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To illustrate the formation of nations, "tribe" and "nation" must be differentiated. I leave the definition of what is and isn't a "tribe" to other scholars, but where tribes arose historically and the markings of such a thing are in political society moot. The conditions of the city make clear that, upon the establishment of civilization - or the accumulation of villages that are tied to a basis in production rather than extraction or predation - whatever tribes came into the city can be freely abandoned, and new tribes can form within the new niche that settled society created. Nothing about "tribe" suggests any political character whatsoever. Tribes may elect leaders or war chiefs, but their function is almost entirely for the purposes of a particular campaign. Nothing about civilization, empire, or the state suggests that there need be any construct called "the nation" to displace the tribe, or that tribal affiliations are sacrosanct and say anything about what should happen. It is an attested fact of history that the earliest cities, wherever they arose, did divide their citizens by tribe, and recalled the tribal conflicts and conflicts of their armies as they move away from primitive and uncoordinated warfare to worked-out formations, command structures, and an ever-expanding tax and levy system to provide the materials and soldiers for the wars to come.
The city is at its core a religious matter rather than a temporal one. What sits at the center of a city, but Its temples, its churches, its civic institutions and civic religion? No practical purpose for a "city" exists that makes this unit of social organization self-evident. If we wished to build a machine for production or distribution of material goods, we could do so without "the city". Logistics would favor a lack of the dependencies a city entails, and would shun the civic religions and backstabbing that is rife in cities - which is really the backstabbing inherent in its religious institutions. Those religions preceded the state, and their antecedents extend past the foundation of the city proper. The intent of a city marks it as distinct from an ad hoc collection of farms, dwellings, and the household idols that are attested to in every pre-civilized settlement. Disbursement of production is seized upon as the purpose of the city well before its establishment, and was never an accident waiting to happen. Why this is done serves more than a malevolence in the city's founders. Control of resources is the surest way to discipline the subjects of the city. The objective was never to "just so" win the struggle of classes, but to establish from the outset and make permanent class distinction. A city without this class struggle would cease to be a "city" with its civic religion, or a place of any particular importance beyond what it materially provides - defensible walls, storage, and a supply of human bodies and labor-power that appear to the naive to be freely accessible by some religious appeal. Money in its earliest stages is granted specific religious sanction, but only in the city can this instrument be useful and freed from counterfeiters. The city appears to be one out of many when presenting its exoteric facade. Nothing could be further from reality - it formed out of people who began as members of tribes, mingled and formed new tribes of the city, marked by the civic religion with distinctions of their worth along new lines.
A makeshift "city of the world" or "city of the plains" may be envisioned - imposed on history - as a rural recreation of civic religion. It is imagined that tribes and nomads, while belonging to a distinct category of social behavior, could only be seen in relation to the religion of a city. Those who would rule an empire from a remote location, away from the danger of cities, find this model especially pleasing - to embody the malice of the city, but lack the proximity of people who could just as easily turn against the idolatry of the city and hang the emperor from a lamp post, not needing to speak any more of such a creature as the sovereign. But, there is never any city without some executive managing this beast, whatever it may be. Placing executive functions in an abstraction does not change what happens, any more than investing those executive functions in a particular despot, or the worst of both worlds, form an ideological cult of personality around the idea of the "Big Man" who rules from the citadel as a highly abstract and serene deity. Despotism is the only basis for civic religion, and any pretension of unity or collective effort always invokes this despotic core of civic religion - of the city itself. There is not between civilization or barbarism a fundamental distinction in relevant political thought. The barbarian can see the despot, and has far less investment in the peculiar civic cult of an alien city. If there were to be a genuine collective effort based on shared self-interest or a concept of the commons, that is far removed from the city. The commons of nature is observed in primitive societies where "the city" is not an establishment at all, and it did not require any imperious manager or institution commanding thought to be preserved. Preservation of the commons - any commons - requires a concept that there is something outside of the cult of the self. It is not an axiomatic rule that the city would find itself in conflict with nature itself, where the natural struggle is inexorably reduced to a struggle of all against all within its walls. The city can maintain a commons. When it does so, it does so against civic religion, because civic religion only sees in anything outside of it a thing to exploit.
This is for most inhabitants of the city immediately undesirable. The people are screwed and lose everything, most of them only being in this city because of enclosure and the treachery of the city's political class. The rulers are confined to the halls of their institutions and rule over a population that is in all respects alien to them. For the religious mission of exploitation, this is a very bad combination. The city then faces its genuine external threats - the barbarous tribes that have no buy-in with the civic religion. For this purpose, members of a rival city are just as barbarous as an unwashed tribe of heathens, until specific relations and the classes of both cities recognize each other as social equals in a greater game. Those with a mindset to rise in the greater game see no great problem. They will always have a haven, and they do not struggle. They do not. Only the sinners are made to struggle and toil, and this fact is thrown in the face of everyone in the city ad nauseum. They will see the elites of cities welcome foreign dignitaries, fetishize a mockup of the primordial that suits the city fathers and that the "noble savages" have little reason to not go along with this. A similar understanding is reached among cities of any type, and the classes that would inhabit them. Aristocracy alone finds its fellows and conspires, as is its proclivity, to shut out the other orders immediately. Which form society takes - tribal rituals, city-state, nation-state, or the conspiracies which are at the heart of all human societies - is not relevant, so long as the same sort of people find each other and keep this spiritual racket going. The city has the distinction of being a religious and institutional establishment from the outset. For now, "the nation" does not exist. Tribes are not nations nor suggest any political association within the tribe whatsoever. The members of a tribe, however they are assigned this dubious honor of membership, only value the tribe because it is familiar, while the city and cosmopolitanism are new. The simplest way to spare oneself of the evils of society is to have as little to do with it as possible, and this is true regardless of the niche someone is in. Tolerating civic life, like tolerating the disgusting rituals of human society, requires one to temporarily disengage from their self-interest, even as those rituals continually say "this is what you want" and "this is what you are". Perhaps there are some strange perverts who really do like the baubles of the city, but they are not normal and never will be. Very often those who have a good thing going with the real game - the lurid rituals that most of us avoid out of necessity - are willing to temporarily play the social game, and maintain a dual face that is necessary in any political society. No "samefaggotry" unites a tribe, and just the same it does not unite a nation, nor a city, nor any arbitrary goruping of people. The only samefaggotry which is persistent is the common interest of aristocracy and their shared world-historical mission of shitting up this gay Earth. The thieves being what they are, aristocracy proclaims that they are the only "uniques" in the world, and all others are to be relegated to what aristocracy dictated them to be. Whatever the form of society, aristocracy works out whatever game it can to impose this world-historical mission. The only distinction of the city is that its conditions of antagonistic relations in close quarters would be toxic to a tribal society. Tribal societies have rituals and persons asigned esteem and roles of leadership, down to the executive of a band who may be the executive simply because one voice and mind carrying out this function was expedient. Had the tribe proclaimed the rank hypocrisy that was the norm of civic institutions, such a grouping would be undesirable, and with nothing to hold it together, its members would abandon anything like the onerous civic institutions which put us in this place. We would only have the muck nature made, which compared to the evils of humanity was not patricularly bad. What difficulties genuine nature created for human beings are things that science could resolve. There is the flesh which cannot change, but this is because of what life is, and life is at its heart un-natural. The natural world is a dead world, and so too does the tribe, the city, the nation, and every social formation and contraption, exist as a dead thing. Granting to it the qualities of a superior life-form is one of the many cults and superstititons that make assessment of these conditions difficult - not because they are too mysterious and big for us, but because the cult of life is a cult of intrigues and lurid rituals more than anything life actually is or does. We learn to hold all life in contempt, for it is guilty of being life, but life in of itself did nothing so wrong or evil. The evil, the malice of human beings, took on those qualities, and it inhabits social formations among humanity because those are expedient. The acolytes of evil who revel in conspiracy view the cult of life and their fetishism likewise - that life is a monopoly for them, and those outside of their conspiracy are neither living nor dead.
The city entails expenditures, whereas the primitive sociality relied on the establishment of persons and record of their standing being reproduced on demand. Alienation was built into the city from its foundation - once you have their souls, you never give them back. The city does not want cordial relations with the outlying land, and has pressed this conflict entirely on its own accord. The barbarians who inhabit that land were always an excuse. So far as the city is concerned, barbarian tribes, nations, and establishments are nothing more than a supply of fresh meat to feed the meat grinder that is a human city. The opulence of a city is its excess, rather than any probity of the city fathers. The greater the demand for austerity, the greater the opulence of its favored classes and the more they will flaunt this opulence to remind others of the distinction. This behavior was inherited from examples in tribal society, and then exaggerated to place the vices of aristocracy and its rot onto the savage, noble or otherwise, who really had no regard for this ostentatious display. What drove the barbarous peoples to such display was knowledge that such a display was always active, rather than the mere idea that status was the point. Absent civic institutions which repeat the process at the smallest levels of society, the barbarian warlord only has an ability to impress others with strength - and this must be a strength based on something done, rather than a passive contrivance no one has any reason to regard. Every humiliation, every slight, every twisted phrase out of the mouths of the city elders and their institutions is calculated, and always has been. It is an obligation of all who reside in the city to similarly calculate every word and every deed, and nothing is left to chance when the holy shibboleths are on the line. If there is any moment of relaxation, it is a trap or an invitation for the retards to condemn themselves after a lifetime of demoralization. It is very different in what is regarded as private space - and the private space and private sector is an invention of the city, a thing very different from personal property and standing. No one in a city can stand as a person, unless they are granted sanction and favor to do so. Making this sanction a scarce resource is the point of this establishment, and this is not done purely for the low cunning of mafias. It is inherent to the technology of the civic institutions and its religion. The city is founded on private property and stripping it from most of the inhabitants, and can't do anything else. If there were a city where property was shared as a commons, it would cease to be a city, and after the litany of offenses and lies of the human race, the only course of action would be to dissolve forevermore this peculiar institution and ban this assocation from gathering ever again. This elicits howls of outrage from those who have a good thing going. But, you will find, most of the inhabitants of the city have no good thing going. Their lives are, in one way or another, nothing but toil and humiliation for one pack of lies after another, so much that it is a novel invention that the old and infirm, who currently do nothing or very little to others, are assigned sin and moral guilt. What do you have to look forward to in any seriousness? Yet, to say this is forbidden. That would be retarded, going against what obviously works by its own circular logic. You're not supposed to think the city could change, even though it is a newfangled thing. All of the expense of the city is wasteful and even in the best of cases is kept on the verge of breaking down. This is not a new thing or a particular maxim of our time. It is inherent to the city's opulence itself.
By the time our tribe members came to the city, this establishment had already taken root. It took root, either in secret or simply declared outright, at City Hall and among those who mattered, who were always a limited group of people - the political class, which took on religious functions for various causes. We might stop to ask ourselves how it could have been different, if we were allowed that five minutes to contemplate what that would mean. In all likelihood, the office-holding and jealous guarding of these institutional fiefdoms would cease immediately. Who would control the levers? The slaves. That was the only outcome of the city from its inception - that it was a creature of slavery, and could never be anything else. Disguising the slavery as wage labor or patronage or buddies scratching each others' back does not make the slavery into something new by some alchemy or dialectic. The ideal city, the ideal commonwealth - and there is no improvement on this so long as we are mired in the the thinking of the city and its rites - would be ruled by and for the slaves, and no one else. It would then be concluded that all in its domains, for the purpose of civic life, are born slaves. Their souls and personal life, their private life, may be whatever it was going to be before this madness began. In public life, or what public life became due to human attitudes towards the political and the apparti they constructed in their image, all were born and die as slaves, and the opulent merely revel in their private abasement and indulgence, then tell us that this indulgence is some sort of probity. The city to this day is powered by that great engine of anonymous inertia, most of whom carry out their tasks with little expectation that the routine would change, or that any change from the city's managers would be for the better. Even if the slaves imagined themselves as the foremen, they first of all know that those who rise to such a position in the slave hierarchy - a matter to be described in a couple of chapters - would not want to end the slave system. Favored slaves have no more interest than the freeborn in ending the institution if their position is comparatively less onerous, for ending the institution ends the thrill of watching inferiors suffer. Without that motive, the slave system could not function - without drivers and enablers among the ranks of the slaves, it would become apparent that the ownership of flesh and labor is unnecessary and counterproductive for something anyone would want, if slavery served an ulterior motive of economic or material necessity. It never was about what was needed. Slave systems have been from the outset ruinous to a productive goal, if economics were a game of resource calculation. They are productive in the true objectives of civic worth as seen through the cult of the city - that if someone is suffering, the city is doing well, and if the masses are too comfortable and can detach themselves from the cult, the masses would see the elites as hoarders in all sense that hoarding has been observed. The masses would seize the city and, seeing that nothing good can come from such an institution, vote to dissolve it, dismantle its hoarded wealth and melt down its opulent waste, and leave behind an industrial husk so far as the central location of industry were still necessary. The city would be little more than an industrial unit, its labor and toil largely automated or begrudgingly accepted. Nothing less than the total capitulation of the city and its civic religion will do. Seizing the means of production changes very little. Such a strategy is effective for intriguers who see labor and industry as tactical chokepoints, but so long as the exorbitant cost of the civic religion remains, labor, industry, and the bodies of those consigned to it, are sacrificed and there never will seem to be enough to solve the completely made-up "tragedy of the commons" which exists as a creature of pure insinuation. After all is done, the technology of the city and records of its knowledge would be carted off, reverse-engineered, and freely disseminated without any "guardianship", with all of the terrors that entails. Such a fate presupposes that the masses see correctly that no matter how the offices are re-arranged and whatever promises they make - promises that are told with contempt because they have, in all hitherto existing human society, been nothing more than insults to mock those who had no choice - they are the damned of the Earth, and all of the promotions and property they were told were "theirs" were never going to be theirs. Such a world is impossible for humans at the present stage of development, nor is it in of itself "the point" or a goal to aspire to. It would become a grim and lonely world, the continued progress of technology and science taken by the lowest and laboring orders. The commoner class as an institution would be wiped out and abolished, their nascent arsitocratic program terminated and a failed experiment we call modernity would be seen as a failure. Little could be expected of such a world, yet from the outset of the city's establishment, this is the great fear of the city fathers - that the city as an institution would be forever outmoded, and every member of the city will see that the only solution to antagonism in close quarters will be to see the city as the site of a permanent siege.
This vision is far removed from anything the masses would ever do. World-historical missions were not the fate of most of humanity. The far more likely view, and one that has prevailed, is for the city-dweller to see the entire setup as an alien to be avoided at all costs, and for the subjects of the city to return to what of their life they can retain. The world was lost long, long ago, never to be ours - and if it were to be ours, it would never be through the political and spiritual thought of the city and its biases. There is not a form of the city that could be different while being recognizable. The closest thing to that would be a peaceful and gradual dismantling of civic life, should the civic cult see its position was no longer tenable. The commoner class in the city would be eliminated as a class, but its members have their bodies, all of the moral sense of effective labor, and accumulated technology. The great genius of the commoners' ostensible champions is to convince them that their class was the universal class, and that it was labor - the nation and the despised wretches alike - that would abolish itself as a class. All of the values of socialism would be displaced with the values of the city and the bourgeoisie. The reasons why were not wholly sinister or unexpected. Socialism entailed the society humanity knew, which was civilization. There was not a "rural socialism", and there certainly is not a "national socialism". It entailed technology and its interests to present any intelligible program that could be put into action. Labor had little interest in socialism because they saw society itself as the problem, and if they believed the evil could be made into the good, they were quickly relieved of that myth by seeing what socialism became. If there were a socialism that labor wanted - and this was foreseen by the early socialists - then the institutions of the city itself would be questioned, and it would be the institution of the city and civic worth in particular that would be under attack. As will be the refrain, every time in history where that appeared to happen, even at the smallest scale, there were agentur who got on the highest horse so that history would be corrected as they saw it. The civic religion and cult from the outset did this because such praxis built the city in the first place, going back to ancient times. Such a city was, for a variety of reasons, likely to possess technology, and possessed a citadel which would be a defensible fortress against the wretches claiming that technology. Ignorance is at the very heart of the city, whether it is a martial city closed off to the world or a cosmopolitan or "woke" hub of commerce and culture. Baubles and the superficial reign, and this is not something the city created ex nihilo. The viciousness of the human race was there from its most primitive conditions, and the ugliness of humanity is found in every social format and niche they inhabit. If there is any good whatsoever regarding these apes, it is wholly incidental to any of the civic religions, their ethical values that prevail in political society, and nearly everything that constitutes this ape and its sordid history.
How did technology come about, other than its origin in natural technology of the body? The body's faculties, intelligence and genius being among them, do not create the new on their own power. They can only ever rearrange existing technology into new systems, and this is something humans do well enough when they need to. So are communication and general theories of technology and science tools which cannot on their own create anything. Technology - the institution, the state - is something which entailed political society to exist as technology. Even in the crudest form technology takes, a state of nature is supposed for us to speak of these phenomena as "technology" in any sense that could be appreciated. That is, the agents of nature are temporarily presumed to think like political animals at the least, even if those agents don't have any thought process and we superimpose one as a useful metaphor for our purposes. Humans are further colored by their biases for life, and particular manifestations of it, when speaking of technology. We can overcome this barrier in our thinking at great difficulty. We cannot overcome the politicization of technology. From the moment someone can conceive of "the political" as more than some vague threat, every tool is a potential evil. The tool is never a good in-of-itself or a thing with other moral values attached to its being, until its observer attaches to it some unwarranted value. The evil, though, inhabits every tool and every word dripping out of the mouths of these fouls apes. Technology did not arise as easy as it was for humans to think of it. It must be realized. The city and its precursors are the first social form where technology as an interest can diverge and become a force in its own right. Before them, the technological interest is almost non-existent - noticable as something queer and undesirable to all parties. The city in its origins shares this disdain for technology, but all of the tools for the city's purpose - its citadels, its temples, its forums - are necessary parts of a contraption which served ulterior motives. The city is not a natural consequence of a diversification of labor, that necessitate some specialize as blacksmiths, some as farmers, some relegated to beggars, and all of the professions one might imagine in an early city. It arises because there is a growing base of technology as metalworking proliferates, and armed and trained men specialized in warfare can be raised in something greater than a warband.
Had the tribes and their members of the city been left to their own devices, they would split off in accord with their interest, and see the city as little more than a hub of scum and villainy, which is what it is at its heart. The city provides technology not because civilization is the first to discover this concept, but because technology is necessary for its machinery. The weapons and instruments of the city's institutions are secondary to the technology that is at the heart of the city. This is the temptation that the city provides - that ready-made, institutional solutions will give you the good for the low low price of a token exchange to the god Mammon or some other deity. The fruit of the tree was not knowledge of a pure phenomenal sort, but knowledge offered to someone who was promised that by this technology, they would become like gods. No one needed a serpent or a magical tree to teach them of the evil, for the evil is imbued in man and was retroactively imposed in the gods that ostensibly "created" mankind. The good, at a basic level, was comprehensible at the least as "not the evil", as in, literally anything else. Well before there was any offering of fruit, the ways out of humanity's nightmare were already apparent, and no great secret. Evil is not mysterious nor in possession of any proprietary knowledge that allows it alone to rule. In the recreation of history that is the fable of Genesis, all are born slaves of the god - the sitting Satan - and so all that happened was a just-so story. The reality is that many times over, the "forbidden fruit" was rejected, and it did not take any great or vaunted probity to resist it. It was rejected because the city had no appeal whatsoever, until a contrived environment was installed to make sure everyone "chose correctly" - or else. If the social engineering mentality was to do what social engineers wished to do, the only possible outcome of the experiment - just as with the Milgram experiment - was for evil to win an untrammeled and eternal victory. In the Milgram experiment, many of us "witless commoners" saw the experiment as farcical, because we know what pain and electrical shocks do to the body. Yet, that truth was inadmissible, until a regime of torture-schooling insisted, ad nauseum, that it worked. This it could only to by repeatedly stamping on a face, and an exultant shouting and thrill of torture is at the heart of this Germanic educational model we have been cursed with. After the fact, "some serpent" is the guise is something that was actually very massive - and that serpent of the Biblical story was taking orders from the god, like all creatures do. That god is written of by men who had already established their city - their religion tenets and aims. It functions as an excuse to enable the vice and orgies that "everyone wanted to do".
Do the newcomers to a city always reject this? Certainly not. There is in the human race a proclivity for this behavior from the outset. All that the city had to do was find men and women with this tendency, select for them, and punish those who would say no to it. The city founders, unlike the lurid cults of demonic gods, must extend this offering judiciously. Unlike the god which the animals cannot hope to challenge, the city founders are very mortal, and their city can be laid to waste and the abomination put down should it be too unsightly to tolerate and there is a will to do to them what they did to us. A terrible retribution, as mentioned before, is at the heart of the city and its civic religion, and this was foreseen from the start as the inevitable consequence of a no-win scenario. The men and women who come to the city really have nothing to do with some club of assholes who don't immediately relate to them. In much of human history, members of this club had enough sense to not violate the lives of those who did not need to be violated, because their greater rivalries were with other cities and within their own class. The class struggle could be temporarily called off so long as the lower orders were not saying no to any core tenet of the civic religion - so long as the weak paid taxes and the powerful were as a rule exempt from all taxation. This groteseque and obviously unsustainable inequality is the very purpose of the city, moreso than it is the purpose of the state. The state needs only procure material sustenance, and only material sustenance can do. Temporal power is won not by opinion but by energy and physical clockwork, in the analysis a state much undertake. The state could command its officers - all of them slaves - to produce and toil directly so that the state can equip its institutions and officers, and the subjects of the state would be livestock and not at all partners in the enterprise. The city - and the technology and material base of the city was the basis for the state as we know it - could never simply command its subjects from City Hall by appealing to a civic cult that says all are slaves and must Do Their Part.
The religious foundations of the city could be worked out without the city as such. Compare the coming of the city to the coming of the barbarian warlord against the savage, so far as "the savage" did exist. Advance in war and a cult of war mark the barbarian as distinct from a primitive sociality, and the barbarian appears to the savage as a new and alien thing just as the city would superficially be. There is less difference between the barbarian and the bourgeois than the savage and the barbarian, with the "savage" being a category retroactively applied rather than something the "savage" believed it was. The same analogy does not work in the kingdom of nature or with mankind's relation to anything in it. It is a peculiarly human matter. The savage hunter or herdsman does not see the animal as a political subject or anything like that, nor invests in the animal any of the meaning or the evil that is applied to humans. The animal for their part has no particular religious knowledge that we would appreciate. The animal's view of humanity is the correct one - that these jabbering demonic apes with pointy sticks, pointy projectiles, and all manner of traps, are an environmental hazard. The animal's contempt for Man is evident without the animal being kept in bondage and acclimated to an environment that domesticates it. The domestication of humans by other humans could not proceed in the same way, but no such domestication was necessary. The human settlements, whatever form they took, worked through the existing vices of human beings and the meaning of the filth they speak. What changed with the city was that division of labor could be imposed for the first time in this enclosed space, where before it could only be insinuated and had limits placed on it. For those who wished to destroy the world for their cause, the conditions of barbarism were not tenable once the city is presented as a base of operations. Those with such a goal gravitated towards cities because that was where the true objective of the war machine was. The men of the warband were always fools driven to fight for the most spurious purposes, and only after the fact does this situation create a justification of self-defense. Had war been fought in the most ruthless manner possible and with no respite, it would be too terrible for the purposes humans invent war to accomplish. What would result from the fighting is not war that engineers a society, but a death and malevolence without end - and it would be a death and malevolence those who would destroy the world cannot control. Such an evil would be neither abomination nor a thing of religious study, but it would assert that the foolhardy aim of destroying the world for that cause would give way to the culls and disintegration that nature did impose. Life surely entails death in order to be life, and the world would go on without this pernicious aberration called "life", if life chose to challenge the undying and undead entity that is the true form of this world. Pale imitations of that world will fare no better than the initial aberration of the life-form, even if it imagined itself to be a giant, unknowable beast to the subjects it ruled. That is the mission of the state proper. The state as we know it - the state as "the philosophical state" - is particular to the city. Within its own logic, the city will never die as a concept. Technology does not disappear from circulation so easily, and so the memory of the city is what every empire would revive. For Europeans, this was Rome. In East Asia, it would be the palace of the emperor and his court. Before Rome was the example of the state, Babylon and Egypt were the common examples, still in force to this day. Cities from long ago imposed their civic cults onto the distant future and could do nothing else, just as they imposed their made up history on the past.
History did not wait for the city to begin. What the city and its ideologues call "history" is something altogether alien from the genuine article, and that type of history is of no interest to me, or anyone who values any study of the past. It is the conditions of the city which make clear the values of regression and progression from an imagined institutional core. That is the distinction of civilization from past forms - that its institutions are far more prevalent, to the point where they dominate the space and choke the life out of it. The city can then sell "authentic" and "rustic" qualities as old and traditional, even when those "ancient values" were pulled out of some thought leader's ass, as much conservative faggotry has been. The pre-civilized people were not mired in any fixed form. When barbarian warlords contemplate empire, they form a court and see in the city useful machinery to seize and make their own, rather than something to jealously destroy because of a faggot's fear. The first cities were an extension of the barbaric empire, and were never a negation of it.
Some attention should be given to the model of the village. The village appears on the outskirts of civilization, never confused with being part of it, but being much like settled society and shunning the nomadic war cult. The village presents a path not taken in many parts of the world. It is not a freestanding entity with an army in its own right, but its resources and people can be marshalled by would-be kings and warriors. They would be a road to the progress of technology or knowledge that circumvented the vices of the city. They might also be seen as a forestalling of the nation, for the villages were always under the thumb of a distant and absent tenant who was removed from the affairs of the village, except as a face of someone who must be obeyed because he represented a far away army. The rise of the city was not so ubiquitous that its format would be reproduced. Many of the empires of history saw the city as rife with potential for uprisings and a thing to be feared, and would love to see the village in their preferred for - as a "domesticated" form of the city. This would not work forever. The villagers would see that they could walk to another village, and shared far more in common with each other than the lord who extracted tribute from them. The village was always accompanied by civic centers much as they existed anywhere in the world. The transition from "tribal village society", for example in the domains the Romans conquered in Northern Europe, to the city and the city-state as we know it, did not offer any singular clean break. Civilization spread by the sword, in one way or another. What the sovereign wanted out of civilization may vary. Emperors whose extractive basis was from the villages saw the cities as things to be governed and forward bases of a cultural war against the world that an emperor wished to rule. When the city-states expand to empires, it is not the result of singular vision from one man, but a city-wide race to acquire spoils in the competition for advancement. The republican form of the city-state is at its core as despotic as any warlord. The consuls hold imperium for a year, and it is a great fear among them that allows this to work. Behind the curtain, the dictator expedites the numerous complications if anyone actually took the republic at face value. The emperor whose basis for ruling is from the levies extracted from the land has very different imperatives. He wants to keep his subjects locked in to the ecosystem, and can do so through various mechanisms. One is a combination of brute force and engineering. The other is caste obligations to stultify the society, lest anyone get any ideas that aristocracy can go away, if it is imbued in nature itself. The city had the advantage of obviating those questions, because it was a creature of the city's rulers. The fate of the proletarian or the villager was another sacrifice, and whether they move from here to there is less relevant. Such things would be delegated to the vast institution of slavery, in one form or another. I take it the reader has figured out that all hitherto existing civilization has consisted of a slave society of some form. Wage labor, the dictates of managerialism, the outrageous extraction and imposition that insists that your torture and oppression are services and goods in of themselves, and much of the technocratic polity embraces slavery without reservation. In their inner circles, a disgust towards the slaves is obligatory, and they will be referred to as such and treated accordingly. Free people are not humiliated from cradle to grave and told "this is what you are", ritualistically abused until they agree with even the most benign technocratic polity. The eugenic creed simply maximized slavery and maximized the sentiments and practices which perpetuated it as the point in of itself. The city by its nature is an exploitative relation and can be no other, but there is a sense of all in the city that something is wrong with this. This turns on itself at some point. So too would the village and efforts to build a "miniature city" without its overt vices turn on itself. Both are the result of Man's interminable war against Man. The rationales for that war are outside of the particular technology of a city and the morals it promotes, however kind or foul they may be. Only until the ugliness of the eugenic creed did such a faggotry exist to insist that worst evils of the exploitation were glorious above God. That ugliness was all in the name of progress, when we possessed clear models superior to the city-state and all of the means of production and communication to implement a far less onerous settlement. To take even the most basic step to mitigate this progress was deemed "reactionary", "oldthinking", and a sentimental attachment that was retarded and therefore ipso facto evil.
This game of progress and regression has been a favorite because it appeals to a growing technological interest that is first represented by the commercial classes and the vices they promote, like drugs and prostitution. The reality, which I hope to describe in the next book, is that history does not operate in any such way. For the city to function, it cannot be a creature of absurdity or happenstance. The world we live in is an absurd one, at least from the vantage point of humans and our method to communicate knowledge. It is a problem of communication rather than knowledge itself. Solutions to this problem are trivial enough, but it is undesirable for intriguers and the malevolent to allow their implementation. This carries onward to the nation-state, the forms of which were built from civilization and the city's cults because that was what was available. A national understanding that circumvented the city and its ideology was never allowed to form for long, without being displaced by the common vices that brought about civilization in the first place. Every time in history where that understanding was expressed and recorded, it would be a religious ceremony to heap upon the very idea every derision and mockery that a foul city of a foul race can conjure.
Every city, even if built in the image of a model city, acquires its peculiar characteristics, and the inhabitants of a city are not freely exchangeable with those of another. The city managers may abstract the human livestock in their holding pens, but this marking of livestock falls apart when the actual tribes of the city are observed in this niche. All of the efforts to corral the livestock meet limited success. For one, the avarice of the city itself, and the ambitions of its leading citizens, balks at any effective control of the human population. The drive to dominate is ultimately individual rather than collective, and the mentality of the city intrinsically compels abasement to the cult of the self. Without this, the cycle that the civic religion relies on cannot continue. There may be a settlement housing some humans, but none of them would be part of a "city" or a civic religion. It would be nothing more than a holding pen, and without effective chains, nothing holds the animals in, nor would confining the humans in this way produce the kind of people a city needs to prevail. The city is built atop the ruined lives its machinery has ground down, and it cannot do otherwise. It is more important for the city to continue the cycle its religion indicates than to reform, even if it would appear to the naive that reform would obviate all of the problems the city produces. There is something in the human spirit that already shrieked at the thought of the ritual sacrifice truly ending, even though it would be trivial to do so in all cases. The insinuating fags always have their hypotheticals and dishonest thought experiments, made especially apparent by the eugenic creed's faggotry. The city as an establishment was constitutionally bound to this, beacuse it was built atop the temple and the ritual sacrifice such an institution entailed. If the religion of a city were different, and there are attempts to build a city that broke from the ancient rite, it would be tested against the spirit of human civilization. The result from this is that the members of a city become habituated to a particular city for reasons beyond simple familiarity, even if they hate the city and the ugly faces of its citizens. No such "culture shock" exists in tribal society in the same way. Alien customs simply have no place in that niche and there was no expectation that it should be different, or that any grand uniformity and world-historical mission was evident in tribal society. To tribal society, there is no "normal" that is institutionally mandated. There is normalcy in the genuine sense, in that over time the members of that society have an idea of what a human is and is not. They are familiar with the procession of events, without any conceit of progress or regression. In the city, "normal" is enforced by a superstition and taboo that is the property of its oligarchs. It is the property of oligarchs rather than despots or kings or political bureaus. At a basic level, the city is the first social form where democracy as an intelligible political idea can exist. To a more primitive society, the idea that the men did not provide their own gear and pay their own way to participate in what counted as civic society was unseemly. Cities present the basis for democratic society inroads to associate first of all, and the "big club" to join that would be meaningful. Absent the facade of the city, this sort of backstabbing would be displayed as what it is - a place for the aristocrat to manipulate public opinion in whatever way they can. The city also makes clear and present that the intriguers are active, and presents to the condemned opportunity to bypass censorship and start tearing down the city, as they must if they wanted their station to change. There is no version of this where the democratic movement would capture the state and continue much as it has up to now. The idea that such a change would be affected by the aristocratic method and theory is absurd. The aristocrat takes advantage of a fact - that a city is defined by its temporal location and its subjects are who and what they are - and insinuates a normalcy that never existed, that is intentionally alien from any objective baseline. The callous bigotry of the ancient city would be weaponized in the past century with terrible effects, all engineered in advance to ensure that the last vestiges of anything that would tear down this beast could no longer exist.
To answer that question, the simple answer is - there is nothing to be done. The city exists in Man's image, and its existence in some form would have come about in any world where humans began as they did and kept doing that. Once it has been established, it cannot be unmade, and technology does not leave this world easily. There is only one potential of the city - that it suggests that another world was possible, or at least that we could see a world that came out of the city. For the tribes who arrive at this terrible place and are now stuck there, there is nothing to do but see the beast for what it is, and salvage whatever can be salvaged that the human spirit has yet to corrupt. That is what everyone involved, including the city fathers, has done. The city for its own sake is a futile cause. What is the city except idolatry and fetishism? The rulers of the city foresaw that and knew better than to let it define themselves. Ideology is for the slaves.
I suppose I should put to rest the notion of "the country" or landed property being a safeguard against the city, before the usual suspects start in. What is the country, except the hinterland of the city-state and its resulting empire? A misanthropic answer is to say that too many people in too small a place is the problem, but the same fuckery persists in the country which pays its fealty. The landlords have every reason to promote the vice of the city, for they reap the benefits of vice without paying the tax of having to live there. The landlords hate having to face consequences, which they are not immune to. The proprietor has in all eras invented numerous copes to face the situation they agreed to - that for all of their merit and history, they have been little more than a glorified version of Vinnie the claims adjuster from earlier. At least Vinnie did his grisly business and went home to his family, if he has one, or made do without creating too much damage. What damage Vinnie did was at the command of others with little to his name except the dubious honor of mafias. The landlords, being higher in the game and being the recruitment pool for true aristocrats who glorify their impunity, cannot be so lax. The proprietors, in whatever form they take, always seek to upset the settlement of the city for the most trite reasons, and their objection is never about any genuine moral affront, but the untidiness of the city and the vice which their property rests on. For property and labor alike, the course of action is not to dismantle the city in a desperate effort to make a new normal, but to invent a better city and wage an intractable struggle against whatever classes comprise the commons. In our era, this is what were called the bourgeoisie. A segregation between the petit bourgeoisie - the middle class strivers - and the haute bourgeosie or commanding heights, is much like the division of skilled from unskilled labor. This is to say, it is a somewhat but not entirely illusory category. The commanding heights of the capitalist world were never attached to the city or capital as such, for the strings of capital were finance and trading empires who understood their mission was an imperial one. None of those who truly contested anything in capitalism were convinced they were "just doing capitalism", as if they were led and cajoled and somehow tricked. Those who would enter the ranks of the haute bourgeoisie would learn, in so many ways, what this game really was and how worthless their tokens of civic worth really were. As the enclosure and monopoly reaches an height, the lower ranks of the commanding heights are on the outside looking in, while an alliance of technocrats and the victors of the struggle for the city make good on what capital always represented. The remaining "residue" of the property-holding classes are given one dictum - that whatever transgressions they are made to endure, at least they're not retarded. Even a less pernicious form of the city was destined to meet this endgame, if its logic were followed religiously - and it was followed religiously, with nary a moment where humanity considered it would be different, despite far better examples than this fate being evident. The victorious coalition is itself dissatisfied, because their strategy - the only possible strategy given what human politics was - only allowed them to seize the state and the institutions. It did not allow them to rule any better than the prior regime, and by cannibalizing the people and the nation willfully and eagerly in pursuit of one world-historical mission or another, all they accomplished was lordship over a dumpster fire. We could have told them the outcome of that before it began, but we're retarded for saying from the outset that this way of life was ruinous, and humanity simply did not want anything else. Only the lowest class really wanted it to be different, and they were the class specifically exempted from civic life even more than they have been throughout every human project. No "other system" would change that. Only removal from the company of the obvious threat - humans and their machinery - would create the appearance that a different world was possible.
There was of course one solution that was already available, and had been known in some sense from classical Antiquity onward - the nation, and making out of it a new understanding that was premised on something other than local and institutional avarice. That is the subject of the next chapter, and it would be the nation proper where this struggle of classes played out. The struggle of classes was anathema to the nation. It is a creature of the city and its offshoots. It is not particularly relevant to Empire, and Empire can only be blamed so much without speaking of its mechanisms and systems as what they are, rather than a preferred model and civic religion regarding Empire. But, that solution, for various reasons, did nothing to answer the proposition that founded the city. It instead offered some model of social life where the ritual sacrifice was a settled matter. Of all of the social forms hitherto known, the nation was the first that could question the sordid origin of the human race. No warlord is in a position to do anything about the sacrifice, or really sees a reason why it should stop. His task in the world at the least accepts the rituals as part of the great war and great game he had to play to become a warlord, and whatever his sentiments about it, warlords are limited in their ability to change the world. That was a creature of the city.
For various reasons, the nation as a construct is a defunct organ. What it might have been has been thoroughly gutted, replaced with a parodic form from the moment ideological assholes made the foundation of nations into a fake and gay story. By no means did the nation solve the problem by being a nation, as if the essence of such a thing had any intrinsic moral weight. I leave that for the following chapters, and return to the city, since no nation can exist without being tainted and turned into a plaything of cajolers.
I cannot answer how us who have turned our backs to the entire sorry facade of the human project would change our own lives by any interface with the institutions. They are things that are unreformable, and even if we imagined a far different type of society, the same fundamental struggles would continue, interminable and the chief participants propping each other up as has been the custom of this sorry race. But, this is really the question everyone faces when encountering the city and the tribes that came to it, who were never good men and women from the beginning. They all brought the vice of their prior society to the city, which was part of the fuel of such a creature. Nothing new could be possible in the city, despite the city appearing as a novel and technological thing and making progress of some sort a tenet of its religion. The question for the lowest class is really the question for everyone. The city's constitution and exploitation make that clear, and it was exploitation that proved to be the chief downfall of the nascent nation. But, for the cast-offs of our class, there is nothing left to exploit. We live what could barely be called lives, wondering when we could do something other than live as a symbol of the eugenic creed's victory over the world and over anything we would have wanted.
There is one obvious thing to do - anything but this. The evil does not allow us to ignore it, and it revels in showing that we will be ignored. It is for the best that we are, for humanity has already elected for the ritual sacrifice in one way or another. Their repeat and flagrant intransigence regarding it speaks for itself, and history has judged them to be a failed race. It is not possible to reverse enclosure in any version of the city. The reasons why are what we have written - that the religious conviction of the city does not speak of "the masses rebelling on their own". For all true intents and purposes, the damned need not "rebel" as if this were a political question, because the political has no answers to exploitation. The political as a rule concerned itself with something quite alien to any economic matter. It was a religious conviction that the damned should suffer that politicians could turn to, and not every politician does. The only rebellion that was absolutely necessary was won a long time ago - we rebelled the moment the body refused to join such an abomination, and no body and no soul can join this contraption as if we could live and breathe it. Simply living was enough. The city and its cult, like any religion, always had to impress upon the subjects that any of this should be followed. It was not the other way around. If reality is to be controlled at all levels, that control is always active and definable. We would know what is controlling reality, and no story or myth or taboo would make it different. We would and historically have named our enemies and their deeds, and there is no controversy. There are no games of insinuation, no superstitions or the familiar eugenist screeching where "you know what you did", because the sacrosanctity of these fucking Satanics was an unmentionable high order - the last high order from Heaven permissible among a Satanic race. Yet, for all of that, humanity would not change. History has judged. Humans were born slaves, will die as slaves, and there was never any serious possibility that it would be any different - not in the city, or in a nation, or any other construct hitherto known. We should, seeing how it turned out at the dawn of the 21st century, question anyone promising "freedom", when freedom in a genuine sense was always cheap as free. The great problem is that enough people made sure that such a condition could never exist, and the spiritual bondage of the human race, guaranteed by its sordid origin, became a value greater than any ulterior motive. Recognizing that there is no salvation in society and there never was would be the first step towards a better life in this niche. This is never about accepting the ruling creed or any of the ruling ideas. What the rulers and ideologues say about anything is no longer relevant. So far as it was relevant, it was only due to whatever threat it made to us, and the realization of those threats. For the past 100 years of human history, the threat is total and action is proactively taken to make real that threat in every thought, and every deed of the modern city. There is no more ambiguity. Humanity has been judged - guilty, on all counts, proven by its repeated and flagrant bragging that it does so and has no shame and no remose. Failed race. And, due to the strange biopoltiical conviction that took root, it would be judged as a race, rather than as a nation, or a collection of souls, or any institution worth saving. A race is the lowest expression of society, intentionally chosen because it met the demands of the city and its religion.
A full accounting of how this could be averted in our present setting is beyond the scope of the present book, and I could never provide useful answers. From here, there is little to be done and little to expect. The first step would be to recognize that it was always doomed. There is no condition to restore where before we were happy, and after we were accursed. There is a progression of rot in the religions humans chose - and it was always a choice, however much religions jealously exterminated any religion calling the gods of the human race the false gods they were. Not one thing of humanity works for much at all, and it never could have amounted to much. Protecting what little decency humans acquired, which was deliberately destroyed by the most flagrant transgressions of ideology and the viciousness of the worst of this stupid and filthy race, is a hopeless cause. The indecent have no regard for decency, except for when it can be betrayed and the goodwill of fools exploited for gain. That is all the city had, and that is all humans really knew beyond a local level that was always fleeting. If humans went against their nature, it was a pleasant surprise, and one we would never expect to repeat.
If there is a solution, there is one which has worked in every time, and before the city formed. This is to mitigate direct contact with society as much as possible, and to live as a ghast among people, so far as it is permissible. We are not so much "the dead". We have, out of necessity, become more unliving than we would have been in a better world, and this un-life relied primarily on communication by the written word, and by our ability to counteract oral treachery and the bullbaiting behavior of this Satanic race. Why should we resist becoming a "bug-man" who shuns the pointless games and finery of this filthy race? It is not us who are soulless. Anyone who would think this filth is tolerable let alone worth reproducing in the form of new life, so that the cycle of the city may repeat and feed on new energy, has to question why they are doing any of this. For those who have turned away from the rot of it all, life is worth living. We no longer concern ourselves with such things, and the worst that can happen is the unlimited torture which is already glorified and exemplified. Yet, this solution has a cost. We claw back some space, and this leaves signs that the jealous overseer detects and uses to mark down who the retards are, and then goads them to lash out so that the thrill of torture can be maximized. The city met its ultimate fate the moment any of its visions could be realized beyond the pretensions of some rich assholes who lived in its opulent citadel. This is all it could have been, and we have sadly been made to place value on something that was less than worthless. It was the technology, the goods themselves, and our very lives that were valuable. Civilization and its cult is long past due for a replacement.
Our time allows a small space to exist - a policed space, and a space where the intriguers and faggotry of snark are ready to destroy any public facing that exists. There is no point in expecting decency to not have shit heaped upon it. They will threaten even the simplest expression of happiness. Eugenics knows no other way.
In short - do the exact opposite of the eugenic creed every time, for the sake of doing so, and you will likely hit upon doing the right thing, if only by dumb luck. When all else fails, by invocation from before rings true. Hate, my friends, hate. I want to let you all know that, so far as I can be in this writing, I consider the readers friends in the truest sense I can in this indirect way. Even if I would hate you to your face and know that trust is impossible in such a world, all of the hatred I spew for humanity and its failure is necessary to speak of something different.
This is no stranger to the city. Among the virtues of the city is its anonymity in regards that are of no consequence to the city elders. The city, exploitative as it may be, had within it the seeds of its own destruction. The "total society" that arose in our time is a profoundly evil construct, and it arose primarily to pervert the nation and crush any concept that the nation entailed - most of all, the democratization that nations entailed, which would have been the basis for disrupting the traditional vices of the city. This would not be a thing imposed on history or the masses or a "self-liberation" to chase after a phantom while abandoning the virtues they already held. All it required, and this has been produced many times over, is something hidden from rites and rituals of the indecent sort that the civic rituals were. For countless generations, it was this which kept any hope at all in the condemned souls of humanity - that at least in some small and fleeting space, there was something other than this rot, and that it was actually very simple to begin the necessary work to move on from this beast. The unfortunate truth of this solution is that it does not lend itself to any institutional rule or pattern which can be freely reproduced. The space apart from the beastial city and its rites cannot be protected by a counter-curse or any religion that comports with what religion must do. Monopolizing this space and claiming it as an aristocratic domain alone was the essential act of the city, understood in advance of its foundation. If the city cannot be reformed, then there may have been another way that obviated the need of imperious institutions. The elders who had a role in the city themselves understood that this establishment did not produce what was promised, but it was a condition they inherited and were invested in spiritually to be anything at all. No city, and there is no empire and they are at the mercy of the world and its retribution, which has no concept or need of the impious snarkers who mock all mercy.