Return to Table of Contents | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

No state, including the so-called state of nature, appeared ex nihilo. The nature of such a creature is that it, like anything else, has a mortal beginning and end, and all of the ancient writers of political treatises, or what would be interpreted as such, wrote with that expectation. The concept of a "timeless state", outside of the flow of history, was reserved for a spiritual authority which merely informed what was politically possible. Politically, the constitution of primitive societies is simple, and it is true regardless of the type of society described. Constitutions, or what count as such, must be simple enough that most who are subject to their edicts know the instruments of political authority and government and could see them for what they are with a cursory examination. The law, as one would expect, has little to do with anything written or assumed in any constitution. To a lawyer, constitutions like any document are playthings to be interpreted by either the scrying of those with the prestige to say the law is whatever it needs to be, or by whatever self-important jackass decided to attach him or herself to the state as a vehicle for advancement. So too does the practical governing methodology and a whole body of "unwritten laws" that can be insinuated by anyone with standing to make them so. The ability to do this is understandably a thing ancient and classical societies saw and wished to avert with one expedient or another - and so, the dictator is the constitutional, republican answer to "might makes right". None of this arose as a fiction or by accident, and for as long as there has been politics, there have been those who navigate it by any crooked mechanism they can summon. The state, contrary to its claims, has always been called into question and contested. There is, at heart, a thing to be contested, rather than merely the idea of the political. The political itself - the polity - can only be claimed in the abstract, and the polity is real enough. The status quo cannot really be claimed by anyone, despite every effort to do exactly this. I do not have ready here a full history and theory of why the state existed from its base components, and that is beyond the scope of the present writing. In the previous section of chapters I descrbied the concept of the political and the origin of the state as a type of technology. Much that is written about the state is written not for the rulers or their auxiliaries, but the producers and the technological interest. This does not mean it is necessarily written by the producers, or that the technological interest ever has its day with the untrammeled authority the state purports to represent. It does mean that nearly everything written about the state, even by ancient sources, starts from the perspective of the producers and the monied interest, rather than a just-so story to defend property claims. The aristocracy hold their true governing modus operandi as a not-terribly-hidden secret, for at heart, the aristocracy sees the state in its entirety as an impediment to its "natural law". When it is written by aristocrats or their auxiliaries, it is written with the intent of talking down to our flat out lying to those outside of the ruling interest, or giving to those of the ruling interest only enough for them to be corralled to whatever fate the holders of institutions have in mind for them. To some extent, this required the collaboration of the technological interest - the producers, broadly speaking - in the ruling institutions themselves. There has not and never can be an institution that is pure in its class character, whatever pretensions a body of men holds about themselves and their pedigrees. When it is written by the producers themselves, political writing takes various forms, from shameless supplication to fads, to a number of get-rich-quick schemes of low cunning to get on the ground floor of the next big thing, to scathing denouncements of the entire sordid process.

There would be with the coming of ideology in the 20th century a taboo against speaking of politics as anything resembling what it actually is, and this has retarded understanding of what is really expected. In our present state, the state's expectations of most of humanity are nothing at all, for most of humanity was in one way or another selected to die, irrelevant to the future of those who hold the ruling institutions. In the past, such an aim could not be taken for granted, and in the past, the vast majority of humanity did not participate in political discourse and had little expectation that such a thing was desirable. There would not be a gradual addition of responsibilities, duties, privileges, and machines around the state in preferred stages, whereby Man progressed from savagery, to barbarism, to the society of classical states and patriarchal norms, to organized religions as empires or ruling authorities claiming tens or hundreds of millions of souls, to the nation-state. That view of history and the state presumed the nation-state was either the apex of statecraft and the default model to be imposed on the past, or that no replacement of the nation-state was possible without a struggle whose outcome was permanently unknowable and outside of significant speculation. For many reasons, the image of today's nation-state is a distorted one, and starting in 1989, the nation-state ceased to be a useful unit of geopolitical currency, giving way to trans-national oligarchs and the siege environment of the 21st century. The presentation of historical progress appearing in stages in such a way has more to do with covering up the reality that the nation-state was never an ideological or philosophical construct and the members of nations, both those who ruled and those who were ruled, resented ideology and all of its terrible outcomes. It is a lie told contemptuously because the ruling power was preparing to move to the next thing without most of us, and so, the people would only be lied to. There is a recognizable line of development from the beginning of reliable written history in the first millennium BC to now, and it is possible to extrapolate from what the ancients wrote of the things that preceded them, supplemented with archaeological knowledge and the knowledge of the present-day inhabitants of countries traced back to what was once considered "pre-history" but is now understood as the era before the rise of classical empires and city-states. Without a proper grounding in history, which I have yet to write about, it is silly for me to make bold proclamations about the genesis of the state. That waits in a later writing. What can be said now is that the descriptors of 19th century anthropology, which took an interest in alien societies and sought resemblances with known European and Near Eastern history, do not speak of any preferred stages that humanity "must" pass through. This literary device is useful for students of history and educators to condense a morass of knowable historical facts into a story which makes the origin of states into something relating to their profession, but it does a disservice to worthwhile knowledge of politics and history. The men who contested the political - and this contest was waged primarily by males for reasons that shouldn't be hard to figure out for any of us alive today - operated in their time and space in ways that made sense to them personally, rather than in line with any zeitgeist summoned in a moment to drive historical actors like cattle. So too did the ruled - men, women, children, the elderly, and the invalid who are stripped of the dignity of any of those categories - act in the way that they would have to, even if that way was mal-adaptive.

The claims of politics are claims on temporal authority, but politics itself must be viewed as something outside of time if it is to be anything more than a mutable code of conduct which can be abandoned at the earliest convenience. This is not to say "we always did politics", or that he who controls the present controls the past and everyone just believed this. It is rather than the origins of the philosophical state and its precursors do not trace to any particular time, but to things which are outside of the currents and whims of history altogether. Rather than a singular founding moment, the state and the institutions humans make rise, fall, and are reborn many times over, first in nascent experiments before they are formalized and enter the arena as contenders. Aristocracy has loved this social experimentation when they control it, but if experiments and political thought ever escaped their command - if the lessers ever saw that the whole rotten setup of aristocracy is itself the chief problem in all of our lives - the aristocrat bleats like some sort of horrific animal at the injustice and unnatural, baleful presence of such contrariness. The only transgressions and contrarianism aristocracy will allow and encourage are those which shatter the nascent experiments humans have built to escape this beast, until such a time that the fantasy of an Aldous Huxley high on LSD can be realized. If the origins of the state are outside of history, then political thought originates not from historical claims at all, but a recognition of time, causality, and potential. It is not possible to truly ask what things are or were if we cannot acknowledge what they might have been - that any other world was possible. Whether we can change the world, or if the world itself is a thing allowing this change, does not change that politiics involves such a speculation, rather than politics reverting to a few crass koans of low wisdom. This would also mean that political actors in any time, while they operate in their time and space as they must, act with awareness of a past and future which are not merely historical tools or props to erect for some narrative. Where we came from, where we are going, and what world will exist for us long from now - what world will be left behind after we pass, and how we make up for the sinful origin of the human race and every single one of us individually, if such a thing is possible - all figure into the political question, in a way they won't and can't for economic or technical matters, and in a way which is incompatible with science. For science to regard this political thinking and its metaphysical components requires the scientist to arrest the origin of the political agent who is capable of this, and arrest its potentials sufficiently to form a worthwhile theory. A scientist can do this - no law of nature, science, reason, or anything else stops this. But, the scientist is perfectly aware that the world does not line up with preferred models in any case, and the scientist's models for anything are their best effort to understand the world and only that. Science has no authority to directly command by imperious will, and such an imperious command is contrary to everything science meant. Science as a method and science as a practice does possess spiritual authority on what things are, do, and can provide useful models of what we are describing. As with the biological sciences, which were immediately seized on as the central political shibboleths of the late 19th and 20th centuries, political thought as a science is marred by the most crass superstition calling itself "the science", and the braying of unmitigated fags exhorting us to believe this is what we really are, this time they swear on Jupiter's cock. This does not prevent science from providing insight into the political as a concept distinct from human psychology or econophysics, worthy of its attention. If the scientist does ask this question though, he must be cautious of everything he says and does regarding something which has already staked a claim on the world and his future job security. This is not purely a matter of fear perverting the quest for truth. There was and remains a purpose for the state to exist beyond power itself, or at least a plausible explanation for its origin that doesn't degenerate into a feel-good story about anarchism being glorious when it very clearly has not been in our experience. The scientist is under no obligation to be honest with anyone, and if the scientist sees a vehicle for pure power, there is not a thing in this world that will stop him. The blessing the world gave us to keep the human menace suppressed would be vaporized, and "all that is solid melts into air".

It must be clear that the development of societies - conditions regarded by 19th century anthropology as "savagery", "barbarism", and "civilization" - speak more of interests within a society than defining traits of a particular society, where no one but civilization defined themselves or understood themselves with those terms. The civilized themselves have at best a mixed view of the situation, rather than seeing civilization as "naturally good" at all. The barbarous nations and tribes of the world did not think it was their world-historical task to be the randomly spawned enemies in a game of Civilization to keep the player on their toes - very often, the barbarous formed rival empires and settlements, and did not internalize a "barbarian" ethos that was consistent. The savage, the presumed muck from which all other types of humanity originated, was never seen "in the wild" - the savage instead exists among humanity, a representation of the residue whose life should be "nasty, brutish, and short", rather than any developmental stage that anyone regarded. The savage was alone in a brutal world and the expectation is that such creatures could never have any diplomatic relations, whereas the barbarians could be paid off with tribute and usually understood empire very well. These terms are useful not for describing a historical progression of societal forms, but for understanding the competing interests of those who could contest the world, and how their environment - which included their own nations and their members, who would build off of each other necessarily even in antagonistic relations - established what strategies could and could not work in the game. The savages of humanity were left to their own devices, with no historical role to play and noted primarily for their xenophobia, which would be if we think about humanity for five minutes, the default relations of humanity absent any good reason to conduct politics. Human history up until the last third of the 20th century would be dominated by the conflict between barbarism and civilization as societal strategies, and this conflict was never between societies which fully internalized those designations, but between two niches that were politically distinct. The world of civilization was the world of empires and intrigues, and the world of barbarism would rise, fall, rise again, and make occasional pushes against the menace of civilization on every front. The attitude of civilization towards barbarians, which the rulers of civilization took to heart, is "divide and conquer". So long as the barbarian tribes did not join forces, civilization could attain peace at a bargain price and fight wars at the time and place of their choosing. If the barbarian tribes formed confederations, acquired technological know-how and could summon the will for conquest, civilization's existence was perilous. This conflict was not just between two worlds, but conflicts within both. Civilization came with corruption and the vice of humanity congegrated in a novel device called a city. Barbarism was plagued by those who would become compradors to the civilized, but this collaboration would also be the key for barbarian leaders to play empires off each other. The barbarian could not "divide and conquer" in his imagination, but he could by cunning and some good fortune stave off civilization for generations, and the most successful lay waste to city after city, as the Mongols demonstrated so gruesomely to the world. The internal politics of both niches are as varied as the nations or polities they do build, and none of those polities conform to an ideal form imposed on the world.

Such a creature as the state does not possess any preferred forms, much as life really is its functions and as everything that exists was arrested to meet its specifications. Where do the forms postulated by the philosophical state, in various guises, originate? They originate not as convenient fictions in the mind which can be changed at a whim, but as the development of technology, which life creates in the form of the body which is itself a piece of technology for this purpose. The life-form is never arrested as its philosophical ideal, but it inhabits a body about which definite things can be said, and its aims are definite, arrested forms. This is a quality of technology and technology alone, rather than things that simply existed as a fait accompli. States, like life-forms and like the schemes humans devise in the most primitive conditions, are versatile enough to respond to their environment, and must be so. The state, unlike a flesh and blood human, is committed to its basis in technology, whereas for us, technology is a tool for whatever purpose we envisioned for it. There is no physical edifice that is defining of "the state" which can be isolated in a laboratory. There are, as with life, consistent patterns which emerge, and these are the consequence of politics and the general fear, and the results of human actions in response to that. Somewhere, a primordial condition may be ascertained, but this condition need not be singular for the creature called "the state" to exist. The state is a technology assembled part by happenstance, and never as men choose to assert its existence like some autistic fantasy; but politics to be politics is always deliberate, and the officers of states hone their faculties much as a human hones their bodies. Unlike humans whose mortality is a limit, and who have to ask at some point what their lives were for, states exist as a consequence of the general fear and the beastial nature of humanity. It is in savagery that the origin of the state must be postulated to arise, even though no "savage" has been demonstrated to exist as a purified form. Civilization and barbarism exist in recognizable forms as distinct strategies, but nobody believes that savagery is a genuine or stable political condition. It is rather an imagined primordial soup from which the barbarian nation must arise, and those barbarian nations can settle and fortify their position to become a different type of barbarian, wearing uniforms and finery and holding pretenses. But, the civilized - the human - does not merely recapitulate barbarism and its values and incentives. At its core, the distinction between barbarism and civilization is not that the latter possesses a monopoly on technology, but that the technology of civilization serves very different aims, in a very different niche, and this obligates the city to pursue very different aims in the world. Out of the hypothesized savagery emerge two strategies for political life. To the barbarians, the idea that they "hate technology" or "hate culture" or anything of the sort is a gigantic cope. For the barbarian, their way of life suits them well enough for the purposes they set out to accomplish, and their struggle with civilization is not with a crime of Being but with what civilization does to be civilization - that civilization and barbarism produce very different states, which resemble each other in the core political necessities but carry out far different tasks to reproduce themselves.

The true germ of the state is not savage conditions necessitating it, but a willful choice of those who possess the precursors of technology to make it so. In some sense, it originated with the first ritual sacrifice, so far as it applies to humanity's peculiar politics, but this ritual sacrifice is coterminous with the beginning of the human race as "human". It is alternatively the claim of civilization that civilization possesses the spiritual monopoly on this ritual, and at the same time the ritual evokes the ideal form of savagery which must exist, and the barbarians both secretly want to be like them and embrace the darker side of the ritual. The barbarians make similar claims, but in reverse and with a more frank admission of what they are really doing. The savage to the barbarian is not a menace, but a retard pure and simple. The barbarian did not need a justification or pretense to squeal "me wantee", nor did they consider their existence a lesser form of society or a breakdown of forms. To the barbarian, civilization had its chance and failed, and these were the times where barbarism could return fire. Within civilization, the barbarian can smell the same savagery they declared retarded and purged from their society with the same vigor that civilization pursued various forms of eugenics and its interest up to today. In all cases, the "savage" didn't ask for any of this and likely had no idea he was a "savage" or that this meant anything. It is the aim of politics for a "man in the middle" to reap the benefits as two beasts are set against each other, as this obviates the source of the general fear. The designation of the "savage" inverts the strategy of those who conduct politics - rather than the man in the middle being the silent beneficiary, the man in the middle is now the hapless victim, and participants and war know on some level that their true enemy isn't the opposing army, but the useless eater civilians and savages who were declared life unworthy of life by humanity's most ancient rites.

This is not hard to see, and it is not hard to see where this leads and that the destination is not good for anyone, regardless of what sort of society they inhabit. Yet, nothing in the world stopped anyone from the assertion that this is possible, and humans had by their limited genius divined a system for accomplishing life's world-historical mission, so far as one exists. Technology presented both the realization of "regression to the mean" and the prospect that the world and the social agent could be very different, and most of all do very different things than they did in the past. There was never a good reason for any of the sacrifice, torture, cults, orgies, and so on that are the hallmarks of the human race. It is in fact technology which drives everything about the states and developed political consciousness. For the interests of labor, politics is a force they are made to reconcile with, and while nothing prevents laborers from being politicians, politics and statecraft are always impediments to what labor wanted to do with its efforts - a necessary impediment given what is known about the world, but still an inefficiency and annoyance which creates perverse incentives. For the lowest class, politics is a menace from above, and whatever attitude they hold towards it is not terribly relevant to the outcome. At heart the universal class is not the technological class which could only fully form in conditions allowing it, and it is not labor, for not all men labor and not all labors are morally valued. The one commonality of men is their existence itself - a symbol bereft of purpose, set against all actions that a malicious actor like the typical human might consider. There is no inherent political value in "being" anything. What is politically relevant has always been acts and processes, functions and change, rather than the symbols themselves which can be endlessly interpreted, picked apart, disassembled and reassembled, and so on. Civilization did not invent this conception out of whole cloth, nor was it constitutionally the dividing marker between barbarian and savage. Very likely, the lowest savage already figured out some system approaching this, because his self-interest - unencumbered by political society as such - saw such a thinking as relevant to what he originally wanted out of life, like susteanance and not being tortured by these demonic apes that are his bretheren.

The claims of the state assert an ex nihilo origin even though the constituent forces at work were obviously prior to it. The rationale for this is that states are the first "forms" which hold institutional relevance, and this is the basis for the arresting of any other form in knowledge. This obviously occurred before "the state" as such - life to be stable would have arrested some form of technology without requiring the mediation of any institution, which is purely something that exists in symbolic communication and in the abstract. Why this is so is not reducible to arrogance or stupidity. It is rather that political history and political claims begin not with aspersions about natural forces, but with claims of things which hold potential in them. That is, the state is an imagined locus of causes and effects which constitutes "the thing" that is political relevant, rather than the polity or the status quo which are vaguely defined at first. Without this, no further establishment or assertion is possible, that is meaningful to politics. Truths and things may be arrested outside of "the state" and political consciousness, and in practice much of what we do has nothing to do with politics. Nothing in nature asserted that any state would or should exist, or that we would regard such a thing as politically relevant. It is possible to conduct something like politics without thought at all or any institutional understanding, and this would be the default. Yet, to communicate any political idea, vague aspersions and sentiments are never sufficient. This is a limitation of us and how we communicate, rather than something tied to the political itself, which did not need any of our consent to exist. The state presents its existence entirely against the consent of the governed, because asking for that consent would undermine its claim to arrest anything until the fickle agents granted it permission. For reasons that become apparent, inverting this understanding was necessary for the aristocratic model of politics and the state to assert itself, but common sense tells us that the state has nothing to do with consent or the will of the governed. Nor, for that matter, does the state have anything to do with the will of the sovereign. The wills of men, whatever they may do, are never political matters. They are spiritual matters through and through, and we do with spiritual authority something entirely different from the political task which refers to a limited purview. What is the state? It is a machine, some technology, and the formal declaration of states is possible with symbolic language, which allow states to hand down laws and dictate orders. Our animal friends have no comparable construct that would amount to much; but even here, the conceit that the animal has "no politics" is relitigating this faith in stages of development which don't actually exist, and which point to a struggle within humanity rather than something defining the race or the societies human build.

In politics and the forms that the state requires, statistical charlatanry and "guesstimates" are anathema to the cause. Something either is, or isn't, a state. For humans, this is worked out in language, which animals lack to make definite in a code what we learn from an early age. The members of humanity who either couldn't acquire language, or didn't "speak correctly" would be summarily executed and this was lauded by the rituals of the race, however foul it was to our sense of dignity or any purpose we would have seen in life. I pause here to remark that it is very wasteful that all of our efforts, all of the malice that has developed from this beast, is the result of humans simply refusing to speak to another, refusing to acknowledge basic things because of that ancient taboo and shibboleth we are not to question - and yet, this is what the states humans built are for. A better race, that saw what they had done, would have seen that continuing this cycle served no real purpose, mitigated its spread and the venal officers enabling such behavior, until such a time that humanity could begin anew as best as it can, picking up the pieces that their forebears left behind from their repeated and rank failures as a race. This is a reasoning animals could appreciate in their way. Nowhere is an animal so foolish to recapitulate in words the faith of something like the eugenic creed and what aristocracy created. Only education can accomplish this, and this education carries out faithfully to this day. Realistically, though, states act immediately, even as their temporal claims stretch backwards and forwards from the present out of necessity. It might have been plausible to claim, in the heat of some struggle, that some of us must be left behind. Those calculations are cold but, in a legitimate struggle and battle, they are made. It would then be the world-historical mission of aristocracy to instigate that struggle, so that the conditions for its flourishing would be established, and they would be the "man in the middle" setting any other social agent, however their social organizations are constituted, against each other. Nation, tribe, city, band, whatever grouping humans have, are of no consequence to aristocracy, here only formed with nascent fever dreams and delusions of grandeur. In all cases, those who were left behind are not a statistical anomaly or an accident. The state cannot claim ignorance, moreso than human beings, and yet it is humans who are told ignorance of the law is no excuse. What is shared in common is that all of these claims refer at first to pieces of technology, whether they are tools where the matter of the world is shaped by labor into forms with useful potentials, or the tools are abstractions like the deed to claim some parcel of land or the court that enforces said deed. They are not really products of labor to be valuable - wealth in situ is still valuable for this political purpose, and as mentioned, there are labors of dubious or no value, and the values of any labor are not freely exchangeable by any rubric found in nature. Money is freely exchangeable, but money is a form of technology, not labor's substance or anything approaching what labor actually does. Technology, whatever its origin, is always valued as something, because its potentials are assessed by intelligence, and intelligence itself is a self-referential piece of technology which hones itself. Intelligence is granted no spiritual barrier granting to it sacrosanctity above all other tools. The crudest intelligence, or some happenstance of the world or life which allowed a spastic to win the battle, is sufficient for the political task, and above all, the idea that a spaz or a retard would win is the horror of horrors for the human race.

Savagery, barbarism, and civilization in anthropology refer to three distinct strategies to navigate this. The category of "savage" really hasn't existed except as a constrast to other strategies, but it is a distinct strategy - particularly, it is imagined as a purely reactive strategy. The savage is not a slave, for the savage is unfit to be a slave. Very often the strategy of the savage is assumed and transposed onto it, since dialogue with such a hypothetical creature is impossible, and those who make the charge have no interest is actually knowing the savage - or, the retard. The title of "savage" grants to the ritual sacrifice seeming political and state legitimacy, and this is a distinction from the true genesis of the ritual sacrifice, which is that certain people simply desired to make it so. Their designs on the world saw the sacrifice as unwanted residue, and so the category "savage" would be transposed on those who were to be ejected from existence itself. In of itself, no one would care about this judgement or the conceits of any human. It is always a choice to act on the thrill of attacking the "savage", often invoked as little more than a flimsy pretext to justify the ritual sacrifice that true believers always sought to find, if only out of a blind urge to feed their god.

What would the "savage" think of this, if you were in its place? We don't have to ask that as a hypothetical, because institutionalized savagery is a feature of civilization. This feature is something barbarism detests for perfectly understandable reasons, but in civilization, the savage, barbarian, and cultured civilian live next to each other, seperate and very much unequal. The savage had no "organic" existence. Before the forebears of humanity became "human" in any recognizable sense - before the ritual sacrifice was codified and seized upon - those proto-humans had a society and some sense of what they wanted out of this, however dim. Language itself did not necessitate the ritual sacrifice, and nothing about the ritual sacrifice and culling of the weak and unwanted created anything. When the ritual sacrifices began in earnest, it was not like proto-humans were surprised. This possibility was inherent in what it meant to be alive, but it required a malice particular to this race and the ingredients that made it a thing to be arrested and settled into a state. It was never something imbued in nature, without regard to proximity or cause or effect. The ritual sacrifice did not impose the state, nor did the state impose the sacrifice. It is what the ritual sacrifice did that prompted political action of any sort, and this was never uniformly in favor of more and more sacrifice, where the heart of politics is "more blood for the blood god".

If humans were never "savage" - if humans were born with a social existence - the lazy dialectician concludes that humans must always been "social animals", and so some political behavior was both encoded in nature and indescribable, and nothing changed until some internal contradiction made itself clear to move the world. This is a shitty line of reasoning, but it is alarmingly common because it suits the interests of people who want to read into society what they would prefer to believe, and read into nature a physical origin of preferred societal forms with that laziest and stupidest of arguments, appeal to nature. It is here where the savage was invented among the surroundings to figure out who the retards of humanity were, and generalize the rule of ritual sacrifice which birthed the race. We are left with one question - if there are no "savages", were humans born "barbarous"? Where do we begin tracing the development of sociality from the presumed savage and raw agency that politics required among humans?

First of all, we have to maintain caveats about what society is and is not, and eliminate the "society without distance" that became a shibboleth for political reasons. To someone without indoctrination into a society where intense antagonism in close quarters led to stark class divisions and developed education, society and the law are limited to the extent of agents who will make them so. The behaviors of primitive sociality are not "political sociality" in that sense, and most do not consider their family a political unit from birth to death or believe their offspring, their parents, their brothers, are consigned to nothing but political existence that requires the game of backstabbing. For most humans, all the way to now, the personal and much of our lives are not political matters at all, and for many humans, their genuine sociality involves far fewer connections than all potential connections in a given nation or any social form they might know. Every social organization, institution, and polity fails to truly subsume all agents into any one "thing" or "society" they could be members of. In the abstract, states make claims over all that exists and must relate to foreigners as if they had agency and the members have nothing particularly special about them by sharing an identity, or anything special from familiarity that marks them as different. It is here where many sleights of hand give rise to the notion of fixed stages of societal development, like a life form arrested to do as it is supposed to.

We can see one point that is definite - that political animals arise with esteem and the proof of each other. This doesn't mean any particular "stage" has been attained or that a genesis was created, but that a situation is recognized. It does not even apply to humans or language or "politics" in the sense we know. But, it is the first distinction - valid and invalid. This did not happen for no particular reason, but because humans like any animal inherited behaviors and will do things on their own power that suit their whims and whatever sense of their interests they possess. It begins at the most local of levels, with the smallest of things, and these things are often not consequential in of themselves. Only in the accumulation of deeds is a record compiled, and it is this where humans - who possess a symbolic recording of this information far beyond the capacity of any animal - develop any form of political life that isn't tied to the same impulses that form colonies of life forms like the pride of lions or pack of dogs. Among the knowledge humans accumulate are the names and behaviors of animals they hunt - and among those names and behaviors are the other humans they encounter, for we have already established that humans will direct greater hatred towards their brother if it is invalid than any animal. On average, life being what it is, the humans will recognize the behaviors of animals who formed stable populations as recurrent institutional behavior, rather than the ritual sacrifice which, however glorified it may be, is an uncommon occurrence, and the cast-offs do not last long as a rule nor form a life-form or race that is distinguished. Those cast out of human society, if they live, will likely not reproduce, and such conditions - as this author will tell you - really would prompt the savage to consider whether reproduction or life itself are ideas worth pursuing, if this is what it is to be. Absent a perilous existence or some disposition that forbade the act, though, it is not unusual to expect humans to find something in creating a mini-me for whatever purpose or whim they possess, and this would have to happen for life to go on. Those who adopted any society-wide habit disfavoring reproduction or the going concern would fade against those who had some expectation that creating new life was worthwhile or a part of their life-cycle. Despite the worst and most insulting cajolers, it does not require a great intellect to figure out that a male and a female in the fertility ritual creates babies, so much that savage man and woman would be able to divine the mechanics well enough. If that didn't work, animals are not known for their prudishness in the act and their life spans are such that they would be familiar sights, especially as humans set about hunting and then herding those animals, and increasing the numbers of the herd would be a task or consideration of drovers from early on. It is also very unlikely that the females of humanity would be unaware of how they became pregnant, though the most disgusting of all cajolers will tell women today exactly this as the ultimate insult to their being. In life, the behaviors of raising a child, and simply living life create potentials that would, for any creature with language or any developed system for figuring things out, create the building materials for sociality beyond a crude set of associations. We can ask why someone is our friend, whether he loves me or loves me not, if she's like all of the other evil apes or if we should even bother asking, how we're going to find food tomorrow, what's going on with the clouds and stars, and so on. It is these very basic activities which make clear that all of our aspirations, however common sense they are, are not ubiquitous, nor is it even desirable to possess an infinite quantity of these things, or that these things are in of themselves "the point" or in service to an ulterior motive.

The seeds of this tripartate understanding were available from raw materials before anyone decided there was a tribe or polity as such, let alone an established order of things. The motives of someone, whether alone or in any association where cooperation is possible, are theirs and do not conform to any necessary purpose. They only conform to the interests of life and the "circle of life" in ways where we can allocate tasks and ask why and how we do those things. It will be a very long time - nearly impossible to determine from our vantage point - before this primordial formation of associations produces anything we'd call "barbarism" even of the crudest sort. But, after all is said and done, familiarity in some association is recognized and an understanding of general rules is established. They only become barbarism when there is a sufficient going concern divorced from the typical intercine violence of the human race, and something more than obtaining sustenance or daily relations can be considered. A higher form of violence would not change this. Any idiot can put together a war band for the same reasons humans are vicious to each other in their daily lives. Any idiot could choose not to do this - the default behavior of idiots is to not start things for no good reason, and to limit their aggression if only because they are too lazy to pursue world-historical missions. None of the aggressive impulses marked a societal development on their own power when they became generals - the barbarian and civilization had nothing to do with such an infantile belief of where social order arose, and such a belief recapitulates the hunt for the savage among them, who would in time become those who weren't that different from them until the finger of shame pointed at them and the curses began.

What did mark the barbarian was not an economic or substantive threshold, either. It is instead the elaboration of ritual and practice which honed humans who weren't very distinct or special into men or women possessing qualities marking them above both their peers and other social units. Those qualities were not purely martial ones, and for martial prowess in primitive times to attain a quality allowing armies larger than warbands, a substantial supply chain and support staff were needed. This is to say, barbarous life began not from the crudest conditions or even the first "politics" as such, but when political considerations overtook daily life, and the questions of why we do this were answered with force and will that were summoned when sufficient knowledge about the process was available. This would require the assembly of viable units for the task, where none were evident in any natural formation of the human race. Slaves, captured war prisoners, the rites of humiliation, would be honed. A splitting of faculties and division of labor is evident enough to sort the more capable fighting men from the general populace. Leaders arise more frequently, and then make their positions permanent rather than situational expedients. The permanence of a warlord is not backed by anything but continued force and has its limits, but the machninations of men shift from endemic war and personal glory to the glory of strongmen, the claiming of wives and harems, the intensification of mysteries, and the formation of fortified positions, temples, and eventually cities and wider economic activity that falls short of "civilization" proper. There would not be any essential difference between the temple-dwellers and the rougher nations whose temples were crude and makeshift, or any reason to believe that the temple-dwellers attained any "higher form" or that these two locales were intrinsically opposed to each other as political concepts or saw a struggle between barbarism and the new priestly conceit of city temples and cults. Barbarism has its cults, rituals, secret societies, games, and so on, just as nasty and vicious as any priest can conjure. By now, the Satanic ape had made itself known enough to become a regular fixture, and the Satanic ape did not define any particular Promethean development of anything, but stole from the nascent efforts of fools who might have seen technology as useful for some purpose before it was co-opted. Suckers being born every minute is not a particular failure of American society alone.

As mentioned, barbarism itself wasn't a distinguished "thing" or identity. As it rose, the peoples who became "barbarous" did not believe any society-wide transformation became universal at all. The distinction of barbarous society against the civilized is that distance remains a real thing, whereas the rule of civilization is that distance would, in the dominant metaphysical views, no longer operate for political purposes. For barbarous society, distance between people is established not by law or reason, but simpler observation. The idea that there "is no such thing as void" would not have been pedagogically taught for its political strength in allowing the antagonism in close quarters that defined civilization. Yet, "barbarous" peoples did form cities and associations within them, and they had antagonistic relations within their societies even in the periphery. The transition from "barbarism" to "civilization" also defies a clear gradient where this happened in one fell swoop. The barbarous nation is constitutionally defined by the rule of men, and law and the will of the ruler are effectively one and the same - but because there is distance, the will of the ruler only carries as far as his force and whatever virtue he can summon can. If there is a spiritual understanding of power, it has nothing to do with the ruling power and the ruling power has no claim to it. The ruler instead seeks the favor of the gods, omens from the gods and wise men, favorable auguries, and so on. If this sounds like the superstititons of civilization, it is because civilization is far less removed from barbarism than an ideologue would pretend, and members of civilization were aware of where they came from and the basis of their societies. They did not suggest that philosophy marked them as essentially different creatures in spirit, but that philosophy suggested values and ruling ideas that did not exist in barbarous society, and only gradually could those values be asserted in civilization.

The values of barbarism can be understood as political society before firm class distinctions arise - that is, social classes can monopolize institutions and establish laws protecting this, which would be the basis of developed law more than any other claim. This did not necessitate a lack of classes or social distinction in barbarous society, but in barbarous society, clan loyalty and local interests were considered political currency, whereas in civilization, the particular clan, identity, or interest was specifically disincentivized in favor of the monopoly. Class society could only partially form, and familiar distinctions were premised on expedience or regular qualities - the domination of women by men in many cases, the subjugation of vassals, the rulers as a distinct body from the ruled with no expectation that this was unusual or unexpected, or that the subjects had any reason to expect anything from the warlord unless the subject was useful to that warlord. Where this arose was not from any worked out theory of "barbarism" or "law of the land", but it arose because the polity could be contested by strength. Who was strong today can fall, new men rise, and it didn't matter what new asshole raised an army if they could win. Barbarous society is grossly unequal and fairness may at best be an aspiration or a condition of basic sociality, but never suggests anything like justice or civic duty.

The barbarous has technology, religion, priestly rituals of the most lurid sort, warriors specialized from the norm, men tasked with labor and a work ethic, and its losers who are kicked down. They are remarkably familiar to their civilized counterparts, and no one is convinced that humans are equal - the lack of any ethos suggesting political equality is basic to the condition. Where this differs is that a philosophical state neither asserts itself, nor would such a thing be desirable. That sort of thing is exactly what the barbarian wants to avoid, because their existence would be imperiled from within by the presence of such a culture. They hold that truth to be self-evident, and if they doubt it, they are in for a rude awakening when they encounter civilization. What defines barbarous society is its lack of any singular definition and rejection of the ideal forms. This is not done because they lack concepts of education, knowledge, or wish to violent reality or rational thought, as if they must be insane schizophrenics. The barbarian definitely isn't retarded. The barbarous nations could communicate with civilization and understand readily the civilized concepts of nationalism, civic duty, and what the civilized valued, and had political thought that was roughly the same, from the same wellspring. What was lacking was the consolidation of interests around a ruling core which was singular and pervaded the space of the polity, which could subsume all ideas and thoughts - all technology, in other words. For the barbarous, technology is just a tool, and not a tool with any inherent spiritual force by being technology as such. This did not prevent the barbarous from understanding and developing technology, and adapting to their situation like anyone. It meant that the values of aristocracy only penetrated the members of society partially, and existed alongside the other interests of society. The ruler of barbarous societies is typically a chief who functions more in the vein of the monarch than the statesman, but without any concept of stable succession, it falls on customs that work, or simply by the impression of strength made real. Nothing about this suggests obedience to a constitution or ruling principle of any sort - the barbarian commands men by virtue or fear, both of which can be easily conflated because nothing about virtue suggests ethical goodness as civilization might assume. Moral authority is a thing separate from rule, for barbarous society makes no pretenses of justice, and does not need to revel in transgression of it. That transgression, particular to faggotry like Nazism, should not be dignified by calling it barbarism or even savagery. That invention is a species of depravity outside of the preferred anthropological trinity, and yet it existed and had its basis both in the circle of life - by the exploitation of symbolism and labor - and in interests that arose outside of it, that were always present as a matter of course for any human society.

The political format in total of barbarous society does not entail any "total system" or descriptor to describe the logic at work. On the surface, it appears like nothing more than the rule of the strong over the weak, but this is really the dictum of an imagined savagery - and the savage itself did not really think about this question because their basic existence was autarchic rather than concerned with the world. For the savage, any "total system" was little more than a sense that the world and its inhabitants did as they did for seemingly absurd reasons. The barbarian did have a code and expectations of human behavior, and this has always been observed even the crudest barbarous society. The barbarous society exists without any total system governing all that exists. The claims of strong men are never limited in principle - the nation may seek nothing less than conquering the world - but this concerned spaces that were large, and did not portend to rule over an infinitesimally small part of the world. So long as the barbarous ruler was dominant and held hegemony, that was the apex of their aspirations. Anything beyond that would be wasteful, and none of his court would have any reason to think that micromanaging private life in the way we know now is worth anything. The ruler's dictum did not have any ideology or a natural interest demanding it conform to monarchy, democracy, a buddy system, or an imagined mass of the nation, or some sense that nature and the gods ruled the world and commanded men from beyond. No one preferred form of the barbarous state or polity can be found, and in practice, each polity considers its own history and conditions and only can make limited claims to the past or the distant future. It is not that the barbarous could not know that this was possible - their encounters with civilization made that inevitable, and even without civilization, some asshole with enough wits can figure out a system to enslave the world - to destroy the world for his or her cause. It is rather than it was both impractical and undesirable, and pursuing such a goal was inhibited by the disinterest of everyone else. It is further the case that everyone did not share the goal of those who would destroy the world for their cause in any way, and destroying the world was not on their agenda list. This was not out of some moral superiority or cowardice regarding power, but because actually following through on that threat to destroy the world for your cause doesn't give you what you wanted. The barbarous sadism is of a lower sort, and though in local theaters it is intensified, this cannot become a general rule that is stable in a locale and becomes an interest unto itself. In this way, most human societies have a "barbarous" element or something interpreted as such, that is often invoked and transformed. In civilization the element is subdued and corralled. In active conflict, there is uncertainty, doubt, and struggle, and the barbarian as mentioned did not see itself as a "barbarian" or consigned to this role or a reactive task. It is rather that a lack of centralization in institutions is evident. In barbarism, men make laws and men establish temporal authority, and institutions are subordinate to that. In civilization, it is the other way - men are the instruments of institutions, and those institutions are deliberately established as inhuman and impersonal, unlike the aristocratic stand-in of gods or idols which grant to institutions a face and particular rituals regarding it. The barbarian king may be cast as a living god with a gigantic court, may produce the facsimile of laws and institutions, but it remains a barbarian - a barbarian with fine clothes, culture, and all of the hallmarks of civilization, but a thing whose origins are regarded as barbarian in any case. The king does not need to mind about any pretensions that he "ought" to be civilized or that what he is doing is not the apex of human attainment. The barbarian king may be wise and demonstrate probity far beyond the human norm, but nothing he does makes him civilized in the eyes of those who hold the name "civilization". From where does civilization arise? It did not arise from barbarism with its birthmarks at all, even though the civilized peoples were all formed out of barbarian nations and remains so for a long time, never forgetting that they came from rough origins. Its origin was something quite different, and something apart from history. The barbarian is a creature of history, but the civilization both stands apart from history, and is beholden to the idea of history in ways that a barbarian nation may dismiss.

It may be a conceit that civilization is a state of mind or intelligence, but this alone doesn't mean anything. Some fevered dream can produce the conceits that found civilization. Nor does civilization transplant cleanly to empire or the avarice it entails - any idiot can conceive of conquering other things and declaring they are bigga like Warhammer 40K Orks. It is not even actions to realize it that make civilization - in reality, the city is never realized in its purified ideal, requiring constant labor and sacrifice to reproduce its edifice for questionable benefit. There is a technological necessity for the city as a fortress of humans against the world and other humans, which could only have been built when sufficient machinery, including the manpower and knowledge of labor required to fight and construct its walls and weapons, were available. More importantly, civilization is premised on the command of men to produce its peculiar labors, which begin to distinguish themselves from the labor of barbarous society not by quantity or sophistication on a sliding scale, but by qualities peculiar to the niche of civilization. That is, civiilization produces not merely whores, but temple prostitutes, finery, rituals, opulence, the decay of slums, factory work and its precursors, developed systems of slavery, writing, commerce as something more than activity at the borders of nations, an internal economy and internal discipline that becomes more exacting the longer civilization goes on. Many of these things are available to barbarous societies, and we should start to see that a clean divide between civilization as a thought-form and barbarism is not an essential quality of polities, but a distinction of strategy that ruling interests might hold. It would not make sense for a barbarian king to start talking about plays, actors, drug-fueled orgies supplied in palaces, and so on, and such things would appear to him as garish and degenerate, regardless of the customs in his society like drinking beer and killing things. These things were not essential qualities of the men and women involved, but were things that were sensical in one niche and nonsensical in another. Likewise, the cultured man of civilization has no business acting like he's totally a noble savage or inherited barbarian virtues, and he looks like the sniveling retard he is when he does so. Both may understand the other and appropriate those values, for what really rules does not conform to a neat model or classification scheme of what "should" rule. Barbarian kings can build courts and empires and would have to do so if they're going to survive in a world where empires are the geopolitical actor. Civilized men find barbarism and savagery fascinating and can see themselves in them and commonalities. What is the locus from which civilization truly establishes itself, then? It is not a disparate assembly of things that just happened to come together to create a new system or life-form called the city and the New Man. The machine of civilization is not defined by the sum of its parts, though it very much possesses those parts it shared in common with any economic activity. It is not defined by its symbols and edifices, which are just idols of little significance. A civilization reduced to symbols and faggotry is a ruin ready to sell itself out to the highest bidder, and this program has sadly been carried out deliberately and in degrees of faggotry hitherto unknown in our time. Yet, civilization is not teetering on the edge of "collapse" in the 21st century. It is far from it - civilization in the 21st century displaced all rival systems as admissible ideas, to the point where seriously proposing barbarian virtues in their genuine form would be nearly unintelligible and, well, a barbarism in the linguistic sense. The last "barbarian" peoples are tied to the thought-forms, technology, and ways that civilization successfully imposed on the world in its quest to remake the world in its image, and this is not seen as something alien to them. Realistically, people from cruder regions could pick up a book and learn much of what a civilized man would learn, and not inherit the baggage and rot that our state of civilization deliberately created for its nefarious purposes. To some extent, civilization relied on the import of barbarous peoples and their humanization to feed its sacrifice pits, and barbarism in turn received weapons that accelerated their incessant war of Man against Man. It is not that civilization possessed invariably superior weapons or knowledge of war. Until the invention of gunpowder, nomadic peoples picked up weapons and developed their own technology which civilization could only partially adapt to. When gunpowder is invented, the barbarians could learn the ways of the gun and be about as effective at fighting as civilized men in the formations utilized, and this is what the modern empires did many times over when recruiting compradors among the "savage races". Civilized men possess no inborn virtue recommending them as superior fighting men, and their technology does not make them more lethal in ways that a barbarian could not co-opt, as if the barbarian were too retarded to figure out that a big fucking bomb is really effective for its purpose - or the barbarian would stand and die as civilization ordered its men selected to die to do for the most disgusting faggotry like Hitlerism did. Needless to say, civilized men are not so depraved to think that this idea of "standing and dying" is at all effective for fighting an actual war, and it is the tactical and strategic thinking of the most disgusting fags to ever lead an army that suggested that "stand and die" was at all a sensical order.

These terms have all been anthropological rather than political designations - and so their root is in the material world, science, and psychology. Neither temporal nor spiritual authority figures into any of them, and personal authority is assumed in all of them in one way or another. For all that is discussed about the essence of civilization or nations or identity, not one of these essences points to any political conclusion, nor to any necessary spiritual content of the forms, symbols, and meanings of these concepts. All of them arise as strategies to answer a combination of tasks someone might encounter. The savage encounters a hostile world where no one can be trusted, the barbarian picks friends and enemies and sees struggle but no peace. Civilization arises first as a thought-form but becomes more with realization of its aims, its constructs, its relations, and most importantly, the establishment of a general theory of politics, rule, and technology, rather than makeshift systems that would have existed otherwise. It remains merely a thought, an idea, even after the city has been established. No one building civilization was convinced that "civilization" was the point, even though it had been established for centuries before the concept gained spiritual or political meaning. It is also very helpful to see that the theories of "civilization" as spiritually relevant arose not in the core of civilization, but either in its periphery in Greece and the broader west, or in the far east in China which largely developed independently of western notions of what was and wasn't civilized. For the latter case, the view of civilization was synonymous with the existence of a ruler befitting such a concept - the despot, whose political theory is worked out over centuries and arises with the Qin Emperor, developing into the recognizable classical Chinese state with the Han. That was what defined Chinese civilization and culture as distinct from the tribes in the frontier, rather than a particular cultural marker or signifier that in of itself held importance. Civilized men were ruled by emperors and courts who maintained laws, trade, and kept peace, where barbarians were ruled by strength and were seen by the emperors as tributaries to be managed in one way or another. The idea that this wasn't what an emperor did - that the people of China were tribes or identities or tied to their cities - was contrary to what the empire was, where the warring states were united under one man and the political theory distrusted large standing armies or anything that would be used as leverage to unseat the emperor. It would remain a trait of imperial Chinese history to distrust armies and militarism, because such an apparatus was the most likely threat to the throne and to the bureaucrats who were established as a kind of law distinct from the militaristic basis that defined the code of law we know. This is the theory that made sense for century after century because it worked, and because the alternatives would seem like madness or some species of treason. For the Greeks, their status as the periphery of what was then civilization in pre-classical times informed their political development. The Greek cities sought hegemony rather than a united Greek nation, and their habit of squabbling remained a defining trait up to the medieval period, never fully abating. The centers of pre-classical civilization were Babylon, Egypt, and the regions of the near east, and this civilizational concept would be reproduced in the Indus Valley where it remained, and picked up by the migrating warrior tribes that eventually formed the Iranian peoples - peoples who were by their own admission rooted outside of civilization rather than obsessed with the conceit that they were civilized in the way Greeks, Romans, and Chinese peoples would be. The civilization of the near East arose not out of conceit that this was desirable "against barbarism", but as a type of barbarism let off its leash and developing particular means of rule, rituals beyond the norm of depravity, larger structures to celebrate the rulers of those lands, and the eventual formation of bodies of law, writing, and the first scholarship that was something more than ephermeal systems worked out by wise elders of some nation or systems held by largely anonymous and undistinguished persons. Yet, it was civilization by the metrics that such a thing would be judged as distinct from barbarism, because it had established a concept of rule and spiritual authority which could willfully impose a greater mission on the world, and conceive of a type of diplomacy elevated above the dealings of warlords and assembles. That is, the priests were not just capable of being kings, but the priesthood held a greater ethos and a concern of its own, and so too did the technological interest find a niche that barbarous and primitive society would not allow, and usually saw correctly as a threat to its modus operandi. What begins as a situational strategy becomes permanent, established, and something members of a society are inured to, whatever their role in it. Someone might be a slave and not formally counted as members of civilization, but they are subject to all of its culture and habituated to the slave system of civilization rather than the slave system of barbarism.

The wellspring of civilization is despotism - it is this which is both the formation of civilization as a distinct idea, and the basis for every other general understanding of what politics is in the moment where it is observed. Every other concept of a general political theory or system - a "concept of the political" - is either clearly descended from despotism, like monarchical claims affirmed by the spiritual authority of a priesthood or church, suggests a modification to despotism like the class-centered republics of the philosophical state, produces a fickle and impotent complaint that despotism is mean like so many failed theories, or suggests that transformation of what we do at a basic level would have to change for anything to really be different. The last of these was the attempted claim of socialism or the slave and peasant revolts of older times, but this concept was largely aborted by the end of the 20th century in favor of something very different, which is presently beyond our description. It is with despotism that the first consolidation of politics as a collection of thought-forms is sensical. No other basis for civilization would allow this without devolving into aspersions about symbols being the meaning of civilization and politics in-of-themselves, or would suggest a degradation of civilization in the cradle so to speak. For better or worse, this remains the only consistent and workable concept of the political that humans managed to enact, and the elaborate institutional facades drawn up are always half-believed and carry force only so far as they conform to a despotic answer to that most basic political condition - the general fear. The conceits of civilization stem from the thinking of despotism alone, whatever one might think about it, and the civilized way of life has ever since found new ways to rearrange this despotism, but never really considered ending it or suggesting another way. The reasons for this are what I began writing this book to explain, but after further contemplation, the despotic view of humanity would have to be viewed as the only correct one, given what we are living through today. Attempts to "end despotism" are among the most foolhardy, and yet, those who uncritically embrace despotism while calling it something else and maintaining pretenses do something worse than despotism, and certainly are no friends of freedom in the genuine sense such a thing is desired. Yet, despots never rule forever in their person, for such a thing is a physical impossibility, impractical, and not even a thing desired in all cases and times. States, empires, polities, are not things which have to be immortal. The despotic view did not assert that to be despotic. Civilization itself exists as a going concern, and it began not because someone believed despotism was spiritually and morally great and everyone who didn't like it was retarded. It is instead the claims of civilization as a thought-form - the belief that civilization establishes itself as something apart from men and institutionalizes all that exist - that make despotism the only workable arrangement of civilization in the long term, to which all institutions regress eventually if they continue purely on inertia and the will of humanity's base impulses. This is not because the humans themselves are "purely fallen" - the true nature of the Satanic ape is something altogether different. It is because the obvious answer to the general fear and the rule of fear is one thing alone - security. No reasonable person, or even a person who thinks for a moment about their predicament, is convinced risk and gambling is a reward, and so many gambling addicts face ruin if they believe risk can be tempted or modeled such that its consequences are invisibilized. If the odds are 80 to 20, there is that 1 in 5 chance that the cosmos decided you lose, and if your entire way of life is to be staked on that gamble when no such gamble had to be made, it's a dubious proposition to tell someone to take on risk. It is much worse when the risk is 1 to 99,999, and a visible group of persons has absolved themselves of all consequences and declared that consequences - responsibilities - are for the slaves and the simps, laughing at them as they fall into the trap they were born into, cradle to grave, forevermore. Despotism alleviates that risk because there is no uncertainty or ambiguity in the final analysis. Those who won have won, those who lost do not need to pretend it was ever any different and can spend what remains of their life, if any iota of agency remains, on literally anything else than this farce that humans called philosophical freedom. You cannot risk what was never yours to win, but if you think it was different, you risk the wages of being a fool - or worse, of being retarded, far worse than mere foolishness.

For century after century, the despotic norm is all there is - men are born slaves, and it wasn't going to be any other way. Spiritual authority, though, does not need to justify any of this. The priesthood and the religions of the time preach abasement to the rulers, and no one will tell them no - but, what anyone believes in is a whole other matter. In this environment, a whole host of secret societies, rituals, associations, clans, interests, mercantile acts, and so on seek that spiritual authority. There is a ruler, literally a living god in one way or another, but in the main, what people lived for was their daily depravities and the typical horrors humans have a fondness for.

The many events making the "philosophical state" are histories unto themselves, and so summarizing all of them in near narratives to suggest a teleological trend is missing the point of why such a state would arise, as if it were a reaction to material flotsam "making history". It is rather that men wrote on the matters around them, and spoke of these things if they were in a position to affect them, for all the reasons that makes sense. Nowhere is political sense or civilization born fully formed, whole and indigestible. They are reproduced in each new person, who responds to their time before they are locked in relitigating past struggles. In pre-classical times, without any history as such, there was no philosophical appeal to regress to the mean, which would be the calling card of the philosophical state to insist "nothing ever changes". After the fact, it is declared imperiously that pre-classical Man believed "time was cyclical", something we will certain argue against in the book following this one. The particulars of what history is are not relevant here - what is important now is that all men, regardless of their standing or whether their thinking reaches posterity, will consider the situation they are in because they must.

What begins with civilization - despotism - changes the condition not because it "is" or asserts like a natural event its existence, but because people act on this new situation in accord with what they sense. The situation is not the same as a primitive barbarism, where life is simple and distance is expected. The drover tends his herd, the size of "society" is small enough, and an expectation is that clans and families operate for their own purposes. The warlord is just there to lead the army and enjoy the spoils of his empire, such as it is. Despotic rule in civilization creates a very different situation. The warlord's harem is now more than just a party, but a cult which aims for all the women in the city. Humiliatiations that would be grossly offensive to barbarous honor are de rigeur in civilization, and this is a rule of civilization no matter what pretenses it maintains about justice or honesty or probity. After the fact, it is declared that this is "just natural", but it is always active - no despotism can be taken for granted. We may think a despot moderates this vice if it suits them, and they have a greater objective, and this is entirely possible, but no one expects that decency or anything forces the despot to do anything at all. This produces for the despot no obligations whatsoever, and it is an ideal that resembles superficially the barbarous honor for one man. This is what the reactionary and conservative philosophers harken to - the imagined ideal of honor within civil society, reproducing a parody of barbarous values amidst civilization and claiming that this is the vanguard of advanced culture and thought. Those who aren't fucking retards, which I hope to be enough people in civilization, see correctly that something is amiss with civilization, but the conservative supplies easy and thoughtless answers that fit the despotic basis of that civilization. To think about the recurrent crises of civilization is "sinful", "weak", because doubt is the death of political force, if it is managed with the miserly rationale of political economy or some sense that virtue can be hoarded and doled out sparingly. That task, like so many others, is left for the simps and losers. The winners just believe that they push the win button and, if no one can tell them no, civilization produces rewards for a time, from the command of so much technology and so many humans civilization provides. In the aristocratic mind, this is a gratuity of civilization, and thus it feeds to those who enter that interest what the lowest class is blamed for wanting - free shit.

For nearly all of humanity's recorded history where any state could develop beyond a hill fort or warband, civilization and barbarism are locked in a conflict due to their very different modus operandi. Efforts are made to ascribe to barbarism or savagery ideals they don't actually possess, to say what barbarians "are" and what the civilized "are", but all of these things have been defined by what they do. The first civilizations did not see themselves as "fighting for civilization", but pursuing a strategy which suited their niche and technololgy against rivals. They become civilized by the claims of their first leaders and their early experience with empire-building. Take, for example, the fate of many early Near Eastern conquerors who subdue an enemy city. What is to be done, without any governing idea? The claim of the victorious king is that he can do with the vanquished whatever he likes. He can choose indiscriminate slaughter, but this is never the point of war. If he wishes to occupy the city, he requires a governor, from men who have no reason to serve faithfully. Usually the warlord trusts members of his family for the task for a variety of reasons, or must hold leverage to keep trust through fear. If someone wished to truly extirpate and enemy methodically, the method is not "war" or the rituals thereof, for extermination is at heart a technocratic matter as modernity made clear. Far more have died to willful neglect and the "peace" of eugenics than the active battle deaths of war or the acts of armies. The great killing of the great European wars was contracted out to specialists or to the "Jehadist" eugnists who were tasked specifically with the eugenic mission above the war effort that was ostensibly the struggle. Very often, the killers in the concentration camps were inmates themselves, made to do this as a social experiment and "morality test", typical of the foulness and demonic nature of the German race, and it is a demonic race ^[1] and culture which infused itself through the state school and a particularly disgusting form civilization took. Mortality outside of battle accounts for more "political deaths" than battle dead. Historically, armies lost more men outside of battle than within it, which should tell us something about the nature of war itself. Armies were typically fought in ways that avoid pitched battles or reckless expense of capable fighting men, and when armies wage war, their favorite target is, for perfectly rational reasons, opponents who are disarmed and will not resist. This rarely happens without some fight, for civilians are not in the habit of lining up obediently to stand and die, but in the main, soldiers and generals are highly risk averse, for the consequences of risk are the most precarious for men whose entire existence hinges on merit. If the merit is not rooted in a genuine war, it must be made up by insinuations which anyone thinking know to be a lie. Such lies can only be upheld by a cult, which develops further only with the philosophical state, empire, law, and a history of such skullduggery and shmoozing generals.

The first and only true "political format" humanity has developed arises not because rule is inherently despotic. Rule as a concept does not suggest any preferred format, and whatever the understanding of politics, politics in practice is carried out by interested parties who do not intrinsically submit to anything, whether it is an abstration or another person. All acts of submission are definite events, each carried out for their own purposes, and submission is not the sole quality that unites a polity to its master. Such thinking is the demand not of proprietors or a base instinct in humans to dominate which doesn't exist in this form. It is instead a conceit of already-established aristocrats who understand the despotic reality and fully embrace its core, while wishing to maintain their privilege in the game. The aim of the aristocrat is not to question the despot, but join the despot in the big club and make it appear as if there is no "despotism" for them, but all others live in an abject despotism which can be abstracted, weaponized, and modified to conduct a civilization-wide social experiment. Barbarous society is incapable of doing this in full, and doing this would undermind the barbarous constitutional settlement so much as one exists. In barbarous society, no "theory of rule" is ever stated, even a faith in violence or the virtue of men. It is instead that virtue itself, by whatever means it has, would be the rule of barbarism. This virtue does not line up with technology or the interests of civilization. It is then technology that defines civilization as something distinct from the barbarism, but only that technology which made despotism possible, from which any other conceit of civilization's politics would have arisen. Thus far, no serious attempt to question despotism really answers the original problem that civilization and the political posed, and every concept advanced does little more than disguise despotism or distribute its offices and privileges by one scheme or another that serves the venal interests of civilization. This process plays out in a similar way in barbarous societies, but without the pretense that there is anything other than the virtue of men holding the society together. In practice, this is never the case. Any society has its recurrent values and institutions, and adopts technology that facilitates rule. The distinction of civilization is that despotism becomes viable as a ruling idea, because it is possible to enclose, ensnare, and corral humans much as livestock were corralled, and this science is worked out into the first general theory of human society - and this general theory of human society is one part of a general theory of technology.

This collection of institutional authority in despotic societies did not just happen because of a natural proclivity, or happen as a result of specific fates which would have been different if humans chose to not embrace despotism. To speak of civilization in any intelligible manner is to speak of despotism, and only after its despotic core is understood would another format of society be intelligible, with the knowledge that at any time, the nature of the state of civilization is and cannot be anything but despotic. This despotism was never a fait accompli, as if civilization's values were self-evident and agreed upon by all right-thinking humans, or that the cults of human civilization ever could reconcile with each other and live harmoniously. Very often, cooperation among mankind was not even a stated objective of any large faction in the human race. The default relations of humans in civilization, much as they were in barbarism, are antagonistic relations in close quarters, between participants that for various reasons do not want to be there, but have been left with few options for political purposes, more than any material reason why this should be so or why this is beneficial. Civilization was for most of its participants a losing proposition, in which a small aristocracy and mafias can openly steal everything you hold dear, hold a knife at your throat, and command you to love your slavery. That is the genesis of the ritual sacrifice and the cults that formed the spiritual and intellectual core of civilization, and they were present in barbarism. All civilizations are at heart barbarous societies, and they never fully strip themselves of their barbarous origins. One thing civilization is not, but which civilization accentuates and makes apparent, is "savage". Where the savage is quickly liquidated in barbarism, savagery is isolated, weaponized, and stoked in civilization because this is useful to the cults which govern civilization. No such incentive exists in "pure barbarism". Any mercy in barbarism is entirely incidental, usually because the barbarian has no interest in killing something that is temporarily useful and has too many interests against a program of general ritual sacrifice as a true ruling idea. The ritual sacrifice that defines the human spirit is done at first not because this rule is seen as "the point" in of itself, but because that ritual sacrifice spoke to something in humanity that it refused to give up at the critical moment where it "must" happen. Civilization begins when the ritual sacrifice is developed, diversified, and takes on novel forms, which lead to the specialization of human offspring for the specific act of sacrifice for the city, so that humans can be sorted into their fate by mothers and by the koans, at first half-understood, that guide the cults of civilization. Nowhere in civilization did a seed exist that the city was for anything we would consider "good", or possess any particular moral quality to make a city worth defending or eternal. The early civilization is born more "barbarous", but the familiar hallmarks of civilization are there. Temples and codes of law regulate spiritual life, war, and commerce, with many commercial and finance functions carried out in those temples, and money granted spiritual significance beyond anything it constitutionally entailed when we think of what money is or does. Nowhere in that arrangement were people truly confused about what money "was", as if money truly had the power of a fetish or symbolized a potential infinity. Mammon, being far wiser than the retarded Randroids and their ilk, would chide followers who forgot the nature of wealth in such an egregious way. Where the money arose was not a contrivance that ordinary people thought was self-evidently useful, but exists because there was a condition where wealth was enclosed and could hold this value, and this was asserted by various mechanisms to create the first market conditions. Those conditions required a situation which would have existed without a market or money, because they were inherent to the technology that made civilization a viable proposition or something that could perpetuate itself. This was only possible because civilization itself was conceptually struggling against a concept of barbarism and the old world. For the barbarian, trade and commerce appear as Marx described - at their borders, in infrequent exchanges regarding what productive wealth was worth trading in primitive times, or by mechanisms involving the personal honor and bargaining of men who considered this commerce to be something other than a business dealing. None of the barter or haggling in primitive exchange was seen as "economically necessary" or a feature of the society that could not be dispensed. Those matters were instead an affair between men who saw a coincidence of wants in barbarous conditions. It is this barbarous situation that is invoked with the parable of the bourgeois man in the desert looking for a valet to fetch him water. The antagonism in close quarters of civilization is a very different beast, and it is here where money in any sense we would regard the concept as worthwhile or valuable can exist. Money arose not as the purpose of civilization or an essential ingredient, but as a tool within it which served a function only when it was tied to Mammon or the cult of the adherent's choice. Saturn and his antecedents got their piece of the action, and the matter of business took on spiritual importance in the old religions of the Near East in ways we are quite familiar with, should we wish to investigate religious and civilizational history leading up to the classical imperial period.

What was at the core of civilization then was a diversification of labor that was not "self-evident", but informed by antagonisms and cruelties of the human race. Much of them appear superficially as an extension of the endemic violence which was typical of a race of half-aware apes eager to start fights for the most spurious purpose. The diversification of labor arises only because it could, and nothing preventing the working of metals in primitive fashion, and the refinement of tools beyond the crude working of someone who thought, on his or her own power, how to build a better axe for chopping things. This diversification of labor would not for a long time form institutional technology which operated for the purposes of the institution, in a way that conforms to our expectations of technocratic society. As it turns out, much of the technological revolution of the 20th century was not intended to teach men to think and gather the resources for technology to advance. It is rather that the technocratic arrangement we know today was designed to retard human progress and technology, which had proceeded on the initiative of men and women who were communicating with each other freely and across any national or civilizational boundaries. A free exchange of technology would have entailed the working class clawing back larger and larger shares of the national wealth, and would have allowed the "barbarian" colonized people unfettered access to the same technology as the imperial core - technology that men of "barbarian" races were already a part of and contributing to, which was not inherently a problem for the imperial knowledge apparatus. If anything, the imperial university would encourage globalization and recruitment of "inferior races" to sell the concept of imperial uplift as a strategy. But, the greater danger was that those who would possess technology would have no reason whatsoever to uphold the imperial religion and its shibboleths. They had no reason to believe in something as foul as eugenics, or that "noble blood" or heredity held any explanatory power for intelligence, let alone could be granted the attributes that the eugenic creed insisted they must possess against all evidence that intelligence, heredity, or anything substantive worked that way. This problem is far in the future for early civilization, and the concept that technology could be a "state monopoly" is particular to our time. Who did command science, and saw the value of controlling it, were educators who were tied to the rites of initiation among humanity. Barbarous society had these people, but in such a society, the monopoly on intelligence and institutions is not just a technical impossibility. It is a danger to the constitution of such a society, because nothing about this monopoly and rule of fear accomplished anything good, productive, or competitive. It is only in civilization that such a condition could arise, and the holders of civilization use this threat and command of knowledge and education for purposes they can harness - if they know how and have a mind to do so.

It is this which informed the aristocratic view of despotic education being driven by fear - that is, the aristocracy attributes to an imagined alien despot the qualities they themselves possess, to make it appear as if the oppressive force is an "Other", and that rulers themselves can never be the problem - it is always something foreign and un-natural, against God, Heaven, and Earth. The despot in civilization arises not because this despot is required for technology to proceed, but because absent a compelling reason, it is only the despot that regulates anything at all so that this highly antagonistic and cruel contraption can function at the barest minimum that allows it to remain viable. The despot arises as a reaction to its conditions, but it functions always as an aggressor - for it is only by agency that anything in social information is propagated, and nothing "just is". No despot can reign innocently or expects that to be the case, and the job is not so glamorous and disdains the opulence and prestige that aristocracy craves. This is less than desirable for what aristocracy wanted out of this arrangement and its world-historical mission, but it was the only way it could hold this creature called "civilization" and its cults. The reason for this is simple - the ruled have no real material stake in continuing this arrangement. What the ruled who are cast out of aristocracy wanted was land, which produces food, and security, which is entirely contingent on the actions of agents. Simple math and assessment of an agent's resources tell that one agent, no matter what knowledge or technology it possesses, could not meet the sum total of other agents in a city. The agents in society chose, absent a compelling reason, to assemble in cities and cults. The true origin of aristocracy is not in something special and unknowable, but in the same muck that produced the lowest class and facilitated labor. Aristocracy understood immediately, and never forgot, that its path to victory was through the fate of the lowest class - to continue the ritual sacrifice, the rejection, the shame, the insinuations, until they reach their maximal stage. This philosophical ideal was not assembled organically as something self-evident to anyone, including those who could grasp what their goal was. The despot was not the philosophical ideal, but its antithesis - the force of will, from the world and the true form of the spirit that animated mankind, that restrained and moderated the vices of human society. To the despot, there is no question of "corruption" or "good power against bad power". This is not because the despot is philosophically amoral, hedonistic, or believes "violence is the supreme authority". That doctrine was a cope of those who grasped for the most frivolous authority. It isn't because power itself is the goal. Power is only ever useful as a means to various ends, but once established, it takes on its own life and operates in conditions particular to it. Political power in the proper sense is always developed and formalized, and never a given of nature. The natural order of the world had no need or concern about "politics" or any suggestion that politics had a solution or any preferred forms. The despot is the first form of civilized political thought that can establish formal institutions and the concept of the state proper, starting from the warbands and functionaries of cults and secret societies asserting things that they came to possess, conspired to possess, and could for the first time perfect with formal knowledge of what they were doing in the city - in the conditions of antagonistic relations in close quarters, rather than every chief and every Indian getting ideas about how it should be, which leads to the familiar aphorism where there are far too many chiefs and too few Indians.

Education does not appear in civilization with ready-made formalism and a central institution dictating what members of civilization are allowed to thing. Such a control mechanism could not be introduced for a long time, and the idea that such a mechanism "works" to any extent required advances in genuine science that only came to us in the modern era. The broad outlines of such were apparent to the priest-kings, priestesses, and cults that dominated civilization and set it against the barbarous world, even in the nascent state where "civilization" is comprised not of the ideal city or social formation, but an assembly of tribes, kings, interests, and warlords that are to the philosopher's reckoning "barbarian". Antagonism in close quarters is emphasized most of all in education, even before civilization or the oppressive forms of barbarism arise. It was the germ from which both could arise - that sorting of the population, carried out by mothers and the peers who establish hegemony in the crade, which was really the true purpose of the human project. All humanity aspired to, all of its industry and labor and technology, was given over to this conceit of those who decided they were better and that they would kick down. It is only for that reason that the ritual sacrifice was given this grandeur and force to motivate humans. Had it not been for that, this sordid affair, and all of the ways education proceeded, would be seen as a sad travesty which produced nothing, wasted exorbitant effort for the most spurious cause humans could destroy the world for, and in the end, didn't work even for this goal it set out as its continuing mission. And yet, no other idea prevailed, because every idea of what political society could be would pass through education, and it did not take long for this education to be co-opted by interested parties that could assert it so. This was never a fait accompli, but the diversification of technical labors created dependencies that no one human, nor a small band, could fulfill independently of the society. This was true of barbarous society, which was rightly wary of centralizing this education and authority, and relied on the independence of agents to create viable war formations. It is with civilization that education and education alone could assert its world-historical mission, shared by every conceited mother and the most idiotic drive a failed race can summon, for the race and for the lowest form of the race. After the fact, "war" is vaguely the justification for political order, and the definition of war is deliberately removed from its genuine functions, observed independently by those who have been affected by the practice. What is war but social engineering, and what is education except the purified form of that engineering? The philosophical state begins its claim with the claim of war and imperium because education demanded it, rather than war itself having this spiritual authority to assert reality. War is not a monopoly on violence or the sole legitimate form violence takes, for much of the death, toil, and violence of humanity is carried out as a routine matter of states and through the viciousness of the human race. The viciousness of the human race is then glorified, encouraged, normalized, and granted sacrosanctity for the most spurious reasons, which are thrown in the face to grant to ritual sacrifice increasing power. The "limits to growth" ecology invokes in the 20th century have nothing to do with a genuine natural bottleneck, but with the limits to how much ritual sacrifice can be summoned at any time, and what the ruled are willing to allow to pass without dire struggle abandoning any reservation that humans are anything but a failed race deserving of its fate. It is not really a limitation of intelligence or human faculties that is contested. It is well known that the potential of human intelligence - this problem-solving faculty - is denuded and detached from any meaningful result or context which would be necessary for intelligence to hold any relevance. But, under the eugenic creed, intelligence became the preferred proxy for aristocratic conceits about hereditary and, most importantly, proprietary intelligence and knowledge. It is the occulting of secrets behind lurid rituals and unlimited torture that is the foul seed of civilization. The despot does not represent this. The despot is the executive force that exists amidst this presence, and is the first human agent that can suggest that regulation and control of this beast is possible. Otherwise, "natural law" never resolves to anything but a roiling battle for position, backstabbing, and short-term gain, which creates a nexus of interests which claim to be the true governing power of a race - and it will always govern a race rather than a nation, a city, or even the material conditions of biology, for the germ of education concerns a peculiar racial consciousness of a lower sort than the worst bigotry ordinary humans manage. If that is what natural law is, it would be self-evident that the only course of action is to reject such a beast since it will only produce needless suffering and imperil the very thing the ritual hoped to accomplish. If so, the despot remains the singular source of temporal authority that can make a definite claim to anything. This has been exactly what was affected, with all malice and deliberation, from the establishment of the modern incarnation of this empire - of what we may call "the Imperium of Man", whatever the name of the race or idea which sells the imperial concept.

Return to Table of Contents | Next Chapter

Return to Table of Contents | Return to Chapter Start