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Before there is any defintion of a "status quo" or "state", there must be a thing which constitutes that state and can be arrested in any way. This is the political agent, and it can only be that. No other conception of a state can be sensical. In principle, this applies to all concepts of stasis, rather than just political states. Even if something is not thought of as a "political matter" for us, we always read into any system behaviors that would on their scale have been "politically relevant". We can reduce this as far as atomic particles or angels on a pinhead and concoct a political form of those particles, or those metaphysical angels which so obviously are among the host of God. Before the political question is dismissed, there is a brief moment where the flicker of thought where a system is arrested in our knowledge can be considered a matter of political importance. This is not because we are "political animals" or "all truth is inherently political", but because in principle, there is no barrier between the political and the world that can be said to exist as a law of nature, politics, or thought. The reasons for this will be apparent shortly. We may never think of eating as a political act because hunger itself is not really something we consider a political condition. Hunger can very much have political effects, when armies are ill-fed or people starve and react to seek conditions where they do not starve, but hunger is not intrinsically a political concern or necessarily the purview of political life, as if states had any natural obligation to the welfare of any political agent. Conversely, states really don't have a claim to say they must enforce starvation by any principle which says this is politically correct. What neither can deny is that, absent any division that is particular to political agents which can be in principle anything and everything there is, the political concerns the world as a whole, and so no one can pick and choose the proper role of the state and assert it as a natural law. It may be a law of states that humans build that much of the world is outside of the concern of the political, either by disdain of something far beneath us, or because it is too far away for humans to have any meaningful influence on it or it on us, but this can only be established once a polity or state is further elaborated upon. There is in politics no natural law that must be regarded at all, and humans can choose an appeal to nature argument. They'd be wrong, and this is a trivial fallacy to demonstrate. Yet, "snows always melt", and generals can rely on that knowledge in a practice which isn't beholden to any political correctness. If the general is wrong, the consequences are on him, but given ample knowledge of weather patterns, it is a safe assumption to make as a rule. Whether that rule will take effect in time to meet the general's ambitions is another question.

The particulars of arresting the political agent itself may be construed as political acts as much as possible. Unlike the world itself, which does not have a problem with infinite regress, infinite regress creates for political reasoning a vicious regress that would paralyze the concept of the political, and so it must be resolved somehow. There comes a point where the formation of an agent would only be describable by metaphors, or by accepting the components of an agent as a fait accompli because we lack any better formative theory. For example, we can accept on faith in the accumulation of scientific knowledge that we are comprised of particles, which form chemical compounds, and we can accept there is such a thing as life which animates those particles, the definition of which can be discussed by learned people. By no means does this necessitate "dialectic" or "contradictions in nature" for political agents. Far from it, political agents like any agents despise the game of contradictions. When using dialectic for anything, the invocation of bullshit is a great danger to thought and the human race. We are more likely to arrive at a useful metaphor by suggesting processes-in-motion and a calculus to resolve a state of moving things from any chosen point during that motion, or in any way in which motion which isn't linear can be described so that what a thing does is sufficiently isolated that it can form an agent. For the world itself, and for our genuine existence, we're not really concerned with infinite regress, and we do not need perfect knowledge of material constitution to know what a political agent is. In all cases, the political agent is singular and indivisible, without breaking it apart and releasing whatever energy and substance constituted it, however that is construed. The energy contained within is not a thing that is suppressed by telling a story that, by dialectical magic, the Bad Man disappears and matter is destroyed by thought or "me wantee". Proper dialectic does not do this, and a wise dialectician goes to great lengths to explain why this doesn't work, which dialectic can do. Dialectic allows for both the construction of suppositions and the critique of existing constructs, but all suppositions are tested against evidence which regards some agency already existing. We don't have a language to describe forces unmoored from any static idea that can be described, however vague. The precision of political agents' definition is not relevant to their existence or what we can say about them. Upon becoming political agents, these things can be ascribed qualities that non-agents cannot be ascribed, and impressions of politically relevant objects carry a weight to us which is an undeniable reality in the final outcome of things. Those qualities do not need to be scientifically provable things to be relevant to our political thought, and very often they have nothing to do with a sober, scientific view of anything. We can attempt to explain them with science or make a quasi-scientific justification for something, but this is an even more egregious fallacy than mere appeal to nature. One thing a political agent, like anything worth talking about, cannot be, is "contradictory" or "moved by contradictions", in the literal sense of the word. If anyone talks like that, this is a sign of some bullshit and it stinks to high heaven. We may ascribe contradictions to motives or insinuate that such a thing exists, but this entire thought exercise is nothing more than shouting "retarded, retarded, retarded" at someone or something until they relent and give up on proper analysis, until the habit sticks. There are political reasons particular to humans or entities similar enough to us why this works and why "retarded, retarded, retarded" is very relevant to understanding political life. That will wait for later in this book. Whatever the fidelity of political agents and political truth to things we would appreciate in scientific inquiry, we regard them as things that are arrested and constituted in some state, some stasis, which is a local event. The political itself, and everything the political pertains to, is never arrested in any "state", yet the only agents which can contemplate it are in some stasis. This fluctuation really pertains to nothing more than a sense in political thought, rather than a genuine view of material history. The treatment of any history as "constantly in motion" defeats the purpose of history, which is at the moment beyond the scope of this book. What is important here is that politics is at heart transhistorical and inherently has no regard for space or proximity, and the shameful behavior of the philosophers takes to heart every abortion of thought which denies this. What is contested in politics is not the state as an institution, which is very obviously a local event and a creation of men. In some way, politics contests the status quo of the world itself, but a sober view of any hitherto known politics tells us that human agency has remarkably little effect on the world, compared to the grandiose claims politics, philosophy, and the institutions of human society make about their Real Ultimate Power. What humans do in politics is not an entirely provincial matter, contained in a neatly arranged box, where politics is a game or a spectacle. All of the bullshit of influencers and cajolers in the past century cannot change that, for all of the wealth and human effort expended to manipulate public opinion, the attitudes of humans in their genuine conviction of what is what does not change by the force of persuasion that is insisted to work without fail, just like the latest war plan from the German high command will totally work and the war will be quick, cheap, and we will surely win.

What can be contested in the political is something altogether different, and yet it is quite important for everyone, regardless of their institutional relevance among human society or whomever gets to decide what the state will be. That is the network of communication between political agents and all of the agents in society that are assigned value as some sort of asset, that pertains to this question of the world at the highest level rather than at the local level of a household or the affairs of the self. This communication did not exist for no purpose, as if humans - or certain among them who claimed a monopoly on this knowledge - suddenly developed the concept of politics ex nihilo, imposed on a world that was created specifically for them, or this political concept was handed down like fire from Prometheus or Lucifer. The polity - this network of communication in a society - is not at heart a rational proposition, or a proposition about knowledge. The polity doesn't pertain to management in the economic sense at all, and for the politician or the holder of states, management is a desultory task. Politicial leaders do not count beans. They have slaves, courtiers, experts, and various functionaries to operate all aspects of the state and the mundane details of political life. They have vassals seeking to rise in political rank alone, and this great game of rising in rank becomes the chief merit that all states, all institutions, all persons, and all of the bodies, minds, souls, and things dragged into political society, are made to abide. This is done not because politics is intrinsically interesting or fun, or because the institutions are an unquestionable establishment made immortal by the logic of commerce, business, or men with armies. There is, for most of existence, no real concern with "the political", until politics comes for them, and this suits nearly everyone just fine. Men with no reason to give a shit about politics find, due to their exposure to such a society, that they dream of toy states, even if only in a game or a fantasy. Men in high places who hold the state or benefit from it did not need to be "good at politics" to be where they are. It is a constant of political society that nothing in politics corresponds to merit, honor, productivity, moral right, or the simple expression of existence. Yet, whatever the values of a society, there is a political situation and an arena to contest this, and the arena is not "the state" or the theories of the state, or the institutions that claim a monopoly on legitimate politics. The state's existence is something altogether different from the polity that a state can claim, and the polity itself carries no moral significance. It has no basis in thought or knowledge or a good and necessary reason why we need to care about politics, or why we should respect the status quo or the existence of a society where this pernicious influence always flourishes. Where it arises is something undeniable for us - that because it can happen, someone with a mind to act as a political agent will do so. Any reaction, or any proactive plan, is irrelevant to the most basic political act, and only arises among developed entities which are capable of imposing a plan, or reacting to any other plan in any way that is not immediate submission to the whims of the status quo.

I reiterate in case there are people who do not understand this that science is not an inherently political practice, and if done properly, it discounts the political conceit entirely and views the subject matter dispassionately, even if the subject matter were politics itself. That is the only way in which genuine science could even begin, so that formal science can hold legitimacy beyond being some stuff people with titles wrote and barked at us, which we can trivially demonstrate has nothing to do with science as a method or something we do to understand the world. It is possible, and due to the prominence of education in political society very likely, for anyone conducting science to be tripped up by political necessities as they see them, and science conducted properly does not guarantee that it will be "good science" that produces the facts we want or would find politically relevant or valuable. The worst thing that can happen is a political conceit "jumping in front" and holding undue influence over our genuine inquiries about the world or anything in it. This holds just as true for politics itself, which can be analyzed with science. This can be a science treating politics as a phenomenon that emerged in nature, or a science developed specifically to work with political facts and the ways in which we learned what politics is on its own terms, without needing any appeal to nature and accepting the political ideas as foundational to this political science.

We may say naively that this makes the individual agent a "state" unto itself. This, though, does not really understand the status quo and the proper purview of the political. It is possible to believe that an individual agent is autonomous until acted upon by something external and that, absent that action, the One is the status quo and nothing else can exist outside of it or against it. This is not so much solipsism or fascism, but autism, and fascism is a profoundly autistic political form, just like its necessary eugenic core. The first proper purview of politics is nothing less than all the world. Absent a compelling reason, it would be believed that in principle all political agents are accessible to other such agents, wherever they may be and whatever the distance in space, time, or any other conception of distance. The concept of politics as pure abstraction is always transhistorical, or it derived purely from the principle of what it would mean to speak of a polity. If there were some other species of the conception that "politics" entails, it would either not resemble this at all and answer an entirely different question, or it would be a rebranding that only exists to make the political entirely unmentionable. In the formation of the polity, which is not a transhistorical concept but something that arises in the world where there would be a cause for every effective, the distance between agents is not removed, but considerations of time and motion are temporarily arrested and treated as theoretical possibilities in a static model. That model projects multiple outcomes based on the agents' known qualities. As with social agents, political agents can only relate to each other in dyads, or through an intermediary that is granted political significance, if not agency itself. An association or club or circle of friends is one such totem that has no political rights or existence of its own, but would be recognized as a force linking many agents, who can conspire through that association. A legal corporation is not just an organization and institution, but one which in liberal capitalism holds its own political rights, its "person", and its institutional influence superceded the conception of political rights as rights belonging to humans in the older sense that such a concept was appreciated. Today's "human rights" is a cynical, sneering devaluation of the original concept, rarely called "human rights" but understood as the rights of Man, or the rights of free men. What happened has been a gradual dissolution of the human subject as the chief political agent and its replacement with a purely institutional subject. Man becomes a corporate entity and obligated by the same modus operandi of firms, bound by contracts and living at the whim of lawyers, experts, and courts of people removed from the cruder human conception of the political. That has yet to be completed, but everything about neoliberalism disdains humanity and glorifies all death of humans, while simultaneously glorifying corporate symbols, slogans, and all mechanisms which corrode the human in total. The agency of human subjects can never be taken for granted, no matter how much Freedom™ is sold as a slogan bereft of any agent with any conditions, material or political, suggesting the concept is meaningful beyond a vague feeling, not even granted the dignity of sentiment before it is turned into a saccharine sing-song lie. Whatever the form of the agents, political agents always interface as singular agents, even if they refer to groups with vague aspersions, like a particular nation or just a vague grouping of "those people" with hints about their unifying characteristics that make them "those people". One man does not engage with every member of the opposition individually when facing a group - he can only engage with the group as a whole or a representation of that group, or deal with individual members in turn as separate relations which are apart from the group affiliation, and can be divided and turned against each other or the group.

The polity is not coterminous with a defined grouping like a nation, institution, or race, which subsumes all political life and claims a monopoly on it. The polity proper is not an institution that is singular. There are singular institutions calling themselves "the state" which claim a singular monopoly on legitimate politics, but this institution does not hold by decree a natural monopoly on political life. It may be granted a legal monopoly in a particular domain, where this institution and it alone is declared "the state" and all other institutions are subordinate to it. Politics, though, does not directly concern any particular institution. Institutions, and social formations which exist as-is and are recognized as such without any institutional character, are only themselves political agents - usually very large ones - but they would be represented in law or procedure as "the state" as an institution, which has to contend with all other political agents as if it were equal in agency for certain purposes. The institution called "the state" may operate at a level above the political agent who is subordinate to it, but the state as an institution always deals with its subjects as if it were a corporate entity, rather than the genuine polity in total from which there is no escape in principle. The state may create an impression and great technetronic show that it is the polity and nothing exists outside of it, but to do so it must eliminate in the subject's mind any concept that something exists outside of the institution. In other words, it must create "total society" which is a very particular proposition that institution must defend at great expense, and in that society, "politics" in the sense referred to here does not include the political agent as a subject at all. The subjects would be either completely depoliticized, or they are so beholden to that total society that they can do nothing but obey the law and be what the state declares they are. To a reasonable person, this appears like madness. It is also the default assumption of states as any sort of formal institution or representation of rule, regardless of any political settlement where the subjects are believed to possess any rights. Politics to be politics in the genuine sense does not allow any other conception of society when the state must exercise its claim. The institution calling itself "the state" is not purely a political organ existing for its stated purpose. Like any institution, it exists apart from politics or any other necessity and becomes an end unto itself, realized by its officers, machinery, who each hold their own agendas even if they are as beholden to the state as the ruled. Yet, even the concept of the political suggests the default political claim of any status quo is that there is a singular force arresting agents or accounting for all of their movement. This arresting of agents does not exist over any domain. The political status quo can only speak for one thing if it is to be genuine - the whole world. Every state, or every political understanding agents could possess, necessarily recognizes that there are alien institutions that might make a competing claim to the same thing, and the mere existence of any agent or institution that says "no" to the claims of the status quo acts in contradiction to the status quo, no matter how meek and no matter what rights were considered operative in the political settlement. Nothing in politics is operative until the operation is complete or can be assumed to operate on faith as a passive thing. Politics may be reactive or proactive, but it is never an inert act. To merely exist with any agency at all is a counterclaim to the status quo, which declared that all agents are arrested. This includes the very institution calling itself "the state" as a singular arbiter of what the status quo is. At a basic level, the claim of the state is this - everything and anything, including other entities calling themselves "the state" or anything of that nature. We make a presumptive claim on planets far away that we don't even know of, to say anything about them that relates them to our political understanding. Everything that can exist, then, is theoretically a thing subjected to political life, regardless of what it is or any understanding that thing possesses.

This claim is only in principle and never fully realized by any knowledge. Even if we supposed the existence of an almighty God that is everything that possibly can exist, such an entity does not so much realize its claim to all that exists in the sense that politics implies. Such an entity, which we know to be impossible for any of our conventional knowledge which could say anything about that thing's political wants, would stand alone as the sole agent, and all others could not even beg to be angels in its service to have political agency. The state may claim it is God itself or an avatar of it, or that it has attained the favor of Heaven which has some regulatory force on the affairs of agents. They will in principle make such a claim regardless of anything they say, because to do anything else is to shirk the political question. Even if the "claim" is that this polity seeks peace with all other agents, brotherly love, etc., it would have to acknowledge there is a world it doesn't control but could or should if it has any aim to exist at all. It would not be possible to love that which you do not know or only address with vague aspersions, but that does not exist at the level of social life where it would be a relevant or definable thing. If there is a love for humanity, or a nation, or some other organization, it implies there are members of that group who would appreciate the concept, and a shared existence that is relevant to our regular lives rather than something far away, in another world for all intents and purposes. The vague, sing-song stories of love are contemptful and intended to be so, and never conformed to any genuine sense of love a human felt for anything. If we were to place our love in a part of the world far removed from political life or conventional social organizations of a smaller sort - if we were for example to imagine that our love and our purpose is in the afterlife - we would not use that as a vague aspersion to claim we "love the world". It would be specifically referent to this concept of an afterlife or a hidden world within our imaginations, and such an existence implies very different things from a concept of universal brotherhood in the world, or a link of all humanity to such an afterlife that is communicated between them. These are concepts humans can contemplate without any great received wisdom, for it is a common escape from the dreary existence of mankind, aware of its sordid origins after seeing enough of their own kind. We are almost pathologically inclined to see another world far removed from this one, if only to escape the demands of certain imperious assholes who claimed the world in this fashion and actually believe they have fulfilled the core purpose of politics by assertion alone. To see another world, an afterlife that the beast cannot touch, is one of the few defenses we had against a cycle that has plagued humanity since the first ritual sacrifice and first celebration of what became the eugenic creed.

This forms the status quo, or a general understanding of the situation of the world, which is reproduced in the minds of those who regard politics. The mind that regards this situation is not a "political mind" by definition, which can only think in terms of political truths and reality. It has to be something outside of politics to exist, and political thought is always superimposed on the world. The political thought may claim to emulate natural laws or be rooted in material realism, but political thought is not under any obligation to honor any such claim. By this definition and by reasonable assessments that most of us can reconstruct without my guidance, political thought couldn't ever rest on a naturalistic claim. Nothing in nature mandated "politics", let alone a particular notion of political thought. Political thought is always the property of those who conceive of such a thing, and barring mind control or an invasion of the most basic mechanisms which constitute thought itself, the political agent, whatever it may be, operates independently of any other. This thought at first pertains to the status quo, rather than "the state" or "the polity", both of which are concepts with noticeable distinctions from each other. The status quo suggests that there is a way in which political events can be understood which must be general, rather than particular to any one person. The thought which allows anyone to arrive at perfect information about that status quo is not beholden to any such thing, as if the status quo were a hobgoblin directing the mind and making it comply with the dictates of another mind or some universal overmind. Without any actual entity to point to with this power over existence, it would be a self-evident fallacy.

It does not require a great mind to discover that it is impossible for a single mind to arrest all that exists in some perfect system of political thought, which supercedes reality. The claim is always made, but in practice, political life and thought is moderated by a perception of all who participate in it of their peers, and a sense however crude or developed of superiors and inferiors. Absent any clear rubric to determine with precision superiors and inferiors, the default assumption is that political agents are until proven guilty equal to each other as political agents. There is nothing in nature establishing any such rubric in a way that would be universally appreciated, and such a rubric would obviate the need of politics as such - it would be subsumed entirely into the study of nature itself and become a different question. Because that rubric is not self-evident to us, we would proceed with the best indicator of political knowledge we possess - other political agents. The natural world only suggests to us what our own faculties of knowledge tell us about ourselves, which was never a political question. We do not need an exhaustive defintion of who is a member of the "in-group" or "out-group" as if that were naturally the question of politics - who is "friend" and who is "enemy". Politics to be meaningful doesn't pertain to who is "in" or "out", or any relation between the agents. States as institutions are not premised on any sentiment or any declaration of friendship whatsoever - the participants may hate each other more than anyone outside of the state or the polity, even if they are husband and wife, as many married couples and their children will tell you readily if we are at all honest about these things. The proper relationship of the state is between the rule of an institution and the ruled. Those who are foreign to the polity the state rules do not exist as "friends" of the state, nor of the polity. It is people who have friends. If the polity and state is comprised of people who possess this ability to make friends, it is the people who hold the state who decide who is friend or enemy, and this is ultimately a personal decision which has nothing to do with the state and its function. To the state, all persons are aliens and all persons are presumed guilty until proven innocent. Any status or title of friendship is irrelevant, for any institution can at will void any title, any asset, any property, and claim it as yet another object in its domain. The state is not held to account for this dishonesty by any law of nature or law of what politics must be.^[1]

We should make clear that social status, property, esteem, a sense of self-worth, and nearly everything which may be coveted by political life are not fundamentally "political" matters or carry any political substance simply by being what they are, and politics does not need to regard any such concept to be politics. The state as an institution is under no obligation to regard them - not regarding individual political agents, regarding any organization of those agents, or regarding the state or the polity as a whole. The state is under no obligation to consider those things in the status quo even as anything other than facts of existence, which may have no bearing on what it considers a political matter. All values that are admitted into political life are those that politicians accept, regardless of the truth or fiction entailed. It may make sense to root political life on something substantive so that the political agents sustain their life-functions and can continue doing this, but a polity or state can dissolve itself without any struggle or gasping for life. The human body does not have such a luxury without training itself to embrace this nihilistic view of its own existence, which is not a trivial task or something that would be mandated by political life. Nothing about politics or the state as an institution necessitates many of the assumptions made about political values or the proper function of the state. The state serves no real end whatsoever. It is the holders of the state who are served, who possess their own motivations for doing anything they do. The polity, which is not defined by any formal institution or set of institutions or anything we would call an "establishment", also serves no intrinsic purpose. Unlike a state or an institutional representation which abides certain bylaws and expectations to be constituted as such, the polity exists on its own terms. It is the polity which the state contests to control, and the proper site of political conflict and struggle is not the state as an institution or any other institutions which may collude with the state or oppose the state, but the polity itself. The polity regards nothing like a legal monopoly on force in the way a state suggests. The polity exists not as an establishment by decree or from the will of men truly wishing it, but as a matter of fact which may be acknowledged or not. The polity cannot be conflated with the status quo or presumed to have undefinable boundaries, as if the polity is as unknowable as a fake god.

There are efforts to conflate the polity that societies recognize with the executive functioning of a social organization, to claim that these are one and the same, and so a social organization has a natural "political leader", which has a legal, moral, and natural role to govern society that must be taken as a fait accompli. This executive functioning is something I wrote about in the previous book.^[2] The "executive function" of social organizations is not a political proposition or a choice, but a matter of fact suggesting that there is some organizing principle which would govern the behavior of any social formation as a whole. That governance is not an institutional claim or something that requires any institution as such, or implies that governance and politics are the same thing and indistinguishable. Politics and the polity have little to do with governance in that sense.

Government is something that exists in societies regardless of politics, and governance is at heart a process that appears part of the world and firmly in the domain of science. All governance, however it is conducted, is observed not by suggesting motive or essences of thought that move history, but by observing behavior.^[3] Governance is only judged after the fact, rather than being something "here and now". The true governing mechanism is not "government" as an idea, but the mechanisms of things acting independently of any plan, for their purpose. Those mechanisms would, following from the ideas of cybernetics, create negative feedback loops that allow stabilization to happen "on its own accord". The material reality of such feedback loops being necessary for governance is the only tenable link between economy and politics. The principles of cybernetics do not in of themselves constitute ALL government, where the whole world is a clockwork of evolutionary flotsam and no agency is possible. They are, however, the basis for all other governing decisions. This is to say, the proverbial buck must stop somewhere. A decision must be made for government to be government. That decision need not be a final one that decides forever what the world will be, for a feedback loop can lead to an active output as a process, and it is impossible to cease a physical process like the procession of matter or heat. The same is true of political mechanisms which govern in one sense, which is that this condition where a status quo exist never goes away or can go away. Where polities and states are different from physical events is that they do have a temporal cessation, where at some point, the polity or state can no longer be said to exist. No process in nature can be arrested so finely to speak of its consequences truly being extinguished from world history. The most minute process, the long-forgotten remnants of our existence, remain no matter what efforts we make to remove our existence from the world. What is said and done can never be undone or unsaid, and that is a reality of the world and any worthwhile concept of history. Politics concerns specifically temporal questions, and must do so. It concerns temporal questions at the highest level where the consequence is final, should politics intervene in the procession of any event. It is not a rule of the world that politics is universal or absolute, let alone that a particular state, institution, or theory of the state can make such a claim. We can govern ourselves by processes other than politics, and we can automate the governance of systems and automate away the politician, the lawyer, the inquisitor, the torturer, or any other functionary that is most necessary to speak of a state. Much of the world arrives at its stasis, or what counts as its "political life", without any automation or event of great importance to us. Events far beyond us, which humans can never hope to influence or would have any good reason to attempt to change, do not resemble our human politics at all. They may resemble the processes of nature but at a greater scale of space, or they might entail abstractions we have yet to conceive, or concern agents so far away from us that we have nothing to do with them in any realistic interval of time. The polity arises not "in nature", but as the result of agents which are able to recognize and act upon a status quo in any way that would be deliberate. At a very primitive level, this governance is carried out or less by laws of physics or laws of some system we have identified as a system devoid of any local governance. A plant or a sheet of metal does not "deliberate" much. The sheet of metal does what that metal would do in its environment without fail. The plant only responds in more or less pre-programmed routines, which may exhibit some impulse due to what life has to be in order to be life, but which never possess a sense of self-preservation or sense that they are cooperating or competing in a "struggle for life" at all. Animals which develop nervous systems and responses to their environment, and must do so in order to better extract sustenance and recognize predators, will become more deliberate than other living matter, and this is not carried out as a blind impulse or a fact of nature. Animals that did not develop this sense and response to the world at a local level - that did not develop an independent sense of temporal authority that would be necessary for such a mechanism to work - would either die from the first malevolent entity or danger in the natural world, or would by the impulse that allowed an animal motility find some adaptation that changed the status quo of pre-animal nature. It is there where the polity and governance can begin. Politics as a concept, and the prior existence of a "state of nature" or "polity of nature", would exist so long as we can describe any event or any system with such a language, but there would be nothing whatsoever to carry out "political directives" without a local and temporal reproduction of it. For a chemical compound or the forms of life which don't really think or orient themselves around this, there may be political significance ascribed to the event, and a stasis is certainly attained. A state of physical matter is established not as a general rule reproduced by a metaphysical hobgoblin, but in the event, the rock or piece of metal or some physical construct, that exists on its own power and would be a sample against which we can speak of the status quo where other such rocks or materials exist.

Both political systems and systems generally appear governed in order to be stable at all. Political agency and political thought can be one such mechanism that governs systems, and for any entity which conducts political thought and action as humans do, it would not be possible to eliminate that agency by governance and claim that by governance, agency does not exist or is eliminated by the laws of nature, or the dictates of economy or ecology. The government of human social systems would work through political agency, if political agents decided it was the proper purview of politics to govern anything at all. In this governing task, politics can only be one of many forces in human beings which can govern, and the part it plays is not ordained by anything in politics conceptually; nor is politics governed by anything in this cybernetic treatment of systems. The two may feed off each other, so that political agents become "cyborgs" - part machine and part political spirit, where the political settlement cites natural origins or engineered mechanisms in technology, or technology is created to serve political aims, or technology is created to serve aims that are not economic or materially necessary, but by some political project which grants to this initiative legitimacy it would not possess if didn't serve any economic or political goal or exist as an adaptation that the world imposed on agents outside of any preference they held. It is a political choice to use economics, appeals to natural processes, or some necessity the world presents, as political objective or something that would be a matter of importance to the polity.

Political governance does not stem from any command of the world or necessity imposed on it in the strictest sense. Governance of political society and of the polity occurs only on its own terms - that is, it is governed entirely by that which enters political interests, rather than anything outside of it. This is not to say that polities are immune to the outside world or exist in their preferred state by thinking it is so. The political agents in reality exist in some world where they need food if politics is to be conducted, as otherwise they would be dead or would never be born. The needs of the body or any material existence don't in of themselves hold any political importance that is regarded by all things. They become politically important in the first place because there is some self-interest of political agents to exist, and the polity accounts for threats to that interest. Presumably, those who inhabit political life, for perfectly understandable reasons, prefer politics and law that would protect their existence, and they would have to at least ensure that the polity as a whole does not imperil that existence in any way that could be obviously ameliorated by cooperation within it. This is not a safe assumption, because there are those willing to commit political suicide for any reason, including pure spite, hatred of the world, hatred of their fellow agents, simply not caring enough about existence, or some ulterior motive involving their sacrifice or disposal to affect the world past their death, or in search of some afterlife they would prefer to this. It is generally understood that humans would prefer to live, and this general understanding is not a choice given what we know of history. We would never accept a political decree that proclaimed the purpose of political life is death and nothing else, or all must be sacrificed to Moloch or Satan or whatever foul god is fashionable today, without some compelling reason why the tendency of humans to like living should be averted. The arguments can be made, but they do not entail a general lust of death or an egalitarian view that all are equally worthless in the eyes of Satan. The leading figures of a polity, who without anything to suggest why they lead are no different from anyone else looking at this, very likely do not intend this sacrifice for themselves. It is a much different matter when politicians can impose this on other people. But, the power of life and death does not hold the grandest political significance it is believed to possess, as if it were a natural law that could be relied on. Pushed enough, the damned of the Earth have no reason to care about any such law or believe anything such leaders would say, and would no longer regard the political institution as salvageable. If they cannot remove the offending laws or the men who proposed them, the damned have no real reason to continue believing the farce has any relevance to their lives beyond the threat the polity poses. Since most of humanity is used to that arrangement, they will, after a terrible calamity when the polity withdraws any support to the damned, return to the typical habit of humans - seeing the chief threat and the worst thing in the world correctly as other humans and avoiding them as much as possible, and limiting contact to forms which are prudent and not likely to lead to a surprise torture session. If the political class wishes to drag the damned to feed the gods a desired quota of ritual sacrifice and torture, they will have to mobilize an armed force and rely on the war machine, rather than write a law and say they totally won by locking the damned out of the Ancient Mystic Society of No Homers. The matter of war and struggle itself has nothing intrinsically to do with political life. The politicians could very easily just not demand sacrifice to Moloch for spurious purposes and make all of our lives better, for less cost and a world that would at least be tolerable enough to ask some other question - literally any question other than this same one that stubbornly insists we have to respect it. Any war or struggle is ultimately a choice. There are those that are not really going to be serious choices, but wars are always initiated by someone and ended by someone. It is never a bilateral agreement arrived at "spontaneously", where war and struggle just happen and the participants let it happen. Even if both parties were somehow ignorant of a practice long known to the human race and glorified enough that it would be impossible to not see indicators of an intent to war, ignorance of the world is no excuse - guilty until proven innocent.

To govern politically is something entirely different from governing in the sense of doing anything we would consider stabilizing. These two only meet so far as stabilizing anything in the real world serves political aims, and so far as the political class and institutions can impose order on a world that was never theirs except by a claim to it. Within the realm of the political, governance is as efficient as a machine in nature could expect to be. If it were not, then no political order could be imposed, and the polity would appear as a morass of interests and agents doing whatever they want. They would only acknowledge that there is a polity, supposedly, but there would not be a realistic understanding of anyone's standing within political life. That would consequently make valuations of social status or proof, or the esteem or virtue of men, difficult at the least and not enforceable at a level that would be viewed as objective. The truth is that politics can persist without bringing much order to the world or society, and in some cases benefits from social disorder and a condition of general fear in the polity. The only order that is particularly relevant is political order - that is to say, the discipline of political agents. This is most acutely felt in the political class that participates in decision-making, but it is felt among all entities who would recognize the state or the polity as a clear and present danger, and recognize other agents as the most relevant influence on their lives. It is not always the case that political life is the overriding presence or danger, such that politics overrides all other concerns if it is invoked. Political life implies that, for the polity at least, that would be the final showdown where questions of social status, rank, property, or anything else agents may covet can be settled. The polity or the state does not necessarily need to settle all disputes, and even if it seeks to impose order on the material world thoroughly, there are disputes that are left unresolved for various reasons that suit the political class, and perhaps the whole of society, perfectly fine. The polity does not need to tell you which toothbrush you must use every day and the proper time to brush your teeth, nor does the state need to regulate all minutae of life to be the state. The polity cannot answer deep spiritual questions with any finality because many such questions do not speak so much to political demands or some want that serves political aims of men - spiritual authority, religion, or anything of the sort would be understood as something above politics if it is to be anything other than a crass superstitition serving no purpose, and if it is that, then religion's function would be more properly a part of the political structure than something people lived by and found guidance independent from political life from. There is no fixed boundary for the questions the polity and political classes seek to answer with the legitimacy of the state, but the resources of polities being limited and the resources of states as institutions being more limited still, any resolution that is a political matter had better be something important enough that agents will risk political life and prestige for doing it. This may not be an issue if the "political agents" in question don't have such things as a mind of their own or an emotional attachment, but even in such a case, the most relevant outcomes of such a system for political relevance are the most significant and those that would be most prominent in interaction with other polities or states.

Without institutional authority, the polity remains a grouping of people whose precise position is never calculated. The spatial and temporal dimensions of the polity, though they are presumed to be fixed by something to speak of a polity that is relevant to a particular agent rather than a generalization of the status quo, are never defined by natural laws so cleanly. Any concept of natural politically relevant borders would be contingent on the constitution of the agents themselves. This thinking is more akin to ecology than a natural political law, and without any ecological science to establish by a reasonable model what those natural borders are, such a vagary would only exist in the minds of people who assess for themselves what agents are proximate enough that encountering them is likely. To things without a mind, it would not even be something dignified by a suggestion that all that is solid melts into air - the polity's natural borders or extent would not be evident in any "political agency" of the things in question. Because this is a political matter, it is determined most of all by other such agents, rather than "the world" in some sense that suggest it is moved by hobgoblins. For most of the things that are arrested in stasis, they do exactly what they would do. There is not one iota of "contradiction in nautre" or any other such hogwash. There is not in any credible theory of nature any other contradiction or uncertainty, either. A scientist may acknowledge that a theory or model is just that, but all science to be science in the genuine sense is something independently verifiable, and anyone reading a paper can grasp language or metaphysical principles to reconstruct the scientist's approach. What anyone who conducts science believes by faith is irrelevant to the natural world science describes. Political thought does not abide this limitation, because political thought is not a "model" or "idea" at a basic level. If politics or society are approached as sciences, and there is nothing preventhing this approach, the model a scientist develops would have to regard that these concepts they describe, however airy they appear and regardless of how humans have always occulted their science in practice, pertain to something that can be independently verified. Politics itself has no rule guaranteeing independent verification, and the world itself certainly has no rule. That is the work of proper science, which has nothing to do with politics, the state, or society as a whole. Proper science is the exact opposite of institutional claims on knowledge and theories of science. Above all, the educator and the pedagogue, whose function is both political and slavishly devoted to aristocracy as a governing idea, abhors science in the genuine sense, and only exists because genuine knowledge is occulted, made proprietary, and the cycle of shame and ridicule has been established forcibly. Otherwise, humans would only have to contend with their immense ignorance and inborn stupidity, which was already bad enough before aristocracy intensified it by an uncountable factor. Even the stupidest human, even in the worst conditions, will conduct some sort of science to navigate the world. That science is not a driver of political events by some virtue science posseses, and science proper has no legitimate political function. Technology, which often applies science, is the purview of a class in humanity that is far more conscious of science as a potential ruling idea, but that seed only develops when it is allowed to grow.

There is ambiguity with the status quo or polity about how much of this is the work of society and information that exists in the minds of people, and how much arises from the world itself or the things surrounding society. One argument for politics is that it suggests this link between society, which really doesn't have an existence in of itself but exists largely as information held by people, and the world, which very much exists and cannot be denied. The state proper has no ambiguity. It could be conceived that society and the world met in ways other than politics, and the political does not necessitate that "the state" is invested with any more authority than regarding that such an entity exists. In practice, no state and no institution can realize its monopoly short of being the only idea that exists. It is something that pertains to society in its entirety, and it only exists in institutional forms rather than something inferred by the question politics answers. As an abstraction, "the state" has nothing suggesting its permanence or inevitability, and in practice, the reach of any state is extremely limited compared to the extent of rule and power that is known to be possible through science. Economics is one such way, as economics did not necessarily require political thinking about the management of daily life. We could manage life and daily activities without any assumption that it was a political matter, and do so every day. Even the introduction of money, which originates out of some political function, does not subsume all it touches in politics, for it is with great disdain that those who command finance acknowledge money serves masters other than its issuer's political force. Money may be a tool at core, but it is a tool that once released cannot be recalled or vaporized by decree, without considerable force and expectations that this trick is materially and politically sound. There is little preventing those independent of political institutions from fashioning their own money, credit, or a whole accounting scheme which bypassed the political control of banks and governments, if such a thing became necessary. Money did not need to remain a tool of political control, nor did money ever have to be respected as valuable let alone accepted at face value as anything more than the facts about it told us it was. This hardly suggests minting your own money will make things better, or that the banks would be better if the owners changed. The removal of political control over money, which was inherent in coinage which was valued because it suggested the money was stable and didn't vaporize because the market declared it worthless at a whim, would have entailed seeing that money never had the moral function it supposedly held all this time. The difficulty, as we will see, was not that money had something special if it was issued by legitimate authorities who claimed the monopoly. The real difficulty is institutions themselves. Many institutions with a say had every reason to regard money as a political instrument rather than something representing a piece of technology, human genius, human labor-power, movable substance of wealth, or anything we might naively assume money was if we didn't assign to it political and moral relevance in a peculiar way. If money were to represent something productive or useful in a sense natural science would readily appreciate and measure, it would be an imperfect accounting tool, and this had always been evident with monetary economics. Money measured quantity of something, but it had no bearing on quality of whatever it could appropriate to the holder of money. If money served human needs or served political wants for those who saw the wider interest of polities as a whole, without the institutional filter placed on that perception of it, it would be understood that what we actually wanted in the first place and what is politically useful were one and the same, regardless of what individual persons want. The argument of biologically ingrained greed or psychological fear is either a facile one or one that is not difficult to debunk if humans are at all capable of communicating with each other and sense that, at the very least, mutual self-interest would outweigh any moral sense that the undeserving had to be punished. The reasons for that are things many children ask, answered with a violent recapitulation of a stupid cycle humanity chooses for no good reason. Among the chief reasons for abandoning conceits about money's grand importance is that it leads to internecine conflict so costly to anything actually useful that whatever an individual gained was worth less than the cost to security and enjoyment of life for an individual. The appeal of being on top of the mountain is not so great, especially considering that money was a poor judge of who sat on top of the proverbial mountain in the first place. Who owned the banks and set the rules made money worth anything at all. Abolishing money would never in one act abolish social class, political and social distinction, markers of status or prestige, or the rivalries of human beings which could carry on through another medium. Almost invariably, arguments to retain the price signals have nothing to do with necessity or efficiency, but are a judgement of institutions that suggest that retaining money is an effective proxy for their own power. This does not have to make political sense to continue. Usually, monetary economics is politically ruinous, when considering the genuine interest of the holders of the state was wealth at the least rather than tokens ostensibly representing it, and the holders of the state are more interested in power over people and the world than a symbol suggesting what is basically an IOU or pinky promise. Institutions, though, do not share our native sense and its disgust for this shitfest. Why would they? Political life is sometimes blamed as the culprit, but the shitty behavior the price system entailed did not have to be politically motivated, and in many cases this behavior was either disdained by the political institutions or it was only tolerated so far as it was useful in the short-term or had to be accepted as the status quo. The judgement of institutions did not need to concern anything so quaint as utility. At core, institutions don't "use" anything but the people who inhabit them and the people subject to their influence. It may be unavoidable, since among the institutions is the person, and the existence of the person would be very difficult to remove from the sense humans or another rational actor would have of existence.^[4] The person is set against its own body and even its own institutional basis, yet this is completely normal and expected. It is this contradiction - one of the rare cases where you can see a contradiction of the Hegelian or Marxist sense in the world - which brings about the state as the typical focus of political life.

The contradiction is not in any particular thing, but between a sense of the polity which isn't institutional and suggests fidelity to something allowing comparison, and the state which is institutional and must be internally coherent to be what it purports to be. States are only compared to a record internal to them or to other institutions, and this does not allow consideration of anything outside of the logic they offer to subjects or that other institutions would offer. Nowhere in the concept of the state does a human being of flesh and blood exist, with a brain and life experience that it regards. States regard persons, legal identities, and their judgement of information in accord with their knowledge base, and would only reference other institutions to back up their knowledge. They don't suggest "politics" is possible except on the terms such logic allows. If persons are endowed with certain inalienable rights like life, liberty, and property, it superficially seems this problem is not that great a problem - the human being interfaces with the state through its person, as it must. When this happens, the person interfaces with the state on the state's terms, and never the other way around. It is not a question of relative strength, where the person as an institution and the state can exist in opposition yet in the same domain. A person, a legal identity, making such a claim is contrary to the state's claim to arrest the polity under one roof. The state as an institution has in principle all of the leverage in this arrangement. The person, or any other institutional representation, has to capture the state for this to change, and this is not a partial matter. Someone may imagine a polity dominated by eternal internal struggles which "must resolve" by some magic, but it never does or can. There is only obliteration of one institution for another, where the old system is scattered to the winds and its constituent parts assimilated. This would include many officers of the prior state, who being seasoned survivors have no difficulty entering the next thing. The history of revolutions and revolts almost never entailed a total turnover of the ruling elite. Only outright conquest and elimination of a rival polity accomplished this. But, if the polity is contested by warring factions, both of whom were subsumed in the same state at one time, the only resolution is for the polity to split into two - divided and conquered - or for the warring factions to reconcile. Long experience with politics taught the political class that civil wars always end in reconciliation, without a geographic division that proved to be impassable or dissolution into the rule of warlords. Never are such affairs clean, and the reconciled elites of both factions see quickly that their interests align with each other more than everyone else in the polity, who never asked for the war and were made to sacrifice something to the victor, only to repeat it the other way after the tides of battle return. This is intended, and describes war's purpose generally - social engineering aimed primarily at expunging this third group, after which "synthesis" is declared to invisibilize what was done. The third group is rarely ever united in purpose, for there is not absent a compelling reason anything that should unite them in most cases. The uncommon exceptions always involved collaboration with members of one or both of the dominant factions, but members of the third group could never rise equally or all at once, and as it turned out, those of the third group eager to sell out and become compradors are easy enough to enroll into the state, with the specific role of sheepdogging the rest of the low to their doom. By the 20th century, this was perfected to a science and could be imposed with frightening regularity in all conflicts, and the remaining exceptions were those countries yet to enter modern technological society and filling a power vacuum when colonial powers left. Even there, the outcome of conflicts would be dominated by the major powers, and it was common habit of the great powers to support gangs and counter-gangs to ensure endemic political and social violence would steer society-wide engineering. Here we see part of the heart of Hegelian and Germanic "contradiction" - a need to render inadmissible groups that were never meant to rise in the mind of aristocracy.

The institutionalization of the state is a choice. It would be possible to consider politics in some arrested form without "the state" as such. It would still be a view of political society dominated by institutions, but those institutions would be seen for what they are and the settlement between them would be understood by the participants which are regarded as politically active. The politically passive would out of necessity attain some awareness, and in most cases are expected to acquire this. If they do not, they fail to conform and will be punished or killed, in one way or another. There may be some understanding that these political agents are humans or exist in a material world which is not actually arrested, and that the dictates of the institutions have to encounter a world that did not conform to their assertions about what it is or any particular thing is. The "struggle" is not one of genuine material forces or anything worth fighting for. It is instead an insistence of a particular political mindset which, absent anything working against it, will always assert that the world is a total system, and that those who possess the mindset hold a master key to command and control it, rise above it, and rule it. This mindset turns on itself in ways a child can discern without any great wisdom, and the proof of this is an exercise for the reader. The necessity of those who hold this mindset is to make any thought but it inadmissible, and this requires a primarily political thinking, rather than anything in the natural world that would make this true. Politics must be "naturalized", but any political idea or any thought inimical to it must be wiped out. Those who aspire to this have long existed, and found niches they can inhabit. They do not reside solely in the ruling elite. They can be found in the lowest classes or the fevered imaginations of those who are truly retarded and damned appropriately as such. Some sick animal might hold in whatever way it can this idea or act on it instinctively without a care in the world, but ignorance of the law is no excuse for them any more than it is for us.

For most of us, and in practice for those with a favorable view of the state for its own sake, the state is something seen after the fact and recognized as something outside of us. Even those who inhabit the state see it as something alien to themselves and their person, and must do so. Nowhere does this institution exist as the singular form it pretends to be, and nowhere can such a unitary "god" or oneness remain stable. That story suggests both a critical skepticism towards the state, and the belief that nothing but this entity could be relevant and that only through those institutions could any "real" thought take place. This is to say, the mind, thought, knowledge, and all that exists is seen through these institutions, and the monarch of the gods so to speak is the state and nothing else. The many faces of this god are subsumed into the one, and yet they are many, and a number of clever tools are invoked to streamline this analysis and criticism so that it would be automatic and proceed like a machine, one stage to the next and without any deviance or existence other than itself. "He who controls the present controls the past" is a koan of institutional knowledge, which never exists in any person or anything real. It is nothing more than spurious facts which can be made true by assertion. The final discovery, agreed upon at the turn of the 20th century, is that there is nothing in the world that can stop this. The logic is only inherent to the state as an institution, and in some sense to political thought which we initially regarded to reasons far removed from any state or institution, or even our own wants. Underpinning such a logic was biological politics, or the belief that animals like humans operate like anything else in nature, and so their behaviors could be predicted. It had to be presumed that there was some essence, some Being, that pushed the world and cajoled it, like the hobgoblins I continuously disparage in these writings. What those essences were remained vague and will always be so, but they were always political essences and converged.

To disregard that there is a political status quo, and resulting polities, is the highest folly. What establishes the state proper? Every crass ideologue has their preferred oneness, and the usual go-to is brute violence for its own sake, which justifies itself. That is their image of the God, the oneness, and they need not think any more on the matter. It appears as martial vigor, but at its core their appreciation of power is nothing more than retarded clamoring for "me wantee", given a uniform and some canned dialogue to give the impression of received wisdom. The men who do this are in some sense aware that this turns on itself and doesn't work, but they are obligated by something terrible in the world to continue the kayfabe, and by the logic of such a state, the answer must be the form of that state and the ideas it espouses and states as "just-so" facts. There is an effort, out of necessity, of such an institution to maintain fidelity to reality, and so the institutions of the state pretend that their adjudication of facts is sober and careful, acknowledging the situation in ways our native faculties cannot possibly do. It is this gap - that the thought of any political agent is finite and the thought of a singular state institution is in principle extensible as far as the world will allow it - that must be exploited to establish the state in the minds of political agents with symbolic language. In short, this is a question of intelligence and accumulated information, and the material world that politics rules is treated as dead matter - which may include other political agents in total, their institutional representation and the flesh that is represented.

The state is not an instrument of rule unto itself, or a dictator of laws which is singular. It is at its core an apparition that is necessary to conceive of "winning politics", and only that. Rule, power, and all that is contested in the polity are conducted not by the state as a singular mind, but by officers of the polity, who are in our case human beings with aims of their own. There is no law that those officers do not form associations or institutions that appear vague and airy. That has been the default, and the apparition called "the state" is a useful vehicle for this. No one is truly blinded about the nature of rule and poewr. It would be impossible for any entity that recognized temporal authority to not see the immediate danger, and so "the state" is for most of us a catch-all for the powers that be. Yet, the state proper is an institution, and its constructs are laws, regulations, constitutions, and an assumption that the mos maiorum can be codified and understood by someone. Those laws, to be effective, would be generally known to anyone with any political agency whatsoever - and so the laws apply to the rulers and the ruled equally in principle. This does not prevent a state from overtly declaring that the law will declare there are distinct classes who will be treated very differently, codifying in the central institution what men are and their position in an imagined ordering of the world. The state must re-order the whole world and nothing less to be the state. Whether the institutions and forces associated with a particular state can do this does not change that the state contends not with the polity or a limited purview, nor with a status quo that exists in the minds of people. The state to be a state relates to other states, and all states are equal for this purpose. Polities, even though their borders are nebulous since they are defined by the agents' ability to affect space, can only ever operate in the conditions they must abide. The state is an instrument which abolishes this distance and anything that had to reconcile with the base world from which it came, and makes the political a useful abstraction. This is the purpose of all that "the state" entails. Rule, power, and all the means of states to exist are held by other institutions, and those institutions meet at an abstract locus called "the state" which purports to be the establishment. On paper, states might superficially claim they are just the law around these parts, or in this domain. In practice, and in all of their conduct, states and those who associate with such a construct must maintain relations with all other states in the world, including those whose existence is potential or hypothetical. States conduct foreign affairs. They do not conduct war, strangely enough. War appears to the state as nothing more than a ledger, a fact to be accounted for in the calculations of those who hold the state, but the state and those who contest it show time and time again that all of the wars they initiate are waged for spurious purposes, and the favored interests and persons of the state will never directly fight in wars. Wars are for the grunts and the slaves. If states had their way, wars would be decided not by armed force or anything meritorious, but by lawyers who decide in a courtroom what the ordering of the world would be, without regard to any result from a battle. The concept, in whatever form it takes, is nothing more than a managing committee. The substantive things a state represents and claims existed without a "state" of any sort. This enclosure is never an economic necessity or mandated by any natural law. It is always a choice of those who see "the state" as a useful pretext. Rule and power are never held in "the state" and granted special status because of this apparation. They are always held by political agents, for rule and power are not really political propositions particular to it. Rule and power may be applied to this political arena, and if they do, rule and power abide the logic and reason of this political question rather than one we would consider for another purpose, whether it is a local event or if we were to speak of spiritual rule and spiritual power which pertain to a very different question. Someone may construe a politics regarding their personal affairs and space, or a politics of the heavens which is beyond us, but such things do not pertain to temporal authority in the world itself. They would either be superceded by a temporal authority pertaining to the world as a whole, or they would be things far removed from politics in the mortal realm and unable to supercede conditions on the ground.

If we were to disregard political truth and look at it as something alien to us, as most of us do, the true contention of political society in the end is spiritual authority - who can claim it, who can possess it and hold it in a genuine sense, who can follow it, who can take from it what is useful and expedient for the political task, and all that can spawn from authoritative ideas and guidance. This is not the same as suggesting that knowledge or thought or any other thing really rules, where spiritual authority is reduced to "wisdom", "intelligence", "power", "goodness", or some other oneness which is always a political stand-in for the genuine article. Politics is always practiced by entities which existed prior to it, and no effort of political life to subsumed reality is successful without a machine build to reproduce the principle that reality is controlled. It begins not with a spark of existence that is inexplicable, but with an effort to establish how we know what we know. For entities which do not know or think in any sense, this knowledge is established from outside, and by doing so, things without that quality are ascribed animistic traits and treated as "theys" rather than things viewed dispassionately as some flotsam or environmental noise. To the things themselves, politics and what they "are" is of little relevance. The forces at work in nature which comprise anything do as they do, creating what appear to us as static systems, but which do as they do rather than do what we believe they are supposed to do. The laws and models we derive to describe nature or scientific theories are premised on observation and confirmation, rather than assertion. Whether we conduct science well or care about honesty does not change that the scientific method, even when commanded by dishonest actors and institutions, requires enough fidelity to reality for science to hold any spiritual authority. Those that seek to stretch reality by conflating science with philosophy or institutional control are not conducting science, and really aren't conducting politics in the sense that we would regard that behavior as useful. They are instead constructing ideology at best, and on average they are the enablers of venal rot and so much of the misery that plagues the human race. We can seek spiritual authority without science and still understand the world - both the natural and the political world. We can through science learn some things about political truth, by deriving the proper origin of politics and its claims and building from there our understanding, but this can only be done with considerable caution for politics is rife with the human propensity to lie about everything. Political institutions have an intense antipathy towards science because the question of rule is threatened by science of any type that arrives at independent judgement. Science belonged properly to entities which saw politics itself as a menace to be overcome rather than a source of authority or legitimacy in of itself. There is in reality no spiritual authority that politics can abide for long - not religion, not mystery cults and occultism, and not a belief that violence is the supreme authority. All of these present to the politician obvious dangers. The worst of all for the politician is to allow the people to possess the thing they wanted in the first place, because that would lead the people to see the institutions ruling them to be the chief menace in their life. People would first impose new institutions above any objection of the political class, out of necessity since the ruling institutions have intrinsically choked them. Then they would question the very idea of a "ruling institution" and make the obvious connection even a dull adult can make - that any agent is a being with an existence other than politics, and the claims of the political class should never have been allowed to become what they did. The worst thing for an imperious mind is to hear the little people saying "no" resolutely and repeatedly, rejecting the cajolers and rejecting the tenets telling them their lives are given over to suffering and toil. It would result in the rather bleak but necessary utopia I have referenced offhand - that in a better world, humans, or any other agent like us, wouldn't have much to do with each other, would value silence and orient their moral and ethical acts towards preventing anything like the philosophical interpretation of the state ever appearing again. This is not a preference for "anarchy" or any particular political idea or settlement, but a disgust towards certain types of political thought that are clearly anathema to anything most people would want. Political society is always in flux, where those who rule today could easily be displaced, and someone cast down yesterday will rise again the next season. Politics relies on the clockwork regularity of the universe to exist, abhors that regularity, and seeks to arrest it while asserting that "change is the only constant". Here again the beast of "contradiction" appears.

We can classify three types of political agency that are evident very early from the moment political thought is possible. The first is that of completely unknowing agents - things, objects, that are granted relevance to the political mind for whatever reasons. For these, spiritual authority is irrelevant to their workings. They can only do as they would do if the political question were not relevant to existence, and would not know of what they do. They do not possess agency in the moral or legal sense that we would regard, but they are agents that would have to be acknowledged. The second is of "part-knowing" agents - animals, things which emulate political knowledge, and in the mind of the political class proper, subordinated or "passive" human agents. For these, spiritual authority is only guessed at by some instinct or crude thought, which has little to do with a formal and established institutional authority that would possess laws or anything that would be called "the state" institutionally. So far as the state exists to them, it is a master and they are the slaves, and violence is the supreme authority so far as the agency of knowing actors is concerned. To not commit to this violence is to shirk the political, even though it is not difficult to see that this is not how anything actually operates in the world. Violence to be effective is only an option for sufficiently developed agents that can hold the will to act. The clamoring for violence has little to do with someone being effective at violence. It is a habit of those who command violence to make others do all dirty work, but without a formal institution to govern or defend themselves, they will themselves submit to the same mentality and internalize it. It does not require a great intellect or institution to see that this way of life is a failure, and animals already possess a primitive moral sense that prevents them from the depravity commonplace among the human race. This is not so much a matter of decency or a lack of knowledge, or even a lack of moral guilt or culpability that could be assigned to them. Guilt, shame, fear, and crude reasoning will always be effective measures to command and control such agents, and they are hoarded as virtues of a cruder sort. The third is institutional reprsentation, laws, and reasoning that required symbolic language to exist as anything more than a system worked out internally for some entity, which they had no way to relay to other agents to create a persistent institution that outlived them. There is ambiguity inherent in all three of these groupings, since in some sense, the qualities of one group apply to the others. Inanimate things are treated as animate spirits in political sense, not because of any moral value inherent to them, but because their existence is a fact that would have to be regarded. A bullet impacting the brain would certainly sober someone who screams like an Ingsoc maniac, and the true god of the world would mock the petulant cult and grant to the damned the one true salvation. Political elites of the third group will always present a facade that crumbles the moment it is established, and it can only be fed by means outside of their political logic. The key distinction in all of them is levels of political knowledge, which are gated not by the receipt or processing of knowledge of information in earnest, but by occult knowledge which must be held as property. And so, the efforts to build an ideal state, long the dream of the third group, devolve and necessitate that men are more like animals and will be ruled in the end by masters and slaves. The shitfest can never end, and it is not difficult to see the laws of the human race as farcical and arbitrary, throwing that in the face of everyone and legitimizing themselves only with appeals to force, history, or a smug sense of superiority. That, sadly, is the curse of the human race, and it preceded the political. It derives instead from that fateful decision to glorify sacrifice and normalize its practice, when the proto-humans and so many of the animals around them knew full well what that was and that it was abomination. That decision was never so absolute that it dominated the daily lives of people or their sense of what polities could be - otherwise, there would be no argument for society at all, and a very good argument for the ritualistic elimination of the human race in total to extirpate a menace from the universe. I have yet to see a single argument suggesting why this is truly immoral. It is impractical, and bound to create consequences should it not succeed, and above all, those who would conduct such a true jihad would not advertise their aims, for those who do revel in the sacrifice cult would hold an advantage and make it their business to detect such things. Yet, for all of the policing and crass moral authority to tell us that such killing is wrong, the societies built by those who condoned ritual sacrifice never can endure for long. They are rife with violence, cruelty, sadism, and struggle that serves no purpose, and it is in the interest of those who rule to encourage this or work through those mechanisms. Producing anything or drawing on the good is the last resort, because anything good would make clear that neither total democide, this cult of Satanic retards, or a few smug assholes feeding vampirically off of the rot, is wholly unnecessary, and doesn't resolve the political problem all of them invoke and rely on to feed this.

Because the politics of things and the master-slave dialectic is not terribly interesting, I will approach the political problem primarily through the view of reason, laws, science, and things most of us can agree are actually worth examining. There is no reasoning with "violence is the supreme authority" or "history is a story of struggles and nothing else", and there is no intent of anyone espousing such doctrines to engage in dialogue. The latter, emphasized by the German idealists, was consciously selected because it would corrode thought and inject itself as a hobgoblin in all that exists. To do this requires viewing the political question not as a fundamentally human one that is beholden to what we want or some conceit we hold about nature, but viewing political life and all that spawned from it dispassionately, and with a contempt appropriate for the task. The fickle contempt of German philosophy and its institutions for humanity and concepts of law is the critique of propped-up fools, and sadly its koans have been reproduced ad nauseum and count for "critique" in this sad, dark period of human history. Since that religion and its offshoots are ubiquitous, the reader can find them and discern their meaning without great difficulty, and I will mention their findings only as needed, since they have left a terrible stain on history that, like herpes, refuses to cease. It is not difficult to see that the utilization of such a tool is intended to grind down subjects in a morass of superficial "struggle" and make them comply with something odious and retarded, and that if someone actually thought about what they wanted out of slaves as a master, such a view of political thought would be worse than pointless. It would cannibalize anything to gain, and suggest replacing reason or law with the will of idiotic retards who should have been ignored. Politics suggests that you could not "just ignore" them forever, and it is this which political theories and thoughts could never resolve - unless there was a will in human beings to not do this.

The arrest of the state is not accomplished by struggle for its own sake or some other grand narrative that reduces all we do to such a crass view of things. It is not accomplished by some plan of a human intelligence which is very finite and confronts a world that is alien to it. This is where any view of the political that would have challenged a monopoly of institutions was smothered if it ever rose. The state can only exist because there is labor-power invested in it, however labor is constituted. This need not be human labor or labor in the sense that it is commonly considered, where labor is a social relation that political authorities regard, and temporal authorities claim lordship over. It is rather what labor actually is - moral intentions that can be appreciated - that allows a state to be oriented. For things which don't think and don't really have "moral sense" of any sort, the moral values are things we would ascribe to them rather than a "soul" or "intent" of an inanimate object. Yet, those inanimate objects would do as they do, and their force is something that did not need to be justified or emanate from a primordial source, as if every thing was actually comprised of body thetans. By whatever forces stabilize the system, the things in this world operate much as we would expect them to, and any failure of understanding is a failure of our knowledge. Nothing in the world required our consent to exist or stabilize, and if it did, it couldn't have existed in a real world that preceded knowledge or any of our particular existences. There isn't really a "state" from the perspective of a molecular system of physical matter, but there is a state we can recognize and regard, and information we can glean from any arrested system that is the result of governed behavior. We are also aware that there are processes going on that we do not instinctively know about or rationalize. We may build a very elaborate rational model to explain these things so much that any ambiguity about what we observe is removed, and there is nothing about this which necessitates any political meddling or institutional power-playing. In a better world, institutions are beholden to a reality outside of them to justify their existence.^[5] For the animal and the "middling" intellect, this idea of an animal intelligence that exists solely to be driven does not describe any interest of that animal, who was not created to serve the mind or the conceits of some assholes. The philosophy of struggle exists only in the mind of cloistered fools who forget that for all of their appeals to intelligence and technology, they are no different than fucking animals, and often their intelligence leaves much to be desired. If they were effective at realizing the state, their plans would not disintegrate the moment they are created, and they wouldn't have to found all such institutions on lies and more lies and tell us this is completely normal. We would instead do what we wanted in the first place, without the intermediary of some thought leaders telling us what we're supposed to think. No matter how many times wisdom is vaunted and believed to command the state, it is not susceptible to some crass intruiges of the lower orders that pretend to emulate their masters, or the dull plodding of things "just being". Labor to be truly worthwhile is never a purely intellectual exercise or a natural force unto itself. It is never guided by purely economic motives or moral sentiments that are a personal matter, and it is not moved by some hobgoblins that cajole the slave to do as master demands, by some general plan commanded by thought leaders. If there is a hobgoblin, it is political society and the demands it places on labor. Those demands are not a thing apart from labor, as if labor were beholden to the political from above. All of the officers of the state, and all political agency, is a type of labor. The actions of an animal are things that it would, if it has developed mobility and sense of the world, have some reason to do, rather than mere impulses. It would only be able to command and control the animal through cybernetic principles commanded by an institution with a considerable preponderance of labor and force itself - hence the subtitle of Norbert Weiner's seminal work, "Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine".

The cybernetician may be deemed a natural abstraction but if that were the case, then what regulates labor is labor itself and the will of the animal. If the cybernetician is another political agent, then that agent has to contend with labor and the will of whatever it contorls as if it did possess a will to act and volition that was guided by moral sentiments. This does not make cybernetics impossible, and far from it it would confirm the theory even more as something rooted in political thought itself. The problem for us has been that hitherto existing political thought does not allow anything anathema to the ruling ideas to be admissible as real. Labor is not a blind impulse or an unlimited potential from a primordial source, nor is it reducible to genius to make it labor as such. An animal contemplates in its own way the knowledge of any task it accomplished. The distinction for humans is that they possess a thorough conception of political agency due to symbolic language, rather than symbolic language itself allowing humans to do more on its own. The language of animal thought is still something that can be expressed symbolically, even if the animal has no system to communicate it or the capacity to learn much through its knowledge and communication. What makes human labor so relevant is that humans make a crucial leap to considering their labor in the context of an abstract political situation, that would only be possible in a society where this knowledge presents an acute danger to those who lack it. The benefit of possessing this knowledge over another agent is not so self-evident that it becomes natural the moment it is possible. It is the danger that this presents which was the great motor of human labor-power in society. We work not to meet our own wants, which are really not that much, but to answer the danger that political society presents that we are acutely aware of. This danger does not appear overnight from the moment political thought can develop. It instead develops gradually, and this development continues to this day. The development of education, technology, and the markers of society beyond the loose associations humans make escalates this danger, and so, the development of technology - which originally began for benign reasons or as a response to malice so that it may be resolved - turns into something which creates more dangers, since any technology we develop is in principle something another entity like us can wield. Everything we know is a double-edged sword because we are aware that there is no knowledge that is proprietary in that sense. Nothing in the world prevents information from being reproduced and others from deriving meaning from it. Technology becomes the chief obsession of property, rather than property being merely a type of technology or a good or a moral force of its own.

Nowhere does the labor that forms this exist in pure form. It exists only is what it leaves behind - the symbols or products it creates, which may as well be inert lumps until some value can be assigned to them. For political purposes, the state appears as nothing more than its emblem and all symbols pertaining to it. The men and their functions are all behind a uniform. Public face is entirely at odds with what anything does. This is most evidently meaningful not in economic life, where we are perfectly aware of labor-power's outcomes and why we do much of what we do, but in political society which is oriented around fear. Absent a compelling reason, symbolic language would not make labor generally alienable because that was the natural outcome of thinking. We would be able to derive a general theory of labor and its products without politics, but we would always remain aware that whatever the theory says, labor will deliberate what it does by some thought that makes sense to itself, and so there is a need of those who work to know what they did. Generally alienable labor would appear to the worker's own efforts as a useful series of facts and a body of knowledge which it may utilize, but labor did not occur to meet some ulterior motive of property or a frivolous conceit someone held. Labor occurred first because that is what any animal would do to continue living, and because the products served objectives that were never about ulterior motives or were not for their own sake, or some sense that labor was the prime purpose of life for some sense of achievement, or a "want" in of itself. Labor is the only way in which any moral purpose, or anything we would really want to do, could happen, and it was those purposes which labor served. We built things not so much out of a utility that suggested we wanted them, but because we are a force which was something more than a spirit. In religious terminology, labor is the soul of us, rather than a beast of burden. Political life has no use for that religious terminology. Nothing in politics or the state has a soul, and no beast of the state exists for such a vaunted purpose. The state has no access whatsoever to the good, and its prevailing moral sentiment is a turgid reminder of the past and a sense of relief from the fear of the world. This serves some purposes we might regard as good, but the state's existence responded to something that was in the first place the product of human labor. We could just not do evil to each other, or mitigate it, regardless of whether the state told us to do so or some political sense made it expedient. This would not be done out of a sense of righteousness or perfection of the world, but because we've always known what evil leads to, and we've always known evil. If we didn't, evil has a way of reminding us of its presence, and ignorance would not last too long if we were earnest and wanted better things for the world, and did not see each other as this dire threat. Everything the state does must presuppose that the agents will do something wrong, being faithful to Murphy's Law - anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. We would not think this without the general fear that politics entails. If the problem is a particular entity, we would shun it for as long as possible, and could do so indefinitely. If we were proverbial billiard balls in the grand clockwork of the universe, there isn't much to suggest we'd really have much to do with each other. It is the general fear that agents can arise from anywhere, especially the unknown, that motivates us to consider political life. For cooperative social existence, we would only be concerned with systems that are not political ones, for some reason we would find where two people share a simpler interest. There is no reason we would not do this, and on some level, we would have had to in order for any society to exist beyond a general fear. The general fear is far from absolute, but it is ever present. So far as political life has a moralizing purpose, it is through that mechanism. The polity and the state may take on qualities that suggest it would serve purposes for its own sake, and the stability of the state would be reinforced by generative labor if such a thing were seen as worthwhile for general security. This is entirely dependent on the state's goodwill, and that will never be given for free. It would depend on the purposes of those who hold states and whether they would be interested in any such thing. If that did happen, we would live in a much different world than this one.

Spiritual authority does not tell us what to do or what we should do. It tells us what other things do, what they are, and why they are and do as they do. We will always be required to interpret this through our filters, and among those filters is political life, which sobers influences. If we wished to know what we should do, or what potentials exist, we would first have to answer what the state really is and why its behaviors are consistent. It should be made clear that the state has no fixed teleology or purpose, and the political forms described here are not natural or "whole systems", but basic mechanisms that are operative because they are products of our knowledge about the world. The arresting of systems is not a "political" function, but the way we have been made to think about "systems" is very politicized and intentionally so. The only way to segregate in our mind the proper purview of politically determiend systems would be by importing that which philosophy despises - void - so that proximity can be discerned. Unlike physical space or void regarded for other purposes, the political world abhors a vacuum. We create one in spite of the ambitions of agents to drive together anything that enters their interests, because this is the only real defense against such encroachment. All of the struggle sessions in the world will only beget more struggle and never truly end, and the consequences of struggles are never "just there". They will form the soul for better or worse, and usually the result is "worse", especially when struggles are futile or pointless exercises imposed on us.

At the core of the claim of the state, or the institutions with align with it, is this belief that they must hold this spiritual authority, by whatever mechanism those institutions command. Because institutional information is ultimately a conceit of knowledge, the view of ruling institutions is, regardless of the governmental form, technocratic at heart. It is presumed that those who rule are smarter and hold an intellectual advantage over the ruled, and that this advantage is not to be questioned in any serious way. To doubt that the emperor is anything less than the wisest man in the land is to invite a challenge to this authority. The state cannot ever quite spiritual and temporal authority, and this is in stark contrast to the orthodox historical view of idiots who think history proceeds as narratives. If we look back to states all the way back to Babylon and Egypt, the spiritual and temporal or political functions were always understood to be different things. Religious offices were given the blessing of the state and served functions of the state, but the functions were always specifically religious. Priests were never confused with generals, and very often, priests did not wage war, or they only waged war in specific ways and for limited purposes. Soldiers, in contrast, waged war because that is what they did, and moral scruples had no intrinsic role in the war machine. The soldiers of civilized society beseeched spiritual authority to grant morale, since fighting for its own sake is a futile and retarded activity. The soldiers of primitive society did not fight out of some indescribable impulse to destroy things or feel "bigga", but were able to split in their mind the business of fighting from spiritual authority, and also from their productive tasks and what they really wanted out of this existence. The Greek and Roman states explicitly delineated the spiritual and political functions, and while men and women with divine functions could hold temporal power - the role of elite female priestess is one of the few exceptions to Roman patriarchy's prohibition on women being seen or heard doing anything - politics and war was its own thing. Rome being what it was, temporal authority prevailed over spiritual authority in the lives of most Romans and those they contacted, and the Roman sense of spiritual authority had little to do with kindness or goodness in the sense modern subjects might believe it operates. In some way, temporal authority is a sobering influence on spiritual authority, since the spiritual authorities most humans have followed were essentially evil rather than good. There is not any good to be found in the cults that have prevailed in every human society, for what religion and ritual pertained to did not speak to a crass desire for material gain or some working to cajole the world, but spoke of world-historical missions and a world outside of conventional existence. Nowhere in that does "the good" exist in some purified form that is held by anyone with an intellectual master key or the right ideas to tell us what we should do. Very often, spiritual authority makes no secret that malice rules the spiritual world just as it can be found in temporal authority and the personal authority of humans. To do otherwise would shirk a basic obligation spiritual authority would have to answer, since that malice preceded a formal spiritual authority and one reason to seek it is because we see terrible things in this world. Spiritual authority supposed, in most cases, that there is such a thing as "the good", at least as a hypothetical proposition about moral behavior, or it suggested there would be something besides evil. In practice, temporal authority has no interest in any persistent moral orientation, and temporal authority is never premised on a crass and retarded appeal to nature or raw power. That would always be found in spiritual authority or the delusions of retards who tell us they're actually the smartest men and women in the room. It is this futile effort to fuse spiritual authority and temporal authority - or its philosophical counterpart, to fuse thought with fundamental nature - that produces so many misunderstandings of what a state is and what is contested by it. The state thus unites spiritual and temporal authority, while consciously segregating the two. Spiritual authority is to become malevolent to match the political intent of humanity - and this is a particular feature of humanity because of its history, rather than "politics being politics", for it is possible to conceive of politics and the state without a malevolent godhead as humans have always chosen. Temporal authority, which wouldn't have to care one way or another, is modified in humanity to fit its soul and spiritual inclinations, rather than temporal authority allowing for the security or anything humans actually wanted out of the world or each other. Exceptions to this rule require a divorce between all of the pretenses of states and philosohy and what is relevant to us, and this is only possible if forces in the political agent allow anything new to exist. So far as the person is nothing more than a tool of the gods or political machinations, the person is always enslaved to the political and to the state, however it is re-arranged.

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