Previous Chapter | Return to Table of Contents | Next Chapter

The bizarre contortion of language where "society" is referred to only in the abstract is sensical only when a general theory of technology becomes paramount as a political explanation—that is when Empire has embraced technology and formed the alliance I have called "the technocratic polity", that effectively dominated the world by a series of coups during the 20th century and has choked the world ever since. The general theory of technology began with individuals and could not have existed any other way. At first, communication of this idea appears like any other communication. We may agree, disagree, and think what we will about the competing theories or the overall condition of society. Nothing about society or technology requires the control of monopolies, and monopoly and technocracy are not one and the same. The political monopoly the technocrats seek is not the monopoly that currently rules, and it is not a given that the technocrat is locked into seeking a monopoly of the sort they presently aspire to. The technocrat can become a traitor to his class and reject the claims of his institution, and I believe that they must do this. They will have to recognize that the technocratic society is a failure and was born failed, and could not be repaired by any working or scheme that they are inclined to believe as the next fad to fix a broken method. It was expected in forming this polity that there was some end goal or state that was desirable for reasons other than technological advance and that this was handed off to humans and a world that was valued for something other than "mindless accumulation". The dictums that we are all Malthus' mindless breeders are fundamentally aristocratic and retarded, imposed on reality by an evil that should have been ignored—if evil allowed itself to be ignored.

If technology were simply regarded "as-is", there is nothing to suggest any preferred political mode or "laws of politics". They would be arbitrary and entirely the whim of the agents involved, whatever their nature. The primary conditions of existence, born time and time again, are agents operating on their own power, and among those powers are that they regulate the existence of the space they inhabit. This is never confined to their being or essence, for nothing can exist without a world where it exists. But, if another agent or thing is suggested to exist, there are ways in which the other thing exists just as the agent exists, and political conceits are only relevant to the agent judging this until there is a condition between agents and things that is established to speak of anything else. If we were to speak of the genuine integration of a knowing entity, very few things can be integrated. Not one union between two human beings can sublate one or the other, even something as close as a child in the womb of its mother. The relation of the dependent under torture relies on the otherness of the torturer and tortured for the situation to exist at all, even if the torture was self-inflicted and someone sets themselves to war against their own existence. But, it is possible to speak of such a union of agents to comprise an entity that operates on its own power and is readily able to do so. The latter condition is relevant here. The parts of an animal body are integrated without any technocratic ordering within the body to mandate the parts of a body be ordered in any particular fashion. They are ordered instead by function, around no particular core. The brain and nervous cluster are interpreted as an obvious focal point for knowledge and the person, but no "corporate government" of a human body exists. In principle, the human can envision its parts reconstructed completely and altered, its knowledge and conscious experience transferred to new parts or "hardware", and the underlying entity in its entirety has not changed save for the replacement of parts with another. It is known by investigation that each part of a human's body is reconstructed gradually during its life, and no body is built in accord with any "master plan" or specification that was "above God" and unquestionable even by a would-be God. The organs are adaptable to their environment, rather than being machines with precise tolerances. The purpose of a heart is to pump blood, rather than restore its "true form". For that purpose, the heart must conform to certain qualities, but beyond that, the heart continues for its own purposes, and its attached brain will only control it—or need to control it—so much.

When considering the situation as part of a general theory of technology, the view of the kingdom of life is very different. Life in the abstract appears as forms that reproduce themselves, their essences spreading as if they were some substance and form to impress on the world. This is the only way to speak of life-forms as being particular types. Nothing about their genuine existence particularly cared about "being" or "identity", but for any group to be isolated, there is some defining quality. Allegiance to a particular sovereign, or following a particular authority, is one such quality. Many nations formed for no reason other than the men and women living as subjects under the same monarch. In all cases, the corporate presentation of the "life-form" only occurs in the abstract, and is then "made real" by the operations of those life-forms. They sense some distinction of things and entities like themselves and act on it, rather than those distinctions having any "natural right" or expression. But, the distinction is always at first technological, rather than one of essential substance or genius necessitating any struggle or distinction. The true behavior of life in the main is symbiotic. Struggle to the death—the consumption of one life by another—is the exceptional condition rather than the rule. That exception may be common to our sense of recorded history, where humans track battles, conquests, victories, and rapes rather than simpler interactions that were not confrontational, but most of life consists of nothing more than breathing. Consumption of any food, rather than being a constant and pressing gluttony, is still exceptional in the regulated life-form, save for the air which cyclically enters and leaves a body. All of the qualities that allow this life-form to truly struggle to exist only existed because this consumption did end, and the system stabilized into something tangible, rather than a roiling mass of "struggle" or "consumption" that might be imagined. But, to technology, all of this is elided. It is the annals of conquests, Empire, and victory that mark life's effect on the world, and any other function is secondary. It would be the same even when the operations carried out by life are not immediately confrontational. There is always some purpose that the technology resolves, rather than the technology being appreciated for itself or any moral purpose we hold above the mundane. Technology is proudly amoral and blind to any moral consequence. It only answers the problem with a staccato utterance, a solution to the equation and logical premises of its existence. The technocrat can be aware of this problem of technology and seek ways to mitigate these obvious consequences, which are themselves comprehensible by Reason alone given sufficient data from the world and some process to arrive at truth. But, it never occurs to "pure Reason" that there is anything morally foul about its process, and it always seeks some ulterior motive to justify under the Law a solution to some moral problem. It must be reframed as ethical and disengaged from any genuine want or meaning of the world and turned into the servant of the entity making this calculation. The only solution within "pure Reason", no matter how aware it is of the trap, is to envision a universal "computer" or "simulator" which can be the authority of authorities, and that is the trap I have described in this writing. It is the same trap that every Empire in human history has kept its subjects in, for such a trap motivates the technologist to find endless solutions while chasing its tail.

The primary condition of Empire, and only Empire, is that its view of its domains is primarily technological claims before they are made real by courts as meritorious claims of victory. For every victory and merit, there is a path to that which is nothing more than a logical premise that such a condition of "victory" is possible. It is not a "base" moral sentiment or one that is meaningful to the universe. It is meaningful only to a generalized view that such things are possible to the participants in the struggle for Empire. Life itself could not care less of its "ultimate fate", as if it were obligated once instantiated to carry out any directive beyond its functions. There would come a time when life could not continue, if for example a heart failed to pump blood to its attached organs, and if all of the functions comprising that organism were disconnected from that which allowed the concerted activity and operations that allow life to have a technologically appreciated existence. Life was never an "immaculate totality" in the sense that a general theory of technology would lay out. It existed for its own purposes and only regarded the world itself as it truly was, before any conceit of what it "should" be was evident to it. But, for Empire, for victory, life at all levels is subordinated to the imperial mission. This was never a condition for life in the genuine sense, because life at all levels, including in our world, largely exists independent of such mediation and control. Command and control are the exceptional cases rather than the rule, even with a knife at the throat of every living thing and the holder of the knife gloating about every moment and every iota of "pleasure" it receives from doing this. But, for Empire to be a sensical proposition to knowledge, command and control is implied everywhere and in everything. Even the concept of passively allowing the world to proceed is recast as a compulsion to act in some way to arrest history. They may spiritually comprehend the Daoist concept of wu wei or "letting be", but never does an Empire let anything be when their true bottom line is at stake. Even if the Empire is old and frail, they will not be a graceful elder. They will be the crotchety old man screaming at clouds to change direction, and gripe about how the world did not give them everything they wanted—and that is both the right and the typical behavior of old humans, for perfectly understandable reasons. Nothing is ever set right and good, up to the fantasy where the rightful King is restored and the evil of the world is put to rest. The evil is never truly slain in the fantasy—it is only sealed, for it is the dominant trope of fantasy that the evil may never truly die, lest the fantasy be spoiled.

If the inhabitants of an empire saw this for what it is, the units that they contested were not political units or things conforming to any political expectation. There are, as you have probably foreseen, three great camps in the imperial game. Some hold the commanding heights of power, some aspire to take them, and a third group is caught in the middle, who are to be contested or judged as nuisances or "non-player characters" in the struggle. There can only be these three groups, and any subdivision or nuance within or between them can only serve the holy trinity - the ruler, the Satan, and the masses or "the plain". While the ruler and the aspirants make very different claims and often arise in wildly different proclivities in life, their program has always been essentially the same, with an aristocracy at the apex of society commanding the world through torture and humiliation. As is the Satan's habit, "permanent revolution" is the ideal condition of Empire, and Empire and "the state" as such as never coterminous. It is here where a break between the political game and the imperial game occurs. Politically, the state is the object of the contest, through which any worldly change is possible. The Empire cares not one whit about the political contest for office, or any material or economic necessity that it insinuates. Empires are never productive enterprises and revel in their crapulence at the first opportunity, for this serves the aristocratic aims of those who contest the Empire. Why would the Empire be favored over the political or some moral purpose? No law of nature or human motives requires it to be so. Aristocracy and its torture could work through avenues other than Empire for the purposes they enjoy. But, all of the ways an aristocracy would engineer a situation to its favor entail war, and with war comes a siege of the land and all who live in it. That situation is coterminous with Empire, and the Empire for its own sake sees no reason why it should not do this, for it has a life and organs just as humans and animals do. If we see Empire for what it is, it is a very inhuman animal, and it is not a corporate animal with some parts organized by Law or even by Chaos. There can only be one master of Empire for humanity, and this is a peculiar problem of humans due to their history—ritual sacrifice and torture. Without the master of the Empire, the Empire would be a shambling beast, and perhaps this beast would be a beast of burden for some purpose. The vice of aristocracy, which is spiritual at its core and always seeks avenues, should not be confused with the vice of Empire which is knowable and always appeals to something temporal at first instinct. Only through those temporal powers can the spiritual authority of torture be impressed upon the world. The true motive for aristocracy's love of torture is not tied to imperial fortunes or even the existence of such a condition as "Empire". The conditions of Empire and how to contest it are independent of the spiritual motives for the existence of these three groups, which may be titled the High, Middle, and Low since that is what they are in the imperial game. This contest might have been carried out without any regard for a struggle of classes, but there would always be a contest for merits to command such an entity, even if the Middle and High alike disdained the contest and understood it to be entirely ruinous. No one in the contest can afford to give up on power, and this is due to Empire's logic once it becomes an abstract or theoretical thing, rather than Empire's imminent existence which remains the shambling beast an alien would detect.

None of this is a new revelation, save for one difference—that it is the theory of Empire and technology, rather than the Empire itself, that motivates all participants in the struggle. In other words, it is the mass engagement of human beings in the imperial struggle that gives rise to the belief and narrative that "all hitherto known human history is the history of class struggles". It is never the particular mechanisms by which a class rules that are contested. It made little difference to a liberal whether rights to land and entitlement existed. Everything about the liberal revolution was about those liberals claiming the same rights that nobles and priests held, which they considered to be their birthright and something they could take by right of conquest and right of Empire. The rights were not in themselves "the point" or things liberals invented, and the liberal could just as well envision liberal freedom in some context where a "right of private property" was abhorrent to common sense. It was always understood that the rights of men were not rooted in any "natural law" of the crass sort, but they were products of natural history and evident to the men who saw that those rights entailed consequences. All rights to be meaningful are not empty merits as a screaming retard would have it, but are extant conditions that would exist independently of men. The consequences of property rights did not evaporate by decree, as if history could be abolished or sublated in that way. And so, the liberal contention was always that the commons (and in practice only those in the commons with money) had just as much right to property as feudal title, and that the record of deeds and trusts in feudal society was ruinous, for history had judged many times over on that count. It was retarded to insinuate what would come to be insinuated by those who have no concept of a free society. If you told a liberal that his crusade was "anti-imperialist" in the sort of Germanic or Fabian narrative given to the losers of the struggle today, they would laugh in your face. The liberal commoners who were up and coming and possessed political sense saw themselves, for good reasons, as inheritors of Empire, and it was not an inheritance of some regional hill-fort-turned-kingdom, as if the commoners had some respect or regard for the feudal borders that kings long used as their excuse to choke the life out of the peasants they ruled. By the time of the late 18th century, it was clear that there could only be one Empire, and that Empire was not even limited to an old temporal domain like Christendom, an inheritance of European and Roman civilization, or an imagined inheritance of the historical kingdoms of mankind. When any Empire stakes its true claims, the objective of the contest is only the whole world in that time and place. For the liberals, this meant the growing trade companies and their investment in the Asian and American enterprises, with the eventual goal of subsuming the slave-trading kingdoms of Africa and every square inch of land within the rule of that trading power. This the liberals did not because they believed that trade and commerce had any power to mediate reality, or a fetish for the scrip they called "money". The liberals did not intend to remain confined to trade and commerce as an imperious, pitiful feudal mindset and its inheritors like German neo-barbarism would have it. The entire purpose of the revolution was for liberal commoners to enjoy the same rights to property and title that the nobility monopolized, and that they were not only capable of ruling themselves but ruling an empire and others. The moral hypocrisy of liberals maintaining and often strengthening slavery was not a repudiation of the revolutionary project, since the liberals quickly naturalized the status of slavery and sought a mechanism to make slavery effectively permanent. They might have entertained manumission as a theory, for nothing prevented an ex-slave from attaining freedom and becoming the oppressor, and that had been the rule of hitherto known slaveries. Nor did an antipathy for slavery, which was known among the liberals, require them to abrogate their claims to political power because there were still men and women in chains. A liberal could reconcile the current condition of slave trading and a vision of a world without the peculiar institution, and it just so happens that emancipation is perpetually moved twenty years in the future. Even if there were a genuine emancipation of all slaves and workers, and this is not impossible for a liberal to countenance due to some fetish for a particular institution, that emancipation and the political contest are entirely different matters. The political contest is never played out in an ideological thought experiment or a "just-so" world. Freedom, even political freedom, and political rights have nothing to do with political power, office, or the virtue of people to do anything with that freedom.^[1] At most, freedom is only considered as an active participant in the struggle in developed societies where there is a commonly understood history. It is not a question of the free needing to know or be told they are free, or that such a condition exists in law or fact. The question of freedom only makes sense when its alternative is thoroughly explored and it is possible to speak of a situation where this did not apply. Nothing about Empire as a concept required it to disdain or disregard freedom in the genuine sense. It would even be argued that the only way a free society could exist as more than an idea is through some worldly empire where the question could become a public matter, which can be argued and debated in peaceful conditions rather than the conditions of general struggle that preclude such a concept. Usually, though, humans do not allow anything of the sort to extend too far, and certain shibboleths like the status of retarded are understood by law to preclude anything like political rights or any sympathy, due to the implicitly understood and acted on faith that "once retarded, always retarded" cannot be violated. Any discussion of that concept must terminate if it ever questioned the aristocratic rights. Nothing can be truly retarded without a standard of comparison, and that comparison either arises from the ruling class that unilaterally sets the standard of sanity for the Empire, or from facts of the world that portray the human race in the most unflattering light, for history—of political societies that is well known, and the true history of this world—has judged. Guilty.

Empires are not ruled by classes, cliques, or ideologies as such, nor are they ruled by a primordial authority that speaks of ruling as self-evident and preceding the cause of rule. They are always ruled by the interested parties that share in the spoils of Empire, to the expense of all other things in the Empire—state, religion, nation, and not least of all the actual existence of the men involved. They do not do this so much for themselves or a belief in self-interest. If self-interest governed empires, the course of human history would have been too ruinous to allow it to continue like this, and the hitherto known arc of human history, if not humanity itself, would be immediately canceled. Empires are by their nature opposed to self-interest not because of a corporate structure or belief that the collective or the world possesses a power that individuals can never hold. They do not actually believe "Slavery is Freedom" or "Freedom is Slavery", and save for our present era of controlled insanity, the question of liberty is inadmissible for the imperial ruling interest. The only reason any discourse on freedom or slavery is relevant is because all of the mechanisms by which empires can be governed require men or the machines men built for the purpose. A political elite is not a requirement of the state or politics generally, or for "rule" to be satisfied in a political or temporal sense. It is entirely possible for the functions of a political elite to be circumscribed such that "rule" and "governance" of the polity is a job and subordinated to whatever is expedient, rather than a specialized profession of "pure politics" existing, which has always been a profession of aristocracy rather than temporal merit or the more mundane Law of the commons. Empires elevate a political elite on one basis alone: control of limited, politically sensitive information either because that contest is carried out within the ruling interest and the ideas relevant to it (such as their familial relations and interpersonal squabbles), or because machinery and technology in temporal, physical reality affects imperial fortunes as an unquestionable fact. For example, Empires needed farmland to grow crops so that men would be available to fight for the Empire, secure new farmland, and oversee agriculture, and this imperative was necessary for the empire. The state in pure form could exist without "material necessity" as such, so long as there are men who carry out peculiar state or political functions. The state could exist as nothing more than a virtual machine in the imagination, and its de facto power and relevance of any of its offices so feeble that it would be some sort of weird joke to think such institutions realize any of their claims or rule much more than the palace. The Empire stakes its claim not on a present-day productive process in the world but on the record of products claimed by the ruling interest, which is a peculiar concept of merit rather than a general one. It is possible to claim property, conquest, and merit without "Empire". Perhaps all of the domains claimed by men in society are understood to be part of a great commons, or the idea of "owning land" as a demarcated legal parcel is alien or does not conform to the dominant imperial concept of land title. For example, the Indians of North America certainly had concepts of land ownership and management and did not fail to recognize the colonists stole land, as if they were too dumb and savage to make connections as a Fabian or Germanic retard would claim. Empire does not have a greater claim that is "above God" or any other justification for Empire, where it alone can adjudicate this. But, every empire is a historical fact judged as meritorious by something to exist at all, and its ruling interest will exist "as it pleases". Nothing about nature provided for Empire any gifts whatsoever, and the first dictum of all empires is the "struggle for existence" or their "right to exist", both of which are silly if speaking of any natural or real basis we are obligated to care about. Without a ruling interest, there is no Empire. This is different from the concept of the political, which would "exist" in some sense to speak of any status quo in the world, even if this were not valued as anything more than a statement that there is a world where facts of specific things can be regarded. Empires, in their heart of hearts, do not care about "the present state of things" or any status quo that is presumed to operate. Empires—and they are all retarded for doing this—make their own history.

The ruling interest is never "rule itself" or a tautology. It relies on a superstitious cycle or "engine" that is imagined to move history. The Empire is a particular application of the general theory of technology, if it is something we isolate and speak of in language, where "state" and the political concepts are implied by the language and all of the ways we can regard such an entity. The application makes claims to the world that are extant and historical and makes presumptive claims to the future of the world. Empires do not create or instantiate anything whatsoever. That is always carried out by the officers who serve Empire, rather than the Empire itself as a thought-form or egregore "making history" in that way. For Empire, the future is always a potential, and its present rule is "post-dated" to exist at the End of Time. (He who controls the present controls the future, he who controls the future controls the past.)

It is in the theory of technology that Empire finds its core, rather than the theory of technology being incidental to the Empire. From the outset, the Empire requires a general operating theory. Nothing requires the imperial theory to be "pure evil" as if the evil of Empire were self-evident. Every historical Empire, including the present domination of the British Empire, has understood virtues as well as vices to be "primordial germs" for the perpetuation of this condition. Without something genuinely good, or at least something that can do good, Empire would be a terrible proposition, in which the proprietors do nothing but struggle; or, the proprietors would agree to freeze the competition and forbid all insinuation about the conditions of Empire. In the latter case, Empire is described in the most unflattering terms. To celebrate that rot as good in itself would require the thrill of torture to be maximized and, absent the odious impulses of pure aristocracy, the torture cult has an obvious outcome that would cannibalize everything and impose a monopoly, thus destroying the proprietors or forcing them to serve a master alien to all of them. If Empire was purely the brainchild of proprietors for their self-interest and ruled for that alone, the preferred outcome would have been security and peace at a bargain price. The proprietors, whose origins were in warlordism and conquest, already held the historical right to property and it was theirs alone. Strength of will or inherent agency has no say whatsoever in property; only victory in battle and judgment of merit by the peerage of proprietors declare property, whatever the nature of that property. The merit of the proprietors is of course limited to property alone. It has nothing to inveigh on spiritual matters, and the proprietors' most crass tendency is to declare that there is nothing but power, but power for power's sake says little about operationalizing that power to do anything of merit. The proprietors require some other interest to be co-opted that will not be theirs if they choose such a faggy rationale, and that rationale has nothing for them. Proprietors do not believe in justice or excuses for the terror, for they never needed any, nor offered such as a "concession" over that which was inherently the proprietors' matter. If another order wished property of their own, they did so entirely on the terms a proprietor set, and the business of one proprietor is not intrinsically the business of other proprietors. If one proprietor granted property to someone outside of the proprietor class, this meant nothing whatsoever, for class solidarity does not exist for the proprietors. The peerage only exists as a demonstrable fact that the proprietors have to regard if they are at all honest about their claims, and while producers are never confused with the entitled, property of any sort is property until it is specifically seized—guilty until proven innocent is the law of the world.

The point here is that the proprietors could never for themselves or on their own power become a "pure aristocracy", primarily concerned with the perpetuation of power itself. Proprietors without property are beggars whose temporal merit is gone forever, just as labor expended is, for generative purposes, gone forever. Proprietors without property have no technology and property has no moral sense or worth for its behavior. The only moral calculation of property is merit, rank, and whatever the title to property means in that contest, and that value exists "as-is". The piece of property cannot be transmuted into any other or even considered to be equatable to other pieces of property. If Empire is viewed simply as the construct it is and the overt machinations of the imperial contest, it appears as this terrible beast clamoring for ever more blood and toil, but it is a terrible beast that asks only for blood and the toil of labor, rather than the thrill of torture and its public display. There is no escaping this truth: Empire as a fact entails the blood of human beings and animals spilled, no matter whether the empire has a fundamentally good, neutral, or malicious character and purpose. Empires do not necessarily need "goodness" for a material or substantive reason that nature will enforce. That requirement is only present because the men who do anything in this Empire require goodness in the world to exist, and if malicious evil were the chief content of things, the world we live in would be very different, and it would supersede any claim we have that we would be equal to the evil at work. Whatever evil humans believe they embody as a source of their temporal power, it is pitiful compared to a whole world if the spirit of the world was evil or inclined to such, and even for the evils of the world that are known without any human agency, there are evils greater than anything humans can summon or manage.

What agents can effect most easily—what is freely reproducible by definition—is technology. Technology can never be instantiated in the real world ex nihilo, but genius—the most basic condition of genuine existence— is more or less fixed in any entity, however, it is defined. So too are the moral judgments of the world no more than what they are. Technology, though, in principle can beget more technology from the example of something small. If the Empire is interpreted as an assemblage of technology, it can be altered, and it will only be altered through technology in any significant way. The ruling interest of Empires always discount genius and never care about the moral wants of anything other than Empire, which requires conquest and domination to be priorities over their alternatives. There is no rule mandating that a "nice Empire" is impossible. If history is any indication, the most successful empires in history succeeded because they rejected arbitrary cruelty. However, the dominance of technology is fixed, since moral sentiments and genius remain ill-defined, and when defined they have a tiny existence compared to the extant clockworks of nature and what history produced. For the interests in society that are tied to technology, who in humanity have constituted a "new class" to the present day, a particular avarice of the commoners is their stake in the imperial project. For every other interest, technology is a necessity, and if they could have it their way, technicians would be a barely acknowledged necessity, placed below the peasants and basic workers. Scholars and those doing the intellectual grunt work would be the lowest of the valid class or outright drawn from the ranks of the invalid, "fooled" by having a knife at their throat from cradle to grave and being told all along that they are retarded and must redeem themselves. Once whatever product is extracted from these scholars, they are summarily executed every time, and the trick is to ensure that these scholars never compare notes, so that "a sucker is born every minute", fulfilling Jabulon's prophecy. They would pursue minor intellectual work, and then be culled like cattle, the knife never once being removed from their throat, and the right to hold this knife will be the last thing this sorry race called Man needs to know as "Absolute knowledge". In this way, all of the technological endeavors of mankind are subsumed into Empire, and they can themselves be mediated by some "received wisdom" which invariably takes the form of that knife at the throat. If you see this "intelligence through torture" from the imperial perspective, this is good and right, and the only way to "make" intelligence out of people who have no particular reason to contribute anything whatsoever to this empire. Without it, empires would be limited to whatever inertia men possess to provide technological inputs and work of their own accord, and that would always be limited. From the outset, the obvious solution to this—humans simply refusing to have much to do with each other so that what need not be disturbed wouldn't be—must be abrogated in favor of this. It did not have to be so, and this path has always been ruinous. It is not a very sound imperial strategy if this is all it can be. But, it was the "path of least resistance" for humans, due to their proclivity for ritual sacrifice. That proclivity only consumed everything when it became technologically expedient, and a theory was worked out to make the ritual sacrifice the sole engine of history rather than merely a prominent feature of their race.

There is a problem here. Empire's imperatives are entirely opposed to the technological interest actually ruling with the program it would deem ideal if it were operating as freely as the technology it commands. Of all of the five "root interests of life", the technological interest is the one most aware of the threat Empire poses to the collectivity technology natively assumes about the world for its own purposes. For the technological interest, Empire can only exist as a means to an end, and the ulterior motives are for a conceit of technology and knowledge itself. The technocrats can trade one empire for another, live in permanent revolution, and think that nothing is unusual or unstable, so long as the same sort of people rule and their interest remains dominant. It is more important for the technocrat that people like them rule than that any particular technocrat rules over the others if they must choose between the two imperatives. If they rule by personal merit and it was not technologically ordained, their rule is unstable and does not play to any strength they natively possessed; or, they abandon technology and its interest, but live in a world where technology will determine in the end how humans are ruled. If they shirk the centrality of technology and intelligence for even a moment, they will axiomatically be replaced by a more purified technology of rule. This is to say, if the technocrat accepts the imperial concept of the political, the technocrat that rules will be an expert in ruling alone as a type of technology, and this is the only correct answer for technocrats even if they are not political experts. It seems not just right but more natural than nature itself that political experts would overrule scientists and engineers or those who do any actual work other than the art of political machinations and intrigues. The technocrats in our time immediately gave themselves over to these experts, believing that the alliance of technology would serve all in the order, and this was indeed what happened. The political experts are just as beholden to the dominance of technology and their systems as any other technocratic expert, and they would at first seek to elevate like-minded technocrats who were useful to the cause and the institution, at the expense of all else.

Empire cannot tolerate this institutional dominance since its true conditions are not identical with state society or institutions. Empires are ruled by the crown, its court, and its purse. Someone might think "Let's just have all of the things an empire does without an empire as such", but Empire has its entrenched interests. In our history, those connected to the imperial court were always at the vanguard of technological advances and saw one of their imperatives being a continual head-start over rival entities that would acquire technology. The technological interest itself desires a monopoly for the class of technocrats and the technocrats alone against alien interests. In practice, this meant the technocrats were viscerally disgusted by labor, and above all their hatred of the lowest class went beyond any imperial mission. Empires were by their nature despotic, and civilization as mentioned in the prior book was a despotic project at its core, rather than a democratic-republican one. Among the despotic virtues is despotism's indifference towards the laboring class and residuum, beyond punishing their numbers if those numbers are too annoying and the numbers of loyalists to the crown are too few. This is as it should be, for the lower orders have seen correctly that nothing of the hitherto known arrangements of human society have meant anything but toil, torture, and bullshit wars engineered to immiserate them. Republics are defined by a faux-pious insistence that the lower orders be dragged into the project, and this is the beginning of their destruction by the malicious forces of the human race. There was an obvious solution to the republic; the lowest class would not be tortured or ritually sacrificed in the way that was glorified because such a mentality has an obvious outcome. But, if this happened, a spiritual precondition of the republic for humanity would be violated. The despot simply does not care. The despot takes for granted a historically proven fact that humans will be cruel to other humans the moment a convenient pretext is available. The only solution despotism cared about would be for the pretext to never be too convenient that glorification of torture overrides anything the despot wanted to rule. What happens when all barriers between the practice of torture and its results are eliminated, and someone decides to deploy this technology without regard to anything outside of it? When a "total system" becomes the imperial system, the republic is not long for this world, nor is despotism able to produce anything stable, which was the purpose of despotism as a type of government. What remains is not merely a reversion to an imagined "noble barbarism" where the world operated just-so and was successfully arrested in some state of nature. No such state of nature actually exists. What results is a strange contraption becoming itself the imperial power, abiding by the logic of Empire rather than the state or any institutional facade. Rather than Empire being the creation of men, Empire becomes its essential form, is re-made as a technological apparatus, and this becomes the only idea that can remain. The particular praxis may vary, as will the excuses for the terror, but regardless of the particular "system", it makes no excuses for its real function, and men can only adopt the imperial faith in total, with no translation of this to anything humans could make sense of for themselves. Much of what is called "the imperial virus" is not for Empire in the sense of claims to the world, but a type of technology that remakes the world in its image and its image alone. This is always portrayed as the only admissible world-system once it is operational, but it is always known, and the technology is contingent on this fact, that the technology only exists because it can appeal to the past. It cannot create a future other than copies of its forms or reassembly of those forms that do not change the essence of power itself as it sees power. It might have been possible to deploy technology with some imperative other than torture and sacrifice as its core, but history has judged that humans do not want any other, and such imperial viruses only acknowledge other such viruses—other "total systems"—as valid. The only way out of this is to reject the "totality" and ideology altogether, which we can do if we want to. But, this is not expedient, and intelligence always seeks the shortest solution to a problem. The need, then, would be to place peculiar conceits about intelligence itself at the apex of the empire, rather than technology proper which could be utilized by any creature with independent sense and judgment, that assembled all of the precursor technologies for compatibility with the available technology of the imperial interest. That is to say, it was necessary to make intelligence and knowledge proprietary and the dominion of a selected class, rather than technology being just another feature of the world with peculiar properties, and intelligence being one of those technologies with its own peculiar properties. This is not a new development, as if there were a time in recent history of original sin, where before humanity was blissfully ignorant. It is not the vanguard of technocratic modernity that imposed this on a world that did not know, as if humans were so sneaky and clever and finally "hacked reality" to make it conform to their spirit. Such a conceit of intelligence was the first and last condition of segregating one class from another to create the class society and class struggles we know throughout human history. Without this conceit, class struggles are never total nor are they particularly appealing. Eventually, class struggle as an active concern gives way to the truth that the aristocratic tendency in life is the only class that really cares for this struggle, and they always see all other interests and groups as alien to the One, the Absolute, which is nothing but torture itself. At any time, we can and do reject this ethos because it is obviously ruinous. But, if there is nothing in the world to tell it "no", then its reasoning appeals to humans in particular, because of the very real history of humans. If humans abandoned ritual sacrifice in total and saw it as a disgusting abomination, such an ethos would not survive. Yet, it has because there were humans that methodically decided to make it so, generation after generation, to create a very real assembly of the vilest impulses of their race, purified and perfected. The eugenic creed is just the latest attempt of those people to change the world in this way, and this is the only way such an approach to history could have changed the world.

If there is a true central pillar to this ethos, it is not that intelligence "must" do this, or that the men and women who join such an interest are actually the smartest entities in the world or hold any special information that entitles them to do this by nature's assent. The central pillar is torture, and the central pillar of torture is forced ignorance—to make the Other "retarded" and therefore inadmissible.

This can only be implemented in the real world by the combination of these mechanisms and motives in a historical context, rather than any one of them "driving" the other. Aristocracies may think they have a "master key" but it will not be automatically effective by insinuating ad nauseum that it is until it is. It is not even in the interest of aristocracy to do this necessarily. Aristocracy elevates itself to be "the best" by cruelty and malice, enslaving the other orders and finding drivers from the lower orders who will be their enablers, but the aristocrats contribute nothing but an insufferable smugness. Once installed, aristocracies are pathologically lazy and make a point of visibly doing as little as possible, so that their claims that aristocracy is natural and "above God" are validated by pushing a button. That button may be provided by the lower orders who believe this will fool the aristocracy and "give the capitalists the rope to hang themselves", but it is always, in the end, an alliance of the ruling interest. The Empire itself only exists as claims and the machines asserting them continuously. Empires may be united by a claim of primordial property, but in practice, one empire gives way to another, and the real soul of power is not the imperial claims as-is, but the mind-virus that allowed this construct to exist in the first place. It is only the combination of technology at this epoch of history that made the present imperial virus—the eugenic creed—effective, and it was only effective for humans with their historical vices. It was never guaranteed that history had to be this, but the human spirit was this, and that spirit was held back in the past by conditions it could not control. But, history really is made as its agents please, rather than by some natural law that compels history "above God". Within the "total system", those who command the technology command everything within it, and will always create elaborate fictions to justify why Big Brother's power is temporarily limited, always looking at some imagined demon that is attributed to the lack of faith of the lower orders. To give up the "total system" is to give up not just modern ideology, but the very contraption of Empire imagined in this way. Empire itself can be imagined as another construct, rather than the technocratic construct humanity chose. But, there were a lot of reasons why a technological basis for Empire would always prevail among any life-form with the symbolic language and technological aptitude that humans possess. The only alternative would have been what the technological interest cannot allow. That is, the lower two orders claim technology for themselves, obviating the role of managers, middlemen, and merchants for good. This could be done very easily because in practice it is the only way anything is built. The entire managerial and financial role is superfluous to anything genuinely productive, and yet, the role of the producers is assigned entirely to the managers rather than the laborers, and the product of the lowest class is immediately stripped from their hands to meet the imperatives of humanity's malice rather than any genuine need to do so.

The result of this is that the "dismal science" is only sensical in this very specific confluence of events, rather than as a general rule of history or human beings. If we wanted to arrange society for productivity or something useful, we have ways to do this, and the solution would be trivial in any era. That is not what humans set out to do, and the managers in particular are acutely aware that if such a thing happened, it would be the end of their interest. It would not be the end of the technocrats necessarily. The technocrat can admit his or her function would not be necessary in a better world, work towards it, and abolish their class. It was the peculiar malice of the human race that insisted on the opposite, where the laboring orders are told to abase themselves to the bourgeois and its trans-historical interest in technology. Since the technocracy humanity got was already given over to aristocratic conceits about themselves and their civic worth, it was obvious why the socialist ideas allowed for humanity to emphasize the defeat of labor by technology rather than the other way around, but nothing about this was efficient or effective at what technology and science can do. The "dismal science" by itself does not make the managers' victory a fait accompli. It was known and remains known to this day, that nothing of the managers produced a single article of worth for humanity. It only produced more managerialism and elimination of the unwanted "dead" masses. Nearly every economic understanding would view humanity correctly as a contemptible race, and tell that humanity really should not do this if it wanted its endeavor to produce anything other than predictable failure. It was a choice to accelerate misery and humiliation, to meet what the human spirit always was. Nothing good can come from a race born of ritual sacrifice, and whatever humans did contrary to that would be abolished or "sublated" in the world to come.^[2] The "dismal science" is a real science describing something that has indeed happened. Still, it is not reducible to some disciplines like economics or a combination of disciplines. It is also not reducible to ideology or political science. It is something new in history, and yet, predecessors and excuses for the misery of humanity stretch back to Antiquity and religion, and above all, ensuring that nothing good exists in this world is the overarching aim. The dismal science is the science of enclosure and holding that familiar knife at the throat of every human being. It is a peculiarly human science. We do not think of doing this to animals, let alone thinking that the torture of animals would be appreciated by the animals or produce great outcomes. Even when we recognize animals are the enemy of the human race and have been treated as such, if animals were treated in this way, it would produce nothing but sadistic torture, rather than the livestock that is desired. Yet, this is where we are.

It may be said that this is Empire and its science, to say that Empire and immiseration must be joined by a natural law. I must clarify that "the science of Empire" is an invalid category, since by nature, there is no such thing as an "empire" that would be appreciated. There are states, polities, human beings, and all of the things in the world, and there is a world to describe for science to exist. An empire isn't actually run by misery, as if this misery were a productive enterprise in any sense or contributed to the safety of the empire. It is rather that this enterprise of torture for its own sake became the dominant imperial creed for humans, because of their peculiar history, and all empires exist in a historical context. There are never empires ready-made in a laboratory with the same meaning, and every empire in fiction can only draw on extant empires or hypotheticals that have already been explored. The torture does not exist to serve the Empire. The Empire exists to serve the torture, and if this empire fails to deliver, those who advance its creed will form a new one from the same constituents that formed previous empires. For this torture cult to persist, it must invade the world we live in, which gave no particular sanction to this. It can only persist on the terms the world allows, for the time the world allows. An empire looking purely for the interest of its ruling interest or ruling class has many complex questions, but the dismal science, which polices the behavior of that ruling interest by asserting that it can, has only one question that overrides all others. It can only operate on the principle that all who do not share in the true franchise are retarded and therefore worthy of extermination. Because of what humans are, and what founded their race as a distinct race in history, this is what worked for humans. It would not have worked identically for all races or as a natural law, and it has not worked automatically for humans out of any unique malevolence humans possess by a natural monopoly. Many of humanity have rejected this credo, having gained nothing from it and having seen the ruin created for no good reason whatsoever. Yet, no human can deny the orgies in which their race gave birth to new members. No human can deny the games and humiliations that are standard for their race. Guilty. It is the art of imposing this on the world that was the first empire humans managed before civilization could be established to formalize and systematize the practice, perfect it, and declare that it can indeed be Absolute, "above God", and override all other imperial ambitions or purposes. Even at the expense of any stable empire beyond torture itself, the logic of this empire, which serves only the constituent of torture itself, remained present. Here we see what it was humanity understood as the general fear as a union of what it truly respected and regarded, rather than the general fear as an assembly of genuine threats in the world. Nothing about the torture cult of the human race has much meaning outside of humanity, despite the repeated efforts to insist its torture cult is ingrained in nature and the processes of life. The overwhelming evidence is first of all that life is aberrant in the universe, and second that life almost always seeks homeostasis for its own purposes rather than mindless sublation of the universe to meet this form. The perpetuation of life's familiar forms in natural history is done because life sees no good reason to change its form out of some sense of blind historical progress, and because if life weren't stable, it would not have endured or diversified in any way like it has. At its core, the dismal science must make claims about life to command life at all levels, and it views reality entirely through the functions of life, which we know to be aberrant in the universe generally, and that life-forms that are significantly developed and can claim greater agency than reproduction and chemical factory-work respond to a real world rather than this ideological one that must be imposed on reality. The dismal science is only sensical to a society where symbolic language has circulated and the notions it evokes are acted upon by entities that are already complex enough to operate more than a mindless death impulse. The death impulse itself, then, must naturalize the ritual sacrifice and declare that all that oppose it are retarded, and this death impulse is always applied peculiarly towards humans and humans alone. It is never really imposed on the rest of the world, which has no reason whatsoever to respect the ritual of Satanic apes shouting "DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE" like the retarded apes they are, and they are truly a retarded race. But, by doing so, certain elements within that race isolated the one thing that they could "return" to as the path of least resistance to intelligence. The universe is not actually arrested by this. It is only as effective at destroying human thought and agency as the real machines it commandeers allow it to be. But, so long as intelligence and conceits about it remain at the apex of human endeavors, and there are reasons outside of this foul purpose that intelligence would be regarded by men—perfectly valid reasons we cannot ignore—humanity is cursed, due to its history rather than a natural law of intelligence, to do this. It is not possible by an appeal to the same trap that brought us here to expect this to change. It can only proceed through its cycle, no longer answerable to a world or any thought that suggested anything else was possible. And so, in this way, aristocracy ensured that humanity would, if this continues, attain "perfection". They would no longer think or doubt. They would be free of sin, and the sinners—those who lack faith in the mission—would be eliminated. Failed race.

Return to Table of Contents | Next Chapter

Return to Table of Contents | Return to Chapter Start