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What is the "philosophical state"? It is that which has entered our language as the aristocratic ideal of "the state", in whatever form it takes. This is to say, it is a conception of the state's spiritual authority - a body of agents held together by an educational doctrine, ethos, and practices which make claims on the world. The traditional view of the philosophical state is that spiritual authority - the authority to know what is what - and temporal authority, which is the domain of politics and rule over the world, were fused together and one until the philosophers conceived of a distinction. The reality, borne out by considerable evidence, common sense, and the reconstruction of these concepts for ourselves even in the darkness the philosophical state created, is the opposite. Before philosophy, spiritual authority and temporal authority were also separate threads, only occasionally meeting. It is with philosophy, or a similar such treatise where intellectual property can be held by a monopoly and paired with political force, that the concept that spiritual and temporal authority are shared by one institution and inseparable can gain currency. The Pharaohs, though they rule as living gods and invoke spiritual authority, understand that religious matters and the affairs of the world are entirely different things. The Pharaoh is not given the world because the divine asserted it as a just-so story. The Egyptian practices, borne out by evidence of what Egypt was during its independent existence, are practices of people who held spiritual and intellectual authority as a monopoly, shared only on the terms of the priests and gathered as the script of religion deems worthy. Any knowledge or science among the people was not a concern of the rulers, and was always a distinctly inferior category of knowledge. The Roman religious and political offices were distinct tracks. The consul's job was not the job of the pontifex maximus, and it is religious offices that patricians held as the most sacred superstitions. For the Romans, the role of religion was not to rule the world, but to guide those who did, and as with many things the Romans believed, Roman paganism was dominated by self-interest; and so, everyone involved with the Roman religion will ask what is in it for them, and in this way, Roman religious authority is one basis for the entire patron-client network that held Roman life and its empire together. The Romans' habit of offering sacrifice and ritual are a type of service or duty of the aristocracy - or, in the words of L. Ron Hubbard centuries later, Roman religion sold to its people a piece of blue sky, and not a particularly appealing one, which led to the Roman embrace of mystery cults and foreign superstititons, in search of the next fad or thing that would make a system in the mind of aspiring Roman opportunists. In the philosophical state, the meeting of spiritual and temporal authority is described in language that is not primarily religious, and becomes the concern not of priests or secret socities or of neutral observers. The philosophical state is the first that can conceive of monopolizing this knowledge with any credibility. This only happens when the tools to enforce ignorance are acquired, viable, and sufficient knowledge of the land and its inhabits allow for enclosure of the people. This topic was considered in the previous book's treatment of the economic problem and the ecological claim, and there I elected to ignore the political matters and instead considered this purely as a material, social, physical, and managerial problem. But, at the heart of economics and ecology - the only reason why humans undertook such a mission - is that this was both politically and spiritually something humans deemed worthwhile, and that humans could obligate all other humans to play this ridiculous game.

Before tracing the global and historical situation where the philosophical state arose as a worked out treatise that enters the historical record, a brief view of the people of a city-state and their environment is helpful. The city-state's domains are the city property and the farmland outside of it that is a tributary to the city. The farmland, in the main, is not very interesting, staffed with slaves and the landholders. The typical habit of the land-holding peasant was that he was a slave-holding man who could be conscripted for military service, and among his property was his wife and children who were at the disposal of the family unit, which fed into civic life by supplying society with more boys who become soldiers and eventually make their own family, and more girls who are tasked with producing yet more boys and girls so the society can be reproduced. The functions of war and reproduction to produce more warriors are viable because without the merit of victory in battle, no other property, productivity, commerce, culture, or society can exist for long. This condition is one that education and aristocracy cannot overcome without social engineering far beyond the scope of anything the philosophical state can allow on the power of its ideas, institutions, and the will of its officers. It is truly the only condition that aristocracy sees as useful for society - that most of the men and women own nothing more than their offspring, and the men and women do not even really own themselves in the sense that is expected of a free, liberal society today. What everyone else sees in this construct is beholden to aristocracy, and the educators who can insinuate that they held a monopoly on spiritual authority. This happens not because the priests' spiritual authority directly creates temporal authority or a force like nature, but because aristocratic priests have, through some foul magnetism, manipulation of the general fear, the propagation of cultural koans, the propagation of their agentur which had always been the true basis of civilization or a particularly developed society, claimed the souls, minds, and actions of the people. The people, out of some desperation, either offer their sacrifice willingly, if not eagerly and enthusiastically to join the party and fun, or they are made to sacrifice and toil with far less enthusiasm and a visit from Vinnie the local "claims adjuster", in whatever form he may appear in a particular culture, time, and place. Without the spiritual authority of a general fear, a state rooted in violence does not have much going for it, for its people will at the first opportunity claw back some space, or leave, or do literally anything else but follow some ultraviolent retard obsessed with power projection. Yet, spiritual authority can easily manipulate people into abiding this violent "power projection", not because the projection of a symbol actually holds any sway over the mind, but because the threat of violence is not merely a threat of violence against the body or some space in temporal existence, but a threat to the soul and a threat that this torture will never end. This truth we hold to be self-evident - that all men are created to suffer in the eyes of aristocracy, and whatever the reality of our existence or anything we're really doing, this is how aristocracy and the cults of rule must operate. Any concept that human societies are united by goodwill, nice things, cooperation, or something useful, does not concern the political matter which dominated the city-state or the early empires of mankind. Perhaps many thought it should be that way, and that it could be that way in some space, but the dominant attitudes of the human race have been malicious because humans simply do not want to be anything else at their core. If humans were something else, it would become clear that a construct like the philosophical state, and all of its practices and shibboleths, are too abominable to allow, and it would be self-evident to those who wanted something else that this beast, and all of its agents, are a thing to be avoided at all cost. Those who wished for a different type of society would be fundamentally incompatible with the political treatises that did dominate, and likely incompatible with any politics that humans have considered with any seriousness. At the end of this book I can answer briefly and far from perfectly the "other worlds" that might have happened if we did not do this, but I warn the reader that such descriptions are a fantasy rather than anything humans can implement or would want to implement. For the question of what the "good life" would be, politics and all hitherto known spiritual authority - and indeed the entire enterprise of the technological interest and the historical middle class - has nothing good to say, and it will remain forever stalled between despotism and its feeble attempts at a republic which fail from the start. In other words - due to a willful choice to embrace biological politics and humanity's inability to break from biological politics without developments that a philosophical state can snuff out as they form - "failed race".

No treatise - no shared concept of a "philosophical state" with relevance beyond a thought experiment - is possible unless there are political agents acting on this idea who are real and substantive. This is to say, it is improper to speak of any "philosophical state" outside of the domain where people meet each other, form clubs, factions, gangs, and exchange communication which would make the existence of another agent something with meaning in the world. Assumed conditions far away from us - for example, what some space aliens on Rigel VII are doing - have no bearing on the formation of the philosophical state as a meaningful event in this world. We may, and as a rule must, consider cosmology and what might apply to something far removed from us. That is not something philosophy dictated, but what the concept of the political suggested - that politics to be politics did not suggest any fixed domain where an infinite number of agents can be confined. It is also clear that an infinitely large space with infinite agents had nothing describable just by stating that any of these infinite quantities collectively held any quality that was universal. Before politics can make any claims about transcendant truths and universalism, it always begins with local and temporal agents, and can only exist on that basis. Any claims about a divine regulator ordering the world by decree and announcing mortal affairs as a series of just-so facts has nothing to do with politics, and as a spiritual authority, this view of the universe leaves obvious questions and much to be desired. We can easily suggest that the universe is a clockwork containing potentially infinite firms, and that all political states are adaptable to account for an unlimited number of agents, firms, events, actions, and so on. What we cannot claim is that any of these interactions are fixed in nature and immediate in the sense that all agents, events, and so on are equidistant from each other. Even if we philosophically discount that there is such a thing as "void" or "space" - if these things are interpreted as illusions of our mind in an ideal world - if we are to suggest an immediate and interminable dialogue between agents in society, we require a number of claims about existence which are trivially disproven, or if accepted would require us to ignore our sense and accept a cosmology wildly at odds with what we can independently verify. It is this which the philosophical state must claim in order to create what it really is - a monopoly on spiritual authority given temporal form. For that to exist, it must be possible for such an authority to manifest, which suggests a regime of education that can communicate formally an idea of rule which excludes all others. Until the philosophical state is established, the rule of whatever does rule is established by fear alone, and any philosophy of rule is something the ruling elite believes among themselves, but cannot apply to the general population. For most of the ruled, every ruler they have ever known is some terrible natural disaster, and this is the sad lot of the human race. For the ruled, the philosophical state is nothing more than an invasion of their life, made possible by a beast which can assemble for the first time in this new fashion. Predecessors to the methods of a philosophical state can be found, but only when the philosophical state is presented to the masses and made default in a society, and its edicts can be enforced by something other than despotic decree, does such an entity exist with the relevance we attach to "the state". How this entity forms differs from one part of the world to another, for there is no one "philosophical state" to regard as a default form. What quality they all possess is that the theories of rule and politics, which were once an occult secret, become general knowledge that is expected, and that general knowledge is a filter which can automate the process of ritual sacrifice and shunning on top of the standard proclivities of the human race. In other words, a philosophical state makes formal and explicit what humanity always implied - that for those cast out, there would be nothing and never will be anything ever again. It is with the philosophical state that enclosure of the world into ecological niches can first be established not just as a rule for humans or animals, but as a general rule of the world - that all that exists can be treated as the drover treats his herd. In the same act which establishes this condition, the drover denies any such thing takes place, and these treatises allude to freedom in one way or another as a concept with political currency. The philosophical state does this not as a cruel act of hypocrisy alone, but because the conditions of technology which allowed aristocracy to build this tool for its purposes could just as well enter the hands of another interest or a combination of hostile interests, and some group aspiring to become aristocrats must regard political freedom for the first time as a menace to defeat. For themselves, aristocracy imagines freedom very differently - as a limited substance of virtue that ought to be monopolized by them, doled out in some way they deem suitable. Freedom in the genuine sense is not a concern of aristocracy for a simple reason - aristocracy, by the rules of its existence, would never allow themselves the "sin" of weakness, and would never once abide being treated in the way the lower orders have been. If that ever happened once, it would happen again, and so on. Aristocracy understood long before the philosophical state that its key to victory is to disallow anyone to tell them no ever again. Every version of the philosophical state is designed specifically to ensure that no one will ever tell them no or act against the dictates of the grand theory and model the state presents to the public, however goofy the model is. In the same movement that creates the philosophical state's facade, unwritten laws and customs are implied which carry the same force as law and virute for all intents and purpose, and it is always expected that subjects "figure it out for themselves" to see that what they're supposed to follow has always been a cruel joke.

The example of classical Athens is illustrative of a law regarding all societies - that there is, in every society, a limited number of agents who can be said to be political agents whose generation of ideas is substantial. Take a city of approximately 200,000 humans, as the city-state of Athens commanded, and then consider those who hold the franchise - adult, freeborn males meeting the property requirements, which reduced the number to 20% of the original, or 40,000. Of those, consider who has enough wealth to be taken seriously in high office, who is capable of leading other men, and the various calculations of virtue that would take place in any democratic society, for most of the people would see correctly that they had little choice but to follow someone who was more influential and could command by virtue where their individual faculties could not. The freeholders, by and large, are first concerned with their self-interest, rather than any collective consciousness where they hope to individually command the state or abase themselves to the state. The inequalities of ability in men for the purpose of political virtue are such that the 40,000 are not an indistinguishable mass comprised of the same type of men. Nothing about democratic society mandated that men were the same in ability or function, or aspired to such a goal. The objectives of democratic society were to produce armed men to defend the city, which required them to hold a minimum of property to fight and to engage in civic life that made this society viable. Nothing about that mandated that everyone had to be at the same level of ability or virtue or hold the same wealth, or that wealth would be held in common and alien to the subjects of this democratic society. What results is that of those 40,000, perhaps 2,000 to 8,000 would be "active citizens".

Now consider what 2,000 agents would do in an assembly. These men are few enough in number that the discrete and real qualities of them would be evident enough. At no point is an assembly of men comprised of atomic subjects that are unknowable and identical until adjudicated to be different. Each man in a democratic society arrives with whatever qualities they possess, and this is expected. They acquire abilities by being in this association called "democracy" - that was the only reason democracy was viable as a force, where these men individually or in small cells of personal relationships would not amount to much. The union of the assembly is not a wholly unitary affair, in that each man and their personal relations with each other continue, and discord within the assembly is possible and expected. The body of men assembles for a shared purpose of rule, and though that purpose covers every domain in the society out of necessity, whether that purpose was desired by all or desired equally. Everyone here has their reasons, which were not at heart political imperatives. Free men of political standing fit for a democratic society never, ever "stand and die" as what the demand placed on democratic society during the 20th and early 21st century. They will fight, they will flee if they must, and they will keep shouting before surrendering the essential purpose they were there to accomplish. This, they do not because of attachment to the idea of ruling or the idea of this assembly, but because it was in the interest of these active citizens to protect something which was a collective benefit - if it was a collective benefit, and it was not difficult to see the benefits of a democratic association or the wider associations outside of the assembly, since these men had associates who weren't active citizens but had volition and further would have had to be accounted for if this body could be said to rule anything. The men then speak to each other face to face, form friendships, clubs, social circles. In this environment, politics is not conducted in the abstract, but as an affair between men who know each other, and for whom personal honor and standing are very relevant. Replacing the men with an assembly of women, or mixing men and women together, or people of different races togather, would not change the essential nature of such an assembly. What is important here is that the numbers of participants are sufficiently small that the qualities of each agent are assessed. They would be judged by the content of their character rather than an abstraction, as would be necessary if this political matter were a serious one.

Before politics is anything else, even a vague sense some savage imagines, it is an affair between people, in what they call society. Therefore, the limited numbers of participants in this assembly is very relevant. The same is true of any assembly. For every imagined institution, nation, ecosystem, society, there are a limited number of agents who are in principle knowable to other agents, and all of their interactions are definite ones rather than ones we assume to exist absent a explanation of how two agents are connected beyond an assertion that they exist in the same assembly of persons. Whether those agents are persons or things in social circulation would not change that there are a limited number of such relations, which are not things obviated by any abstract symbol. All such abstractions would be declared by those involved in the assembly. At first, all political treatises - all such assemblies that may be called the political class or ruling class - are mere ideas in this chamber. Their effect on the world outside of the assembly is nil, and nothing stops another assembly from existing behind the backs of this assembly. By no means does the formation of an assembly spring from any class or interest pre-existing in society. Since this is ultimately an affair between persons, the agents can come from any interest, and concern the political matter for society as a whole. This assembly lacks any inherent legitimacy or authority that those outside of it have any cause to regard, and the assembly ultimately commands nothing outside of its halls. Not the army, not the propagandists, not the commerce of a nation, not the souls of its subjects, and above all, not the bodies and lives of those outside of the club; nor do the members of the assembly have any domination over each other, except for esteem in this contrived ecosystem.

The important thing here is that every concept of a republic begins like this - as the design of some small number of people who gathered in one space to decide that such a thing exists, whatever the name it takes. This is not true of despotism, where the decrees and edicts came from a force that established itself and which is only regarded because the force is clear and present to the ruled. A republic need not contain any inherent class character, and as a rule, the republic conceptually is both class collaborationist and abolitionist. It requires the collaboration of classes to form the ruling interest above all, and the exclusion of those who will not possess political agency for certain. Implied is that the excluded lack agency of any sort, and their very existence is to be regulated by those who now call themselves the political class, who possess political rights and a shared interest in this franchise. It is abolitionist in that, among the classes with agency, political and social classes are understood from the outset to create faction, rancor, and distrust that will undermine the shared aims of those who share this franchise - the exclusion of all who are outside of it. Those who are outside of the franchise are recognized only as aliens, and as much as possible, they are excluded entirely from their models of society, even when their presence is obvious. Should there be too large an excluded class, two options exist for the republic. One is to grant the outcasts entry into this society in some capacity, most commonly by promoting to the ranks of the freedmen, or by foreign nationals swearing an oath to their new home if they are to reside there permanently. This promotion never grants to the new members full status, even when such a thing is promised, because of the realities commonly understood about this arrangement. The second option is grisly but common enough - the alien is to expunged, either by exhausting them by various means to lock them out of the society, or active measures to eliminate aliens or drive them out of the nation's domains. These fates for the excluded sound much like the Nazi faith in a republic, which is entirely the point - that the end stage of the republican idea, as could be predicted, devours itself and devolves into this friend-enemy distinction. The important take-away here is not how to prevent this, but to ask why it did turn out this way. It should seem simple enough that a republic can be inclusive of the downtrodden and of foreigners with reasonable caveats, and this has been the stance of the most successful republican empires in history. Rome and America worked with multinational bases for their empires. "Ethnic Romans" only existed in the city of Rome, and in some sense of Italian heritage which was never relied upon for political unity, evidence of this being the civil wars where Italian citizenship in the Roman system was at stake. There was never an "American" race or nation in the European sense, and all efforts to create an "American" identity have been failures, with the efforts to make a "white" identity even more farcical than a sense of civic nationalism. The same example can be found throughout history - the most successful empires were always multi-national because this was the most effective way to politically and economically integrate very different people without the costs of assimilation. Ethnostates such as Nazi Germany have a hilariously poor record, and the entire racial ideology of the Germans is first a gigantic cope because the Germans did not have such an empire, and second misunderstands the Nazis' modus operandi for their planned world empire - a world empire in which an aristocratic, Germanized fifth column would be installed in every client state and racial policy was entirely a proxy for the global mission of eugenics, to be inflicted on "true Germans" just as much as it would be on occupied nations. The exclusivity or inclusivity of a public interest is entirely in the hands of this ruling interest, and no rule requires them to hold this interest as a monopoly handed out in the most miserly fashion imaginable, or on any spurious pretext invented to make the whole society suffer for nothing.

Friendship and membership in society are never abstract notions or figments of an imagination. There is in every society a ruling interest which can adjudicate this, by some law which is commonly accepted among the interest and handed down by those with sufficient agency to determine who else may be members of society for some purpose. If this power to decide who is "in" or "out" escapes the ruling interest, it is lost to them, and no assertion that the ruling interest can overrule what it gave to the people - or what it had to accept in a lapse of its monopoly - can truly undo it. This is to say, if members of society include the outcasts as people with social agency, the ruling interest has no way to dictate who those members' friends and enemies truly are, or that the rulers are in any way the friends of the ruled members. This is not merely a rule of life's interest or the nature of the political for humans. It is a simple rule of what it means for such a construct of political agents to exist, and so it would apply to a despotic society just as much as a republic or any other form of government. Another form of government may not care about friendship or makes no pretensions that such a status is relevant to its calculations. Despots are the friends of no one and have no reason to pretend otherwise, and despotic governments are accepted by enough people - even appreciated because at least in that way, they are honest and no one has to waste energy pretending that government is a service to the ruled. The despot fares no better than a republican body in controlling who gets to be "in" and "out" of society. A functional republic does not devolve to the stupidity of Nazism and can correct judgement of social membership at the highest level, while the despot has no useful rubric to assess the class, worth, rank, and qualities of any subject that is determined by the laws of men. The despot only has the judgement from the throne and whatever magistrates are employed, and can only judge social classes by scientific treatment of the question, or by the whims of what the despot wants at this time. The latter is the course most often taken because this is expedient. What this means for us is that republics, and the philosophical state in any form, is where class definitions and conflicts become far more prominent than they were in the past. In an earlier time, conflicts were personal and tribal, because those were the interests that prevailed in humanity rather than the interests of institutions, technology, or particular classes that formed. Classes could be discerned in early humanity, but their political relevance mattered less than tribal or familial loyalties, and spiritual relevance - membership in the right religion or cult or praying to the correct deity or the correct priest who represented said deity - trumped everything else, as it always would in all hitherto known human societies.

The public can only be regarded as a machine with a variable but finite number of agents. Absent anything else which holds political agency, the only agents which can perpetuate this machine are the agents themselves. It does not have an existence granted by any natural law. Nature does not regard a "public" as such. Everything about nature suggests the opposite - that political agents begin in isolation, and face the same question without regard of whether the political matter is public, private, or the property of anything in the world. There would not be by nature any agency of anyone that can be taken for granted, unless it were accepted that the agents "just were" so constituted to believe a public was in force, and a republic was a natural form of government. Ample evidence of human history tells us that no such assumption was inherent to human society, or even something those in republican societies believed was "just there". Republics were always understood to be fragile things, held together by the virtue, esteem, ability, and substance the agents of such a government embodied. Lacking any other machine to unite them, the republican machine imagined here can be viewed as a network sharing information at each node, without any central node arbitrating anything that exists as an independent agent. If we imagine an abstract center or totem of the republic, it exists in the minds of the agents of such a society, and this abstraction is not incidental or irrelevant; but, a republic exists whether or not this ideal model of a central ruling interest dominates all other interests or dictates the correct ideas, or if none of those conditions are true. The basic condition of a republic is that the agents share an interest in the public, rather than the offices or individual merits, and that this interest is something more than primitive democracy where the shared interest is purely an ad hoc arrangement.

This interest is not an assumption made of hopes and fantasies, for no such thing as "the public" can be taken for granted, and it does not exist apart from agents who comprise this public and start off as self-interested as anyone else. Those agents arrive with pre-existing relationships, families, tribes, nations, associations, interests, and so on, but not one of these can speak of "the public" in any recognizable way. Nor does "the commons" map on to "the public" in this sense. Primitive commons exist as an arrangement given tacit approval by those who are involved with it, and the management of this commons is not conducted by any particular will or institution. For a primitive commons, there is a sense of the participants that keeping the commons in place would be a good idea, but this commons is not a "public interest" of a state or a political matter at all. The public requires that there be a private matter significant enough to be mediated by such a thing as "the public interest" - that is, that the agents in question possess sufficient technology and means to affect the world that a public interest in its own right becomes far more expedient than many private interests or collusion between gangs and oligarchs. There must also be a concept that this thing, "the public", can be communicated intelligbly to its members. This means that every republican society requires education in a way prior human societies did not, and this education is more firmly in service to political life than education of the past. Education of the past mostly demanded obedience to the authority around these parts, equitable behavior towards peers, and disdain towards inferiors, with little attention paid to any shared ideology or method. It did not matter so much what education taught beyond its necessary political and social functions, and in practice, education taught very little. To this day, education is notoriously disinterested in learning, and so anyone training to work for any job will be expected to re-learn what education purportedly taught. The public interest is more involved with education, for good or ill. It is the republican mindset which understands immediately that the root of education is fear and humiliation, and that favorable treatment will designate who the preferred persons in society are, and these preferred persons are expected to become a distinct social class by this method. It is also the public interest to promote technological advance such that the society can be reproduced and adapt to its situation, and this is transmitted to the men and women of such a society. For the individual subject, this public interest is aligned with self-interest and prestige. This happens for two reasons. One is that self-interest is the fastest route to motivate citizens to "serve the public", because doing so serves themselves, especially if the favored classes' "service" is to enjoy the fruits of opulence and exhort others to do their part. The second is that, by aligning with the image of the state and the dominant institutions, men and women whose mindset is naturally supplicant can find, in a republic whose institutions are strong, a home where the typical politics of humanity can be temporarily abated. A republic can then claim that this novel form of government is what "protects" them, even though republics historically have not been more creative or scientifically inclined than despotic societies. As the republic as a concept is tested more often in modern times - and the modern "republic" is a very different beast than the ideal form mentioned here, which is a topic for another time - the failures of such a government become more apparent, and so too do its favored interests double down on failing institutions, insisting that those institutions were perfect before "stupid commoners" corrupted them by saying that the republican emperor has no clothes. Even when a republic's sins are tame compared to what we know to be possible, the tendency of a republic is to cling to its genesis and foundation, even when the founders of a republic are aware that societies, polities, and the realities of this world change in ways none of them could predict. Even without regressive modern ideologies, this faith in the past is built in to the republican concept, because past examples that are common knowledge will be more accessible than future models which have to be developed by a person or shared by like-minded people who form an interest of their own.

The public interest here is not an assumption but a technological certainty, and so it abides the laws of any other technology, rather than knowledge or thought itself or a spiritual conception of the state. What it does mean is that the public interest of this sort requires religion or philosophy to be sufficiently developed among the members of that society for this technology to perpetuate beyond a crude guess that such a thing is possible. Many religions and societies accomplish this goal without a "public interest" automatically following as something people believe in, but that is a pre-requisite for the concept to be intelligible. If someone were truly barbarous and their religion was crude, the concept of a public interest could be communicated to them and this developmental stage could be surpassed, and this is often what did happen. Nowhere is "the public" a thing taken for granted in this sense, but the concept is easy enough to communicate. There must also be an interest of many people who would want such a thing, and this is a greater barrier. Democratic society is not as natural as its advocates might believe, and only particular conditions facilitate it to exist as something more than a primitive constitution favoring egalitarianism. That interest must be able to defend itself, and it is here where democratic societies typically fail. This means that technological knowledge would have to temporarily be widespread enough that democratization is possible but not fully realized, and that no monopoly on knowledge or inborn human limitation of the subjects makes distinctions of intelligence - in institutions or in human beings - a political matter which makes the republic not just unworkable but anathema to the favored intelligentsia, who are as a rule inclined towards aristocracy and hate anyone they consider stupid, which is how intelligestia have always viewed everyone who isn't them.

There must be sufficient tools to propagate and enforce this idea. This usually means writing is ubiquitous, and there is some symbol of wealth to hold in common - usually this is coinage issued by treasuries and financial institutions, which is a different thing from the commodity-money of earlier times and understood to be such. What free trade, stocks, and the hallmarks of capitalism would be for modernity, state-issued coinage and the role it played in society since it was introduced around the 8th century BC would be for Antiquity. It was nothing less than a new normal. Histories do not start as we understand them until after this period begins, and historical writing of the Greek variety itself is a product of the society which can produce a republic.^[1] A republic - public thing - exists because the institutions themselves are seen as valued, intended to produce particular types of men that would not exist in a different society, and eventually affect mass behavior. It only exists when the institutions can assert their independence from their origin and become total institutions, dominating what were once human subjects. And so, writing or some record-keeping would be ubiquitous, and the affairs of state and politics and law would be far too cumbersome for any one person to hold in their own mind, or for any collection of minds to reassemble this knowledge without some formal institution and body of records to reference that was itself valued for this purpose.

A public interest can be found with a republican form of government as such - it would be immediately evident from any worthwhile treatise that such a thing exists or can be surmised to exist, and so the concept of a "philosophical state" is not unique to the Greeks from which it would spread to the world. The Analects of Confucius and the teachings of Buddha and schools of Buddhist thought, and then the arguments and teachings of every two-bit guru in India or sage in Persia would make claims about society and what would be sound for subjects and rulers alike. Religious, despotic, or monarchical governments had some pre-existing legitimacy that was never questioned, and the religious aspects of all of the former teachings save the Analects were already prevalent in the societies guided by them. The Chinese example is made clear by how many Chinese political writers considered spiritual authority - Heaven and Earth were cruel and served no one, and the cults of god-worship that originated from Satan-worship in the Near East were not reproduced there. The identification of the aristocracy with the gods would have been nonsensical in that context with the same meaning it took on for much of the old world, and likely seen as grossly offensive on top of being absurd. The Chinese emperor is, for all of his status, a man with a lot of political power - absolute power, as his station required him to be, even though in practice bureaucrats and chancellors really ran the Middle Kingdom and the smart emperors saw this as valuable, until the bureaucracy was corrupt and weak emperors were unable to repair cyclical crises without some big war - civil or barbarian invasion - forcing a change of the guard. During no part of this did the concept of any sort of republican power-sharing gain credence, and the entire concept of the country would have been imperiled by such a thing - as the fate of Rome made clear on the other side of the world. Every part of the world except one large region would be largely excluded from the development of the current form of the "philosophical state" I describe. They had their own concepts of politics and what the world was, which survive in some form to this day. The modern world is understood best by one conflict which overshadowed all others until the 20th century - the conflict between Christendom and Islam, which reverted in one form or another to the wars of Antiquity to build the great empires, settle the Roman and Iranian sectors in a long-running rivalry, and which ultimately originated from the Near East with Southern Europe and Northern Africa as a periphery where colonists eventually intermingled with the locals. Whether there was something special about this region or its inhabitants matters less than what happened in the 15th century, as European kingdoms chartered expeditions over the sea, found America, and began a long-running and ongoing campaign to open the entire world to trade, exploitation, and eventual schemes of political integration. This setup of a mercantile empire has its origins in the philosophical state of the Greeks and the concept of a republic or commonwealth, and the example was noted to exist in many a city-state along the Mediterranean coast, like Carthage and the Italian cities, which Rome emulated as a new city built from basically the cast-offs of the surrounding area. That one city built by the refuse of Italy gathered in one settlement came to dominate Italy, then Europe, and, as I hope the reader knows by now, made its stamp on nearly everything in modern history. I would not want the reader to think this grants to European civilization an aura of inevitable victory, since the current period tells us the folly of eugenist race-theories. This is however what is most evident to the present situation, and the Greek concept of the state was marked by stark contrast between political and spiritual matters where the political prevailed in the writing over the spiritual, but both are present. This is different from Chinese political thinking which didn't grant to spiritual concerns much at all and portrayed Heaven as a callous actor granting and withdrawing its favor by its whims, and different from much of the world where spiritual leadership held decision-making power and legitimacy in the minds of people that was not a feature of Greek paganism. The entirety of European paganism consists of obviously self-serving cults which are stand-ins for the aristocracy, devoid of the virtues even the Near Eastern temples could claim as features of their society. The philosophers very often flout the superstititons of the smallfolk, while demanding abasement to those superstitions to remind the subjects who and what rules them. No effort whatsoever is made to suggest that these ostensible gods or the philosophies have anything to offer to the ordinary Greek or Roman citizen, to say nothing of slaves, women, and those who had no role in political society. The typical Greco-Roman attitude towards religion has been, and remains, "what is in it for me?" The format of the republic contributed much to this idiotic selfishness and pigheadedness, leading to the familiar white pissant teenager who thinks he is totally rebelling against God with some trite statement.

The ideal, philosophical state begins with the form it identified in the world as a thing to inhabit. For our purposes and for the purposes of Plato, this was the city, described as what it would be in the mind of a social engineer who was Grand Poobah of Existence for the purpose of this space - this ecology, as it might be described in modern biopolitical language. The philosophical state inhabits something it holds as an ideal form, which can be replicated more or less perfectly for as many examples as one would like. In this thought experiment, infinitely many such states can exist without changing the essential nature of any one of them, until they meet, which is a matter outside of our present investigation. To be a state in the political sense, the city is internally consistent and stable on its own terms, given the inputs to feed its processes and its outputs - in mercantile terms, its imports and exports, with the imports including the parts of nature extracted within its borders which were never part of the philosopher's design. The city's registry of material deposits to find new inputs, and destinations for its outputs, are information that would be catalogued in meticulous detail for this thought experiment to work, and no city planner would fail to think about the very important question of what will feed this entity, what it will do, and the consequences of its actions as a collective unit. Whatever resources are available to it, the ideal city will utilize them, and some resources are so ubiquitous like air, water, land for crops, and in Plato's time manpower since life was cheap, that their scarcity is not too great a concern for the basic operations of this device. Even with no inputs, the ideal city would store fuel for its operations and manage its internal affairs which are the output it desires. Since the inhabitants of this ideal polity may as well be points of light in a diagram, their base material needs are not particularly required for the thought experiment, but it is worthwhile to consider that this city-building task is a human problem rather than a general one, even if the state takes any other form suitable to call a "state" in this sense. The important thing is that there are many of these points which represent a member of that society, and the things appropriated by society - including slaves, foreigners, and things alien to the plan - are shared in common by the constitution of the ideal city. This is done not because it is kind but because it establishes ideal conditions which remove the biases of wealth and inheritance, for this thought experiment to describe the behavior of these social members. The members are presented whole and inseparable, and cannot be otherwise for this thought experiment to work - and so, the aims of a man cannot be split between vocations and professsions that the model called for. The members can only be what the plan suggests they are, and the plan calls for particular types of men, as all societies notice a division of labor. The particular types of women are marked as inferior types of the men, thanks to some fantastic Greek sexism from our good friend Plato.

No "constitution" is written down in the sense we would imagine today, but such a thing is imagined as the instrument of government rather than a throne or a crown. It would not change significantly the constitution if the finery of a crown or splendor were placed atop the constitution, to disguise the instrument and tell a very different story to the ruled. Constitutions are, by their nature, handed down from the ruler to the ruled once they are established, and each modification is promulgated. It is the composition of the constitution that is questioned - that somewhere behind the instrument of government there were men who are at first not granted any special distinction or legal status entitling them to set anything. That instead is a political affair rather than one set by legal precedent, the natural constitution of the men or the society they regard as living under this instrument's edicts. The constitution concerns itself first with men who are, absent any particular reason why they should be otherwise, equal to another. The first deviation from the constitution is clear - all men are not equal in ability or the circumstances of their existence and what was inherited from nature. But, nothing in nature required a political distinction to hold merit in the eyes of the constitution or the men who follow it. This was always a choice of people in the society. The true origins of this political distinction are things I have written about before then. It is the constitution of a philosophical state to claim that political distinction originates from nothing more than a lie told by the true ruling power of the state, whomever or whatever that may be. For those who write political treatises, they automatically place themselves at the apex when handing down their models of the ideal society, as they would if they were proposing any model of what the world was. Even when the men writing this are clearly not in charge and not producing a program of rule, it is implied the writer is in a position to assert what this governing power is and its modus operandi for making political distinctions. This is how Marxists understood class analysis - that something in human society created social distinctions which become de facto political distinctions, if not de jure political distinctions. No one doubted that, in practice, the rights of a liberal society were only extended to men and women who held property and the legal title necessary to exercise them, and this was the chief political distinction that would be recognized in that society, rather than a distinction of faction or class strife within those with the political franchise. There certainly were class distinctions within the ruling faction, and class distinction within the ruled where one group could claim they were better off politically, socially, and economically than another. The classes of liberal society and the societies of modernity came from interests that were shared by the class, rather than a mere idea of rank or what the class was supposed to be. So too did the classes of Antiquity match interests and definite markers; senators in Rome met certain property and wealth requirements, equestrians another bar, and the Romans marked distinction between Romans, allies, foreigners and their status within Roman society, their role in the military since Rome relied heavily on auxiliaries from foreign allies to supplement its legions, and then the distinctions of slaves and freedmen which are catalogued extensively by the careful manager of slaves. A whole sorting of the working class has long been the obsession of any slave system, whether it was classical slavery, the specializations of peasants who doubled as conscripts, modern wageslavery, and the technocratic splitting of the mind which locked people into their specializations.

The objective of the philosophical state is to elide the class distinctions that arose from interests outside of its establishment and the genuine distinctions of rank that would be independently assessed, and replace them with a model imposed "from on high", pedagogically taught and regarded by the pedagogues as a self-serving lie but a useful lie for them. This can only be accomplished by education and a monopoly of education by one interest above all others. This is the role of the philosopher, and the purest form of the aristocrat - the self-styled "best", who did nothing whatsoever but rearrange the world to their whims.

The vehicle for accomplishing this can be the philosopher's choice, but it invariably is guided by a principle which is valued for its own sake. Merit tends to be the most obvious - that those who are judged to be stronger should rule over the weaker or that this is inevitable. Virtue to command men - influence over the souls of those who work and disdain for those whose labor is useless or who don't work - is another asset to be hoarded and made scarce. Whatever the principle, the philosopher claims a monopoly on it. Plato's choice, and the beginning of this dialogue, is "justice", but it would not be justice in the sense that a naive soul imagines the concept. Immediately, the aristocrat seizes upon one defining quality of the republic - that the common producer should be paid as little as possible for product. This serves a purpose most of us regard as just and sound enough, and a purpose which is exactly contrary. The sound purpose is that no one procuring a good or service wishes to pay more than he or she must, or see some barrier erected to maintain the perverse incentives and biases in society. The unjust purpose is that, because these are philosophical points of light and stripped from their material and spiritual context, all that comprises the soul of the producer, to say nothing of the classes beneath them who aren't even regarded as members of the polity, is irrelevant. The ideal producer lives off nothing and provides everything, and this is positively just and correct because the aristocratic mindset wants it that way. The producer here has been made nothing more than a piece of technology for the sake of technology.

We should keep in mind who Plato and his friends really are - men of intellect and writing, who were on the losing side of a power struggle and writing a giant cope because their Great Guru Socrates was put to death for various political matters, backing the tyranny that claimed Athens, sacrilegious offenses for being a proto-atheist, and the not small and well-attested crime of buggering many young boys and probably girls as part of the rites of his cult. Without the aristocratic trappings that were already present in Athens, the men of letters and philosophy would be very wealthy members of the technological interest - of the middle class, who are currently on the outs of a power struggle between democrats and oligarchs, so far as the conflict was over the type of government. No "theory of democracy" underpinned the Athenian experiment. The genuine origins of Athenian democracy were not any belief that such a form of government was philosophically ideal, but a need of the state to raise soldiers who paid taxes, and would require property to fulfill this role. If they are to hold property, they would hold a political stake, and the democratic reforms were not demanded from below, but a decision from those in high places that would draw citizens into state service, and in turn allowed social mobility so that new men would populate offices, as the conditions of their time demanded. The democracy only considered free men with property who had a tie to the city - who were born there or were granted citizenship for extraordinary service, the latter being disdained because of existing tribal interests being what they are. A purely genetic theory of the demos did not exist for the Athenians or anywhere in the classical world, but heredity was the chief understanding of what tribe or nation someone belonged to - who your parents were, which family raised you, where you lived. The extension of the franchise to freed slaves, women, foreigners, and everyone who was conspicuously absent would have been seen as entirely contrary to the project, because no ideology was at work. This was a relationship of convenience for a particular time and place, and while there were theories about why these reforms were good or would work, nowhere does justice or a belief that democracy was good in of itself animate the Athenians. Democracy would be proven effective or not if it produced a city that could defend itself and its interests.

And so, early in the dialogue, paying labor and commerce as little as possible for goods serves a very important political function - to suppress democracy and its origin in property and wealth.^[2] The proliferation of state-issued coinage is only a few centuries old, and a matter contended by philosophers and political elites. There are arguments over what metal or good would be used as currency, how debts may be tallied or forgiven or extracted forcibly, which have much to do with the laws the city deems fit to commit to code. Sharing wealth in common, as the ideal city must, is what the proprietors scorn, and the proprietors are the philosopher's enemy - the philosopher wants to take everyone's stuff, and that includes those who would presently be their masters by right of property and conquest. From the outset, the ideal city seeks the same goal as Ingsoc in 1984 - to arrest history and place the right leaders as the sole owners, who claim collectivity under a limited oligarchy with a clear chain of command handed down from "wisdom" - which is to say, the conceits of philosophers whose origins are properly understood as the technological interest, who had wealth and monetary claims and saw capturing the bank as obviously necessary for anyone who took ruling seriously.^[3] True to the first Ferengi Rule of Acquisition, once they have your money, they never, ever give it back, but unlike the Ferengi for whom this philosophy rewarded commerce and individual guile, the philosopher takes it all for keeps and offers the dubious service of a protection racket. But, this is not the standard "pay tribute to keep us from taking your stuff" racket that many had known for centuries. The protection racket instead concerns the idea of force itself, distilled into something that has yet to be described as a free-floating substance, but whose presence is palpable throughout the society. Something like this had always underpinned the protection racket of old, but now the threats are not about property or violence in a cruder sense, but the intellectual domain itself. Property, commerce, and knowledge high and low are now subject to the monopoly a philosopher would deem necessary to answer this question of justice that no one really asked or expected humans to ever honor. It may seem good to a naive soul that believes justice meant something good that made life easier for everyone around you, who you may have regarded as friend, until the fine print shows that literal definitions are the Devil's playthings. This will be made almost painfully clear throughout the dialogue that follows in Plato's work - that the world described is really a horrorshow given the appearance of virtue, and we have to ask if this is really what we would want to live in.

We see here the function of the lowest class - that of living for its own sake - is immediately seized by the aristocrat, who for all of his pretensions, did nothing but assert that he will receive what he wants, and all of the vices are pushed down to the producers, who in turn push them down to the invisibilized classes who can be freely ignored, thus performing the magic trick splendidly. This freedom of merely existing the aristocrat claims for himself, and then retroactively declares himself deserving because of wisdom, or something. Yeah, that's the ticket. This is all, very nakedly, a get-rich-quick scheme for aristocrats who are coping after their loss, but it has been handed down to us as a political treatise because it says something about the condition of the human race - that, for all of the efforts humans have made to claim temporal authority, none have been persistent or particularly successful, because the claims were spiritual ones rather than claims to technology apprehensible in the world we live in - the world of things which are rationally isolated and understood. It is this where Plato's genius is evident, and it is this which is the takeaway from Republic that most would find, rather than a belief that this form of government is actually desirable or something that could actually be implemented. It should be noted that the despotism of the Guardians is fully intended to be a despotism, and this was always about seizing the reins of political power and legitimacy. Done properly, it becomes impossible to say what this truly is, and in that, the partisans of such a faction have definitely succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Labor is nowhere to be found as a force, and this is befitting to a technocratic vision. The political treatises that have been written up to the present day have been primarily concerned with technology and the interest of the commons, and labor is either entirely invisible, deliberately dismissed as valueless as it was by the utilitarians, or placed in a clearly degraded position as it was by classical political economy. As much as the liberal degraded labor, the liberal was the first to acknowledge labor's political function in the West, and this was no doubt influenced by Britain's affairs in India, ruled by a caste system defined by five castes that neatly correspond to the theory of knowledge I posited in the first book.^[4] All of the functions of labor and the lowest class are subsumed within the producers, who are handed down the model from on high to reproduce within themselves and towards the lower orders, and this is in line with a tendency in line to reproduce familiar thought-forms. Something like this figures into every version of the philosophical state, though the rendering may be different. Another culture would grant to the peasants higher status than artisans, with the men of commerce placed at the bottom, and this creates a very different attitude towards value even with a monetary economy in place and many of the same incentives that were present for the Greeks. It was the very different political niche of the Greek city-states, and the particular time in which Republic is written and who is writing it, that suggest this particular format. In all cases, the moral purpose of labor is subsumed into something which is subordinated to the ruling or political class that is relevant, and these rulers are tied to scholarship and reason above all. Whether the format is overtly republican or despotic, the philosophical state is differentiated by the place of formal knowledge and the dispersal of technology in human society, such that civilization can for the first time assert its aims as something distinct from barbarism. The philosophical state, then, is the beginning of threads we take for granted in human history today. It is the beginning of the struggle, continuing to the present day, between civilization and barbarism as concepts and approaches to how humans are to govern themselves, each other, the ruled and the rulers, and most importantly, the lands from which all of the substantive goods must eventually originate, since no substance comes out of the idea of a life-form or any ideology. The life-form can only assimilate substance from a world that existed before it, for life cannot occupy a true void nor sustain itself from void.

The affairs of the producers are of little interest to the philosopher, aside from noting their existence as the basis for all other possibilities - that there is some class involved in social decisions that must be suppressed for the good that the philosopher sees, so that the wrong sort of people don't get ideas that they are equal politically, socially, or morally to the aristocrats, presently writing this cope in their Super Adventure Club somewhere in the city. They are noted as the desultory grind that feeds what the philosopher spends large effort to control - the army and the apparatus of the state, its edicts and the culture to be imposed and enforced in all areas of the society. Much of the text describes the fate of artists, poets, and things that would have been familiar to Greeks whether they were lowborn or highborn, for democratic Athens was noted for a very free flow of information and the Greek hobby of hobbies - shouting arguments and posturing matches that the Greeks call the fine art of "debate". This was both a sport and an avenue for inquiry into the nature of their people and the situation they find themselves in. While these ideas are found throughout the world, the Greeks are the first to invent philosophy, the dubiously named "love of knowledge" which came to possess no love and little knowledge but which became the calling card of European civilization and a hallmark that influenced Christianity and gave it the philosophical flair and its habit of doctrinal disputes, leading ultimately to the concept of ideology in modern times. Philosophy remained a Greek thing, with the comparable thought of the rest of the world being more often religious, political, historical, artistic, or a part of the folk culture that philosophy detested above all. The Greek philosopher did not always show disdain for the smallfolk, but Plato is among those who start the trend of philosophy's great crusade against Plato's chosen enemy - democracy, or those filthy so-called people who put his senpai to death. This concept is picked up by the Romans, along with the republican government, but as we will see in the next chapter, the Roman concept of a republic began for very different reasons and never believed for a moment that the republic had anything to do with a philosophical ideal. Philosophy was something Romans would pick up and drop based on their particular proclivities, but in the main the Romans were soldiers, administrators, interested in commerce and what was to be gained here and now, and saw philosophy as one of the Eastern temptations to be kept at arm's length. Even those of Rome's political elite who saw the value of Greek knowledge and philosophy kept their wits about them when it came time to conduct the business of Roman politics, as Cicero was noted as a keen student of philosophy and took a cynical view to the idea that politics stepped aside for wisdom, as an astute politician would readily know. The Emperor Hadrian was the most famous Grecophile and made it a point to elevate all things Greek, but he was at heart a soldier and commander and understood as well as anyone that empires were ruled by legions, not wisdom or secrets, in his time and place, and acted accordingly. For those who are kicked out of power, like good Plato and his comrades, succumbing to coping and seething is far more likely, but Plato being smart knew that if he was going to cope, he was going to cope bigger and grander and make it into something memorable. The extent to which republicans have been motivated by ideological purity or piety is influenced in our modern narrative by the noted piety of the American Republicans and their corresponding factions throughout American history. This distinction between the "pious" and "liturgical" remained a constant part of the running narrative of American political posturing, until it was turned into a parody with neoliberalism and the most incorrigible fags insisted they were holier than Jesus Christ Himself and called this "the religious Right".

The Greek philosophers are no dummies when it comes to war - their cities lived and died by its fortunes and their ability to raise an army from civilians, and for those men-at-arms to return to civilian life when their term of warmongering expired. Usually this meant adult men spent a large part of their life fighting, but the dominance of the warrior aristocracy was a story for the aristocracy and those in their favor, even among the war-happy Spartans who reveled in every cruelty a soldier ever knew. There had to be something to fight for other than an ideology, and the spoils of war would have to be managed by the men who claimed them at some point. Armies do not win battles by any ideology in any era, however much modern idiots believe war is like a high school pep rally which in their experience is the sort of war they would prefer to fight every time since it's rigged for certain people to always win. Rigging wars so that you win would of course be a sound strategy, and no one ever won a war by admiring or respecting their enemy too much, but the pageantry of the war cult cannot be confused with actually commanding officers who are effective, who in turn command the producers when you, the opulent ruler, are too busy shitting on your auxiliaries to do the grunt work of Empire. The most important rule for our would-be philosopher king is that the soldiers do not appear as soldiers really are - rough, cruel, vicious, callous, and above all, the soldier cannot be seen as the beneficiary of luck or good fortune. If the soldiers of the ideal city win, it is because they are the best, and are only ever defeated by another such army who was just better by some substance of virtue that the philosopher covets. This is not merely done because the philosophers are pigheaded and believe the system is infallible - far from it, they are acutely aware that the system is very fallible and that they are as fallible as they ever have been. The image of invincibility and faith in inevitable victory is entirely a faith of the auxiliaries - or, in Orwell's example, the Outer Party, and this tenet of Ingsoc is one that is enforced by fear rather than actually believing, short of being mind broken as Winston was at the end, that the war is winnable or that the war is even the central interest of the Party.

Far from belief in victory, the Inner Party would know - and makes clear their knowledge and ability to transgress demands placed on the Outer Party - that the war is not just spurious, but can be freely ignored. For the Inner Party, encouraging the war cult serves only one purpose - culling the numbers of the poor and middle class, and disciplining their behavior. They receive the benefit of slaves from enemy countries, one of which is in the employ of Inner Party member O'Brien with no suspicion of the slave's loyalty. Nothing like the tacit agreements in force in that scenario would be possible unless there was active communication between the ruling parties of all three "super-states" - philosophical states in the same vein as the ancient example - who are not "half-aware" of their tacit agreement, but have agreed in secret and hold assurances that the war will be fought exactly as the aristocracy wishes it to be fought. For those assurances to be held, no one in the Inner Party could actually believe even by doublethink that the war is at all war in the sense such a thing is relevant. The zeal for the war for Winston is very simple - Winston himself is enamored with the return of the British Empire and continuing its mission, unaware that his Empire sold him out a long time ago and laughed at him for being yet another sucker. Open disdain for the government's line is expressed among all classes of Oceania, and this is not just among those who are "rebellious" or pretending to be so. The proles know the war is bullshit, as wars typically are. Other than periodically quizzing Outer Party members about who the official enemy is supposed to be, no one in the Outer Party suggests there is anything to win in the war until Winston breaks down at the end of the book. The more ordinary, plodding Party members freely express their disinterest in the war and any serious political matter, and are usually aware the nature of their work is contemptuous towards the ruled and each other. It is largely known and acknowledged that the war's theaters of direct conflict are over irrelevant territories near the poles, and it is known that Floating Fortresses are overpriced boondoggles much like the neocon's Viagra- and pump-enhanced boner for "power projection" to make up for their lack of cojones. The war buildup serves one genuine purpose - that the mere existence of such technology would have necessitated either all great powers maintain a large standing army with platforms that would deter an aggressor, regardless of any philosophy of war or ideology. The world of Antiquity is no different, in that the free adult men of such societies were often expected to fight. For a free adult male to be taken as a slave was a mark of shame beyond the norm for humanity. It might have happened, and for such men who were not trainable to the driver's whip or possessed some exploitable talent that allowed them to bargain to exist even as a slave, the fate of adult male slaves taken in such an ignoble fashion was to throw them in the mines where they would surely die. It would be cleaner for a free man to sell himself into slavery to pay his debts - a shameful thing but one that was at least understandable, especially if his circumstances are dire - than for a free man to be taken by conquest. This meant that even peasants were expected to fight at some point in their life, even if they were to live in fear of proper warriors and the state. This meant that every free man was in principle a soldier, even if the rulers of ancient societies loathed to admit it. Of course, the concept of "freedom" as the Greeks and Romans understood it did not apply so much to Babylon or Egypt, where slavery was considered the default state. It did not apply to the Chinese peasant in the way the Roman understood freedom, for the peasant was bound to landlords and the emperors and governors were not keen on letting the little people believe they should pick up a spear unless a warlord has conscripted them and ordered them to the drudgery of fighting. But, the image of docile men ruled by highly trained and advanced warriors who brutalized them every day would not be normalized until this idea of the philosophical state could percolate for long enough; when the war-making technology of warlords was stronger, when religion was organized and threatened the soul of anyone who dared suggest the king didn't have a right to fuck the man's wife right in front of him and repeatedly goad the serf to attack so the noble had an excuse to torture something in the true spirit of this failed human race. Even here, a sporting noble liked his peasant "game" to have a little fight in them, just enough to stamp it out and taste the thrill of torture being pushed where it could be in those days. This image of feudal men humiliated and crying for mercy never fully stuck, and many remembered with fear the wretched masses of Rome who could easily turn vicious and accept the invitation of anyone who would make a mockery of their social betters. Many a peasant in medieval times could live to see a noble get got by his own kind, a noble shamed despite the Church giving to the nobility their own super special morality and encouraging the Satanism of aristocracy. Many a peasant would be too uninteresting for the noble to get their jollies from him, and in any event, they know that Europe is the shithole of the world. The peasants know it, the slaves know it, the nobles know it, the Church knew it. If they want to celebrate being the biggest man on Honky Mountain, that is quite sad, which is one cope of European nobles picking a fight with the Muslim world and usually getting their shit kicked in. The same drama would play out in other parts of the world. Not one empire in human history could claim to have reached the dubious prosperity of Rome, and the Romans were the beneficiaries of slavery, a lot of good fortune going the way of the Caesars, and the lack of anything that seriously threatened their existence until Man once again encounters his most implacable enemy - himself and his own crapulence. The Muslims, given over to their usual death cult chanting and obsessions, cannot say they ever accomplished anything. The Hindu way of life is so ridiculously backwards and corrupt that it remains a notorious hotbed of filth all the way into the 21st century. Chinese despotism left little expectation that the world had much to offer anyone except the emperor, who usually pissed away whatever his forefathers won. Chinese history is devoid of any impulse to invent much at all, its culture typically sterile though sufficient for the purposes it served. The remainder of the world remains largely barbarous and makes little of the crapulence of the Old World Empires, with the best of them finding it prudent to just not play the Empire game and try to stay out of it as much as they can. So, in light of this, and the prevalence of ruinous wars, waves of death, and seemingly little purpose to all of it, is the world of Ingsoc really a change from the historic norm of the human race? The only difference is that, because Ingsoc is a thought experiment and not one that would stand up in a real world, it closely follows the expectations of the philosophical state, while everyone else eventually recognized the function of the military was primarily defensive and usually did nothing with war except the annual sacrifice of excess men - glorifying the elimination of men they considered ugly, awkward, and life unworthy of life. Such is this failed, retarded race of Satanic apes calling itself humanity.

The defense of anything is not a passive thing, and can never be so. The philosopher is not unaware of this - that defense is never truly won by decree, but by battle and victory, and what you are "defending" is not just a parcel of land or a body, but the reason why the state exists and the way of life it represents. It had become expediment for many states to not just declare war the moment someone's pants were down or betray the diplomacy that had its antecedents as far back as tribal society. The concepts of war, taking hostages as leverage, ceremonies of peace, and how to betray that trust, were known to tribes around the world, and it was easy enough for the Indians to understand why the white man found the Indian's way of diplomacy and war unnerving, and the white man knew that the Indian neither cared about the white man's posturing nor had any reason to believe the white man was ever honest, based on a long list of dishonest and unsavory behavior the white man had shown them from the moment English colonists landed in the Americas. The Indian did not just see the white man as violating a line in the Earth or an abstract concept of territorial integrity or racial connection to the land, the latter being alien to how the Indian nations understood their society and their relation to the environment. Everything about the white man's society was invasive simply by the habits Europeans developed in the old world, and it would seem in the early going that one village on a hill against many nations would be quickly demolished or absorbed into the Indian society, given the faintness of the alien presence and how little the colonists had to show for themselves, since most of the English colonists were there to make a buck off of indentured servants and slaves. The land produced a few crops, but generally, the American colonies were a crummy assignment for those who couldn't get in on the much more lucrative Asian trade. The servants and slaves had even less reason to love their country or any sense of society.

One thing that works in the favor of all defenders is simple; no human likes traitors, no matter how spurious their connection to that which they betrayed. As dishonest and vicious as humans are, rank betrayal of the lowest sort is something only done to retards. Even betraying a loyal and productive slave so brazenly evokes a sense of foulness. It is only to the retarded that betrayals are made so brazenly and proudly, where the betrayal of the retard is itself a glorious exercise of the human spirit. When a retard is sacrificed, humanity is upheld, and so the idea that this is "wrong" or "treasonous" is anathema to a human's sense of right in this regard. It may be counterproductive, since too much open sadism would lead to a lot of humanity seeing that they will be declared retarded next. And so, what is the one thing - truly the only thing - that all human states share in common as a thing to defend? They defend themselves not against hypothetical enemies or the world as a whole. The former may be phantoms, and the latter is an intractable problem. There is one thing that unites all human societies, so much that it is a universal rule - that "defense of the city" demands ruthless humiliation and torture of the retard, whose very existence is both a crime of Being and an act of treason simply by Being. When asked why this torture is truly necessary, productive, or useful to the city's defense, humanity never has an answer, because it needs none. On what other basis was human solidarity created? They decided who they wanted to sacrifice and kick out, and it is this which was the first unifying quality of all tribes. For most nations, and certainly those who have developed, their stated purpose for unification, which usually will be an honest one until the eugenic creed of modernity made all other qualities moot, is to defend their way of life so that the valid members may continue to produce and extract their sustenance from a world they have every reason to believe they are a part of, just as any other nation or human would be. The idea that there are humans who have "no right to complain" about being destroyed in this fashion would only make sense if the enemy has been declared retarded, rather than a party to any treaty, even an unequal treaty where one party demands formal submission from the other, like the Roman deditio that was the standard terms of surrender for barbarian tribes. Formal submission - particularly a submission which allowed many of the men of a defeated tribe to save face and be spared from the indignity of chattel slavery without doing the thing where they fall on their sword or are slaughtered in some grisly fashion - is far removed from the treatment of the retard. The idea of allowing a fucking retard anything like the deditio would be a self-evident absurdity, one the Romans religiously followed by their sense of virtue. Even slavery of the lowest sort was too decent. If they are to be slaves, it is only to have a fool for the other slaves to attack, as such ritual sacrifices remind the slaves that, no matter how bad it seems, at least they're not retarded. Yet, the idea that a retard would suggest he would save everyone the bother by simply walking away from society, preferring to die alone than under the torture of these Satanic apes, offends the human statesman at a level that seems bizarre. We must remember the claims of the political and the state. This is no mere sentimental attachment to malice for humanity. If the retard is acknowledged as an equal, what does it say about the basis of their society? A retard may be allowed the lowest form of mercy possible, and even if someone is stupid, a beast of burden is just as useful as any other in slavery. But, we are speaking of the retarded, a particular designation which is more offensive than mere idiocy. A Roman did not have an exact word corresponding to the eugenist "retard"; by the medical definition, someone who was merely slower than average was not particularly noteworthy or marked for especial contempt of the sort eugenism reveled in. There would always be something disgusting about "near-humans" who were visibly unable to exist among the valid but were also aware of their predicament, and so the dull of humanity found various ways to hide themselves and live more or less anonymous existences. Enough people would know the truth and no one would mistake such people for "real humans", but the needs of an ancient nation were far more pressing, and besides, most retards of the sort who are scorned today simply did not live long in the ancient world. They would fall victim to the cruelty of the human race at a time where life was not assigned the meaning modern science and technocracy attached to it, and they would be almost certainly dead in a war. The usual fate of a slow legionaire in training was that he was simply executed for sport, to rid the legions and let the poor sods blow off some steam. Humans will deny that this is what armies do, but we are not as stupid as their ruling ideas tell us we need to be. It would be contrary to drilling an army to omit that ancient human ritual of hazing. Today, this hazing is done at the age of 3, now institutionalized and granted a status far above what was for most armies a tertiary function barely acknowledged if the dim-witted had the sense not to waste the legions' time and accept the fate of failing to show up for conscription. Now, this hazing is basically the chief aim of technocratic militaries, and this is not what the philosopher would want of his ideal, model army of competent auxiliaries, where the officers wear the most impressive uniforms and show off not just their badges, but qualities which associate those badges with something that is actually useful for the rulers.

The drive to defend the city and its cause tells us much about the ideal city. For one, no city is truly built on the same foundation. What is just and good for one cannot really be a universal rule. For Plato, this is not too great a deficit - the concept of a just order for the rulers of the city is a basic expectation of the public thing, for a society that could comprehend the concept. For Christianity, universalism is a tenet that specifically questions Plato's position about the state, but the Church supplants the role of the political state by being the overarching spiritual authority for all states. In effect, the Christian view would be to make every city and nation a city and nation of God, and so whatever their tendencies, they would in the long run gravitate towards the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, united by one Jesus the Christ as the story goes. This would have political implications less because it was inevitable, but because there had been from the foundation of Christendom those who ruled and played the political game, but scoffed at the idea that there would be anything but the special morality aristocracy and nobility had always truly embodied. The particulars of that decline are beyond the scope of this chapter, and to truly understand the theological origins would require me to write a different book. I can only partially suggest how it came to this, and how the German ideology in particular existed as the first great blow against the Christian idea, but that is for a much later time and this is not a book dedicated to my hatred of the German ideology, but my hatred of Francis Galton's Eugenics and its disastrous consequences for the human race. It is not a given that the just city really exists to defend itself. It is possible for a city or a social project or some institution to exist for a time and for a purpose, and to see its mission as an aggressive one. We assume naively the passivity of the state not because it was philosophically necessary or ideal, but because of assumptions that are self-serving for the lower classes, who need to believe that they're not lined up for failure.

The act of war and the cult of war would for the ideal city be a thing minimized rather than glorified. Every competent military, and the philosophers can concur, has known war to be economically ruinous, taxing to the society that wages it, and devoid of any benefit that would not have been accomplished by far less destructive means. Moral education is never accomplished in war, however much the depraved failures of the human race insist that war is an opportunity for them to kill the honest or anyone who isn't a slimy survivor. War has a sobering effect not because war itself has value, but because it entailed combat in a real world where consequences were not a political or spiritual matter at all. War and the threat of it presented to humanity a reminder that, whatever its political claims or the ideas that get into their silly heads, none of this stuff was greater than reality. War is not the only sobering influence, but it was one humans were familiar with. Where war figures into the ideal city is not from the violence it entails or what would be gained or lost, or even the claims that it defended anything or brought justice by vanquishing some abomination called the enemy. It is something very different - that war as a practice in humanity is, at heart, about social engineering, and this is something aristocracy always understood as its genuine function. Aristocracy was the key class that could distance themselves from war, outside of extraordinary circumstances where they faced revolution or the revenge of the world for their transgressions against all decency. What is the ideal city, except social engineering taken to its conclusion and made absolute? It is only possible to impose this ideal form with exemplary violence, for nature did not provide any law or guidance to suggest that anything about humanity had a basis in science or truth. Humans have always been liars, and the ideal city begins the description of its education with a litany of lies that Plato knows well to be lies. Children will be taught that the gods are good and their behavior is good, when it was long established that the gods, like the humans who beseeched them and used the gods as their spiritual meatpuppets, were always wicked and cruel and could not be any other way. As we will see in a later chapter, religion deals primarily with the problem of evil if it is to be religion, and so saying the gods are good is tantamount to saying that the children will be lied to about something the pagans understood instinctively to be a lie. So too would Judaism and Christianity see this immediately as an affront to everything their spiritual thought acknowledged God to be. God in the Abrahamic tradition is ultimately something far above human concepts of moral good, evil, or bad, and is portrayed as such. It is the world that the God created that was, at a basic level, deemed good in Genesis, and this was not without qualification if anyone is at all familiar with what the religions truly teach. How evil came to the world ultimately was the working of the same God who created the good, and Satan in the whole tradition is understood to be a servant of the God as all things must be. This concept is more or less universal to religions. The particular god or concept tantamount to a god will always be different, but the business of religion is evil first and foremost, and the actions of the gods of any religion are callous for good reason. For the Greeks and the pagans, the cruelty of the gods was expected and this cruelty was not arbitrary or a thing that could be changed.

It is this lie which leads into many more lies that the ideal republic must drill into children; that there are distinct essences of men and women which decide at birth what you are. The three chosen for the Platonic example are Gold for the philosophers, titled the "Guardians", Silver for the soldiers, who are formally "Guardians" like the rulers but are demoted to "auxiliaries" who are tasked with the grunt work of the state, and Copper for the commercial class who may be known by various titles but are classed generally as "producers" - here referring to the men of commerce whose wealth was the object of interest for the state to claim. Now, we may ask whether this division of men into distinct classes that are essential was ever necessary, or if the functions of all three could be found in every person as a necessary condition of understanding what it meant to be a citizen. Certainly members of society know the nature of their society enough to fulfill the roles expected of them, so the lies told to children could not have that much power to explain why the world is as it is or why it should be like this at all. If that is accepted, than all of the malarkey about the right people with the right ideas would be elided completely, and we could have the thing we wanted in the first place - to have a public area, a city, worth living in, that could be defended. Nothing about that required us to believe that any "essences" were at play, or that any of the fictions of the state were helpful. Far from it, such fictions would be corrosive beyond fables told to young children, all of whom are eventually pulled aside and given a suitable education so that they could navigate the ideal city and manage to not fuck up too badly if they aren't the best and brightest, as most people would be by the distinction of abilities commonly accepted among men and women. Someone who is of humble means has no particular reason to believe in the lies told about them, and would probably ask the wise philosophers who run the joint why any of this malarkey is necessary. Whatever their abilities and the talent of the philosophers, these humble men probably would surrender the political matter to elites. That is in effect what they did in a democratic society, as most men were too busy and deferred to whomever in the demos showed leadership potential and an interest in doing something intelligible. That was a welcome departure from the norm of the human race, where habitual backstabbing is practically a religion among every nation yet known, with some nations taking to the proclivity more than others. The philosopher who knows he or she is superior to a soldier or producer would have no difficulty explaining his or her superiority and why it is better this way. By the time the ideal city is conceived, this habit of aristocracy had already asserted itself many times over in human history. Mothers know best, and the ruled would always be viewed as petulant children if they started talking about their "rights" or concepts that they could do away with aristocracy. The extremely misogynist Greeks were still familiar with "mother knows best", as that is more or less a natural reality of humanity's condition.

Where are these essences necessitated in particular people? They are necessitated by social engineering itself, which is war. Social engineering does not take place in the land of wishes and unicorns - it only works with the people in question. This itself did not necessitate any "essence" of anyone simply by some vague struggle. It is the particular struggle of war among humans, its spiritual significance, and why it was waged in the first place, that aristocracy could capture. Education could proceed without marking distinct essences that were useful in an economic or martial sense, because education at heart is not about waging war - education need not be a war-making exercise, or something that conducts social engineering in the warlike sense that I described before. Education does affect human society and the world as a whole, and cannot do otherwise, but the educator does not need to consider his or her function one that would affect everyone in the polity and the polity itself as something apart from the students and members of the education cult. A religion or a cult could decide that its education is in the end particular to the nation of believers and to those granted the gift and privilege of tutelage under the master, and what this means for society, the political and economic matter, is not really the educator's concern. The educator may be the aristocratic god of his school, while recognizing his institution doesn't hold any more authority or legitimacy than he can convince students to believe in. The educator has no natural right to expect any student to obey or receive pedagogy uncrticially, and the educator may specifically warn students against the slavish mentality for his education to mean anything. The Academy of Plato is no different. Plato imagines the Academy not as the type of insufferable Germanic or Fabian pedagogy that was specifically hostile to the idea of workable republic at the most basic level. It was a place for those considered the best and brightest to escape what Plato believed to be an inferior race beyond salvation, and so merely being allowed to enter the Academy placed someone above the rest of the human race, who were at this time in history not considered "human" in the sense the Romans understood humanitas. That concept did not exist for the Greeks, who understood barbarians as alien nations and Greeks as civilized, but did not grant to "humanity" or the mindset of humanity any particular prestige. It is with Plato's Academy that this concept of humanity could find its seed - that the Academy suggested a pedagogy and a way of studying formal knowledge that could be reproduced by those who pass through the rites of the Academy, and this pedagogy was not a flat and simple declaration of truth for its own sake. Instead, the education of the Academy was an exercise in political power. The Academician studies the ideal Platonic Forms not so he knows the world better, but because commanding the Forms means commanding the minds of other men and women - in effect, Plato's Cave and all that comes out of the metaphor is a description of pedagogical, reproducible mind control, and the description of the ideal city describes a whole city under the effective mind control of the Guardians, and that this is a good thing for the masters of the Academy. Only in this way can the classes and essences be reinforced - not because nature "required" it, or because inequality was the price of civilization. It is the description of a totalizing pedagogical concept with clear political implications for social engineering - for social engineering to be conducted as war and war to be conducted for social engineering with the implied knowledge that this was indeed war's function in the human race - that marks the philosophical state. Plato's students did not possess a monopoly on the idea that this was possible, for the gurus and Confucian sages taught of things that would be familiar to the Academician. It is in Plato's example that the intellectual germ of this machine - its technocratic origin, the basic material to be studied and classified - marks its distinction from the other forms of the philosophical state, and this is one thing that made the republic philosophically more appealing than it would have been if the republic were the consequence of Greek and European geography and their geopolitical position alone. Every form of the state entailed a theory of education and knowledge, for this is not alien or something every other race was too stupid to grasp. It was the peculiar value Plato placed on technology and eugenics as he understood it that were distinct qualities. For China, the peasants were viewed as socially superior, and the currency of interest was not the virtue of subjects or pieces of technology or slaves, but land and the ability of landlords to draw on peasants, which fed the warrior-scholars and bureaucrats. The Chinese are certainly familiar with commerce, technology, productivity, and what these concepts mean. It was rather a specific choice to curtail the power of merchants and banks, which had a number of effects on Chinese history. Those who initiate rebellions in Chinese history were not the merchants - at least until early modernity and European influence over the country - but the landlords, some of whom were by social rank considered very rich peasants and not essentially different from the common men of the Earth. The European fetish for eugenics is not reproduced in any other race, seen correctly for the damage such filth has created. Where concepts like eugenics and the veneration of heredity exist, they do not take the peculiar fetish for technology that the Europeans instilled in their sense of heredity, that found its most foul expression with the Nazi and the truly evil masters of European eugenics, the followers of Francis Galton. The struggles of class that the philosophical state entailed would be found in the history of every empire and have their parallels in nations where the philosophical state was only partially understood, or something the barbarians learned of and adapted to as they must.

What this means is that the philosophical state is where the concept of class struggle takes the forefront, and classes are identified with men in their total person, rather than things particular men and women did that described functions carried out in society. The purification of social distinction by pedagogy, and pedagogy's invasion of a learning process that was native to all humans regardless of the imperious dictates of an institution, begins here, and the Hindu guru and Confucian sage are conducting a similar process, with some knowledge that this is intended and a good thing on their part, and with knowledge among all of them that what they are doing is an unnatural imposition. A pre-requisite for this pedagogy is that there is a cosmology and spiritual authority already worked out describing the "gods" or "Heaven" or something that already held currency for enough people, that was the effective education of their society and would remain so for most of human history. Without a pre-existing condition where spiritual authority was already understood and acted upon with increasingly dire consequences for social organizations, formalizing this knowledge and suggesting a way to command it through technology would be difficult. Attempts could be made, but the habits of a society would make this education local and a hidden secret. Aristocracy would follow it and value it among themselves, but little effort would seek to suggest that this education was a social obligation or something that the state should formally sanction, legalize, mandate, and use to control society. The philosophical state is the beginning of a long chain of events which led to both the concept of a free society and the concept that freedom could be something more than the lack of the slavery humans were born into by nature, and to the state school of modernity which would be the vehicle for abolishing forever this concept of freedom in any way that held genuine meaning. Class struggle in the sense that was taken for granted, and that is certainly acted upon by the ruling powers of the 21st century, would not be intelligible without this construct of the philosophical state, with education and a type of mind control at its core. The purpose of the class struggle is not because humans were just-so divided into social classes by some inborn essence or that social distinction was a consequence of property and became a fact which must be respected to its final conclusion. It was entirely possible for the class struggle to be something noted until humans understood that the entire history of class struggle produced nothing whatsoever for the contending classes. All class struggles can only end, axiomatically, with the ruin of the contending classes, and a philosophy of struggle dominating the political produces exactly that and nothing more. It would seem far more effective for the classes to recognize the institutions of social class could be peacefully set aside so that the ruin of aristocracy and all of its fucking retarded conceits did not need to turn the 21st century and the future into this morass of shit. The choice to end class struggle or allow even class collaboration is entirely in the hands of those who hold education before it plays out among the proprietors and interests of wider society. No engineering to ameliorate or end the class struggle is possible without an educational approach suggesting that the hitherto known organization of the philosophical state will never allow struggle to be resolved or allow class collaboration on any terms other than abject submission to aristocracy. No ad hoc arrangement of classes in collaboration can last without the antagonisms of social class creating needless stupidities that would be averted if we simply did not value social class or the pedagogy mandating it in the way we have been trained to accept, and in the way the mind control of any philosophical state must do for the control of men, the control of society, and the control of all rituals, to continue - for the philosophical state to be a state with any meaning "the state" implied. Efforts to end class struggle through "pure pedagogy" or some theory that the struggle can ever resolve on its own or by some clever trick of the schemers, ignore something that is obvious to labor and the lowest class, but that the middle classes and especially the producers pathologically refuse to acknowledge - that all we have been made to contest in the class struggle was waged for spurious purposes, and existed primarily to destroy all concepts of spiritual authority, all concepts allowing comparison with facts pertaining to a real world. The answer to class struggle lies not in playing on the terms of struggle the philosophical state laid out or believing that there is such a thing as "natural law", but in seeing the entire setup of the philosophical state, whatever form it takes, as a farce. This farce should not just be ignored, as the aristocratic tendency of anarchism would lead the naive to follow. It should be held in total and open contempt, called what it is, and never allowed to go on like this. We could easily do better. The final purpose for the consolidation of social classes, with the educational aristocracy always at the apex when it can assert its force, is to ensure that we are never, ever, ever, allowed to contemplate the end of the philosophical state and the end of "natural law". The state of nature, which never actually existed, must become permanent, immutable, and override history. History must end, and yet it never ends in the sense that "ending" would be meaningful to us. At the End of History, it becomes impossible for the subjects to speak of the monstrosity that now controls every thought and every deed - and this is what philosophy in total set for us, with full knowledge that this was their sole goal. This "ending" is then sold as nature's only possible path, and that because it is natural, it is good. This appeal to nature argument is more facile with the most trivial knowledge, but it can be violently recapitulated and made permanent. The only way the philosophical state can truly end history is through something more pernicious than forced ignorance. What the philosophical state needs to fully realize itself - something that only came to dominate in the past 100 years of human existence - is that retarded must be the final mark of victory of the favored against the damned, and all who are not of the aristocratic cult are to be declare utterly and absolutely retarded. This is the only way the republic could have ended, and it was built into its most basic foundations. The same fate awaits the philosophical state regardless of any technological modifications it would make to its forms, like today's so-called liberal democracies of every ideology that is far removed from anything we actually live in. For a despot, this has no bearing on the political format, for the despot had no reason to and disdains to conceal his aims. The surest way for today's despots to succeed would be to work through the mechanisms of a republic, rather than declare themselves to be Grand Poobah of Earth and the God-Emperor of Mankind.

We presume that there is an ulterior motive for the state, but the state needs no justification. In the philosophical treatment of the state, the state is justice, and no other definition is suitable. By what other means would justice be adjudicated and made factual? The philosopher like any state invokes spiritual authority, but this spiritual authority too has to concern itself with the political matter before it can speak of something apart from the political. The philosopher's claim is nothing less than all that exists, down to every form it can identify. Anything less is a failure of the philosophical state's claims. There is no arbitrary point where the personal is not political, or the political is not a personal matter and duty of the subject. No such division exists by any law of nature, for by nature there is no fundamental distinction between the subject and the world it inhabits. That exists only as a conceit of some mind, and the mind is not locked into that conceit to exist. Far from it, even the crude mind of a child will ask what "I" am and how "I" came about, and in doing so, the child already acknowledges that "I" could not have an existence apart from the world in which "I" exist. All of the efforts to fortify the delusion of "me" have no basis in the philosophical state. The philosopher does not have a "theory of mind" as the modern liberal did, and all knowledge of the philosophers' cosmology suggests the opposite - that the philosopher is acutely aware and makes it his interest to assert that humans by nature are very much a part of the environment, and the philosopher himself appeals to natural gifts that he proclaimed to be an essence of him and his class, imparted only by education and wisdom that is a limited quantity. If not for the limitation of information that is a simple fact of what it means to know anything, the philosopher's position, and the entire construct which seeks to command political life through education and the division of classes by spiritual authority, the construct the philosopher values and requires for his profession to exist would not be possible. He would not merely be up shit creek - he would face the same angry mob that Socrates faced, and for the greatest and truest justice, the philosopher would be put to death for buggering boys and girls as their proclivity is wont to do. Better philosophers may have eschewed the Greek habit of pederasty, but similar corruptions are inherent to the philosophical state from its foundations. Is the object of the philosopher's justice nothing more than a defense of their pederasty? Even they know how facile that is, and only the most insufferable fags who rule a state would defend such a claim. That claim is particular to Galtonism and the most perverse forms of the eugenic creed.

On some level, this construct of the state has a purpose beyond power itself. Whether the men who hold the state have any good purpose, and whether the institutions in of themselves can produce anything good, is not the point. Nothing about the philosophical state, like any state, is premised on Being. That has always been a Germanic corruption to destroy the concept of a state. The arresting of forms and familiar patterns that a philosophical state entails suggests a world of moving things that preceded it, and so the philosophical state can easily imagine a time when Christ the Son was not, as Arius did. The mere design to take over the world is not a monopoly of the philosophical state. If we wish to rule all of the world and control reality at all of its levels, the philosophical state is not a hard requirement, or even a particularly effective method for doing this. Any true "reality control" worthy of the name - for Ingsoc is, by any reasonable and objective view, a shitty and highly ineffective cult of power and barely controls its own ranks beyond the drive to torture thingts - would see the philosophical state as contradictory, silly, and a thing avoiding the central problem of what it is to rule and control. At most, the philosophical state presents an insight into the despotic mind that is at the heart of civlization as a concept - how to take the conditions of a primitive republic and subvert them, in one form or another, so that civilization's despotic nature is restored. The philosophical state, whatever the format of politics is endorses, weaponizes the concepts of civilization, barbarism, and savagery in its description of the world, and it is these which form its three essential classes, from which no others can deviate. It is that struggle which the essences of the classes truly represent, rather than any function of the classes or the talents of the men who are members of them, or any function of the institutions. The institutions of a philosophical state may vary and disguise themselves in many forms, particular to each nation or race or any body of men where the concept holds political currency. The institutions themselves are not the thing to preserve. It is instead an impulse, which originates in a theory of life - in the biopolitical theory that was seized upon in the 19th century to enslave the world under the pseudoscience of the eugenic creed - that animates the philosophical state. The philosophical state can be perfectly aware that its own existence is a problem - any honest philosophy that can govern is aware of its own failure and impending doom, and the Platonists are explicit in foreseeing their own doom. The philosophical state can foresee, and almost mandates, that there will come a time where its constructs and its concepts of power would be things of the past, and a new way of thinking would prevail. But, the philosopher as a class and an interest in human society insists on its impulses, and for their interest and perfectly understandable reasons, they seek to preserve themselves in any new order, whether it rearranges the philosophical state or humanity may, at long last, do something that is neither despotic nor republican, but can be something appropriate to mankind's current level of technology and things its people have long wanted their lives to be, if the world were better than this.

The particular prestige of the philosopher, or the pedagogy being the One True Science or One True Religion, is not the point of any form of the philosophical state, and it is not the point of any religion which was modeled off the concept or entailed such a concept being possible. It is, like any institution tasked for this purpose, an instrument of government. It is not a legal instrument or one whose words or facts hold inherent political weight, but there is always a motive for anyone who holds the state, and motives of those who are ruled to live whatever life they live. At no point is a slave truly dominated by the idiotic Hegeloid "master-slave dialectic", a nonsensical claptrap to justify some fantastic Germanic racism and cope about their failure as a nation and race against the superior nations and ideas of humanity. Slaves as much as anyone have expectations of life, in the small world they inhabit, and would have to if they are to perform any labor a master deems useful. No master has the time or interest in micromanaging slaves, nor do the drivers have all day to micromanage the smallest operations. If a programmer were to model a slave factory like a computer algorithm, any computer programmer wants to program the most elegant solution once and not have to repeat his or her work ad nauseum. The ideal programmatic slave, following the computerization example, would expect the slave to be capable of taking on board any new programming and, in its own autonomous existence, it would be able to adapt to new programming without the rigamarole of beatings and humiliations that slaveries have entailed. It is a perversion of eugenists and the retards of aristocracy that brought us to this sad impasse where things that would be simple are made complicated, if the goal were to convince the slaves to love their slavery or the teach to people the value of freedom and independent thought. Nothing about the German ideology and the domineering filth of such failed institutions as the current educational regime produces freedom nor slavery. It only produces faggotry, and ensures that nothing new is possible and all that is good turns to rot. The evil cannot be made good by any philosophical alchemy, but perfectly reasonable human beings can be degraded and turned into a eugenist slop, and the creation of such living abortions is the only thing Galton's demonic creed ever accomplished, appropriate for such a failed man and a failed race that led a failed project to monopolize the world under a trading company.

Were all of these things on the minds of the Greeks and the Romans, with the doom of humanity prophesized and locked on this course? I rather doubt it. Certain minds make it their business to chart the doom of the human race, and this is not always a nefarious purpose. There are those, like this author, who have seen the doom from an early age, and charting all of the things that can go wrong is intrinsically interesting. Any sound engineer never forgets Murphy's Law, and certainly our experience of the past century demonstrates this law in spades, and that Murphy was indeed an optimist. But, the philosophers, like anyone who takes power seriously, are never good men or interested in anything good or just. Their good and justice is diametrically opposed to the good moral sense that labor would require to be labor, even as slave labor. The prosperity of a country, a nation, a city, is not the philosopher's interest. From the outset, the philosopher does not want those with foul ideas to suggest that they are entitled to any share of the national wealth. If the philosopher did so, he is absconding from the sworn duty to his cult. That conceit will always be his, and it is that conceit and vanity which doomed him. Worse yet is that the philosopher was perfectly aware of that vanity, but refused to consider that the vanity itself was the center of his project - that his philosophical state was a piece of technology and was not made of any magic or occult knowledge. For the philosopher's interest, Murphy's Law meant that labor or, worse of all, the lowest class, would grab ahold of any part of the machinery that was to be the philosopher's monopoly, and see correctly that all of the pedagogy offered to the lowest classes and to the producers would never produce anything more than more fads and more lies to prop up a bad idea. For the philosopher, this problem was in the future, for the philosopher like any man has to concern himself with his present interests - to rule, to capture the state, and to enjoy the opulence of his class and his fellows at the expense of those who are not in the big club. Nowhere in philosophy is a concept of "love" of the divine sort entertained. They will obsess over eros and the various forms of fickle love, but without the true and holy hatred, there is no love worth giving a single shit about, and those who have known the true and holy hatred have little interest in "love" of such a personal and trifling sort. It is good and right and there is a sense in us, if we retain any sentiment and decency, that seeing others succeed and cooperating towards good will make everyone's life a lot easier. It is a sad testament that it takes a long treatise for a philosopher to figure this out part-way, only to subvert it and associate it with a pedagogical project which habitually lies to most of humanity about what it is really doing. But, human knowledge is itself a local event and not a thing to be shared for its own sake or willy-nilly. Education serves another function altogether - a necessary function, even if it is a grisly function, but it is impossible to speak of intellectual life without both education and learning, and the monopoly on education would become a political matter in any order. This monopoly is never a fait accompli and never "just there", as with the "dasein" faggotry of Heidegger, and it is only conceivable as a general theory of technology once many prerequisites are met, and communication and literacy in human society becomes a general rule rather than an exception. The classical city-state created a situation where the lower classes came into increasing contact with the rulers, and this was facilitated by a number of new inventions. For one, money and currency - issued by states as a way to get around the breakdown of states' ability to provision their officers and assert some control over the mercantile interest - brought the laboring classes and nations into more regular contact with the state, taxation, and economic thinking appropriate to political life rather than the personal affairs humans would rather have done. For another, writing, poetry, grafitti, and the reproduction of knowledge for art, learning, and practical purposes, became more ubiquitous. New media meant that instead of inscriptions in stone monuments or difficult-to-store-and-build clay tablets, scrolls, and eventually the codex that is the basis for the book as we know it, became the media for writing. Oral tradition developed over time, both by the organic needs of ordinary people and by the designs of social engineers to manipulate humans to accept more depravities as the aristocratic habit was wont to inflict on us. These developments created the conditions of the philosophical state before anyone thought to write down the Analects or any treatise telling us what this was, and the sages of history are reproducing from their experience, wisdom, and travels around the world they knew a model of society and suggestions for how their own profession could fare better, in the world that was already evident to Confucius, Buddha, Plato, and the sort of men who are the proper sources for these treatises rather than some necessity in nature or something that ordinary people just assumed would work by that old pedagogical method "monkey see, monkey do".

The Empire, which is the true basis for the state's legitimacy rather than its ideology or spiritual claims, arises alongside the philosophical state, in the form that Empires are truly appreciable as free-standing entities. The Empire does not need a "state" as such, and in all cases the State and the Empire are deliberately kept apart and remain distinct propositions. The Roman Empire does not exist as a unitary state at all, but a collection of tributary city-states and nations under the hegemony of the City of Rome, with clear divisions and interests of each city, province, region, nation, and the interests of different classes and business ventures represented in the Empire. The British Empire rules through corporate fronts and by subversion of the ancien régimes of Europe and Asian states, and through colonial vassals which entertained notions of independence - like the former "United States" whose status as British or free has always been dubious - which openly disdain even the pretenses of laws, governed at its apex by a belief in Eugenics and philosophical anarchism which is better described in a future writing. The Mongols rule an empire through the very small Mongolian nation establishing hegemony over the nations of the steppe, much as the Huns under Atilla attempted at the other end of the arc of civilizational decline, and install Mongolians over the existing nations who rule with an iron fist and extract the remains of the civilizations they subdued. We could ascribe to what we know of the Egyptians and conquerors like Sargon of Akkad imperial ambitions, but without a reliable historical record, what the Egyptians really thought and how they actually were is always debated. Without a time machine, we'll never know the Egyptians' own treatises and doctrines outside of a few scattered reports of what went on with their contemporaries and the occult mysteries that have often been the true government of the human race in the final spiritual authority we have noted. Not the philosophical pretenses, nor the Empire, nor the Law which becomes the premier force of the commercial interest over society, nor the Nations which come and go with the fortunes time give to them, nor the agents themselves who for all of their accomplishments remain but a miserable pile of secrets, really define "what rules" or the true political status quo. What comes out the other end of all of these forms and ideas that the political entails is a wholly different animal, and no treatise, let alone one this humble author can write, can claim to tell you what politics truly and finally "is". What I can do is describe the mechanisms at work that motivate political agents, and the philosophical state is not "just" a pretense. It is a pretense, and is conscious that it is so, and it is only through bastardization of bad education (cough, Fabians, cough), that enough sleight-of-hand tricks are used to mind poison the subjects to accept any depravity and torture. It is not that the philosophical state is destined to produce this faggotry that Fabianism and the eugenic creed alone created above any past depravity.

I can close this introduction to the concept of the "philosophical state", which is necessarily short and far from an exhaustive treatment, by saying that the state premised on division of labor is not necessarily referring to an economic division, in the sense that economy or management of mundane affairs was interesting to the state. All that would constitute "economics" is lumped into the category of the producers in Plato's model, and no other political treatise until modernity spent much effort on the question of managing information. Even modern treatises concerned the political matter disdain economics, and the subject matter of Adam Smith describes what capital and stock are before moving to the very important matter of political history and the history of money and banks that was the purpose of his inquiry. The division of labor the philosophical state notes is specifically originated in the political problem, rather than any information that was managed. In an economic sense, all of these divisions, including the dubious category of the producers or technological interest, are superfluous. Economic rationales for the state can only consider the lowest class to be the relevant subject, and this is at the heart of Adam Smith's claim - that labor is defined not by its generative power or moral worth in of itself, but because the alternative for the working class is to be tortured and whipped. For those without capital or technology, the relations of production were slavery and nothing else, and when the rural country dwellers were kicked off their land, this new wage labor relation was understood to be a slave relation with no expectation that it was or should be any different. Maybe someone can invent a pretense that the working class proletarian is not a nigger, but to create the category of nigger relies on philosophical assumptions about natural slavery and race that were never taken for granted, and were little comfort when the manager of the factory whipped a honky just the same as they would whip a black man. The moral worth of the concept of a nigger is only truly felt when a society creates a very elaborate enforcement mechanism for racial slavery, and at its heart was the same pedagogy that German racists built into their models of schooling and drilling children to hate the idea of democracy. When one sees enough Kraut screaming and whining, it makes one question the virtue of white racists who uphold their behavior as favorable against the nigger, when Kraut screaming and shouting for war is lower than any behavior of the black man, and many a black man has wondered where this remarkably stupid race called the Germans, or their English cousins, got the idea that their pasty, mayonated existence was anything other than an abomination in the eyes of the true God. This of course shows how facile racial essentialism and essentialism in general has been, which is entirely the point of creating all of the rituals surrounding the word nigger - to make nigger a prelude to the universal curse retarded, and tell the lowest filth of the honky race that even if they're retarded - and they are truly a retarded and failed race - they can claim that they're not niggers, and that piece of blue sky is more worthless than the gold star Plato's Academy hands out. It is curious to this author why we were ever made to argue at all for these essential categories, but this was always at the heart of the Academy as a project. There is no "other version" of this that works as it is "supposed to be". The whole thing is nothing more than a get-rich-quick scheme, and Plato's coping friends are no different from coping Southrons or coping Krauts, or their imperial masters who feed them this cope while feeding their rivals. It is the habit of aristocracy to control all sides, and it is especially strange to me because their experience in creating the no-win scenario for the nigger should make clear that everything Reaganism and its filth created was to create of all mankind a fate worse than anything mere nigger-ness meant, and that this Satanic rot Reagan represented should have been ruthlelssly exterminated on sight and never given a single apology. Yet, by the time the filth that is Ronald Reagan and the unmitigated fags that came with him rose, it was far too late. Eugenics had gone on for too long. It's antecedents come back to this particular philosophical experiment of the Greeks. They do not have the same antecedent with Hindu or Chinese treatments, or any other idea. Eugenics-type ideas are found everywhere, and aristocracy is basic to the rot of the human race. It is the particular habit of Plato's lie and a mechanism to reproduce it ad nauseum that made possible the disease of the white race and European society.

We should remember that the philosophical state isn't proposed because this is itself a workable model, but as a thought experiment to describe the ideal education of a subject, what values and rituals would be produced in a better world to lead to the goals the thought experiment had in mind, and it would have been in that time the only way to really speak of the world being significantly different. Almost immediately, those who write philosophical treatises are aware that these models not only don't work but never could work, and that this inquiry is only the necessary starting point to describe general rules of what exists now, from which a proper framework could potentially be built. Every time it appeared such a thing were about to happen, as with the abortive efforts to establish socialism as a genuine force, the political instincts of men and women would step in to assure no such framework existed, because the interests of rule outweighed any concern of longevity or a purpose beyond ruling. This is not inherent to the philosophical state or the technology which allowed it, but to the fickleness of the human race, most of whom were never good enough for the projects they held above us as the vaunted ideal. It is with the rulers and those who are their running dogs that blame would be laid, if the human race were sane and committed to truth. But, humans are liars, and one of their first tricks was to learn the magic power of the scapegoat, and all of the war guilt of those who rule is pushed onto the lowest class for some strange reason, despite this making no sense and being such a facile charge that it can't even be stated explicitly without showing what we've always known - that the human race was born failed. It was the rulers whose retardation sealed our fate, and most of humanity, who had no inclincation to do any of this and saw the entire aristocratic project as an onerous beast sucking vampirically everything they did value, has been made to abide the intolerable. A failed race would, recognizing its failure, attempt to salvage something out of it, and perhaps see a day where the failure is mitigated enough so that they would be something. If that happened, though, the ancient taboo - "once retarded, ALWAYS retarded" - would have to be violated. Redemption must never be allowed for the philosophical state to hold for too long, or the damned must be made invisible and unmentionable. Why the lowest class must be shamed when they are clearly the furthest removed from any agency that affects the political situation, you're never allowed to ask, and when the insinuations begin, they carry a demonic tinge which made clear that for all of their pretensions, the philosophers were no different than the rest of this filthy, disgusting race.

At the close of this book, I will briefly touch upon what might have been, if humans were different and the philosophical state were overcome - if we were allowed to speak of these things at all as they have been, and acknowledge the terrible damage that has been aided and abetted every day to dig a deeper hole for all of us. For now, it is more useful to describe the rise of the state not by its philosophical pretensions, but by its basis in the more stable and evident institutions - the empires, the laws, the nations, and the interests which are the true facade we first encounter, before we can speak of material conditions as vague aspersions or essences in the aether.

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