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So far we have considered the division of labor as a number of sentiments regarding rank, prestige, favoritism, and the symbols of property of individuals in society, and we have considered the distinct functions that would be present in any society where economic behavior is acknowledged and deliberately pursued. These functions are not at first divided by person, but by the acts themselves. The prestige of the agents is itself of no consequence to the functions, for the society must do these things for reasons which are outside of any sentiment, or they are part of the reality of existence. The functions would be carried out even in the absence of society as such. Individual humans extract from the world, allocate their basic labor, develop that labor, consider exchange with anything else that could be exchanged with, must fight, develop formal understandings, and suffer, for reasons that are not intrinsically social or even economic. Nothing about those functions suggests that any division of labor is truly necessary beyond recognition that those are functions carried out. It is only in abstraction that those functions take on the role of institutions and then classes within a domain we call "society". None of these institutions or classes has an existence outside of human agents which insist that they must exist. They arise instead because there are people who believe they can abstract the sum total of wealth in an ecosystem and allocate it in some scheme that makes sense to them. Even if this scheme only exists in the imagination of someone, it is entirely possible to conceive of doing this, and then spend real effort to force the scheme to command the world, or some part of it. We would need to do this to function as an economic agent, and this serves some function for navigating the world. We would have sought to mitigate the invasion of the economic or the political into the rest of existence if this were intended to serve some physically necessary purpose, but the reasons for classes and institutions was never a necessity. It did not require much knowledge to consider a world without classes as such, and where institutions were limited to a purview deemed appropriate to meet the needs of its participants. For much of human existence, there are no classes as such, nor any primitive analogue suggesting classes should exist or are desirable. Institutions are almost entirely small-scale and limited in scope, and do not consume the lives of primitive humans in the way institutions in settled society are designed to consume the life-force of men and women. Even when classes exist, the struggle between them is often in name only. When push comes to shove, the class war would give way to necessity. The aim of those who hold the insitutions ruling a class, or ruling subordinated classes, has been to make sure any necessity that would temporarily halt the class war never happens, so the interests of the institution override anything that would lead someone to question the institution's existence. If the institution doubts itself, humans are left with their raw faculties which would find the institutions distasteful, and the existence of humans individually would be a miserable and small one. Human in their genuine associations, seen as a physical force rather than an abstractly managed mass, would still just be a bunch of men and women and their machines, buildings, and so on, which do not match the pretenses of institutions and empires. While this inevitably does assert itself in the end, institutions perceive their longevity stems from one source only - command of knowledge as a process, such that only the correct ideas are taught and ideas become pseudo-physical agents. Things conjured by some mind trick become more real than the physical world, and must supplant that more base world if the institution is to survive. Through this, the agents of the institution find a source to obtain wealth for free, and see the perpetuation of the institution's thought form as the true perpetuation of themselves. As mortals, they would only extend as far as their bodies allow them to live and act, and would only be able to spread in some sense to their biological offspring. Since genetic legacy doesn't actually count as an innate purpose to life without ideology suggesting that we exist for that purpose, a human being alone in the world would have little relevance, and would content him- or herself with whatever inner space and immediate surroundings they may find themselves in. This existence could be tolerable or even preferable, but if they remain unaware of institutional conspiracy, then those who command the institutions would effectively lord over those who are ignorant of institutions and their traps. It is the desire of those who command institutions that claim knowledge as their own to keep the ruled ignorant of institutional schemes for as long as possible, until the institutions can defend themselves with force and deliver their proclaimations as a fait accompli to the ruled. The rulers always envision themselves a step ahead of the ruled, and are never reactive. The moment the rulers are reactive is the moment they have already conceded that they will be supplanted by rebels in the near future. No ruling class or institution has ever been passive, and could not be. The claim that states are passive settlements is among the earliest great lies, and never a credible one. It is a lie told with utter contempt for the ruled, always with a hint of humiliation and violence if the ruled refuse to agree to this social contract.

Taken by themselves, the functions are not worth anything. These functions are never concrete things, but abstractions concerning large groupings of events which serve those aims. The particular objects in the world, particular people who comprise the motive labor power, their skills and tools and any machines in society, the tokens of exchange, the machines and men deployed in war, the archives of written knowledge, and the suffering of people in a real sense, are each individual events and do not intrinsically have anything to do with each other. If these functions were viewed in the abstract as general rules of the world, then every function would in principle have no boundary regulating it, nor would the functions intrinsically be in conflict. All of them would build off of each other as the sense anyone would have about the world, and would be necessary to speak of any one function being effective in the world. Everyone who fights, writes, and trades must engage in labor and build machines appropriate to the task, and all are creatures motivated in part by suffering or the avoidance of suffering. If someone were trying to mind their own business and did not suffer or wish suffering on others, a malevolent actor can easily choose to change that. All things, including the constitution of the human beings who become people, are drawn from the environment in some way, and the bodies of living agents are themselves a part of some environment. There is no natural law suggesting that the bodies of humans are tied to any "ecology" or bound by economics in any way. The actual gathering of sustenance does not require managerial intent to tell us how to breathe, eat, or think. All that describing these functions can do is suggest there is a way to unite all that could be construed as fulfilling them by some metric that allows comparison. The functions cannot be compared to each other directly, in that so much labor is worth so much substance of the world or so much money or so much research. Within the function, though, everything fulfilling that function can be tallied and compared against a common reference point. Which may be chosen may vary based on the systematization of knowledge pertaining to it. In a cruder time, the world might be summarized as so much timber, mining output, arable land, fresh water, and so on, and a science might be able to compare those resources from their source. All of that which was construed as "the world" in ancient times was the product of the land, which was claimed and divided into lots. In modern times, a science would seek to describe all physical matter and energy with chemistry and physics, and suggest that all of that matter is comprised of common substances which would be extracted from some space, and could be produced by various reactions, so that carbon could be transmuted in some way to another element. Some scheme by which different elements may be compared within a function is proposed by the nature of that function. This is done not because the utilities of each different element are fixed in nature, but because the existence of physical substance is a fact that must be abided, and the substances available are what they are. Those who covet some land must be able to compare two lots of land with very different resources and determine which would be more valuable. Even if the value of this function would be contingent on what can be done with labor, scientific knowledge, accumulated capital, social arrangement, what can be claimed by force, and what all who labor would be pushed to accept that is against their interests, all of those functions operate independently in order to be properly distinguished, and do not intrinsically have anything to do with each other. To the world, all that we would labor for is just another physical act in the environment. To labor and the craftsman, the world is not particularly important, as labor can conceive of making do with whatever environment it must live in. The act of knowledge accumulation in formal institutions has nothing to do with the actual accumulation of skills and machines that constitute what we consider today to be capital of one sort or another. We can consider the formulation to "unify" these functions as follows:

Extractive: The world is comprised of numerous elements, which abide laws of physics that lead to formations that are common, such as stars, planets, mountains, continents, oceans, and so on. All of these constructs are comprised of physical elements and compounds which we can understand, which have a common origin in substance and energetic actions found in nature. We are aware of the energy contained in physical matter and what it would cost to convert one substance we would extract for another, if we were to consider directly transmuting the substances as we know them to exist. None of this requires us to consider the labor costs or upkeep, which is variable and never confined to a bare minimum that can be treated as a natural law. We presume that even without machinery or a theory as to how substances can be transmuted or energy harnessed from natural forces, that this is possible in principle. If it weren't, we would have to introduce essentialism into our understanding of physics or chemistry, when there is no evidence that this is the case. Even if we were to accept that there are distinct essences in the world which are not transmutable to another by any possible process - the natural equivalent of God creating something so heavy He could not lift it - this didn't stop humans from suggesting that we could compare these processes' worth in a managerial scheme. Here we would run into the first problem of reducing the extraction of natural wealth to a single metric, in that this transubstatiation is not trivial and likely impossible in the sense that anything could be made into anything else without absurd energy costs that make doing this highly impractical. It would further be impossible if it were found that certain laws of physics can never, ever be overcome - if for example it was physically impossible to travel faster than light, or for certain types of matter to exist. This is a problem more for our theories of the world than the world itself, where chemical and physical processes would have had to allow for the creation of any element we observe, and for those elements to interact with each other. We can call all the product that is extractable from the Earth essentially the same thing, or divide it into areas that use similar equipment and labor. Agriculture, mining, drilling for oil, fishing, and so on all extract something from the land, and no force on Earth will make the land produce infinite wealth. The output from a plot of land is not fixed in the sense that crop yields will always be the same regardless of technology. Labor must plow the fields and harvest the crops, and the seeds, tools, fertilizer, and so on are types of capital which would have some effect on what the land may yield, or can replenish the resources of the Earth. The claim of those who would rule through extractive economies is that they alone can manage the world's natural wealth and conserve it correctly, and this is the chief conceit of aristocracy, even though aristocrats are notoriously incompetent at managing the Earth and the actual maintenance of land is delegated to workers, waste management teams of the lowest class, scientists, and officers stuck with a desultory task that they have little interest of protecting. In the main, the land is conserved not by any great mind and certainly not the aristocracy. The world is instead preserved out of a sense in us that we would not despoil the thing that allows us to actually live in the first place, and because in the end, the world will reject efforts to make it do what it cannot or that which is abomination. The latter usually entails a lot of death and suffering, which aristocracies always encourage since it falls on anyone but them. It is more the former that wins out, because most people, contrary to every conceit of aristocracy and their managerial lackies, know not to allow shit to fill their homes and will eventually clean it.^[1]

Basic Labor: So far as labor has any value in-of-itself, it is valuable not as a social relation or as the bare minimum cost of maintaining it, but the motive force labor entails. Here, the qualities of labor in the abstract have been separated and treated as skilled labor, leaving behind the motive force itself which is understood as the object of interest in nature. The motive force of labor is not a mere substance sitting in situ to be released by managerial will. Labor is only realized when it is active, and it can only be released in particular ways. The motive force of machines on their own, like that of an engine or electrical generator, substitutes for basic labor, but is something that can only be channeled in ways the machines will allow. The human laborer in this light is viewed as another machine, and not one with unlimited potential. The advantage a human brings is that they are mobile and bring so much machinery at a cost of nearly nothing, since the machine maintains itself to arrive ready to work the next day. The particular machines are considered a kind of craftsmanship or capital, rather than the machine being itself the energy output of labor. The result of viewing labor in the abstract has been to shift to the view of human labor and the human itself as a lump of utility. In this way, all of the machinery, knowledge, spirit, and soul of the human is subsumed into a drive to generate more man-power, like driving a horse or any other beast of burden. This is also evident in the way many a liberal speak of automation with zealous enthusiasm, as this is the great cargo cult of the neoliberal period. Anyone who has to work with this automation process and computerization can tell you the drive for automation is entirely a liberal fantasy, divorced from any real process of economic worth, but that was not the point. The point was to recapitulate the same aristocratic idea that everything else in society will be made invisible, and that people will be made just another part of the land to be extracted, like so much metal or agricultural crop is extracted. The Road to Serfdom was a guide, and this is most true of the idiotic bastard that wrote the book. Above all, the aim of the aristocrat is to claim, in typical contradictory fashion, that the aristocrat defines what is and is not valuable labor, and at the same time, basic labor - from which all others would be derived, including his own - does not exist as a real thing operating in real conditions. For this to work, labor in the abstract must be divorced from its raw form, which is truly little more than horsepower, and interpreted as something else. That may be the social relation which is represented by a wage or a deed granting a slave to an owner, or an account in some registry that sees in the human an asset to be exploited in all possible ways. It may simply devolve the relation to an equivalent of money or some substance that is not the actual motive force of labor, but a token that is completely alien to the laborer or labor itself. It may do even worse and replace the toil and sweat of labor with a grand theory and ideology suggesting that labor's sacrifice is commanded by God, or the state, or the spirit of revolution, or Daddy Trump exhorting any idiot following him to give up their money to the stupidest cult of personality in human history. It will inevitably reduce basic labor to one thing and settle on it as the final contradictory form - that human labor is suffering and nothing more. That suffering does not move anything in the world at all as a force unto itself, and usually retards the motive force of labor or anything that would substitute for it. Yet, by the same alchemy that allows aristocrats to do as they do, suffering to glorify aristocracy, encouraged by the aristocracy in all ways, is identified with basic labor and the lowest class, even when the laborer did not see himself as a member of the lowest class or really consider class his concern at all. The basic laborer might have been a man who not long ago had both the dignity of being a workman and a man with property, who could very well fight for himself and had enough knowledge to know he's been lied to. The aim of aristocracy is to engineer every no-win scenario to substitute the motive force of labor or anything like it with a vision of the world arrested in time, conforming to aristocratic will and nothing else.

Skilled Labor and Machinery: Here, machines and "human capital" - the skills of any laborer - are taken to be the same thing. The comparison between then is the study of operations, rather than the material being of the machines or the formal science which would present principles by which machinery would be generalized. All of the machines involved are effectively "dead labor" - that is, they are the product of labor that is at some level construed as simple and undifferentiated. There is no reward for the laborer to acquire this machinery, whether it is in the form of any skills or tools or machines owned by any means, from the point of view of basic labor. It may be interpreted as a multiplier of basic labor's motive power, but only so far as the machines produce more quantity of a force, and this is a limited application. A tool may be more efficient at producing quantity in some way, but even here, it is not that the horsepower of the laborer is improved mechanically. Usually an increase in the rate of production is won not by expending more energy, but by using the same energy more efficiently - for example, replacing hand-operated hammers with machine tools, which do not wear or exhaust like a human executing repetitive motions, and would properly designed be built with a sense of mechanical efficiency. The chief aim of mechanization is not to produce greater quantity at all, but to produce qualities that were not possible with previous technology. The same applies to the skillsets of laborers themselves. The aim is not to do the same thing but bigger, but to produce new types of things which are useful for reasons that are not a linear progression of force or "usefulness" for another purpose. The value of the dead labor is not truly the cost expended to create it from basic labor, time, and raw material. Once created, the skilled labor and capital is by itself "worthless" in that regard, if it is not deployed for some other function. The value of machinery and skilled labor to the laborer is what this machinery can do, and among the ways this is gauged is to sell the skilled labor or machines to willing buyers. That is not the only way it can be valued, for the laborers themselves have lives and purposes for any machine they use, and their own bodies and everything about them beyond mere existence are among the machines, which wear and tear just as any other machine does.

Operations are never in service to a singular function or even a combination of functions outside of the operations. It is well established that operations must follow from other operations to complete any complex task and assemble any machine beyond the most basic. And so, the valuation of operations is best described by a theory of systems, however that may be construed. There would be a way to assemble knowledge of functions and events and sense what it would take to assemble a machine that is novel. Assessing this cost is not something done by the other functions on their own. Only those who work with the machines will really know what needs to be done to realize the result. Those who rely on a theory in formal writing and then insist reality must conform to the theory will never accomplish anything, and those who are actually qualified to write about science are not the cloistered academics but those who work with machines and the natural world - that is to say, laborers are the true scientists, and aristocrats are the last people with any true claim to science. The university is presented as a religious institution and a false conflict between religion and science is presented. The true nature of the university, and institutions like it, is that they are strongholds of aristocracy. Because it has been the state of formal knowledge and education to never allow the classes tasked with productive industry or agriculture to formulate philosophies of science, the world where science returns to its proper authority with knowledge of what was developed in the past few centuries is far removed from how we are trained to view science and operations. Operations are instead viewed through the demands of monetary exchange and the management of finance, or the interests of aristocratic scholars and mystics, or the needs of war. Rarely, they are viewed only as an assemblage of basic labor, and skilled laborers are treated like the basic laborers who were turned into a suffering class or threatened with that status and presumed to be "invalid until proven innocent", which is never really allowed as security. Skilled labor is able to secure its position because, while unskilled and basic labor is common and seen in the main as a mass of population to be fed from, skilled labor is not so freely reproducible, and labor has historically shown little interest in sharing knowledge for all of the reasons that make sense. Where unskilled labor has no bargaining position, skilled labor does, and in principle every basic labor possesses some skill, some quality, that is inherent in the constitution of people. The presumption of a baseline for a given society of "unskilled labor" is a fallacy, because the floor for potentially useful labor is far below the median for a society. Someone barely functional who can push a cart or be made into a useful machine is as good as someone with far more potential if the task is limited to pushing carts. It is this conflict which was played up by aristocracy to ensure the defeat of the collective working class.^[2] Nothing about this process truly played out "behind the backs of the producers". Inherent to the concept of the industrial capitalist workplace was an interest in operations. No capitalist, just like anyone else who acts in the interests of a state, is a passive lump that is unaware of how his money has been deployed. Those who work on behalf of the capitalist to manage operations will always demonstrate greater loyalty to the capitalist than the subordinated workers, for the manager of operations is himself among the bourgeois and likely holds some stock to be a capitalist himself as part of his contract. The workers down the line which plan operations are always aware of what workers do, or seek to be aware as much as possible. The workplace being an ecology commanded by the capitalist would mean that the overseer of operations would know much about what workers are doing, and in every event, someone paying for skilled labor would be interested in the quality of that labor and product. Never is the capitalist a slave to the pursuit of coin alone. The coin is a means to various ends, and so too are the qualities produced. No capitalist is going to allow something to exist which undermines his property in an obvious way, and no clever conspiracy will always outsmart the witless ruling order which is blind to all, as the narrative of every pseudo-revolutionary cult proclaims. This stupid, pernicious belief of faux-revolutionaries has always been advanced precisely because it is so ineffective at understanding operations, either for industry or for the supposed revolution which will happen any day now.

It is easily forgotten that at the end of the day, the utility of products for the interests of life's power over life - which include different types of people and specialization of functions in society - are the only reason productivity is tolerated at all by the ruling order. None of the products created exist to fulfill basic wants, out of a sense that doing this was nice or because the purpose of labor is to give things to others as a gratuity. None of the products are created simply because product will translate to coin by some mysterious alchemy. The exchange of commodities proceeds because the holder of money found something useful in them, even if we may think that judgement is dubious. With the wealth of capitalist economies focused on a class of property holders who are notoriously tight-fisted, and the existence from the start of large interests like the trading companies, natural monopolies like power companies, and state interest in building railroads and everything a modern state would want, it would be very strange to think the production of qualities proceeds for only the most crass motives, as if the product were intended to go nowhere. The creation of "null product" intended to waste resources is not done mindlessly. The products to be wasted are often weapons of war, or indulgences intended to degenerate the will of those who buy them. Their creation is in of itself a testament to the true heart of capitalist motives, and their share of the market is not some mistake but something inherent to the entire project of British free trade. The Empire would not be anything without dealing opium around the world, and this was a scandal very early in the era of industrial capitalism. Nothing is produced thoughtlessly or without regard to how the product could be used against the masters. The moment any product escapes its intended purview, that product will be banned or brought under the control of the ruling interest. For the most part, there are few products which would truly threaten the ruling interest. Guns are useless without an army that is determined to use them against states with many more armed men and a will to fight with the backing of the state's legal monopoly on violence. Even if the rulers fear a revolt, most of the world had done everything needed to disarm mass movements, and specifically encouraged gun ownership among those who would fight to defend the ruling order. The production of guns serves the interests of rulers who can usually control who is allowed to keep and bear arms, and those who would strike back are as a rule denied and such right, either by some invented pretext or because there isn't a concept of any "right to self defense", which was never a right explicitly guaranteed by any state in human history nor one that could be realistically enforced or interpreted. When the lower classes do possess weapons, it has been easy for the ruling interest to stoke intercine violence and especially to turn the guns on the lowest class, who usually don't have the money to buy guns and are denied access not merely by poverty but by a long-standing taboo against the lowest class showing any initiative or backbone, which is the most ancient taboo of the human race for reasons we have already made apparent. This stupid, naive theory of "mindless producers" always assumes that states are pathologically passive and will not lift a finger to defend themselves. This is at odds with any government that is a going concern, which will pass laws regularly to address security, and at odds with the state which has always acted beyond any limits set on it and would always do so as a matter of course. This stupid theory is the pet of cloistered anarchist retards, and they are retarded, who think that everyone else will be honorable and they alone will transgress decency. It is easy for these people to think they have a monopoly because the eugenic creed has declared such a monopoly on transgression, and ensures laws and enforcement are subordinated to the creed in all things. That monopoly is only possible because it is protected by a tremendous command of force and zealous control over operations.^[3]

Where these operations are oriented ultimate answers not to a theory or management, but to spiritual authority, which is the topic of the next chapter. As this is the proper authority which can speak to labor with any seriousness, and skilled labor is identified here with the interest in life which would spur labor's development, it is difficult to suggest any hard rule compelling the value of one operation over another. Generally speaking, though, the operations that are common in any society are known not just to the laborers themselves, but the people at large. Most people are aware of the professions that exist in a society and their associated operational tasks. They are aware of what a medical doctor does to be a doctor, and for much of history, medical care is delivered not by university experts with a state-protected monopoly that punishes transgressors with jail time, but people without any great prestige and whatever knowhow was needed to fix broken body parts. It is not too difficult to understand why one skill is valued over another without needing to believe there is some ulterior interest or function that the different value must serve. Operations are not figments of the imagination, but things which are realized every day, and must be realized in sequence to complete a full chain of operations that would create a product or some service of note. Humans are not so stupid that they cannot figure out the overall cost of getting to point A or point B. These operations are never entirely fixed in nature as a course of action, as new knowledge and machines will modify what is possible, what is desirable, and so on. All of this is properly in the realm of operations. The latter four functions I describe do not produce anything real at all. Money and exchange produce nothing on their own, as we will see. War obviously produces nothing. Scholarship as a rule disdains production and favors occulting knowledge within a select group. Suffering obviously produces nothing, and though it is not associated with any class for the same reason the world as a whole is not truly the property of any class, the suffering disciplinary function is transferred to basic labor, which on its own is considered an inchoate blob. In all of these disciplinary functions, they are carried out in the end by operates just as productive labor would be. Financial institutions must do things to regulate the exchange of money, as would anyone handling money as a tool. War, education, the rites of academia, and the infliction of suffering are all operations. The suffering itself, if it is an agony caused by no particular malevolent actor, operates in ways that are comprehensible, but that it is a taboo to acknowledge too plainly if it is decreed that certain classes exist to suffer. In the main, labor as a class has no interest in upholding the disciplinary functions at all. Labor has always maintained a sense of what is valuable operationally, because it had to in order to do its daily work. So far as the disciplinary functions are recognized by labor, it is because laborers are not "pure laborers" but men and women with wants like anyone else and leverage to get what they want, even if they must claw it from the institutions. Labor has to engage with the disciplinary functions because it cannot wish them away, but if it must acknowledge their existence, it considers their institutions and interests to be antagonistic and would insist on limiting their influence on the affairs of labor. It is labor and democracy that sees the rule of institutions as a danger to be checked, rather than the good will of aristocrats claiming they will govern honestly and cleanly. Labor does this not out of some high-minded sense of justice, nor out of a sense that they're trying to rip off the Man, but because the disciplinary forces had been active against the laborer before labor could organize independent countermeasures. The corruption of monied influences on labor's quality and the products available does not require a philosopher to understand, as if workers actually liked seeing their paycheck shrink and forking over tokens of ostensible money which are never theirs for long, that are only useful because the products of labor are put behind a paywall and every worker has to operate in that arrangement rather than one labor would have chosen in a better world. Aristocracy has no interest in opposing those things, but instead places its own institutions and education in a world that is sacrosanct. In principle, the aristocracy is immune to the influences of money, because aristocracy commands the bank and can direct institutions to grant to aristocracy an "I win" button, which was invoked in 2008 and 2020. The only thing the aristocrat doesn't like is that doing this through disciplinary functions other than the infliction of suffering cannot be done without consequences. The aristocrat cannot change the laws of motion of currency in the hands of everyone, or the fortunes of war. The aristocrat cannot surrender the integrity of the university too much without destroying its credibility among their own kind if intellectual dishonesty becomes too rampant for the university to be anything other than an aristocratic club of pissants and failures. The only truly reliable friend of the aristocrat is a willingness to make others suffer and grant to the aristocracy sacrosanctity which allows them and them alone to live in a world without the torture machine.

Exchange: The unifying value of exchange is very simple - currency, which has been in use for centuries. Without currency, notation of debts, credits, honorability in the form of credit scores, and various devices are suggested, which all converge on something that accounts for what is really an ethical view of behavior that can be tokenized and represented by currency units. When tokenized and distributed, the coin or whatever unit operates on its own, just as a written word committed to paper is dead and outside of the control of the author. The deadness of the currency is necessary for the exchange function to be universalized by currency; but if there were no reliable coin, there would still be a sense of balance of debits and credits, and a sense of what would be necessary to write off debts and the consequences to the treasury. Different currencies are presumed to be exchangeable.

We of course speak of the currency within a contained ecosystem as we have defined. There is no way to guarantee that some token would be confined to the country of origin, but currency controls may prohibit the use of foreign coin, regulate trade with foreign entities, and so on. States, financial institutions, and ordinary people have a lot of reasons to desire economic life to be insulated from external agents, especially when dealing with much larger countries which are wealthier and would overrun a weaker society by flooding it with money. We cannot presume that the inhabitants of a given ecosystem see themselves as patriotic subjects, but there is a general sense that exchange escaping an ecosystem leads to bad things. Another consequence of trade balance would be the wealth of a country frittered away on foreign luxuries, and so the money tokens do not need to invade like soldiers or a contagion; instead, the tokens of one country can be spent on something like opium, thus sending both wealth to the aliens, and weakening the resolve of the country in preparation for an escalation. The trade policy can operate in the other direction, where trade advantages are played up and coin becomes a useful diplomatic tool. The same policies for a state can apply to lower ecologies on similar principles. Generally, though, a given ecosystem seeks to internalize its basic economic functions and avoid dependence on foreign entities, or if it enters into outside trade, the trade is regulated in some way. Those who command a given ecosystem would be in a position to game trade to favor their command, more than any value of the coin itself. That command of the ecosystem may be the command of a comprador who wishes to sell his country out, or a petty lord looking to defect, or a city block paying tribute to the new Don or some gang lord. The effective compradors understand that even if they move to a new lord, they will be looking to the next betrayal and always look out for number one, themselves.

Since foreign trade is outside of our purview I would leave it, but it is important to note that money is not the sole way in which economic policy will affect another ecosystem. Money does not have a spiritual monopoly on the communication of economic information, and a frequent difficulty of money is that it is actually a very poor communicator of any value except the professed value of money itself by the institutions that issue it and loan it out. Money have the advantage of being explicitly a token of exchange, whereas the exchange of other things is implied in more convoluted ways. In principle, though, money for its own sake is the most meaningless thing that exists, and is more meaningless than war which is saying a lot. Every exchanger of money is conscious of what that money intends to purchase, whatever that may be. Even without exchange, anyone looking at economic activity is looking at events that are happening. The smart merchants have never fetishized money for a single moment, and make investment decisions based on rational payoffs of events. In effect, the smart merchant is a shrewd gambler and usually much more than that. Only a fool fetishizes "risk" as something to seek.^[4] The smart merchants, like the smart gamblers, always seek to mitigate risks, first by playing the odds and avoiding anything but choices which are close to 100% win, and then by playing all opponents so that anything that would be risky is negated by some prestige or the sheer size of the money bin. Enough has been written about finance that I need not repeat that here. The common reference of currency has always been recognized as a proxy for everything else, for the interest of institutions which can command money and a general sense that exchange becomes a political and moral practice rather than exchange of the things people do.

Fighting and Deception: The common thread of all fighting is a sense of what is effective to attain victory. "Victory" here is not defined in the way a naive observer of war would be taught, for the objectives of violence and war are not to offer a fair fight or an epic struggle. There is a vast science and game theory where there is any struggle resolved by violence or deception, and to a crude mind, this is taken as the purpose of life. It is not a very worthwhile purpose, but it will exist any time the disciplinary function of choice is violence. Deception is carried out with no less a sense of victory and the thrill of domination that is inherent to the cult of war, which becomes a purpose unto itself. It is only beholden to any condition of winning that allows it to flourish, rather than an objective metric that labor or common sense would value. This will be written of later in this book when the practices of war and its social function are described. All such fighting is beholden to a condition outside of the participants which allows them to fight, and all fighting consumes resources and leaves behind offal that is judged of no value to the war. Because the language of war infuses human society from an early stage, other functions are subsumed most commonly by the function of war, and the warriors are always the ever-ready tools of aristocracy.

Scholarship: The common thread of scholars is the method by which their formalism spreads, which is to say, education. There is always in an ecosystem one and only one "real" education, to which all others are implicitly compared. It is this which allows the "grand system" of ecology to be established as a formal theory, rather than a mere assumption. The universal standard is then defined by the will of academics, who are in principle not beholden to anything but their own world, a world apart from material concerns. All other functions exist to parasitically feed the Academy and university, and the intellectuals form the elite in this ecological view. Naturally, this is the preferred domain of aristocracy, however education is conducted in a given society. Before the establishment of cities, the favored warriors and those "in the know" enforce their aristocracy through fear and ignorance, and thus begins humanity's full transition to a demonic race, from its sordid origins in ritual sacrifice and the terror of savage existence. If not for this, then the scholar is concerns with the mechanisms of learning and the transmission of knowledge just as the laborer would be, for scholarship is itself a type of labor rather than something actually existing above the world. The same is true of the merchants and warriors, whose work has to abide the conditions labor would face, and so all are beholden in some way to versions of science, and will seek to command science and spiritual authority. The formalization of doctrine is the preference of those whose work is in establishing education. Everyone else sees education correctly as a threat to their genuine learning.

Suffering: The ecosystem cannot be enforced without acts of suffering to suggest that the confinement of agents is natural. Without this suffering - for life-forms which are not disciplined by this function which is particular to animal life - life would travel wherever it needs to acquire its genuine sustenance, and the natural limitations of its movement and its preferences would be asserted, if needed. Animal life shows territorial interest, but this territorial interest exists not by an immutable instinct, but because the shortest path to food is through community and the establishment of colonies of life. Traveling alone in the wild is likely to end badly and likely to not result in anything particularly good. Very likely, the sociality of humans and their close relatives encourages members of a community to scout and report their findings, and only out of necessity do people embrace solitude. That necessity arises early because they see without great investigation that humanity is essentially created evil and cannot be trusted for the simplest things, but the territoriality of humans often exists at first because doing this is easier. When antagonistic relations in close quarters intensifies - when settled society forms - it becomes necessary to lock down the city and the village and make it into an ecological construct. The same is true of factories, households, farms, and every other parcel of space which must be commanded and controlled to be utilized. If humans could come and go based on their need or want to maintain a city, the structure of every space we create would be very different. We see even today the existence of the commons and shared spaces, and bourgeois rights of the city are still mostly held in principle. The test of what is done to the lowest class is the vanguard of aristocracy's desire to choke the life out of cities and the whole world.

How is suffering universalized? It can only be done by supplanting the genuine material world, where suffering is an inconvenience and something of little importance, with an entirely subjective world where sense experience and suffering are paramount and take on existential importance. This is what many of the aristocratic spiritual authorities do, in one way or another, and became a moral philosophy. There is no way to claim that suffering is truly "natural" or would be assigned any great weight at all. We would, if we were free, acknowledge that suffering exists and will discipline our behavior, without glorifying it or suggesting suffering should be maximized. If we did that, then we would not merely encounter the products of society as what we wanted in the first place. We would reject ecology altogether as a beast that is ultimately aristocratic in origin, and we would instead seek to consider all of the spaces in which we can live, and humanity could in theory live in something like happiness for the first time in its sorry existence.

It is through suffering that ecologies are created in a way humans manage them, and also through suffering that the final imposition onto other ecosystems is understood. And so, all functions, which serve legitimate aims, are twisted to serve suffering and their opposite. The education of aristocracy concerns the destruction of knowledge, where education is intended to fail students at high rates and lies profusely about the very nature of its institution. War and fighting, which can be understood as an unpleasant but necessary evil, is instead glorified to become the prime want of the enablers of aristocracy, where the generals, officers, and grunts are assigned desultory tasks to feed the parasitic aristocracy, and aristocratic values are reproduced in the warrior class to show dubious leadership. Technology is made to serve further suffering and the ruling sciences only. Labor is made to toil solely for the promise of future exploitation. Above all, a lowest class is designated whose function is purely to suffer, and in this way, the subject in society is ruled primarily by the image of what worse fate may occur for noncompliance. There is no other basis for a society to be converted into an ecological niche by force. If this were a matter of any tendency in life, it would be clear that any such barriers are unnecessary when they are nothing but harmful and exist to serve a predatory clique, who offer nothing but the promise of more humiliation and torture and the thrill for doing so. The natural borders of a human society so to speak would not see a city or any territory as something which should enslave them, and people would come and go from the city. When locking away the food and products of society is not enough, the rulers inevitably resort to confining the people, and do so by torturing their genuine existence and replacing it with a parody. Fascism and eugenics took this to its highest form yet known, where the replacement of the world and our true existence with a world of unlimited torture is the only possible world, and all other concepts are inadmissible from birth. In doing so, the thrill of those who have always reveled in torture is maximized, and all other functions exist to serve it.

At first, these functions are only apparent so far as people see them as necessary. We did not exist to be economic actors or locked into any ecology, and all of these functions give way to that which we would truly desire. The world is the source of all that we could consider good or morally worth pursuing, however we perceive that. There is nothing "outside of the world" that would be substantive, and even if we were to consider holding to some meager existence and reject the world outside of our immediate space, that small space of our own is recognized as part of a world that we would protect; and in doing so, we would need to retain our native connection to the world, without the mediation of thought leaders and cajolers. No social classes exist in nature, or as a direct consequence of functions. It has long been the case that social classes proper have nothing to do with any genuine function or the private sentiments regarding rank, prestige, and so on. Social classes can only exist when they hold institutions, and whatever the tendencies of people or the conceits they hold about what the world ought to be, these institutions are ultimately constructed from materials in the world and the basic motive force of those who labor to turn the raw material into a machine which makes the institution. The institution then is deployed to transform humans who were at first not sorted into any class into members of some class, either due to membership in institutions or institutional force exerted on people who are tagged with some marker and handled in the manner an institution prefers. The classes never truly exist "in of themselves" or even "for themselves". They are only constituted so long as their institutions actively enforce the existence of the class. Independently, members of the class can do nothing for their class except gripe that the society should conform to their expectations. If someone individually wishes to change the world, they are only able to do so through institutional means. Their labor and any human quality is channeled into an institutional representation. This may be the institutional representation of the individual that is the person, or humans might abase themselves before an institution in which they would exert force collectively. Never are the classes "just so" acting in interests, as if by some incomprehensible force. There is always a motive and mechanisms the members of a class do to make the class real. If this did not happen, then social class would be nothing more than a flimsy conceit and lacks any relevance. Before classes proper can solidify, the institutional basis for the class is constructed, however thinly it is constructed. Only when spiritual authority is associated with large institutions, such as the existence of states, do social classes appear to us as something that appears self-evident. We are attuned to a society where social classes dominate, but the most primitive societies did not entail any distinct classes as such. The rise of class society did not assert suddenly that all men and women were assigned to a particular class, and that class assignment was unassailable and natural. That step to construct social classes can only be finalized as spiritual thought and the state are sufficiently developed, and the humans who were once wild become subjects of institutions which gather at the apex of society. If social class, or any other grouping of humans, is a just-so story based on feelings or a purely surface-level description, then it is not a genuine understanding of social class and worthless for any analysis of society or anything that actually happens. Social classes rise and fall as the conditions humans operate in change with the ages. There are common trends that are inherent to the concept of the political and the economic, but the particular institutions and classes which represent those trends will change as the mechanisms that allow them to be realized change. Property, for example, can refer to common property, private property considered by numerous law codes which adapts to the situation actors find themselves in, public property that is effectively owned by those who hold the state regardless of the pretenses concerning public property, personal property that is understood by custom to be an expectation of anyone who considers themselves free to act, or the property of corporate institutions which is granted sacrosanct status beyond that of either private or public property, and claims to be spiritually superior to the personal property of actual humans. Property is not the sole foundation of states or politics, since what states do entails not just the claims to property or claims of birthright or genesis. The trends of aristocracy, meritocracy, technocracy, democracy, and the necessary rebellion of the lowest class against all such schemes, are suggested by interests life would hold individually and in any social formation we could imagine. The expression of them will vary greatly, and never does one dominate so thoroughly that it would be able to entirely negate the others. In primitive society, would-be aristocrats would never be able to rule, and technocratic polities are unthinkable. What results is a presumed meritocracy and egalitarianism that would be analagous to the sense of democracy that has long been dormant in human society, but also a world in which many are downtrodden and live miserable and small lives, pressed by warring bands to pay tribute and having no choice but to accept a daily quota of raping and pillaging, without any expectation that this will go away. The only thing that is comforting to the lowest class is that a world outside of that is very conceivable, and in the end all conceits of economics and politics are secondary to the need of life to survive. Without any mechanisms to impose a preferred tendency at the level of a confined space, and those mechanisms are never able to operate with the kind of untrammeled might their advocates would like, the true final result, true in all times and places, is that all of these classes and institutions are absurd, yet nonetheless stalk the Earth like some terrible plague.

Any disease originates from causes that can be isolated, and so like any sound medical practitioner, the diagnosis must begin with a view of the anatomy of the patient. That would mean that we have isolated some society that is stuck in an ecology, and we regard for historical reasons that this ecosystem has been established and accepted as a reality for long enough. Where does the need for humans to remain in confined spaces arise? There is, at least faintly, a sense that straying too far from the familiar would lead to suffering or a danger from outside, and that compels people to stay if they doubt what is out there in the world. There may be reasons why people prefer to settle down somewhere and do not want to travel, but if it is accepted that the boundaries of society are fixed, there is something that would restrain people from moving outside of them. The practical difficulties of movement may be noted, for most of us cannot build our own spaceship to leave planet Earth, and traveling far on foot will not be easy or without danger. The first requirement for the formation of persistent institutions would be that the boundaries of society where they could operate has been established. Even if the institutions are presumed to be global in primitive society, "the world" at this time is understood to be a limited space. Man has long understood that they cannot sprout wings to inhabit the skies, and that even if they could fly, all of the sustenance and things allowing men to make tools are found on the land or in the seas. The heavens beyond the sky are even further away, and primitive society would not possess any detailed cartography of the stars let alone a sense of what those distant planets actually are, or the material composition of stars. There were certainly vague speculations about what those entities in the night sky were, and far more speculations about the sun and moon. It still accepted that we would never set foot on them like we would on the Earth, and that much of the Earth was outside of our reach if we are alone. The natural barriers to movement though are less pressing than the social barrier; that is that there is some potential agent like ourselves elsewhere in the world who wouldn't think for a moment that sparing your life meant a thing. We would have enough experience of human hostility in the space we live in, and extrapolate that similar entities in another place would be just as hostile and even more hostile to outsiders. Those who have a good enough thing going where they are would have some space to defend and consider their home, and this instinct runs deep. It is one that slave masters have long deployed to induce slaves to accept their station, since even if a slave escapes, the slave has no home and lives in a world where the order of slavery is presumed operative all around, in one way or another. The best hope for a slave would be to escape to some other tribe or city where slavery has been abolished, or where redemption is possible. In any event, the boundaries in which institutions can form are presumed to be enclosed. The enclosure of the Earth itself is guaranteed not by natural laws but by a general fear and suffering. If not for that, then the natural barriers could be faced as a simple fact and we would out of some sense of decency not want this limited space to be despoiled by our own malice or malice that we know never needed to exist. It is with this fear in mind that all economic actors in this ecological view would think. If the "ecosystem" in question allowed for free movement of people and things, as is the liberal ideal, then natural boundaries of ecosystems may be understood and described, without attaching to the ecosystems any particular moral weight. For example, it would seem reasonable enough to believe the Earth is a single "ecosystem", but this is not going to be accepted by the various nations living on that Earth who weren't consulted about some liberals in Britain deciding the world was ruled by the free market. There really was nothing stopping free trade from existing except the barriers human societies erected against it, and there would be arguments in favor of free trade in principle. There would also be compradors who were eager to switch allegiances to the emerging global empire of capitalism as we know it, and many people in the world who regarded the country they lived in as nothing more than a place.

However the ecosystems are established, there is a primitive sense that humans are able to demarcate them based on fear. If we were to work backwards in history, we would see the origin of settled states as a story of general fear, slavery, deception, malice, lurid cults, and almost entirely bad things. If it were not for that, then the history of humanity would be very different. It would also be far more likely that all nations of mankind would be led by people who see universal peace as necessary, and cults of war would not have intensified but would have been diminished as the clearest danger to anything we would want out of life. If humanity were a race that actually believed in justice, then free trade would not have meant imperial rule and humiliation as it did historically, and it would be simple enough to bring an end to all such struggles and operate a global society on the basis of peace, mutual prosperity, and something that most people would have wanted. It becomes evident that the malevolent do not need significant support in the general public, vast wealth to begin their campaign, or any great idea that would allow the malevolent to rule. It is only necessary that the mechanisms allowing enclosure can continue and insinuate that human societies must accept them. The malevolent are allowed a monopoly on transgression of all decencies, which are then redefined to declare that the predators are the truly decent and the honest are simps and sinners, guilty of the cardinal sin - being retarded. It is easier said than done to make this the final judgement of human history, but just as humans could only live in the first place because they were allowed to live, the malevolent could exist and persist so long as they were allowed to exist. The genuinely decent could only exist so far as they were not forced to compromise themselves to the general fear and suffering, and it would be impossible for the decent to claim "ignorance is strength" and pretend suffering is not real or an illusory state to be overcome by chanting koans. Suffering instills in most humans a demand to not suffer for all of the reasons we would expect, and this is not a purely reactive response that gives an absolute monopoly on initiative to predators. There is no true defense of the decent that is not willing to pre-emptively attack known predators who are a clear and present danger. It has taken some cleverness to insist that the little people are not allowed to do the only thing that would have stopped this, which would have been to drag out the predatory element and their enablers and shoot them dead on the spot with no remorse or regard for doing so. Instead of doing this, where death would be assigned to the aristocracy and their enablers, the complete opposite is insinuated - that it is the lowest class which is guilty of creating suffering, due to crimes of Being, and the aristocrats get on a high horse and claim they fight for justice when defending their vampiric chokehold of the world. Without any aristocrats or little people naturally ordained by the world, the first stirrings of this appear at the local level, in which families pick which of their children are selected to live and which are condemned to be little better than slaves of their parents and the wider society in which they live. The best way for aristocracy to begin its foul crusade is to get them while they are young, and to this day, the chief aim of aristocracy has been to capture outright the children, the breeding process, and regulate how children are to be raised and educated. In short, among the germs that allow for the realization of ecology is education and the control of new life's development. By directly commanding the source, the aristocracy could in principle rule as make it appear as a fait accompli. This, though, is recognized right away and must be fought before it spreads too far. Families dutifully carry out the mission in their small domains, but there is a sense in the wider world that doing this as a general rule would create immediate disaster. Early attempts to do so beyond the scope of a family likely did fail and led to nothing but predictable death, as social experiments often do. All that was necessary to begin the cycle of aristocracy was to pick apart the lowest class and assign to them the entirety of war guilt, even though they had the least to do with the state of general fear and war and were often never in a position to even join that great game.

Where is the fear, except in the world itself? Without any particular knowledge, which must always be adjudicated, the first instinct would be that fear and suffering are somewhere in the world. If we knew the source and method of the fear, we would recognize the source and not need any concept like an "ecology" to contain it. It would instead be assessed as if it arose from its genuine origin, and the language to describe it would not be ecological or economic but mechanical. Knowledge of the mechanism does not grant security against it, but it allows us the possibility of adapting to it and refusing the dictates of those who would rule by fear. The people initiating the fear are themselves as human as we are, and are mortal and subject to the same mechanisms. Only by asserting that there is an essential distinction between master and slave, or any other relation, can the predator make its will sacrosanct, and conversely the ruled is to be abolished as an actual entity and reduced to some information, some token, which allows it to be shrunk. All of those conceits, though, derive from a material world which is described with definite qualities. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt do not exist in physical reality or nature. The true nature of the world doesn't care about any of that nonsense. To summon the fear requires exploiting tendencies that were evident in the genesis of life, and this is why appeal to nature has always been a go-to of aristocracy and those who wish to rule or manipulate the world through the general fear. Consequently, those who are aspire to rule through a state dominated by that fear interpret politics as a great game of deception and struggle, and nothing more. This replacement of the material world with a philosophy of struggle, where the political is associated with two essences deemed "friend" and "enemy" and a third essence is supposed but never spoken of, eliminates all other meanings that would be necessary to define a source of that which brings suffering. The final programming is to say that "the world" or "society" in some vague sense created the suffering, made it omnipresent, and in doing so, the thought process is arrested. This is not something that is done by the audacious declaration that someone willed it to happen. Only by repeat habituation can this be internalized, and the habit like any other implies an expenditure of raw material. At a basic level, defending against this is as simple as refusing to play along, and so in typical existence, the strategy of infinte transgression meets the barrier of the true, physical reality. To generate enough force to impose by thought and will this general fear requires not mere knowledge, but something foul that channels energy in the world in some demonic working. The working of devilry is mystified and made sacrosanct. At its heart is merely the connection of a primitive will or urge that is particular to a degenerated concept of life. This fear cannot be summoned properly without a mechanistic view of every single action in the whole ecosystem, which the summoner believes is a property of themselves and of the world. In other words, the first hubris is the necessary act - that the would-be conjurer considers themselves identical with the world, and at the time time is abolishing the world as it was to create something new, with no intermediary. Those who scheme and cajole must do this as the most essential act, and it is not a habit that is natural to all living things or even a particularly effective way to wield power. Many who rule simply follow the numbers and leave the demonic working to specialists or underlings, and possess only enough knowledge to sit on the throne. The true heart of ruling, as you probably figured out, is not to wave a mighty hand to make the world go. To rule in any sense requires the arrest of the world as a whole in the mind of rulers, even if the effective reach of this rule is no more than the ruler's local environment. That is the necessary genesis, recreating the most primitive reality of life itself - that life really isn't a "thing" in nature. It is necessary in doing this to make life natural and immortal, and at the same time to envision a circle of life and death feeding into the ruling order. There is no other way for rule to be maintained persistent and the most effective mechanisms for ruling to be isolated. Even those who rule as a means to some ulterior motive, who would seek to do something with rule other than ruling itself, would be aware on some level that this is what happens. So too would the ruled be aware of this in some way, because the ruled are never truly ignorant. Part of being ruled and governed is an understanding of the relationships at work, and conditioning the ruled to accept this condition. The ruler might justify their rule with something other than fear, and usually makes an attempt to do so if the ruler wants to accomplish something substantial. At the very core of rule is a vampiric and nihilistic view of the world which claims to supercede the substantive and create a super-truth. In doing so, the thought-form of rule materializes its mechanisms, and all who contend with rule will have to abide it, regardless of their opinion on the matter. The ruler cannot do this by screeching "me wantee" like a retard and receiving what he wants. Rulers can only operate through the world as the rest of us do. Yet, the very act of ruling suggests the heart is a foolish will to change the world which is far greater than anything life could accomplish.^[5]

The ruler's typical routine - since the real plan is too abominable to be acknowledged too frankly and has obvious consequences - is to suggest that rule is really management in an economic sense, and that the rulers by some right have a claim to the world, in all concepts of it. This includes the people in the patch of space where people are ruled, and every thought and abstraction the ruler can get his or her hands on. Here, the ruler can belong to any tendency, each with its own vices, and the tendencies attract certain sorts to the ruler, who are their natural constituents. Everyone can aspire to rule something, but not everyone does or sees any purpose to "rule", and the motives of rulers are not reducible to some calculus which demands them to behave any particular way. It is only when rule becomes management that they abide the notion that rulers are obligated to anything at all, whether it is popular support or the reality of the world. Rulers rule not because of a managerial intent that is natural, but because they wish to rule and claim the means to do so, and those means to rule are not merely a substance that compels rule to exist. What rulers do with the mechanisms that allow rule is ultimately up to them. The ruled have no reason to go along with any of this, and in practice, the rulers never command the world as absolutely as they would like. This is because the the very idea of ruling is absurd if you didn't carry the biases and incentives of living, thinking creatures who are acutely aware that ruling is one way to survive in a hostile world. Rulers are never purely motivated by self-preservation, nor are the ruled obliged to live. Either can choose to simply abandom rule, life itself, or accept a worse position and their eventual mortality. There isn't a particularly good reason to die or shun the power that allows someone to rule. The true motives of humans are, in the end, truly their own. We really do not have to do any of the things I have continuous complained about in this writing, and that has been clear from the start. Whether there would be any point to doing something other than ruling is up us, but if life for the sake of life is circular, rule for the sake of rule is a loop of pure stupidity. Never is the ruler motivated purely by ulterior moral motives that are outside of him - that is for the ruled and the servants. But, rulers are perfectly capable of valuing something other than their own rule, and have to consider abdication or succession unless they are truly immortal and immune to anything that would dethrone them. Even if someone did possess that secret, which is likely a physical impossibility, it doesn't follow that the ruler is obligated to rule or live at all. In every case, to speak of "rule" is to speak of ruling an ecosystem defined by the ruler, and that may include the human beings or institutionalized persons in their domain. The true rule is not really over people but over spaces. If the spaces are controlled, and the resources in them are controlled, controlling the people is much easier, because the ruler controls the primary leverage that would be available to change the situation. The ruler can show remarkable disregard towards the ruled, so long as the ruler is confident that the ruled have not claimed any part of the domain against the plan of rule. In practice, the ruled will carve out some space, whatever they can, simply to live, and there is nothing stopping the ruled from ignoring rulers at any time. The ruler never respects the rights of the ruled no matter what philosophy or institution suggests that the rights exist, and any rights the ruler allows are always a thing that can be cancelled at will. Cancelling the pretenses of rights, legal or moral, will make consequences clear to everyone affected by this, but the ruler is never married to any of those pretenses, as if he must ask permission before he can be a ruler. Rule is established not by consent of the governed but by force. The governed may be able to resist this domination and assert that they're going to disregard the ruler, but if the ruler truly cannot control this situation, he is no longer ruling. Wherever rule exists, it never surrenders from the outset its claims to rule, and any agreement between contesting parties to coexist as a ruling interest is a temporary thing rather than a permanent and natural state of affairs. The rulers may wish to share rule jointly, but this arrangement can only be made through an institution which once established abides its own laws, as to the members of the institution. Nowhere is this joint rule an airy or indescribable thing, if it is to be an actual state rather than the pretenses of one. Here, "rule" and "state" are not identical, for there are ruling interests which are not state actors, and those subordinated by states who rule over a petty domain and operate independent of the ruler's direct command. At the early stages of social development, "the state" as a formal institution is little more than the local warlord and his loyal officers, who start out as no one particularly important or noteworthy.

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