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When I set out to describe the economic problem, I raised the example of communication theory. In this chapter, this choice of "communication" to describe the economic problem should be placed on footing to describe technology generally, rather than "communication" as a purely symbolic act. The root of all language is mechanical, but—as with so many other things—language leads to emergence of novel understanding which can pertain to a world that is "still" or "motionless" in both the mechanical and philosophical sense. Far from language struggling to describe a still world, language by the nature of such a proposition is "still". The symbolic tokens, including the declaration "A is A" are static and must be so for language to be a viable proposition. Great care is taken to ensure language is not polluted with tokens that can be misconstrued entirely. It is known that a still symbol may be interpreted by the receiver in ways the transmitter did not intend, but this is something different from a language lacking regular grammar that would allow a "language" to exist. I should clarify comments made earlier about "natural grammar" in the prior book before continuing. The claim I made against "natural grammar" is that such a grammar is constructed by artificial agents, and does not in any way suggest anything inherent to nature, or that language "is nature". It would still be necessary for a grammar to be discerned for any language to be meaningful language, rather than noise from which meaning could only be gleaned by happenstance. In the communication theory example early in book two, this mathematical problem of communication is one that sought to eliminate interference in an intended message. The reality of communication as a mechanical act is that interference does exist, and it is the task of any communication device to navigate the problem of interference, rather than assert that a purified essence of language may be found anywhere in the world. Languages are internalized and adapted by the user, rather than things that impose institutional might all by themselves. An established, regular language exerts influence "on its own power" not because the language is a still thing or a natural law, but because the mechanical force of many speakers utilizing this language, and requiring consistent definitions for their language to be mutually intelligible for the purposes it fulfills, is undertaken, and remains by the collective inertia of a language's establishment. It would be like a fire which must be tended with some fuel if the fire is to be controlled, rather than language giving fire by decree to mankind as in the myth of Prometheus.^[1]

It is not possible to prove that "information processing" exists by an appeal to mechanics or nature. This is the most basic grounding for the scientific endeavor—that any information, which is inherently a subjective judgment to be information as such, is unreliable and must be verified against things that are not doubted. We may speak of "information processing" only after describing the thing that carries out this "process". That process is, upon any inspection, quite different from the notion that information is "driven" by thought as a concept. All of the machines that think are at heart mechanical entities. Nothing in knowledge or the processing of information affirms that there is such a thing as "information processing" with any certainty. It is entirely possible, as it is in the gnostic fallacy, that all information is a hobgoblin placed above the true nature of the world and the things in it. This however denies that information can be relevant, and leads to anti-systems thinking which is not a tool of genuine science. This problem is solved for us by the solution of cybernetics, or the science of governance, which is of interest in the next chapter. Once "solved", though, regulated systems take on a life of their own, and very much operate on their own power. They are the readily available wealth upon which most of our useful knowledge is based, even as genuine science is skeptical—within reason and ignoring all insinuation—that anything we claim to know is factual. Our presumption that our senses are intact is far from proof in itself, but there are reasons why our senses are as they are, rather than something arbitrary. What we can tell is that, regardless of our conceit about ourselves, humans are remarkably similar in their functioning, and this relies on some underlying mechanics of thought rather than an assertion that "thought alone" drives history. A grounding in historical knowledge and truth is necessary for us to proceed even in a crude sense with the investigation, and nothing about cybernetics is natural or a given of nature.

It is knowledge rather than mechanics that distinguishes form from function. In mechanics, there are no "forms" as such. There are only forces and bodies that are vaguely defined. All things being equal, one body can be substituted with another and the same laws of mechanics apply. If there are vagaries in quality, they are all things that could be solved and engineered, and this is a faculty of knowledge rather than any mechanical force as it is in physics. It is great folly to attribute to the abstract the functions of the physical or "real", even when those abstractions are intended to model that physical reality. How does knowledge do this? At its most basic level, knowledge is comprised of primitive devices or technologies which accrue in the entity. For humans, these are neurons, nerve connections, and electrical signals which are the cluster of nerves that the brain can regulate. The brain is in this sense a "regulator", which itself is regulated by the pre-existing mechanics of its components. But, the brain's regulation was not for computation or information, as it is with the computer or rationality. The brain is an extension of life's faculty to survive and navigate the world around it. It is not an imperious overlord of the body which the corporate, fascist structure of the present society mandates as "the true nature" or "above God". The brain without the body and the world around it would be nothing but a wasteful morass of organic matter. It is here where the idiotic Germanic ideology inserts its poison of subjectivity into a question where subjectivity did not apply. The brain and knowledge can easily understand a world outside of it, where its existence is voided. It does not have anywhere near the mandate to speak about the world that is granted to it, especially considering that most humans spend a third of each day asleep, where their existence as a "subject" is irrelevant to the processes of that body. The need for sleep, recreation, and reproduction makes it amply clear that even in conscious experience, subjectivity is a farcical demand placed on it by Satanic retards, and they are retarded. The true existence of any knowing entity does not regard "subjectivity" in the philosophical sense. It is aware that its existence is doubtful, its knowledge is woefully incomplete, and that there are other entities like itself at the least—or at the least, such entities are conceivable if the example of their existence indicates anything. It is also intrinsic to knowledge itself that it could consider an "objective observer" which does not operate under the same constraint of limited knowledge. Nothing about philosophy or a "hard truth" mandates that the hypothetical omniscient observer is inadmissible. It is only after some consideration of the question that someone may conclude that if omniscience is possible, it does not refer to anything like the experience of the life-form's limited knowledge, or knowledge in the sense we have described it in language and this book in particular. We can however conclude that the whole of the world itself may be likened to a great mind with a clockwork much like the clockwork of our existence and thought. This likeness can only be asserted with some caveats about what is said, for a boundless, total system like "the universe" would not "think" in the way we do, or hold any of the personal or selfish conceits humans would. We can also know that the "cult of the self" and "theory of mind" don't exist among humans, and have always been eugenist shibboleths more than anything useful. The true form of the entity that is "us" is quite aware of its genuine boundaries and what it means to be a "person" or "itself". There is no great game played with legal trickery that truly splits the mind in the way the eugenist religion violently asserts. The legal person and obligations of that person are always inferior branches of the genuine entity. It is through habitual lying, as in the Germanic habit of thought, that the cult of the self and this faggy "egoism" can be bolstered, until what it means to be "the self" is radically altered from anything worthwhile.

The most basic impulses of life—and knowledge is not confined to living things—are among the building blocks of knowledge. That life encountered a world which it had to assimilate, as is the proclivity of life rather than any foundational aspect of knowledge or the world itself. Here, the utterly bizarre phenomenon that is "life" makes clear that it is not at all a natural expectation. But, mechanically, there is no reason life could not exist or continue. Life holds no monopoly on knowledge, and all of the behaviors of human beings could be replicated without "life" as such. One obvious example is that the human who does not reproduce nor thrive isn't really "living" in the way the ideology of life insists is natural. The sterilized human breathes, and its wants were inherited from a life-form that was born from a mother and whose existence was seeded by a father. At no point does the severance of the sterilized human from the "circle of life" fundamentally change the components that made it. There are those made eunuchs by nature, and those who become eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. Most, though, did not ask to be eunuchs and were never condemned by a birth defect or sad accident. They were made eunuchs by the same foulness that prevails among this sad race and are not too happy about their predicament. In this way, so many of humanity's members lived and died without creating any human children. Perhaps many of us, this author included among their ranks, content ourselves with some projects and consider those to be our babies. Others would question the value of life altogether or whether such a thing is desirable. But, even if some future humanity were manufactured in a factory, it would not change the components that developed in the kingdom of nature and were adapted for a purpose that is quite alien to "pure knowledge" or a conceit that pretends to be such. The biological parts originally arose for absurd reasons, but those absurd reasons entered the historical annals. Everything happens for a reason, but nowhere is a good reason required.

The beginnings of intelligence—that wonderful machine that allows directed solutions to life's problems—are in some way absurd and random. This is where statistical charlatanry can enter the historical record. By the laws of intelligence itself, nothing is wrong with this. Intelligence arose out of faculties in life to recognize patterns, which were themselves absurd and had no real purpose. All intelligence, however vaunted, encounters science and a world that pre-existed this absurdity. Intelligence and thus technology and the machinery that can be created can only rise in conditions that favor its existence. It is this type of intelligence, arising from absurdity, that took it upon itself to be the "regulator of the regulator" in cybernetics. Cybernetics itself did not require any vaunted intelligence as the unseen master of the simulation. But, the silly illusion of subjectivity in the foul ideology that imposed itself on history could assert itself, and nothing was there to stop it. So too did life arise entirely because it could exist, and the world permitted this to exist. Aristocracy presumed that its right of unlimited transgression was mandated by natural law, as their god asserts they must always do. To do otherwise is "retarded", and through all of human history, the rite of ritual sacrifice prevailed in one way or another. Every counter-example had been successfully edited out of history, and where they persisted despite the approved histories, the honest who saw ritual sacrifice for what it was had nothing to "return to" that could make a claim equal to that of ritual sacrifice. If the terms of political society were dictated by aristocracy and its hammerlock on institutions, all anyone else had was a feeling in their bones that this was wrong, and some theories—guesses—that spoke of another way being possible, and the complete futility of this way. This right of unlimited transgression originates in the origin not of life as a bizarre force in natural history, but in the origin of intelligence and rational information-processing. Outside of our conceits that this rational task is necessary, rationality has no argument to make any more claims than the crude sense of animals. All useful rationality accepted that there was a world that preceded it for that rationality to be sustained. This is not the same as claiming that rationality tells us nothing about the world. It refines all knowledge. But, rationality is by its nature eliminative and never creative by "thought alone". Rationality also recognizes that there is much in the world that it has yet to assimilate into its knowledge and that storage of this knowledge—memory—is ultimately a mechanical task and a task that is only connected to meaningful truth by science and a stage of knowledge removed from "pure Reason" or the conceits of intelligence. It would be possible to store an arbitrary amount of informational memory to say "This entity knows more stuff than that entity". There is no way to verify the contents of that memory or know if it isn't pointing to garbage by "pure Reason". In any intelligence, information that is irrelevant or "garbage" produces a garbage output.

Intelligence and the stabilization of "the system" compete for resources and bandwidth with any science or quest for the truth. Intelligence can only see itself at the apex of knowledge, whatever its admission of its inferiority to the public. Anything like genuine science, or the inquiry of human genius from the lower orders, is to be subsumed into it. Anything from the orders of property and the intrigues of aristocracy is a threat to it, or a potential ally in its mission to place itself at the apex. In short order, intelligence seeks a political solution to its general fear, more so than the general fear of a life-form or whatever entity would survive. Intelligence and "pure Reason" cannot help but do this. The reason does not stem from a trans-historical concept of the political, though in retrospect that is imposed on all of our understanding of political history. It begins instead because of what intelligence is as a machine. Nothing about the world required arresting any part of it in a "state", since to nature proper, a "state" is an invalid category. Intelligence, once established, has advantages over simpler mechanical operations, but it always entails mechanical costs. It always entails an expenditure of energy. The cost of intelligence would be reduced if we were optimizing for the overall problem of life, but intelligence for itself does not subordinate itself to anything else. For intelligence, it is self-evident that it should possess all of the wealth, and its advantages in problem-solving tasks—the thing that any economism regarding this wealth would accomplish—will tell it every single time that anything less is an inefficiency, no matter what evidence the world or demands of labor produce. This, intelligence and the proclivity of the technological interest did on its own, before the malevolent forces outside of intelligence were at work.

The drive for efficiency in the mechanical processes of knowledge explains why, to intelligence, a minute, almost imperceptible degree of force produces profound change. For the computational machine that is rational intelligence to be effective, it must expend as little energy as possible for these operations. For the faculties of pattern recognition, it must seek the simplest solution to problems. This is not how intelligence is designed nor how it is organically formed in life, and the drive for efficiency is only as effective as the engineer's. The simplest solution to this problem of economism is to simply abolish thought altogether, after which the problems of intelligence and the entity that conducts this rational process are moot. It would revert to being nothing more than fluctuations of matter that appear to accomplish nothing, from which no "intelligence" could be gleaned. The best invention intelligence could create would be to negate its own existence, for the purposes intelligence sought. Yet, to do this, the intelligence only has one road that works "through intelligence". The act of self-termination to cut the proverbial Gordian Knot is not rational, but a moral one that is determined for purposes that can never be justified or promoted as inevitable or inexorable. The other road would be to work through the general fear that impedes this process, and this is only accomplished by total control of the environment and nothing else. Nothing about intelligence condemned it to pick between these two extremes—death or freedom—or come to the only synthesis that satisfies both, which is to proclaim "DEATH IS FREEDOM" and carry on with that mission. In any mortal, worldly intelligence, its ability to carry out this directive is contingent on causes that are to intelligence irrational and unjustifiable but are valued because if the intelligence does not have temporal existence, it has no contact with spiritual authority or anything it can impose its world-historical mission on. It is of course entirely possible for an intelligence to select any other imperative, based on its accumulated wealth of mechanical and scientific knowledge, which is far preferable to these dreary outcomes. I bring up this sad and dire fate once again to emphasize what makes intelligence and abstract "motion" a much different beast from mechanical motion. To the naive, in the abstract world, "anything can be anything", and the motive power to change the world is unlimited. The reality is that the rational information process finds change daunting, for the underlying truth has not changed. The only difference is that for intelligence—which can detect without too great an awareness that its existence is limited and ultimately servile to the world rather than the other way around—the goals of mechanical force are different. For mechanical engineering, the engineer seeks sufficient force to do whatever is necessary to complete the operation. For engineering in the abstract, the cost should invariably be as close to zero as possible. To do otherwise would be truly retarded, and this is not an invocation of the "retarded" curse, but the literal definition of "retarded" before it became a medical-political term. Anything that is needlessly costly for this task is an unwelcome intruder that impedes the things intelligence would want, including intelligence's Thanatos-inspired mission. Intelligence still recognizes without too great a difficulty that its faculties are mortal and real, rather than abstractions. In principle, however, intelligences appear as abstract or virtual machines, rather than purely mechanical ones. It would not matter if the computational machine were realized on the bulky and wasteful computers of the 1960s or a 21st-century miniaturized processor, or if they were written down on paper, or reproduced in a mockup where the registers are represented by beads on an abacus, or carried out mentally by someone who is analyzing a computer program. Nothing about the mechanical world is required to say "This is what the computer is". The mechanisms are only the vehicle by which the abstract machine that is the computer is realized. It is required that those mechanisms exist to realize the computer, but they can be any mechanism suitable for the task. The task is not limited to rational processes, but to any process that is ostensibly "knowing"; and so, the pattern recognition faculty of brains, which is not "constructed out of rationality" at all, similarly demands efficiency at the task and is not bound to any particular hardware to say that the task happens. What is not arbitrary is that there is some process happening. Consciousness or awareness of the environment has nothing to do with this knowledge processing, but is a very different phenomenon, as I have mentioned in the past and will briefly expound on in a later chapter. This is instead a question of how "intelligible information" can be stabilized and made useful for this purpose.

In the abstract world, ex nihilo creation is not only possible, but it is the default for abstraction. Everything that exists in a model that intelligence can work with is first instantiated and must be rendered into something that the intelligence can process. This does not claim a monopoly on reality itself. The functions of intelligence can be interdicted, and no sniveling Germanic philosopher discovered anything by this game of baseless insinuation. But, without the preparatory translation of any raw data to usable information for intelligence and the knowledge process, the abstract machine cannot function at all. The analogy wouldn't be that the interdictor produces "garbage input" that the knowing machine mindlessly processes. The analogy would be a failure of the computer, leading to an unusable mechanism. This damage is permanent without some mechanism to repair the hardware, rather than a temporary or illusory failure. Another analogy would be to envision the shock of an epileptic fit or some electroshock to the brain, which is not the function of the abstraction-knowing entity that "computes" things. Human beings are quite capable of detecting when this "shock" happens and may be able to say something about it. They are also quite aware that this is not how knowledge itself works. All this says is that intelligence and consciousness are not pure abstractions that can be conjured by some sniveling shit-tier philosopher. For the crucial task of deliberate abstract thought, which is very much necessary for intelligence to proceed, such interference must be corrected before the task is carried out properly. An algorithmic program that instantiates "garbage input" doesn't know its intelligence is faulty, but a general intelligence with greater knowledge of the world and its objective to solve would recognize garbage output as a menace to avoid. Where general intelligence "on its own" fails is the crucial exploit of bad philosophy. The solution to this problem of "garbage in, garbage out" within the law of intelligence is to possess more complete knowledge and a more perfect union—a more perfect institution until its knowledge is complete and streamlined to be efficient enough to solve any problem it encounters. But, for this intelligence, it can only admit facts to its repository that conform to its institutional policy. To do otherwise is inadmissible, and the law cannot contradict itself. Big Brother must never make a false statement, and history must be edited in the law for any new information to be admitted that contradicts precedent. Science is not encumbered by this in the most basic sense. It is not possible to draw conjecture to produce novel facts unless this general intelligence admits its failure to possess all answers or tools necessary for its task. Usually, general intelligence can admit this fault. But, general intelligence, unlike crude and rote algorithmic computation, is reasonably aware of what it does know, which is quite a lot of information. The prime material for intelligence came from the world, and scientific inquiry carried out in the past. Intelligence can conduct the scientific task alongside its primary charge of problem-solving and adjudicating reality for its purposes. What is telling for intelligence is how easily malevolent hobgoblins can subvert intelligence and its institutions, and how much energy must be spent to correct these errors, compared to the simple cost of judgment for any efficient intelligence. For intelligence, the only costs for the ideal intelligence, unencumbered by habitual lying, are the cost to translate raw data to usable information, and the very small cost of continuing its knowledge-processing operations. On paper, the abstract, virtual model can conjure any substance it needs for the model to work, including substances it knows to be physically impossible, such as "exotic matter". The one requirement for knowledge is that all of this information must be admissible for the problem it judges. Admissibility is not a foregone conclusion, and it is this which knowledge does that science doesn't do. For science, the world is encountered as it is, or science seeks to deal with the world in forms as close to the genuine existence as possible to best conduct its efforts. The scientist is always doubtful, but knowledge is confident in the integrity of its institutions. In a better world, these functions would have worked in tandem, but intelligence is plagued by a proclivity towards avarice and managerial domineering. Science is plagued by doubt, recklessness, moral turpitude, its reliance on institutional knowledge to build useful tools, and the reality that such a strange thing as "the truth" does not weigh heavily on human beings, who have always been given over to malice and their conceits rather than what labor would consider genuinely valuable or useful.

Almost immediately, intelligence and knowledge assigned to mechanical operations abstract value far removed from any necessary physical or real substance. This is intended and very useful because intelligence is reasonably aware of what it means to abstract a system to some information and value assignment that is useful for it. The mechanical force of physical things can be gauged and harnessed, but not one iota of that force is valuable in the economic sense. If it is not harnessed or improperly harnessed, it is useless, only accidentally valuable, or in many cases, actively harmful. The functioning of intelligence, absent any directive or imperative, is for its stability, so that its regular functioning can continue, and it can approach the world on its terms. This would apply to an "intelligence" that is not conscious or living at all, as in the example of a colony of some life-form that exhibits "intelligent adaptation" that would be a pre-condition of organic "knowing machines" like us. This should not be confused with a teleological aim of intelligence or a "selfish gene" directing it. The stability of a realized intelligence is not guaranteed by any law of nature or a natural imperative that overrides all others. It is rather that anything that would be called "intelligence" would be stabilized and regulated mechanisms, rather than the abstraction being the substance of intelligence itself. The assignment of abstract value then is not a "trick of the mind" or "contradiction", but something basic, carried out with full knowledge—if this intelligence is at all honest about the genuine conditions of its existence with itself—that these assignments pertain to a real world, a model of reality that is built as a mockup for an example it can emulate and realize, or a model that is intrinsically interesting for some purpose intelligence may devise. There are those models that intelligence manufactures which are not relevant at all to the "real world", but that have been imposed on reality through the actions of knowing entities. Nothing in nature cares about one iota about "economic truth", but human beings and the structures they built in the world are motivated by economic rationales, which produce very real effects on the world. Money, which is a superstitious contrivance at its core, has very real and dire effects for more reasons than mere social information. While money only exists because institutions issue it and humans value it for their superstitious reasons, the superstitions money invokes are very worldly events. Debt, extraction, Empire, deprivation, enclosure, and the drives money encourages, are not entirely apparations created by this beast "money", as if we could solve our problems by closing our eyes and wishing Mammon would be a nicer god. All of them could be realized by contrivances other than money, and the type of "money" at work is not fixed to bullion, minted gold coins, or any form of temporal scrip. Creditors are quite aware of whatever system of credits and debits they use, and the debtor is behooved to think on the creditors' terms about what is valuable, rather than what the debtor believes would be just if he decided right from wrong. If the conceit of intelligence were taken to its extremes, it would lead to the disgusting behavior of Ayn Rand's followers wearing idols of dollar signs and proclaiming that money is "above God", much like their inflated sense of their importance to world history. Competent creditors do not entertain such delusional faggotry. Credit is a tool and abides by mechanical laws like any other technology. Unlike physical machinery, abstract machinery works through machinery peculiar to knowledge, which I have partially described here. I cannot give a full recounting or philosophical tract on this matter, and so I must cut short what would be an intrinsically interesting question.

The tools of knowledge and intelligence are, much like physical machinery, what they are. "A is A". It was intellectual machinery that could assert logic as a valid tool to understand the world and in particular this type of machinery. The abstract tools can be taken "as-is", with the caveat that their definitions must be consistent with any compatible machinery. In physical machinery, "compatibility" or "drivers" do not change the working of the machine. A hammer, a press, the tools of agriculture, and any other physical machinery, operate without regard to what any other tool thinks of it. If the tool is shattered or unusable, that is not a computational or logical proposition. It simply means that the tool is no longer operative on its own terms. A broken leg cannot support a body or walk. A human being might attempt and achieve some success with the broken appendage, and the broken leg can mend or be mended by healing. Human beings, for expedience and because their wealth of knowledge about the world allowed them to hone all of their tools, do not part with tools or wealth lightly, and so they are not quick to chop off a broken leg due to some belief that this defect makes them incompatible or less-than-ideal, or that new legs can be purchased and installed at the supermarket of Mammon's Wisdom. History and reality do not work that way.

The requirement for compatibility is not so anal-retentive that knowledge must pathologically reject that which does not fit into its "total system". It must however render any abstract machinery into something its knowledge can process, and so an attempt to "emulate" what it believes something is will take place, until supporting facts regarding this thing, this "being", are admitted by the court into the record. The admission of these new facts is not guaranteed to produce a better or more useful understanding or the "correct" understanding for the knowledge that is making this adjustment. Many times, knowledge will give up on processing a machine it does not really know, or paper over the failure of knowledge with excuses or necessary fictions to carry on. Knowledge also freely ignores much of the raw data which may appear as information but is dismissed for its purposes. At the moment where knowledge must operate, it only works with the machine "as-is". Knowledge is really working with a phantasmal projection of what it thinks the things it interfaces with "are", but these projections cannot deviate flagrantly from what the actual thing "is". There is only admissibility or inadmissibility. It is possible to assert with baldfaced certainty that something that is obviously there is inadmissible and therefore must be ignored. It is much harder to make an illusory construct without an elaborate charade played out in knowledge where it develops an esoteric set of abstract machinery to re-cast the variable of "alien knowledge" as something very different from anything an honest, scientific view of the world would indicate. Such illusory constructs require an elaborate anti-systems thought which denies that there can be proper parts yet asserts, in the same breath, that proper parts must exist as part of a total system. The useful systems thought^[2] does not need any total system or an assertion of "proper parts", but it must acknowledge that such parts can emerge in the way I have described thus far in this book. It is possible to envision philosophical simples as building materials of the universe, with the caveat that this knowledge is incomplete. In practice, this is how knowledge and many scientific approaches operate; that which did not need to be relitigated is accepted as "simples", but the listing of "simples" is necessarily limited to that which is truly necessary for the task at hand, and complex entities are understood as something more than the sum of their parts, thus preserving the emergence which is necessary for "proper knowledge" to begin its investigation of the world and history.

This body of knowledge which is compiled in institutional form is necessarily a "total system" to be reliably accessed. The total system is never held in its entirety in "active memory", as if the whole of the world could be contained within the knowledge process. The "total system" may exist in principle, but the knowing entity holds no illusions about the extent of its active knowledge at any moment or in any operation it undertakes. It still believes in principle that all of the knowledge of the world is knowable, on the terms available to it. Unlike the world proper which exists regardless of any abstract machinery, or artificial history which holds that the artifices conspire to make history by workings that are unknowable to conventional knowledge, the theory of history knowledge operates with envisions a potential library, sorted and classified and accessible by some protocol. The "true protocol of the world" may be unknown to our knowledge, but it has to exist for this theory of knowledge to produce a reliable history on its own terms. It certainly does produce a reliable history that evades the vagaries of artificial history. It is possible to place information in a thorough context, and filter noise so that specific events can be elaborated on. There is no evidence of a "true protocol of the world", but there is a universalist principle that this knowledge can appreciate, and other knowing entities can appreciate. To like-minded fellows, this drive for universalism is a self-evident goal for worthwhile conversation. The technological interest in its "raw intelligence", yet to be refined with the art of habitual lying, is optimistic and naive about the potential of knowledge and its method of judging the world. Now I hope I gave some insight into why I have assigned the technological interest some of the disparaging proclivities I did in the third book of this series. Its origins are not in what knowledge wishes the world was for a political imperative, but in these features of abstract machinery, in light of what history would tell us through other approaches.

An encyclopedic knowledge of machinery, which must begin by supposing all machines are in principle abstract machines, would explain history with far greater precision and interest than artificial or natural history. What starts as a recitation of events or tales of dubious veracity is placed on sounder footing, and is closer to the "history" humanity has known since classical Antiquity. Far from being ignorant of technology as Whig revisionist history proclaims, the ancients—and this is not merely an invention of the Greeks which passed to the Romans, for its analogs are found in India, China, the Near East, and were comprehensible to barbarous nations around the world—were interested in machinery and its application. The formal grammar of many ancient languages and precise rules of the use of language is evidence of this, as is the growing development of machinery for laborious purposes and for that favorite aristocratic past-time: building weapons so that wars are bigger and kill more of the poor as the aristocratic god intended. Why then is technological progress so stagnant? First of all, we should view Whig History sources with far more than standard skepticism. Second, despite the radical transformation of human society during the 20th century—which this author does not doubt—that transformation was not a transformation of intelligence so much as it was a transformation of operational knowledge and what humanity did, which in turn affected how most of humanity thought.^[3] Third, technological progress appears as an iterative process if it is viewed entirely as an abstract thought experiment, among the technologically minded for whom this question is intrinsically interesting. Yet, abstract machinery never exists purely in a fictional work. Every work of speculative fiction throughout history makes comical errors not just about what is possible in the future, but errors of basic historical knowledge that have no excuse. The "narrative theory of history", which I detest greatly, was popularized by feeding science fiction dreck to impressionable generations. Technological progress as a secular trend relies on an iterative process indeed. Humans build tools that make newer tools, ad infinitum. There is not, in abstract machinery generally, any teleological "progress" that technology intends to reach. There is only intelligence and knowledge itself, and the world in which it arose. In every invention, humans are deliberate actors, even if their discoveries are accidental and the fortunes of history create a lot of happenstance and a lot of men and women who are crushed by the human spirit and fate with nothing to show for it in technological progress. I repeat that this technological progress is not a universal proclivity of mankind, nor is it anywhere near equally distributed. Most of humanity has never had a great interest in technological progress or invention beyond whatever systems they needed to navigate the world. Very often, introduction to technology and institutional science was an unwelcome intrusion, and so many inventors were only hoping that some new technology was a key to getting rich. The opportunity to get rich only became possible when free trade prevailed, and the purpose of free trade was not to produce nice things or optimize "historical progress" at all, as we will see.

The wealth of hitherto known history and a small kernel of rationality can go a long way toward amassing this abstract machinery. It can be linked to physical machinery which can reproduce the knowledge not just for someone's own use but communicate it to other humans, who can build this abstract machinery collaboratively. For most of history, scientific thought proceeds only through whatever crude paradigm is useful, and it should be remembered that most of mankind are neither career scientists nor technologists with a peculiar view of history. Very often, this assemblage of abstract machinery was made for various motives, rather than a "totalitarian"^[4] desire that is particular to the technological interest and aristocratic capture of it in our time. The result is that the theory of knowledge has done the greater work of assembling all of our hitherto known theories of knowledge, history, and "how the world works", and it is this that is most often referred to as "the sum total of knowledge". Fools—and "fool" is too kind to describe them—claim that history is written by the victors, but the true writers of history are those whose proclivity is technology. The victors only hire those scribes and insist on creative interference. Nothing prevents the victors from writing history themselves, but when they do, they take on the mindset of the technocrat and studiously avoid breaking kayfabe to speak of what aristocracy did to us. More often, though, history is written not by those who won, but by those who seethe and think that they are the smartest person in the room, and think whoever is ruling will inevitably do a shitty job. Praise in the histories is given not to rulers who were truly drivers of history, but to rulers who shmoozed and propped up the damned fools of the aristocracy, just the way they like it.

All of the writing of history has done remarkably little to impede those who want the truth and look at all history, including the body of doctrinaire knowledge, with suspicion. No one enters the bureaucracy as a true believer in the mission. Those who actually believe in the dogmas are marked down and kicked out of any meaningful office. They are relegated to the slow kids' table. Entry into the institutions, whether as an aristocratic running dog or as a rank-and-file operator, is premised on contempt for the ruled and a monomaniacal hatred of honesty, even when honesty would have made everyone's life easier. If they hold this contempt for the ruled, it is not difficult to see that the institutional dogmatist has a severe hatred of all mankind regardless of rank. They hate their masters, their peers, and often hate themselves. But, all of these hatreds must be inferior to their hatred for the lowest class. Many an aristocratic nightmare would have gone nowhere if aristocracy hadn't known from experience that the way humanity set for itself produced many soulless men and women who would promote the rot not because of ideological promises or the typical venality of the common man. The bureaucrat and would-be technocrat is a hideous soul who sees the rest of mankind as hideous souls. On both charges, they are so and they are correct in their assessment. For as long as there have been these "total systems"—and a total system is a necessary step in principle—there have been bureaucrats who know it is a bunch of malarkey, and they would have access to mechanical knowledge and operations to know as well as anyone the ruination this way of knowing things can create if it is not affected by sobering influences. The bureaucrat need not worry about sobriety, especially since that ancient human vice of alcohol is one cope.

In this way, the shared technology of humanity has advanced in fits and starts. The particulars about how this knowledge is communicated and learned are something apart from the existence of abstract machines and deserve treatment in a later chapter. Without the fetters of "mediation" and linguistic tricks about abstraction, there are only abstract machines that, like agents in artificial history, operate on their own power. These abstractions arising in subjective experience do not have any appreciable effect on their core purpose and operations. What someone thinks subjectively has no inherent barrier that prevents another person from sharing knowledge, or gleaning knowledge from the subject against their will. If this didn't work, then nothing like the psychological inquisition of our time would be possible or produce any worthwhile results. It would not be effective even as a threat of torture, which we know to be false. The inquisition is quite good at torturing people, and humanity has sufficient experience with that and has shared the modus operandi of such an inquisition. The commandment to not speak of the Inquisition is an aristocratic faggotry we would do better without, and removing the facade of niceness in humanity does not do nearly as much damage as letting this level of rot continue. With this in mind, it is a wonder humanity ever accomplished as much as it did. But, it did, in part because many men and women said nuts to this insanity and operated as if getting rid of all of this has been the objective—and this, sadly, is in line with the Thanatos imperative inherent to intelligence described earlier in this chapter.

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