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The further elaboration of science, I leave to another writing, for it escapes the purview of The Retarded Ideology. The preceding chapters and reference to science generally I write because it is necessary to never take science for granted, or presume that a scientific or technological category is ever cleanly demarcated from our ability to pursue science or develop technology. Humans only know what they can claim to know, and what humans know is—despite a rightful cynicism regarding human faculties—considerable when regarding this question. What I aim to accomplish with this entry in The Retarded Ideology is to escape the model I have used up to now and how economic history has been told up to now. In the second book of this series, I suggested economics as the study of the management of social information or information generally. This is useful for us to place economic categories on sounder metaphysical footing and establish some basis for the mathematical treatment of economics. Yet, by that reasoning, all economic activity is reduced to game-theoretical outcomes and interventions, which have nothing to do with human economic activity. We do not play a game or write out laboriously a game theory when managing the house. The operations of game theory are things that cannot be untangled from political consciousness or the scurrilous games humanity has played regarding our fate. If we are to reduce economic activity to game-theoretical activity, there are two answers. One is that the management of resources and information is trivial in any era, and economic writing has written volumes about nothing more than humanity's skullduggery. The second is that, in light of humanity's history and a cursory glance at what humanity has truly valued, the economic problem is intractable, because humans have chosen, in some way, to not allow it to be solved. The problem will always persist because humanity simply cannot tolerate the lowest class having what they wanted, and that became the model for all other oppression and the establishment of the division of labor into political castes, rather than any allocation of labor that was premised on what was good, or just, or useful for anything productive.

There are a few treatments of economics which will be useful for the remainder of my work in The Retarded Ideology. I will list them now.

First, economics is at heart the study of the science of production, more so than "management of the house" as the name of the discipline implies. It was more credible to use the term "economics" when the household and home manufacturing was a common base for industry, particularly for the production of consumer goods, textiles, and things that were in the past reproduced by laborers themselves or by those close to them. The movement to what Marx called general commodity production was never a clean break from the past, but it was—is—a real distinction between the free trade society that prevailed in modernity and the estate-centered economic life that prevailed in recorded history. What did not change, though, was the "mode of production", or how humans operationalized the task of making those things that were the object to acquire from economic activity. Adam Smith's pin factory was premised on cooperative labor under the aegis of a firm, but nothing distinguished the firm from the estate or family household of before, and in practice, the family and nepotism remained alive and well under capitalism, regardless of the transformation of the family that industrial society entailed. The collection of wage labor under the command of factory owners, and then vertical integration engineered by monopolistic firms to create the technocratic polities of the 20th century, did not change essentially what was done by workers, as if there were a golden period of the past where men were not alienated from their product. It did not change what was necessary to operationalize everything a productive firm did to produce any article that was useful for consumption, and it did not overnight spawn a whole class of goods whose sole function was to maintain capitalist relations. Similar vices can be encountered in the modes of production of the past and can be envisioned in some future arrangement, whether it is called "socialism" or something else.

I argue that a "mode of production" is a misnomer for what are changes in the transactional social relationships alone. After all of that legwork is accomplished, nothing changes or can change if labor is to produce useful products for society, or if labor is to accomplish any other task such as ruling, fighting, management, or annoying the rest of humanity with their continued existence, all of which entail labor, inputs, and outputs to be reproduced. The worker still has to set out on the task of regulating his or her own body to produce the product and judge the utility of their own labor if they are to discipline themselves or be disciplined by anything else. The worker will always view working for a boss as some form of slavery. Realistically, humanity never truly knew what a free society was, and before humanity found any lasting freedom, certain braying assholes advanced the notion that freedom meant nothing but the enslavement and sacrifice of others. The most ancient conception of civilized society posited that all of mankind were slaves of the gods, including those who wore finery and presented themselves as Heaven's representatives on Earth with the sole agency to dictate political affairs. In economic and productive affairs, this never changed for a moment, and it would not be possible through any hitherto known political or economic model to speak of "free labor" as anything more than an aspiration. Sometimes that aspiration is realized enough for the conditions of labor to be tolerable, and it can even be entertained that the laborer has a life as something other than an object of utility. That is intrinsically a political matter rather than an institutional one. Institutions have no concept of a free society and disdain the concept, reaching back to that maxim mentioned in Book 3 of the "copper rule"—that slavery is eternal, especially regarding the abstract models humanity uses to arrest history and understand their relations through game theory.

Second, economics refers to the management of property generally, rather than the property of the estate or any productive unit alone. An earlier iteration of the concept of political economy was "Political Arithmetic", as it was called by Sir William Petty in the appropriately-titled Political Arithmetic.^[1] Property has nothing to do with productivity. It is quite contrary, in that property generally wants as little product as possible, and disdains technology in particular. Towards labor, property has not merely a pre-existing and long-running antagonism, but a sickening affinity, which was one reason why the alliance of technology and industrial labor could never persist. Labor has no use of abstractions when it possesses genuine authority regarding science and technology, but labor appreciates property and its need for security. Labor had no use of the despised lowest class and only accepted the reign of aristocracy by some magick that was seized unilaterally by aristocracy because their hatred of the low was always going to be greater than hatred of the ruling power and the trickery. It had after all been a thing they were selected and bred for, and they learned early what happens to those who refuse. But, the likeness with property rather than technology is what labor saw in economic thought, and the claims of abstraction and managers never would match what labor saw as their imperatives. Labor had no likeness with aristocracy and its property, but a history of fear of aristocracy permeates the whole society, and a history of disdain for the lowest class likely permeates the whole society. A few of the workers might reverse that thinking and side with the lowest class, but they still face the same imperatives that property faces, and that mirror cannot be easily undone without a laborer or labor generally jeopardizing their position. Economics was offered first of all as a defense of an opportunity to seize property and wealth, rather than value being intrinsically manna to acquire mindlessly. This is at odds with the necessary basis of economics in the management of information. Property and wealth by itself has no intrinsic value whatsoever. What is claimed as an asset can just as well be taken or destroyed, and the question moves from the management of productive information to the management of military information and military intelligence.

It is this concept of economics that is invoked by "basic economics" as an ideological excuse for eugenism and the excuse of military necessary to force this social engineering plan into reality. Production and social engineering of this sort are irreconcilable aims. One seeks to exhaust the surplus of human product on war and struggle while pulling aside those who are granted impunity and never have to struggle for a moment and tell them how good this is. The other has to contend with that struggle and the conditions humanity was born into, which were not their own. All of the ways we have been made to contest value in economics have been primarily contests for wealth, rather than a problem where humans do not know how to produce things, or the land simply refuses to produce enough. For all of human history, the natural product of the land has been more than sufficient at the scale of global society or the domain of the nation, if that land were not besieged and made to die screaming as is the habit of war. Productive science need not be particularly advanced, and for how well humans could produce things with present technology, we have always known that the exploitation of the land is nowhere near its optimal conditions. The conditions of the 21st century perfect productive economics on a small scale, but anything outside of local machinery is woefully and deliberately inefficient, as this provides the best opportunities for managers, proprietors, and aristocrats to continue their scam. Without those fetters, the product of the land would be almost trivial to produce, and it would be very simple to arrange globally or regionally the flow of resources to operate factories to produce, more or less arbitrarily, the industrial products desired. The problem of labor is trivially solved because, throughout history, labor's share of the national product has been abysmally low relative to that given to the technocrats, the commons of any era, and the proprietors whose asset wealth is measured in millions of dollars at the least if they are proprietors worthy of the name. The favored grades of labor would consider an annual income of $100,000 very well off, with more than half of that income extracted in taxes, another third extracted in land rent, and services that ostensibly mark social promotion putting the laborer in debt. The typical condition of labor places their annual income at a third of that, obligating a laborer to enter debt simply to survive. The same conditions are reproduced in every region where civilization prevails, and this is for those who are valid and not pressed upon with extraordinary charges. Very often, the laborer faces some legal penalty for a crime, spurious or real, and lives in constant fear of organized crime and the police apparatus. The conditions of labor are openly democidal, and this fact is thrown in everyone's face. When labor secures any personal security, it is treated as illegal and unseemly. This applies to the valid sector of labor without the marker of underclass status—a mental defect or crimes against eugenics. The figures of their ostensible income are pressing, yet irrelevant because the money is fake, and their situation is calculated to ensure that all subjects are either in debt or live with a knife at their throat from the police powers of the state, which makes clear that they are lower than slaves.

The endgame of this approach to economics, regardless of the system promoted as "natural" is thus, quoted for posterity because this is the sad endgame of the 21st century:

It really is that simple. Economics will always be a zero-sum game so long as it entails this inquiry into wealth because that is the nature of wealth and property. Nowhere is wealth "generated" by any industry as if by some alchemy industry endowed the base materials with some novel substance. Labor has no such generative power in itself, and that was never the claim of political economy. It is also not the case that technology has any power to create wealth by the magic of its form or some energy passed through it. Wealth, to be appreciated as such, is always claimed from the world, and that includes claims on human beings and machinery. If it is built by labor, it is just as easily destroyed, ignored, or simply irrelevant. In this view, all of the product of labor is nothing more than a gratuity of the Earth given to the proprietor, and by extension all who align with the proprietor or the overlord which can rule by insinuation and torture. In practice, the proprietors are always beholden to aristocracy, and so this basis for economic life does not last for long on its own. Every such reign of the proprietors has to be joined by aristocracy and some spiritual authority granting its seal of approval. If a warlord must hold this claim with nothing more than the army at his disposal, the warlord will see the necessity of claiming some spiritual authority and the technology and manpower necessary to enforce his claims. Property without labor or any substance has little going for it. Certainly, there is a great faggotry in our time which promotes the ideology the World Economic Forum sells.^[2] This tendency is hardly an aberration of history or even a characteristic of a peculiar epoch. So long as wealth is tied to economic logic—and this is a perfectly reasonable claim—that logic will entail a zero-sum game, and no expectation of vast expanses of land or space to claim and distribute will change this. Eventually, expansion into any unclaimed space and its thorough colonization will exhaust that space. It is this which granted to the Malthusian ideology its hold on the psyche—that so long as wealth was contested, it would appear as if the contest were an intractable problem. So far as wealth is the objective of the competitors, it will indeed be an intractable problem, no matter how much a participant wishes for this competition to not corrupt what the competitor wanted in the first place, which was security.

While wealth is a zero-sum game, what wealth represents—security—is not wealth. As a natural entity, security doesn't exist as a form. You can't define it by any simple rubric, nor condense it into a token that has inherent worth. To the world and most of the things in it, the idea of property is absurd, and the wealth of the world and nations simply is, without regard for any claimant. It is entirely possible for the wealth to be distributed and expectations of endowment and entitlement, such that the economic competition rarely disturbs wealth, regardless of whether it was held in common or in plots of land that were respected out of a decency which has little to do with economics. What cannot be done is a conjuring of wealth or any invocation of abundance, as a Satanic cosmology, will often do to justify this forced ignorance. There is only as much wealth as there are things to claim since wealth does not produce more wealth.

Capital, or any other conception of value, operates not as wealth but as technology. Technology is always parasitic upon labor, and labor itself is not freely reproducible any more than wealth is. Technology itself, for it to be technology, is freely reproducible in the abstract. This is the third, and for this writing, overarching concept of economics. What economics entails is a general theory of technology, more than a theory of wealth or moral philosophy or the general study of science and operations. It is overarching because all systems that are rooted in knowledge are products of technology, rather than wealth necessitating that technology. Productivity did not require any economic theory or system to occur, and the operations of a productive society largely do not concern any general theory of technology or procurement of wealth from the world. The inquiry into political economy, and political treatises since Antiquity and likely before then if they exist, were always inquiries into this general theory of technology, rather than an inquiry into psychology or the humanities. The human being in political society is always oppressed and cannot be any other way, and economics is an excuse to naturalize that oppression. This is deliberately played up because aristocracy sells at a premium their exemption from oppression and upholds that exemption by the use of torture and humiliation against the lower orders. "Suffering is the price of civilization", they say in various koans to justify what they have done. The suffering was never materially necessary or even politically necessary. It was imposed entirely because aristocracy saw what they held—their right of impunity—as sacred for its own sake, and the political rationalization was invented to create institutions and technology that locked in what they had won, just as humans invent tools to arrest some operation that is useful for them and reproduce it freely.

Free reproduction is a peculiar quality of technology. The products themselves, which are the objective of any economic activity, are what they are. They cannot be compared to each other without the necessary framework to generalize production, which brings about all of the other conceptions of the economic problem. To generalize production purely by a surface-level science—for example, reducing all of the products to energy, water, farmland, or labor—defeats all of the necessary understanding of how this generalization leads to the final product. It is trivial to say that all that is produced is the result of matter and energy and that in principle, all of the economic activity can be compared to a single form that is deemed useful for the purpose. But, in all cases, none of the products nor the substance which originates them is freely reproducible. There would not be a managerial problem if everything were freely reproducible. All of the product that can be created is limited in supply—hence the invocation of supply and demand in any understanding of this creature called "the market". The wealth is a zero-sum game, whereas the product could be assumed to be some manna that enters social circulation when the products enter this exchange or game that has been played. Wealth is only claimed, and before it is claimed, it must have existed in situ, awaiting the first exploiter who comes across it. As the study of economics moves to a history of science and labor, all of the potentials of labor are limited by the agent which can carry out labor, and the laborer would not need to regulate its behavior if it did have a moral stake, and thus a stake in a real world that was never freely reproducible. The laborer uses technology and its free time for purposes, rather than imagining a boundless fount of value that can be conjured on a ledger. Anything written on that ledger points to a realized condition. This leaves the technocrat with two conceits. One is faith in technology itself and the genius of the manager, which presents to the impressionable as a "master morality" to lord over the workers and revel in the suffering of the lowest class. The other is faith in one fount of value that is not beholden to the world—the suffering of subjects, which is realized in the torture and humiliation of the lowest class and the impression of that display on all in a society. The suffering of the lowest class, though, is not boundless or something "above God", which can be counted on to make real the conceits of the technocrat who believes its technology makes it god-like. The lowest class would have to internalize the technocrat's faith in "free reproduction" being an infinite fount. This is to say, the lowest class and the technocrat would have to internalize a Satanic cosmology for this concept of "unlimited free reproduction" to hold.

If the technocrat is stubborn about fidelity to reality, it may claim that technology is in the end not freely reproducible, and all of the tools, intelligence, and implements that constitute technology are limited. If that is so, then on the technocrat's terms, its technology was pre-ordained and subordinated to nature. This defeats the purpose of the technocrat inventing technology in the first place. If the only technology someone could create was destined to exist, then no "technology" as such was relevant to the economic function. The positions of the technocrat would be irretrievable, lost, and gone forever. This appeals to those who have internalized a Satanic cosmology and assertions about human nature. It runs into one obvious problem—history does not work that way and never did. Nor does human volition operate in a way that is blind to the world around it. The technocrat is more aware than anyone else about the nature of its position in society and has to for its function to be sensical. Humans are not merely users of tools ready-made for them, but inventive and capable of reverse-engineering to create new tools. The potential of technology is thus expansive, and this expansion is not linear, unlike the accumulation of product which is more or less linear and valued accordingly for the race for production to be sensical. Wealth is measured not by any substance of value. Wealth is measured entirely by the cost of securing the claim, rather than any productive or substantive content of the wealth. Wealth can be worthless or actively harmful for economic value—for example, the poison in a bog, or some unwelcome intruder that is included gratuitously as the wealth of some parcel of land, difficult to remove without the proprietor raising some force to expel the unwanted.

Technology alone is freely reproducible for it to be technology; this is to say, once the plans are drawn up, provided the materials are present, any number of instances of technology can be instantiated based on the same plan. The "plan" need not be a rigid, doctrinaire form unchanging throughout history. Technology is adaptable, and it is adaptable by technology. The only limitation of technology for human beings is that human beings are not wholly "technological constructs" that can be freely reproduced, or summon computation by an imperious will that is infinite. But, in principle, the machine that is human intelligence has no natural boundaries that must be respected when speaking of intelligence. There may be specific limitations of intelligence from the hardware that reproduces such a construct in reality, but those limitations say nothing about intelligence or technology itself. It says something instead about what humans are, and what their brains and minds are when realized as physical constructs. The universe itself had no concept of intelligence or computation inherent to it. It was something emergent from the world, and intelligence is not a substance or a unique property that is identical to consciousness and will. Intelligence could be read into things that do not think themselves—for example, the intelligent behavior of a colony of microbial life, which adapts to its situation as a colony rather than as individual microbes chaotically and blindly acting. No thought exists in the colony or an individual entity, but the system reacts to its environment in ways that retain memory and seek the survival of the colony, rather than every microbe existing entirely for "me wantee". This the microbes do not by any moral impulse or by some will of the colony which is unmentionable, but by a few simple principles of what life is and does. Life tends to seek environments that are fertile for it and allow it stability, and for these microbes, forming colonies accomplishes this without any thought or reason involved. Yet, this behavior is itself intelligent and adaptive to the world around it, to maintain the integrity of these functions of the colony. The individual microbes could survive on their own power, but the colony maintains its own properties and enjoys advantages over individual microbes which would be swept by the winds of history in ways that the colony would not.

The purpose of explaining this natural technology once again is to make clear that technology is not identical with "thinking" or even "knowledge"; but, the colony is only appreciated as a colony by knowledge, rather than any moral necessity that the colony is a "thing" or the genuine existence of the colony being whole and unbreakable. The colony of microbes is adaptable to new types of microbes. Very likely, the colony in question does not exist for a singular life-form, but an ecosystem where many different types of life coexist without any "struggle for life", and those types of life come and go without any necessary parts of the colony to reproduce it. The peculiars of more complex life-forms create different challenges, and what works for simple microbes is not something that can transfer cleanly to societies of human beings. A society of human beings is not a colony or a city, but something very different that has little to do with the properties of life-forms, individually or collectively. But, humans do congregate in population centers, because this habit serves them well, and formations of people accomplish tasks that no one human would reproduce freely by the technology of their body alone. In principle, though, knowledge could reproduce for the individual all of the faculties of the collective. The phalanx's advantages as a military formation could be reproduced by machines that are piloted by one thought and still maintain the shield wall and all of the physical attributes that recommend the phalanx. The phalanx can easily be superseded, as it was in our history, and this does not require some exotic technology of the mind to envision.

The further elaboration on a general theory of technology is the subject of this writing, and so I break off this description here and describe it in the further sections of this book, as it arises in history. Never is this general theory of technology perfected, as such a task is impossible given the premises of such a theory. But, it would be possible to develop a general theory of technology that is adaptive to its environment, rather than a "total system". This is actually how economics or things like it were understood historically, and in practice it is the approach used to truly understand economic thought and what any of these models or systems mean for the participants, for the economic theories have, for humans, revolved around human beings and their subjectivity in political society. That is one reason why the division of labor was central to the treatises of Plato's Republic and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, stated explicitly from the outset of their presentations. It was never a natural segregation or division that pre-existed them, and this point was again made explicitly by both; that the division of labor is illusory or a useful fiction before it is realized and perpetuates itself due to the division being useful for the social machinery's operation. The functions of political society, even at a small realize, are operationalized first by human beings before those operations are distilled into their individual acts. The division of labor does not by itself make them distinct classes as such, for the functions of the class do not define the men so thoroughly, but in practice, that is how the requirements of life in political society make them, and this becomes expedient when social inequality becomes a planned part of the machinery for its own sake.

The division of labor, wherever it exists, is always operationalized through individual deeds, rather than the machines themselves as any essential form. There is a general theory of these operations, which itself is a technological construct rather than a laborious one. It is a technology necessary to speak of any labor as labor, whether it is generally alienable or not. An animal acts with some deliberation to regulate its body and the resources available to it. Unlike humans, who express the abstraction of exchange with some token that can take on superstitious values of its own, animals only have their existence and sociality. This does not grant them immunity to the same superstitions and foulness of mankind, but it greatly limits symbolic expressions to anything other than momentary gestures. It is much the same in practice with humans. Whatever the symbolism and conceits of Man, none of their symbolic systems are worth anything if they are not operationalized. Humans are very capable of operationalizing every part of their body in ways that animals do not and can not. If they did, they would behave in ways more like humans, and they would attach to symbolic language meaning which is absent in animals. There is no good reason we would attach to the utterances of language any inherent meaning. Humans can speak nonsense, or babble about things that come to mind which have no imperative meaning or ulterior motive. The animal is not at all "keyed" to linguistic communication. Among the reasons why humans care about language is not an inborn proclivity for it, where language can be taken for granted. Language and failure to understand were among the prime qualities that selected the failed for ritual sacrifice and the thrill of torture, as befits this monstrous race. It is not guaranteed that symbolic language requires this. For whatever reason it happened, it did for humans, and this is proven by all of the hitherto known conduct of the human race, in the record, and from a cursory observation of this monstrous race. It did not take long for human brains to adapt to the ritual sacrifice and internalize it, first carried out by the fickle desires of their race. I would imagine this monstrous behavior is an inheritance from the kingdom of apes, and certainly, animals show callous disregard for their kind that is never shown to aliens.

A sleight of hand is made to tie division of labor by function to essential differences which mark those selected to live from those selected to die. This is ruinous to any functional society. The various operations of a factory or assembly line are never political designations. It made little difference if someone was a line worker, a worker in a cubicle working on his or her task independently and feeding their product to the collective output, a foreman, or someone whose work was in the abstract tasks of management or theory of the factory's operation. None of these distinctions necessitate any social classes as such, and whatever the distinct functions of a factory, all of them at the end of the day are people set on a task, which is but one of the tasks they do with their lives. All of the workers return home to whatever their life is, and the job is just a job, which is not mutually exclusive with other jobs. What is mutually exclusive is contractual loyalty. Either workers are free to associate outside of the contract, and the former must be explicitly stated rather than assumed naively. Absent any compelling reason against it, the contract—the legal claim to command labor—damns the worker to the status of servitude and some form of slavery. The mere act of working for the boss makes those who engage in actual productive work the servants of those who do not, and this is secured not by the essential act, but by the contractual expectation that this labor is freely reproducible by the machine of the contract and social relations. That is, there is an apparatus to ensure enforcement of the contract, which has no limitations beyond those which are explicitly stated in the letter of the law. If the worker wants to challenge these contracts, he would have to appeal to an authority that adjudicates these contracts. This would be the law of the state because the policies of free trade were never premised on any natural law that obligates men to honor any contract. If the law of the state allows the manager untrammeled authority, then there is no appeal, and the letter of the law may be re-interpreted at will by those who hold authority—the manager, the firm, and the class of men who work in these abstractions. The worker under contract is not an equal. It is always master and slave in principle. Even if the workers were partners in a firm and the presumption of equality is made, all this means under the contractual regime is that the partners are slaves of each other, with all of the obligations and consequences of the slavery institution shared between them. They serve each other directly, and they serve in some sense an abstract capitalist in the Great Material Continuum. Why is this so, if the letter of the law states that the partners are free and it was in their interests to take this claim seriously? It is because of the nature of contracts themselves if they are not sobered by some reality outside of the law. The rationales for the partners in this situation to honor concepts of a free society or equality between the partners are not conditions freely chosen or freely reproducible. They do not spawn from some primordial will that "just so" mandated natural equality or any natural law or natural rights that have the same or greater force as the law enforced ultimately by operations and the efforts of men. No moral claim and no ethics can be taken for granted, and woe to the poor soul who believes any contract, any pact, or any agreement between two knowing entities works this way, where an invisible friend will sort it out for you.

This reality is understood by the participants in labor and all operations. For the operations of labor to be worth anything, they are consequential in a world outside of what law declares the world and the arrangement of society ought to be. Humans engaged in labor, however removed they are from their history or a sense of humanity as we casually understand it, remain human, with all of the faculties such an animal possesses. This is not true of labor generally, and it would not be true if the condition of mankind were so degraded that "human" no longer applies to the participants. As mentioned, no contract can be taken for granted, especially one grounded in a conceit that is far removed from the true conditions of mankind in this century. What results is that, even though this division of labor into social classes serves no function and is entirely ruinous to the goal of cooperation, it is done so long as political imperatives override what was desired in the first place—to make a useful product. Politics will always be the clear and present danger. So too are the consequences of politics a clear and present danger, precisely because it can be seen how ruinous this political contest is for what was wanted out of cooperative labor in the first place, down to the smallest operation. Intrigues and the general fear plague any productive enterprise. So too do these intrigues plague any competition between the producers, which has a disciplinary effect on them in any society where producers compete for a market and must establish relations with the consumers. Far from being equal, the merchant is the patron and the customer is the client, emulating the patronage of Rome that has its counterparts in civilizations around the world and was appreciable by the barbarous nations for what it granted and the vices it promoted. In short, any arrangement of economic life had to suffer the reality that the participants were, from the outset, profoundly unequal, and there was not—by design—any way for this arrangement to not interfere with what was desired, by appeal to nature or economics itself. This could be circumvented if humans remained human first, and their operations were a distinctly inferior sphere of activity when they concerned the products of industry. Nothing about a market society necessitated the invasion of private life or anything like the onerous terms of contracts that marked wage labor as a slavery with the same properties as any other slavery. It would have been very necessary to not allow this madness to reach the level that is normalized in the present time, as I write this book. Yet, it did, precisely because an appeal to nature was inserted in a situation where it did not belong, and nature said the exact opposite of what the dogmas of aristocracy insisted—as a known lie violently recapitulated to the people to show their eternal contempt for us. Nature made clear that market interactions were inherently antagonistic, and this was understood at the outset of the free trade settlement. It was incumbent on the class of men who held commanding privileges of the state to mitigate these consequences. How they did so was never clearly spelled out, and if we have thought about that problem for five minutes, we can conclude it can never be "solved" in the crass manner prescribed by certain people who should have been ignored—if evil allowed itself to be ignored.

It is here where two great distinctions arise in the economic problem, which are particular to political economy rather than politics. In politics, many classes and interests, without regard to any necessary natural prescription, contest the state, and they do so entirely due to political imperatives, with the material world being no more than a playing field in this game. In economics, we would look at this situation as a necessary managerial task of operations, and then the abstraction of technology would be understood as a way to automate those operations. Only in this way are the operations freely reproducible by technology, and they are only reproducible when there is a world where energy is fed to these machines. The machines have no motive power of their own that is "just so" or granted by an imperious will. But, the operations carried out by the machines are very real and appreciated as such. This is where the trinitarian view of knowledge broke down irretrievably. In the trinitarian view, the commons held all of the authority regarding the muck of producing, and the lords were split between the spiritual authority—the priests and, in modern times, the academics and university—and temporal authority, which commanded military and police functions, which in the liberal state recruited not from old families or established pedigrees, but from the ranks of the commons, where this promotion took place "behind the backs of the producers". Had the promotion taken place publicly, it would have been too obvious to the ruled what would result. Those who were installed at the commanding heights would select each other to live, and the broad masses of the commons would be selected to die, living what could barely be called lives and told "This is what you are". Within the logic of the commons, there was no solution. Technology had to remain a "black box" to maintain the trinitarian view. The unitarian view was to conflate all of these things within "the One", which claimed to abolish all classes but in reality calcified whatever classes and interests existed at a time, proclaiming that they were eternal and history couldn't change—that "infinite growth in a finite world" was simultaneously a necessary claim for their primordial thinking and a physical impossibility that forever justified the malice of the human race. The other alternatives were dualism—the bosses simply take from the rest of the population and there is no right of appeal, which is clearly not tenable for knowledge and would quickly regress to the priestly authority—or the "quarternarian" approach, in which labor is an undistinguished mass, and the dualist outcome played out within the commons while the upper two orders were secure against the consequences of the commoners' whips. Very quickly, the trinitarian model would be asserted within the commons as a solution—that there were laborers of various gradients who could be operationalized and laborers who were useless.

The creation of classes is less relevant than the operations the participants undertake in the name of those classes. Very often, no purified, doctrinaire member of any class exists, even among the lowest class who are the only order who must be nothing other than their designated function. Aristocrats have to periodically reduce themselves to ruling and are beholden to a world where they will be judged by the commons, rather than judged as they would want to be as infallible demi-gods. Proprietors are not unaware of the work of technology and labor and have to account for such in their actions, and they can only contest property as technology allows. It is very important to note that technology rather than labor is the material constraint placed on property. The proprietor can treat the laborer as kindly or horribly as he likes, but he is constrained by technology to produce products that are appreciable for property. The labor itself is only appreciated by property when it is useful for merits that property requires; or, the deed is measured as a piece of technology, alien from its original moral intent. Technology and labor in turn have to account for the orders above them as the dominant forces compelling their action, and their aims are never for their order to attain supremacy. They always seek, in some way, to emulate what aristocracy and property do for themselves, becoming petty priests or proprietors in some arrangement they consider more amenable to their personal wants. Only the lowest class is sufficiently detached from this to be isolated from the circuit, and see it as something wholly loathsome, but the member of the lowest class has little concept of these operations being different. It is the operations, rather than the essences of the class, which are relevant. At heart, humanity is split between two great classes—the valid and the invalid, the former properly belonging to the order of labor before they adopt any other interest, and the latter marked by their exclusion from labor as participants. The reserve army of labor is called upon and immediately thrust into the most abject misery, and the lowest class has no choice but to accept this arrangement. Because nothing about this is guaranteed by any natural law, this thrusting of the lowest class to abject misery must be enforced by operations, and never for a moment must the onslaught end. That is the human spirit—always has been, and always will be, no matter the cost. It is an imperative that quickly loses its "class character" and becomes a force unto itself, and operations carried out for their own sake rather than any ulterior motive. The operations don't exist to feed a preferred model of class society. Class society exists to facilitate the operations.

This priority of operations is not unique to the drive to immiserate humanity. If anyone thinks for five minutes about what labor does in this world, the operations carried out are the purpose, rather than a technological essence driving history simply by Being. No technology could exist in the first place without those operations, but that isn't the reason why operations take precedence. The operations take precedence because it is not difficult to see that all of this political society and all of the essential wants are contingent on a primary want in the agents, or a force within their constitution which must do, after all reasoning, what it is doing. The latter is recast far beyond its proper purview. We cannot realistically expect humans to cease breathing or refuse to seek water as part of their natural existence. Humans can terminate their life, or refuse sustenance from a source that is malevolent or likely to lead to poison. But, humans will find some way to breathe, and this is for reasons other than "you will die otherwise". Humans can do what is necessary to terminate life and know eventually they will die if their hitherto known history tells them their likely future. The pressing of this constitutional need is not a reasonable one. It can never be justified and does not have to be. But, humanity is guilty of it—guilty until proven innocent—and we then ask if these constitutional demands are what we want to do with our lives and the full ramifications of their consequence. No reasonable person expects that a moral obligation to cease breathing altogether would affect the world in any beneficial way. We may ask if we could engineer the constitution of life to not require oxygen or food grown from the land, and what advantages that may confer to survival. We could not imperiously declare that certain people deserve all of the air and food and the rest of humanity are obliged to live a reduced existence, without invoking a caste society whose demands center on the glorification of torture and suffering. It requires an ulterior motive that is intended for malicious purposes. The Fabian demands this to abrogate moral education which would recommend meaningful austerity for beneficial motives. For example, it is common for children to learn not to be greedy, to be aware of their body's genuine needs, and learn to share with their siblings or the members of whatever association they are thrust into, and that free association requires this understanding if the association's members are to coexist, since associations are comprised of humans with wants which cannot be subordinated to an imagined collective. In that case, there is a reason why "stop eating" makes sense, even though it is a constitutional instinct of human beings, and it may mean going without food for days which is unpleasant. In all cases, the judgment is not made imperiously by a court which abrogates the sense of the members of society. Most humans are aware of their environment and the consequences of their actions, and those who are not fully aware do not consider their ignorance an excuse or some sick virtue. To be ignorant of society is one of the most horrifying situations we can imagine, for we have always known the malice of this monstrous race, and the need to abate it if this life is to be tolerable. For the Fabian, the screaming hatred and ritual sacrifice of the ignorant is in of itself a higher value than any value of cooperation or moral probity. It can't behave any other way, except for some ulterior motive where life itself is merely the prospect of future ritual sacrifice.

We may elect to view the world however we like, rather than being locked into arguments about being or doing. If we are to speak of political economy and the view of value it proposes, it always involves what the agents do rather than any essence of what they are, or any "contradiction" about them. For the agents, their actions are never "contradictory", and the requirement to do so is a deliberate insult—the exultant shouting of "DIE" to the retard, and nothing else. Nothing about commodity production or exchange has any "contradiction" that is necessary for it to continue, or the agents to carry on. They are always aware of exactly what they do in exchange and are guilty of all consequences of their exchange and social mores. Ignorance of the law of the world is no excuse, and the law of the world is guilty until proven innocent. The world did not prescribe any laws in the sense that we regard them as institutional demands, but the objects of the world did what they would without our consent or any social contract. The contract between men was always provisional, freely abrogated by the interest that allowed this right of transgression, who mocked those who were locked into the contract. It could not have been any other way—for humans, whose history is replete with this habitual lying, guilty until proven innocent. It has also been known to all humans, regardless of their giggling laughter at the sacrifice of the damned, that their economic behavior entails consequences for the world, which they did not control. Every economic act entails externalities that are not between the agents making this exchange. However much the participants might mitigate this externality, out of a sense that doing this would be mutually beneficial for the arrangement, those around this exchange are not blind and will never be blind, especially when the externalities entail their suffering or death. To circumvent this, aristocracy pre-emptively declares that it alone has the right of transgression. Under any political-economic arrangement, this right of transgression becomes the chief danger of all of the dangers human interaction entails.

There are thus two views of operations that prevail. One is a view of operations where the right of transgression of aristocracy is central, "above God", and can never be questioned. The ruled are trained, from cradle to grave, to fear this specter and this specter alone. All other operations are thus reduced to this. This places the habit of aristocracy of permanent regression on economic grounds, rather than more primitive moral grounds or spiritual invocation for its own sake. The other view is that operations are judged for what they do, and are knowingly abstracted when fit into some model. The operations once completed are "dead labor", but the dead labor is not yet transmuted into any value. The products—say, an ear of corn or some service of import for society—are at first understood as what they are and only interact with what is close at hand, with acknowledgment of distance between any affected agent. In a real sense, once the labor is exhausted, it is "gone forever"—what is done cannot be undone, but it is not intrinsically consequential to the imperatives that are valued. What "game" someone hopes to solve with an economic view may vary, but for that game, there are many inputs of labor that are effectively inadmissible as an economic concern of any sort. The externalities still exist, and it is not the game master's arbitration that decides what facts are real and which are to be ignored. That judgment is made by all who play this game or who are affected by it in some way. If someone in society did not want to play this game and was minding his own business before the game came for him, this innocent man does not get to wish it away. He knows that whatever his innocence in any game, the law of the world is guilty until proven innocent. For nothing more than being an external annoyance to the political class, the innocent man is made guilty and answerable to an onerous imposition. This is obviously unjust, and cruel, leading to consequences since the guilty whose lives are on the line do not stand and die as the Fabians command. If his life is at stake, he keeps shouting at the least, and if he can do more than shout, he would scoff at the law that asserted this guilt for the most spurious purposes. For anything in political economy to work, this is known to be operative for all agents. Otherwise, the only thing the law of economics produces is autistic behavior in the political class—and that has sadly been the fate of this economic problem in our time.

It is a problem that will persist because, regardless of any political-economic dictum, human beings act deliberately to conduct labor, and labor precedes any conceit of what it should or was supposed to do. Labor begins for purposes that the laborer held to be valuable, rather than any technology that was held as a knife to his throat to make an offer he couldn't refuse. The fetish for technology is not a universal condition. It is a peculiar sickness of the technological interest—in our society, a sickness of the commons. It is a sickness that, like any other, has its etiology and mechanistic operations. To assert it is "just there" is some Germanic rot which had to be exposed for what it was.

Once all is done, economic conduct is the result of labor, just as the products made for utility are always products of labor, rather than some stochastic motion of the universe or things that are done just because they are what humans would do by their constitution or by nature. Those actions which are the result of human constitution, like breathing or eating, are not granted any innocence just because they are natural. They are judged, correctly, by the maxim "guilty until proven innocent". No institution is taken for granted at all, and no "human nature" exists unless it is a machine and treated like any other. Whether humans deliberated to make themselves as they are is irrelevant, but humans did deliberate when they chose to mate and spawn children, with reasonable expectations of knowing what they consigned their children to, and the obligations of parenthood in human society. It is not possible to claim that all human reproduction is the result of ignorance with any seriousness, and even if that claim were made, those who are born inherit all of the guilt and are left with the world their forebears created. They can make of it what they will, whether there really is anything to make of it by any philosophical investigation. But, this is rather silly, because it was not a "crime" for humans to be born with biological constructs that require breathing. Nothing about eating or breathing is some sin against nature unless someone is a screaming Satanic, where the result of their ethos has been laid bare by history ad nauseum. The crime was ritual sacrifice, which could easily stop tomorrow. Humans regularly stop this at a local level, mitigate the consequences of this ruinous behavior, and have long seen that the continuation of this rite only works against the vast majority of them. It is not a reasonable expectation that children must continue this ritual for no good purpose, especially when so many of humanity scoff at this ridiculous law and manage to pass through their lives with a minimum of ritual sacrifice. There is no way to make the ritual sacrifice good or necessary. If however, humanity wishes to purge this demon, it is insufficient to attack the symbolic form or idea of this as if it could continue on the sly or as a "necessary evil". Ritual sacrifice would have to be utterly annihilated, and this would entail consequences for human conduct in the future. It would indeed be the end of recognizable humanity, for the rites of sacrifice are repeated and inserted specifically to promote the "eternal return", in a way that tells the ruled they can never truly escape this. A world without ritual sacrifice would, for a start, require a type of education that is contrary to how humans have conducted education up to now. It would require an eternal hatred of the ritual, which is not easily transmitted and is never a thing that can be taken for granted. Arguably, the world where ritual sacrifice is eliminated is far too grim for it to be compatible with humanity's expectation of what it is to be human. But, nothing about being a biological life-form necessitated it. Everything humanity accomplished has been despite ritual sacrifice. The only function of ritual sacrifice is to cull, to retard, to shout "DIE!" and insist the rest of the world comply with controlled insanity. So long as nothing in the world tells it no, ritual sacrifice acquires an economic character, where doses of ritual sacrifice are measured out, sold, and infused in seemingly innocuous objects, specifically to lure humanity back to the primordial light—to the core superstitions of their race.

At the root of economic operations is a simple question—"why?" We could assert that at the end of all calculations, economic agents do what they do because that is what their existence does, and all explanations and ulterior motives are irrelevant. They could have done otherwise, and whether they were fated or not is ultimately irrelevant to why these events happened. The problem with this is simple—the existence of this agent is reliant on such labors in the world, rather than the agent itself, and punting the question to the world does not change fundamentally the question of why. Those labors are what reproduce its constitution, and while reproduction is interpreted as "stasis" to the conceits of the mind, it never really is that. The new existence has adapted to conditions it did not control or necessarily perceive, but the economic task requires the agent to be guilty of all of those conditions regardless of awareness. It is not unexpected for life to adapt as if it were aware of some of those conditions and its own conditions, and this is what brings about some will that is relevant for the economic task, and thus for political economy. The question is one of the world, which is then punted back to the individual agent. That is, what are we really doing here? This is not a question of some ulterior motive to be divined, but a question of what we want to do and be, rather than carrying on as we are and assigning to that a value of "good" as the default. We are very clearly not up to face the charges against us as humans, and in some way, this applies to any economic agent. No agent can justify their existence by any appeal to reason, or to the passions which have been the chief emotional investment of human beings. The passions are never for political society, which is a dreary and miserable existence, and if the passions are wasted on such a task, it produces predictable misery that we rightly hold in contempt. The passions are not an economic motor of any sort. They exist entirely despite the economic problem and the dire necessities of the world. We can see that the dire necessities of existence are not as much as they are made into, but all that we do can be subject to one question the world poses to existence itself—the fate of the lowest class, or those who were consigned to torment.

Without any necessary ritual torment with superstitious qualities, this remains hypothetical and by no means foundational. It can be rephrased then as: "What works, and what is work?" All of the actual work is not conducted by labor, but by the losers who give to labor their life-force at some cost to themselves. The losers may be the laborer themselves, who lowers themselves temporarily to the muck, but there is no moral value inherent in the operations themselves. It is only because those operations pertained to a world where the operations were useful that they became labor and valued, rather than any intrinsic value to the operations that anyone had to regard. If we could have those results for cheaper, it would be undoubtedly an improvement that harmed no one. Yet, immediately labor sees a problem. If the labor were cheaper and entailed less sacrifice, their interest and function would be minimized, and labor as an interest would have less leverage over any other interest. This is the only thing labor has to offer—its toil and sweat, rather than the utility of its products. Once the products are instantiated, the labor is "gone forever" as an active force, and the laborious content is vampirically invested in some technology, or to those who claim technology as theirs. Labor might reclaim technology as their own, and this would undoubtedly be an improvement, but this moves the costs and benefits to an abstract manager or capitalist. There is no way out of this so long as sacrifice and toil remain life's prime want. If not for sacrifice, then labor as any sort of force would have nothing for themselves. It would be concluded by all of the other interests, and to labor itself, that its function would be obviated by technology, and the toil and suffering itself would be mitigated. They would be squeezed by any of the commons who took on the cause of the lowest class, when they could maintain a cause, as the necessary outcome to end the cycle for good. "Labor is humanity's hatchetman in the end" because on some level labor understood that its existence was imperiled by any such alliance, whether between technology and the lowest class, or labor and the lowest class seeing that this cycle has a clear outcome that is unenviable for both. Labor would risk "polluting" themselves with the invalid, or be reduced to the standing of the lowest class by the still extant proprietors and aristocrats who are not party to any such alliance.

We do not need this to be an existential or psychological question of suffering. Any cost-benefit analysis entails this calculation—how to mitigate all costs and risks and place them elsewhere, without regard to consequences beyond what is necessary for the calculator. The toil and torture create a pressing need that cannot be ignored forever, but abstracting the problem by claiming the torture is actually something else, or claiming torture is something far away and irrelevant, does not change the consequences of a society where these values prevail. Unless there is, for once in humanity's sorry existence, a reckoning with what it has done since its genesis, there is no answer to the question. A cursory examination makes clear that the conduct of ritual sacrifice and humiliation was carried out because the thrill of doing so was "above God", and so all invested in that conduct will abrogate anything working against it for an interest that is not bound to any class. Members of the lowest class are among the most fervent purveyors of this interest, with nothing to show for it but a cheap thrill before they are used up, like so much ammunition in a great jihad—and it is a true jihad for the believers, greater than any other association can be. All of this bases the political model from the prior book on operations that are very basic to speak of politics happening. There is no solution within the political or the economic to this. The solution would be a moral choice that has nothing to do with imperatives—"Do we really want to do this?" Those who are partisans of the ritual sacrificed answered "yes", and pre-emptively asserted the right of unique, universal, and unlimited transgression since they knew before committing the act that if anyone could say no, they would very obviously refuse until enough "moral education" entrained the ruled to naturalize the torture and ritual sacrifice. Without this, nature has little to say about this question, and neither does the lowest class asserting what they want to do or what they must do have any claim to economic life. The simplest solution, either way, would be to simply not do this at all and await termination. After that, the problem is no longer a problem, and the world will carry on without us or our malice. It would be, in all respects, a better world without us. We have no claim to the good after doing that, and the good of the world would like anything else emerge and fade from existence, without any necessity for it to struggle against the elements. If there is a struggle for the good, it would be a drive to wipe out the transgressors and nothing else. With the surplus of human activity—which would be the vast majority of human endeavors—it is left to the persons in question, without any particular need pressed against it, or any want that would be especially pertinent. The good could even accept its time in this world is limited, prepare for the termination of its life, and what happens after is not consequential to its judgment of anything economic or anything it would do in this life.

The purpose of this is not to throw up our hands to say it's all valueless or all pointless. That is not a claim that can be substantiated by anything "just so" because it begs the insinuation that there must be a point by Reason, which was not a claim Reason can trivially make. The purpose of this investigation is to make clear that after all calculations of who deserves to live and who deserves to die, and all moral aims of labor, no interest and no class in economic life can do more than the facts of their circumstances warrant. All of the conclusions to draw from systems are composites of simple propositions. We may doubt those propositions and seek to prove them beyond a reasonable doubt, but the propositions do not change by some unknowable whim. We do not get to choose that humans breathe oxygen or did breathe it in the past, and if we seek an alternative, we are going to ask how this life-force is sustained, and what life does with this new limitation, if anything—or if the existence of humans continues to be "living" in that sense. Regardless of what might be different in the future, it is the case now and it does not change by any imperious decree of what life ought to be; nor does any plan exist by pure will of assertion to make it so. If someone wants to transform their body to function differently, they must ask questions about that body and what transformation of it would entail, then set about every operation that would realize it. Perfect knowledge of the operations is not necessary, and in practice, it is never carried out. The human laborer only possesses enough working knowledge to have some sense of the outcome and might have worked out a system of mechanics that would generally tell someone what the result of some series of operations would be.

Rather than economic behavior being "the dismal science" as a retarded fag would crow, economic behavior is rooted in what would be close at hand and sensical. World-historical missions are not things that would be solved by "economism", as if they could be solved so easily. What economics can do in larger models is tell us what some agents do, or what some construct of those agents does. It says nothing about what things are or must be. If we approach the science of production like this, we will be closer to what we wanted in the first place—to attain an understanding of our wants, and how to best set out to meet them, with an understanding of all consequences for the next operation or plan. That is all the economic task had to be. It had to be placed in some general sense of what economic agents do, but a worthwhile general sense would quickly encounter political imperatives which have their own life, independent of any economic necessity or judgment that is appropriate to economics.

All of these conceptions cannot possibly contain all that is invoked by the study of economics, since they cross over each other and entail things that are not subsumed into the "circle of life" so cleanly. They are, however, ways to approach the study of economics as a product of history, rather than as a trans-historical claim or a claim about political society. Economics never had to be tied to politics as such, nor did politics entail any necessary economy to be politics. The costs of maintaining the state through war or politics by other means do not translate to any economic necessity at all. Politics to be politics requires commitments that can never be reduced to value in the purest abstraction. The very token of value, whether it is money or credit or some other technology useful for the function, is issued by institutions. Economics can very easily have no political content whatsoever. The management of household affairs is rarely a political matter, and the terror of "the personal is political" has been seen for what it is in our time. Such a statement says nothing about economic necessity or planning and speaks instead of a spiritual commitment to an ideology that must attack and violently recapitulate its claims against the enemy. When the enemy takes such people at their word and attacks the person of the transgressor, suddenly the response is outside of the bounds of politics and "economically irrational", even though the damned did nothing more than reflect the attacks against them onto the transgressor. This reflection is entirely legitimate and within the bounds of politics, so clearly "the personal is political" never applied when it was in any way unfavorable to the transgressor. Such a statement is the statement of those who demand the right of absolute impunity. Such a right only speaks to a moral philosophy where the thrill of torture must occupy the highest position of pride, and the emphasis of such a philosophy is to make public the transgression so that public life becomes intolerable and private life becomes unmentionable for the condemned. It is a wholly Satanic ethos, for there can be no other, and the transgressor has little independence of their own. Such an ideology can only be granted its necessary impunity from a central and singular source that denies that all others can assert anything and that nothing can exist outside of it. This is not merely a fascist claim. The fascist claim was limited to political matters of the state, without any necessary economic claims to life's most basic functions. The private citizen of a fascist society is only suppressed on political matters, but the state may grant or revoke the privilege of existence. The philosophy of "the personal is political" enthusiastically repudiates the concept that there is such a thing as a privilege to exist. It insists that all in the society must be politicized and must do nothing but project this ethos, shouting exultantly "DIE, DIE, DIE" until the targets are indeed dead. For the fascist, this only applies to political enemies, which is no different from the political fatwa against enemies of the state common to any state society. For the Satanic, this permeates all existence, for it is at heart a moral and economic claim to reality itself and all metaphysics. It is something far worse than mere fascism. The peculiars of fascism and eugenism I leave for later books in this series, but it is helpful to draw the distinction here because economic history has been the justification for this invasion of private life. It can arise from other sources, where the dictum to engage in this praxis is religious and the practitioner more directly summons the evil that religion entails, rather than making the thinnest economic excuse for the terror. Those who espouse such an ideology need not commit to any particular political format. Their aim, ultimately, is not a political one, and it is not economically necessitated. It is only economically minded and demands internalization of the singular, Satanic ethos at its core. They operate best in liberal societies that have permitted this right of unlimited transgression within the boundaries prescribed by liberal constitutions, but they also operate within democratic associations to make democratic society impossible. That was the true purpose of such an ethos—to ridicule the very notion that there can be anything like democracy, and grant to the right of impunity the highest spiritual authority, "above God", as a Satanic ethos will inevitably claim to be the highest power in a society. Whether the devout and studious Satanists believe in doing this right "NOWNOWNOWNOWNOW" as the pressing of the nerve of the ethos demands may differ. The Satanist only regards the power of such an approach, not that it is universally prescribed or desirable for the master or the slave, and the Satanist believes—with historical evidence and study of the evil supporting the claim—that this is how spiritual authority operates, and nothing in the universe can override this spiritual power. To counteract this spiritual claim is a tall order indeed, for every wholly religious approach to the question has been in part Satanic, or dominated by the centrality of the Satan in their concept of the spiritual, with the ostensible "God" of the religion forever out of reach and often little more than a skin-mask for the Satan. Religion and philosophy have much to say about the economy and modes of production. In this writing, I scarcely mention it compared to the prior two books, where religion and allusions to it were very prominent in my conception of the economic and political. This is because religious claims are not easily inspected by science, and a proper telling of religious history is far too difficult to integrate into a history that concerns technology and institutions primarily, and the work of science that supported them. So too are the claims of property law or the law regarding rights less interesting to this history than changes in the technology and science that could be summoned by men. It is the progress of technology and science which mark the epochs of human history more than a transition from one law to another, or one name of the master to another.^[3]

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