down for insolence. For the most part, humanity does act on its better instincts to alleviate the worst of these incentives, whether the ruling ideas or any theory suggests there can be a way out. For life to endure at all, let alone society, many such vices are counteracted without resorting to any imperious violence. The exacerbation of vice is accompanied by the thrill of said imperious violence, which itself becomes another perverse incentive and the most deleterious of them all. It is not a surprise that the Right and especially the Nazis reveled in every perversion and insist all men and women must glorify all venality in all things, and they can't not be this. Anyone moving to stop this, even in the most minor way, must be denounced as - hilariously enough - "fascists", while fascists have always made clear their alliance with vice and rot is foundational to their political agenda, and politicans across the board understand the value of their alliance with vice.

This does not make the economic task "contradictory", in the sense that it is an unworkable morass. Economics will happen regardless of our conception of it, and there will always be this fear. The solutions to it were never in economics, but in moral philosophy and a choice for us to reject economics outside of its proper purview. We would engage in economic life to meet our needs for sustenance and security, and view all other activity as a surplus that allowed us to pursue what we really wanted, by knowledge, labor, or our interest in silly symbols for whatever reason. The former two impugn on the latter three, and the latter three can see the former two as assets to be used. The economic problem is at heart not a problem of knowledge or information, but of moral choices. Much of what we attribute to economic failure is really not about a resource shortage or a material threat to a security at all, but a choice that was made. Economics merely concerned logistics of making the malice of others a realized thing, or any effort that would act against it in the world. We cannot seal ourselves off from the world in the way a rational actor must in order to hold any virtue, without an expenditure to meet that requirement. The expenditure ultimately is spent not on trying to push the material world to make our preferred vision of humanity real, or changing the world to force humans to be better. The chief agent of interest is not the things humans manipulate, but the humans themselves. That is, humans concern themselves primarily with controlling and influencing other humans, and the environment is in total an externality, no matter how much we depend on it and how much material conditions influence our lives. Even in savage conditions, humans are willful actors and had to be in order for their behavior to exceed impulses no better than the prey they hunted, and this took effect long before any imagined Prometheus dropped a black cube or monolith to give us all the right ideas.

In principle, the economic problem concerns the world as a whole, and so there is an age old answer that is always suggested - "if you don't like it here, you can get out". This is obviously not possible at any point by the nature of the economic need of security and the temporality of actual bodies, but in principle, nothing stops us from refusing to play and finding some part of the world where this game is not played, or where keeping one's head down is possible to live what life can be lived. This is the strategy for the vast majority of humanity, and in a roundabout way it was the strategy of most rulers when they could afford it. Rulers, like anyone else, only do as much as they need to continue ruling, and this is typically good for them. Rulers trying to hard to make the world work in accord with their conceits not only fail and look like idiots doing so, but raise suspicion among their peers and among the commoners who see that whatever great plan an aristocrat has now, it's probably a bad one for everyone. The same is true of the typical ideologue, zealot, or slimeball on a power trip who finally thinks he or she is something. They make plans that usually go far away from the source of the problem, because facing the situation is far too much for any one person. No one fights the world, and very often they can't fight city hall which is just a building with a few local assholes running what amounts to a crime syndicate that calls itself the government. You can't fight city hall, but most people live without being detected by it, as they have long been able to largely ignore any government of humanity unless they're prominent enough to be worth notice. In the end it turns out the only thing that protected humanity was the limited means of any institution to invade the actual lives of human beings, rather than any virtue of their institutional representation of the person. The state and anything else clearly had no regard for any institutional pretense that impeded doing whatever felt good in the utilitarian moral sense. Institutions are cursed to favor the utility of whatever is expedient to perpetuate their existence. It is humans that are moral actors in their genuine knowledge and understanding, rather than institutions ever making men good or even decent. The world itself had a sobering effect, but the institutions that sought to declare they were nature personified and claimed this natural monopoly had the exact opposite effect. What keeps the peace today is not any virtue of institutions or the human beings, so much as it is a desperate determination to not do what all of the dominant ideas humanity permits tell us to do. If anyone followed to the letter and the spirit any of the ideologies permitted, mankind and the world would truly be lost. It is because there is a world outside of "society" as such that the actual humans can escape, even if their person is marked for elimination and passes its taint to the body wherever we may go. So long as there is something outside of the reach of machines, those who seek to arrest the world will always sense a disturbance in the Force. Since economics cannot choose to make its rules essentially different in different spaces or for different classes, a new concept would have to displace economics, while economics was depreciated and used only to justify finance at the large scale and microeconomic decisions at the personal and local level. The micro-economic decisions concern themselves more with the analysis of systems and their manipulation, which have been discussed at length in this writing and are of further interest to us; but the analysis of systems ultimately concerns operations of things we regard as real or virtual systems we treat as real. Finance has always owed more to political thought than economics proper, and economics as a discipline is born because it was possible to bring finance in line with this operational research that began as machines and knowledge became general. Not only could operations be harnessed in a way that was previously impossible, but interests in society would asset the wealth, authority, and ability they possessed whether any such alliance existed or not. For the economic problem to be truly solved required its development into ecology, and the introduction of natural science and biopolitics to the economic problem not just as a condition economic decisions were made in, but as a concern unto themselves. This is where biology rises to become the greater doctrine over the humanities and moral philosophy in the liberal order of society.

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