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If this technology were carried out in an imagined ecology with so many agents, it would appear purely as a technological problem of Empire, and its victory would be assured. That is how every imperial vision will view the world, regardless of history or the conditions understood by the participants. It did not play out on any "blank slate" of history. Even in the most primitive conditions of mankind, some social groupings and interests are extant, inherited from the animal kingdom. What truly happened may never be known in a way that allows us to reconstruct a convenient story of how it "should have happened". We often want to presume that the present imperial logic would apply to the past because such a thing is necessary to ask why we are here now, rather than what those living through these events saw. In our time, though, we have the benefit of extant writing from past men who thought very differently about the world, and we have a long history of explaining how and why these men thought the way they did. This history was established with the first written treatises, and we are fortunate that men of the past were very argumentative and concerned with their then-present-day efforts to demonstrate intellectual superiority than any notion of an eternal Empire whose kayfabe must never be violated. This helps us because we do not have to be confined to a "bottom-up" approach where smaller personal and interpersonal units are the necessary bridge. We can, before any particular social relations are formed, view the world as systems and see that a great ordering preceded our reconstruction of it. This ordering does not impose any ideal form on us, but we are aware of the ordering and look to the extant world for some authority to know what is what. Only when the world is sufficiently accounted for will someone successfully create relations from their own genius. If the world is barren or irrelevant to the cause then we can make the world and our conditions very easily. If the world, or more accurately the entities in that world, do not allow us to, we would know what in the world forbids this, rather than a vague generality that "material conditions did not allow it" by some spooky action. Often, though, our creative impulse finds inspiration from the world, rather than mindlessly copying a form because we were "supposed" to, or because reality was mediated to tell us there is nothing but the forms pedagogically imposed on us. We take inspiration from the world because the world's examples are very sensical, themselves existing because they could persist and this serves some purpose of the things we observe. We are also aware that what humans do with thinking, animal life-functions, this symbolic language that is peculiar to us, and a long history of acting in this manner, is unlike events in nature. So, a child can see past the idiocy of appeal-to-nature arguments. Fags appeal to nature to justify their perversions. We see what nature tells us about history as a useful indicator of facts about the world generally with all of the caveats needed to distinguish meaningfully what things do and what we can do, have done, and importantly will do.
Civilization and barbarism do not exist transhistorically. Both are by natural standards highly developed organizations of living entities and technology, and the former is not strictly a higher stage or inexorable consequence of the latter. In the previous book, I remarked that the distinction between civilization and barbarism is somewhat illusory. In every civilization, the ruling core has remained barbarous in its intentions, for the logical condition of civilization—scientific despotism—has yet to exist in human history as a workable theory of government. The last attempt to do this resulted in the eugenic creed, Germanic neo-barbarism glorifying the rot of the human race, and great confusion. Humans, in short, have been too stupid to carry on with civilization, and this is interpreted as a fault of civilization rather than the ruinous doctrines that were confused with it. The ruling interest of humanity has been nowhere near good or effective at any task we would expect of a government, since the ruling interest has indulged in every aristocratic game of skullduggery and every fad the middle class is pathologically drawn towards. Many of the failures of civilization could be remedied very easily if only humans made any effort instead of glorifying those who want rot and exaggerating the importance considering their small numbers relative to the majority of humanity. Most of mankind simply asked to be left alone, not caring significantly what type of government they lived under. They see correctly that nothing good came out of humanity's social enterprise, or could come out of it. Arguably, the civic project was yet another wrong path in a world with many wrong paths, and it too can be superseded by a superior concept of social organization. But, from the first city-states ruled by temples to today's cities, the civic project has been a constant presence, known to many in the hinterland as something to fear, despise, or perhaps envy if they have a peculiar mind about these things. Those who founded civilization did not have a wholly realized treatise based on reason or written codes to tell them the grand arc of 5,000 years of history give or take some centuries. They might have seen past experiments with settled fortresses and religions, but if they lacked the means to stabilize such a system, they would fail. This meant war-making technology had to incorporate fortification, stone-working, metal-working, and particularly copper and bronze, and a whole body of psychological knowledge that could be held by a class to manipulate everyone into accepting the arrangement. Without written language, this would have passed by oral tradition, and systems of writing and record-keeping throughout the world were often haphazard. To this day, formalizing a written language is no small feat. The standardization of English occurred as late as the 19th century, and this standardization was not immediately universal, as American English broke off from British English, and the accents and dialects of many places are still intact to this day. Over the next 200 years, novel concepts would require new words and eventually mutation of the language, such that someone in the early 21st century appears visibly degraded compared to someone at the turn of the 20th, despite the subject of the 21st century having no excuse and a large body of study to do better than this. As is necessary with language, words from foreign languages would be imported, either outright or with literal translations, and become part of the common vernacular, e.g. "paper tiger" and "brainwashing" lifted from Chinese with racist overtones intended due to the political narrative of the day. It is a mistake to view the project of civilization as standardization and "sameification" in accord with some ideal form. But, the philosophical state of the city and its antecedents required common standards for the city to be understood as a thing, rather than an agglomeration of families and buildings that happened to form at some strategic location. The particulars of how a city forms are not the issue of this chapter, since some of that has already been described and further description may be found in later chapters of this book. No one is in doubt, once the central temple and citadel and bank are established, that the city exists and is ruled by someone or something. "No man reigns innocently." Well before an accounting of the family and personal units of a society are known to someone exposed to wider society, the edifice of the city is known to the child, since that will be significant for the child's understanding of what mess he or she now lives in. It is the same with barbarism. The culture and normative expectations of the tribe are known, and while they never conform to a technocratic conceit of the chief-as-manager or the vision of the chief ruling by pure meritorious strength, there are manners and gods and history of the barbarous nation, and of the family living in such a condition.
The purpose of this chapter is to describe how these cultural expectations are played with in our modern narrative, rather than treating it as a trans-historical phenomenon. As I mentioned in the last book, the founders of civilization did not believe their goal was to make cities for the sake of cities. Cities were a means to an end, and the elaborate temple complexes and centrality of religion to every civic project make clear their primary purpose. If cities existed for trade or the orderly supply of troops, they would be very different entities, and the corporate state of modernity made clear that cities and nations aren't necessary for commerce, technology, and profit. It was often the case that corporate government disdained cities altogether, and the ruling elite of modernity kept among their luxuries remote homes and palaces that the common folk would be barred from entering. The cities since Antiquity created fortresses and clubs that were always off-limits and segregated by caste most of all. In theory, these were class distinctions that were mutable, but in practice, social class was assigned at a young age and followed by parentage or the sponsorship of someone of higher standing. Even when new men rose, as the conditions of civic life necessitated, the behavior of the civic cult always remained aristocratic, and new men would be prompted to "backdate" their accomplishments to early life so that their rise to greatness came from an inborn virtue, and that new men were actually born aristocratic but lived in the wrong body. Superstitious authority that speaks to something the humans recognize will remain prominent, for how else do humans sort through the knowledge available to them to select which is a priority, due to their limited resources to learn about the world? Only through further inquiry can formal habits of inquiry and systems to verify facts be possible, and this would be too laborious a task for anyone if they were distracted with irrelevant information. Efforts to force as much "garbage data" into the sensory cluster are irrelevant without the intervention of brute force and a great fear drilled from an early age into the subjects. Both a superstitious understanding that is confirmed by the outcomes around us, and formal knowledge which need only a crude level of development for us to reliably confirm those superstitions, are readily available and far cheaper. Formal knowledge and theories, proven by sufficient fact to line up with all meaningful reality, fill in for us many of the details and allow refinement of this sense. Even when damaged, the sense of a human being is stubborn against the insidious "mediated reality" imposed on them. Very often, the madmen of a society are not so much ignorant of the law, but they have lost any reason to comply with the kayfabe or invest any more inquiry into the lies and more lies of the political class. And so, the madmen will not care about their standing in court and probably do not know of their standing after long enough, because such things are no longer relevant to their existence or what they are doing in this world. A quick way to enforce mediated reality is to create that madness and the appearance that the madness is a general, "default" state, that only limited political knowledge can correct. Here, the ancient rite of ritual sacrifice can take its place as the crown of humanity's project, whatever form it takes. Those stupid enough to be sacrificed must have brought it on themselves, for lacking the right information or doing something wrong. It's their fault, even when we know from any cursory investigation what this is, and that the human race will never give up their most sacred habit. Quaint notions of truth and justice pale before the "greater truth" of their race's love of ritual sacrifice and the interest that surrounds it. It would be quite impossible to ignore that superstition even with the crudest sense, for humans never needed anything else and no idea seriously conquered ritual sacrifice in the entire history of this sad race. They might demand a sacrifice to a different imaginary deity, the most popular being a fictitious man on a cross with doctrines and more doctrines to tell believers they are not allowed to use the bathroom.
Reducing civilization to its religious character is a stupid trope, but it would be quite impossible to speak of civilization and barbarism without the distinction of their religions, and the distinction of both to an imagined savagery. The temple of civilization spurs very different technological aims and different types of people who would pursue them, and very different values of these people. The barbarous technological aims are primarily concerned with merit in battle—"violence is the supreme authority" when barbarism is reduced to its lowest character—and find much of the culture and art of civilization to be deplorable at best, and a path to faggotry when they find the vices of civilization too much to look at.
The character of "true civilization" is less relevant, for civilization itself has no monopoly on social organization. It was in civilization that the first theories of "political science" could arise, and where writing to record those theories was prominent. From the outset, civilization is a strange and queer thing, steeped in esoteric rituals and classes of people whose entire life was given over to things that would be completely out of place in a "typical" setting. For most of humanity's history as something familiar to us, where men were part of stratified social orders, barbarism was the sole indicator of "normalcy" for the civilized. The barbarous themselves didn't particularly care about this designation and knew their own situation and that of their rivals. The barbarous was assigned the status of "normal" or "base" to describe most of the people in this city. This became a convenient pretext to break down the resolve of the subjects of the city to resist the dominion of its rulers. The rulers might be little more than jumped-up warlords or gangsters, but they invent finery peculiar to civilization and its culture or simply appropriate the work of better people in other places or the middle and lower classes of their city. Who is most attracted to the "queer" qualities of civilization? It is the technological interest, that found a niche where it was for the first time in history prevalent enough to be distinguished from any mass of people. For most of history, human societies are comprised of workers, soldiers, skilled tradesmen, and the ruling professions tied to state force in some way like lawyers and priests. In cities, a surplus exists and an environment exists for art, music, ritual celebrations, and strange things that do not appear in the barbarous society. The strange things are not automatically "elite", for they include the cult followings of silly things and distractions.
There has never been a "normal" that is the baseline for comparison when describing society and the limitations of technology. There has never been a mean or median that can be pointed to say "This is what you must compare against as your first comparison". Sense and reason look to that which is prominent and defining of their condition, rather than an imagined average asserted by statistics. It is even more dubious when statistics are known to be manipulated and the subject is exhorted to believe them without criticism as if they were "above God" and above any sense we have to verify knowledge and information independently. Even if an average were verified by independent sense, these averages have nothing to do with the "normal" that is insinuated to exist. "Normal" exists because there is an imperial interest that lords over civilization. At its root, the imperial power and the dismal science presume barbarism as normal and disguise it as a projection of civilization. Low cunning and the appearance of intelligence become paramount, and fads are invented every day to tell the masses "You are this". This, the rulers attribute to their superior intellect and mediation of reality, rather than the truth—that the rulers are, in principle, barbarous and disdain all of the genuine advances civilization entailed, and want the new class that civilization entailed—the technocrats—to live the most denuded existence possible.
Had civilization prevailed, the ethos of free trade and corporate government would not have been a thing allowed to exist for a moment. There was never an excuse for such a ruinous regime, reliant on forced ignorance and a vast preponderance of fear to continue. When describing free trade, the liberals were describing a situation that was already extant and described economic behavior generally, rather than a policy prescription to be imposed on reality. This is something different from saying the liberal proposition was rooted in "nature". All of these economic and political ideas are the constructs of men, and that was never denied by anyone who was at all honest about what humans do. But, the condition had been established, because the political and economic order was in the main an inheritance of medieval barbarism rather than civilization and Reason. The modern period arose not because free trade and avarice were the goal, but because they were demonstrated to exist and the malcontents of the time saw this as the conditions the political matter had to acknowledge. Some wished to rule the world without regard for any civilizational project or "good idea", those obsessed with an antiseptic vision of the future where the poor and ugly were destroyed in a vast ritual sacrifice, and no shortage of malcontents among the masses who saw their hitherto known existence as a great travesty to be overcome. As soon as the free trade concept and liberal ideas proliferate, the malcontents of the masses write and speak their critique and make their disgust at the liberals known. This disgust in the main does not arise from the conservative order and the faggotry it entails. The conservatives said their piece and only had more rot and faggotry, for they were the barbarism made definite. The feudal order is, stripped of all finery and excuses, little more than glorified warlords engineering bullshit wars and famines so that poor people die. Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus did not need to come along to invent such malice. The malice has been known for as long as humans have been around. With the liberal theory comes an explanation of why it is so, or the beginnings of one, and the contention of those liberals who saw that they had just as much right to oppress as the old nobility, and would probably be better at it given how this oppression has happened. Whether the liberal would want to do this remained an open question, and had the worst of the liberals been described as what they were, the liberal experiment would have been—and in much of the world was—terminated before it got worse. The history of civilization and its interests would not have seen corporate government as a desirable course or one that should be defended or sanctioned. Nothing about the liberal ideas of the 18th century required or justified this corporate government, and in many cases, the liberals explicitly warned against such a course without some regulatory check. That check would be the intellectuals of the technological interest and the grouping that came to be known as the bourgeoisie, and this name is in many respects a misnomer as I hope to describe throughout this book. But, the basis of liberal ideas in civilization suggested something very different from what happened in the 20th century would be the outcome of this. The expectation of civilization would have been an economy governed by a general plan and class conflicts as the main motive of the plan, whether the class conflicts were to be won by a particular class or if the ruinous class conflict was to be terminated once and for all. The corporate government cares not one whit about "class struggles" as such. Every institution and every foundation that could lead to a city is a thing to be utilized for conquest. What is the corporate state, but an idealized barbarism? The corporate state offers nothing to its subjects, has no actual "citizens", and its aims are openly and proudly democidal.
The long-run values of civilization were always socialist and communist, understood to be such since Antiquity. They were not socialist or communist in a humanist sense, where all of mankind shared and enjoyed prosperity as individuals, but they always disdained any regime of property. Even the necessary collective or state property of civilization has been an unwelcome condition. The ideal of civilization, by its own foundation, would be to no longer need "property" altogether, so that the city and its institutions could flourish on the terms they would prefer. Civilization has always been opposed to the dismal science and saw such conditions as something to overcome, rather than accede to. They are problems to solve, rather than problems made into the central "germ" of the society in question.
The values of barbarism were never capitalist or "proprietarian" in the crass sense, but they were never communist or amenable to anything like socialism. There has not once been a condition called "primitive communism", where the tribe is re-imagined as a technocratic polity and its order regimented "by nature". It cannot be said of more primitive tribal arrangements of society, or the enterprise of a band of nomadic humans. Barbarism does not map onto any "economic treatise", and the only political treatise it follows is a frank admission of the nature of power and force. In all situations, anything like socialism or the domination of the technological interest, which communism would entail, is anathema to the barbarous sense of themselves. The barbarous do not want to be subsumed into civilization or technology, and see as well as anyone that this can be an unseemly and terrible thing. Individuals of any system might find the prospect of civilization and its trajectory appealing, for foolish purposes, or for purposes that are very sensical in a situation. It should be understood here that the "capitalist" situation was understood as a temporary one and a ruinous one rather than a "system" in the sense a socialist would work with. Capitalism was not the antithesis of "systems thinking" in the way today's eugenists wish it to be. If capitalism were understood to be the condition, nothing would prevent the capitalists from colluding and ending the situation for their own sake, for their own purpose. They would, among themselves, establish a type of socialism out of necessity, or they would see the situation as irreconcilable and seek to make themselves immune to the misfortune this arrangement did. The feudal landlords had no "theory of feudalism" or "system of feudalism" that they regarded as good in itself. The feudal landlords would have—and this is exactly what the writers of the old nobility said—seen capitalism and free trade not as "economic anarchy" but as a step of progression towards something they dreaded: the collective interest of the monied interests of society that would attack the landlords' power. It would appear to them and was called at times, as a socialist vision rather than an "ideologically capitalist" one. The rise of ideological capitalism has always been the vanguard of these inbred, Satanic retards of the old order of Europe, and they are retarded. The feudal order itself was never "pure barbarism" or an idealized version of itself. It could only exist because there was a prior period of civilization in Antiquity, in which technology, commerce, militarization, and Empire could rise. The men who rose in Rome and the ancient world often came from no special place, unlike the monarchical regimes that invented ever-more-fanciful cults and excuses for their faggotry, and it was a terrible faggotry that stunted and terrorized the Earth for over 1,000 years. These "systems" or situations can be seen further back if we wish to or broken down into sub-stages or causative germs. But, eventually, this framework for viewing history as the progression of "general stages" is useless and cumbersome, and does not describe what has happened to bring us to this. The main "contest" throughout history was between civilization and barbarism, and the malcontents of both, which were the vast majority of the human race.
Nowhere is any of this "normal". Most of humanity is not a party to this struggle of organizational forms and has no interest in the outcome. It is pressed primarily by political intriguers who decide what will be normal, in all times and places. It is never something supported by the actual mean or median of existence, which is that most humans do little more than obtain their sustenance in the political arena. That is what polities hold against the majority of humanity; that they have asserted a monopoly on security and a monopoly on transgression, and that is how the political format, whatever it is, continues. It is "made normal" to expect a contest instigated by a few people within whatever social niche they inhabit, within a niche they identify rather than the relations someone would prefer. Otherwise, we would not have such a strong identification with civilization or a particular tribe to the point of believing wars "just happen" or can be set off by aristocratic instigations. The "real normal", if such a thing exists, is that most of humanity is not content with any hitherto known arrangement of human society by these people, and the chief reason this stays intact is fear—justified fear—of something uncertain and alien to life as we know it. The experience with the new has generally been that the new leads to some worse perversion, as aristocracy likes to control the new. The question for us is how they have done this, and the simple answer is that the new isn't really controlled by aristocracy until it can be detected and smothered—"negate the negation", as they say in their philosophical language.
Rather than a "material" origin in the civic temple, it is what the temple preaches, and its counterpart outside of the temple, that makes this insinuation. What starts as a superstition must be made "more real than real", and this is done by creating normative expectations of what "should" exist. It starts with something as simple as intra-family squabbles stoked by that familiar malevolence in the human spirit and the nature of their race, set by its original act. But, before it can be "normalized" it has developed far beyond the original act, and it must inhabit a familiar form. It must make a mockery of the world that never asked for any of this so that everything and everyone in the world can be replaced with aimless struggle or "contradiction"—in other words, it must be transformed into weaponized Lie. The historical conflict between civilization and barbarism is the same. There is not actually an existential struggle for a way of life or particular symbols or a favored form of idolatry. There is instead a drive to normalize ritual sacrifice and some insinuation. It does not work to normalize anything good. That is left to whatever recognition of the good entities might recognize, where something that works is favored so long as a sense of the good remains in this world and this knowledge can be reproduced. There is no shortage of reproduction of malice and informational shit, but good knowledge—technology of the good—is always scarce. Life under the dismal science exacerbates this, rather than dealing with the goods themselves which needed no economism as such to tell us they were good. This struggle plays out in history where civilization around the temple was the construct that eventually prevailed, and where cults of power and insinuation were attracted to technology and the shortest route to maintaining temporal authority.
What cities provide is a way to distribute surplus to a lot of people in a small space, such that distribution as an abstraction can be effective in ways it would not be if peoples' self-interest saw the civic project as a hazard to avoid at all costs. With the city comes the potential for malice, and the abstraction itself can be used for this purpose. In a "purely barbarous" setting, the goods cannot be obfuscated, nor do they change too much. Everyone knows in their home what their possessions are, and has a notion of their worth to them and their worth in that niche. It is not so simple to calculate this in a city or with the technology available in the past century. Things that would have been useless or a thing to never allow to exist are regular in the present century, and things that were common knowledge in the past have been forgotten or made scarce. In some sick way, the values of barbarism were lionized and declared to be a luxury, but this is mostly a projection of low cunning rather than the merit of barbarous thinking. Even when barbarism becomes today's "neo-barbarism", the emphasis on simplicity and autonomy remains, even if it is misplaced. Barbarous societies never resemble the "freedom" or seeming anarchy that is projected by these misguided fools. They have laws and standards of right and wrong, and expectations of manhood or womanhood. Failure to meet those conditions means death and none of the appeals or shelters that civic life allowed. But, without any strong state or expectation of such in a barbarous society, enforcing that death penalty proves problematic for those who envision a "just-so" world lionizing the barbarous habit of ritual sacrifice. What neo-barbarism seeks to accomplish is the worst of both worlds (or the best of both worlds depending on your disposition); the weak are summarily exterminated with ruthless efficiency and prejudice, but the spoils of civilization and exploitation are regularly deposited into the gullet of neo-barbarist fags, and they are fags! Among the advantages of civilization is its exploitation feeding regular spoils to its rulers, but never is the exploitation of civilization a normal thing. Cities are uncertain propositions unless they are ruled by a considerable preponderance of force. Either the exploitation has to be regulated and stabilized by some technology forcing the world to comply with an unnatural exploitation, or the people of the city see they could easily bypass "mediation" and free themselves from exploitation, and the character of the city must change. The rulers of the city can choose to oppress or allow liberty for the citizens, but they cannot have it both ways without invoking something very queer and alien to civic life to make this regular recurrence "normal". If not for modern ideology, the likely conclusion of many citizens, including many of the rulers, is that civilization cannot continue with the fantasies it entertained in the past. It would have to become something novel, and the civic cults and the interests invested in those cults simply would not allow that. Therefore, it would only be faith in technological supremacy or some form of neo-barbarism that could prevail. The technological vision was one of ever-greater revolutions that suspiciously led nowhere. The neo-barbaric values required making cities that weren't cities but parodic recreations of barbarous nations and tribes, and could only be maintained by editing history to make its existence seem natural. Nothing in this "struggle of ideas"—really the struggles of interested factions that had their petty agendas—allowed anything new to exist. It only exists to impose a world where nothing can change.
We do not need to invoke civilization or barbarism in particular for this example to work. The real culprit is the "normalization" of something that was never normal or natural and an organizational conflict that exists in the whole world. Any two antipodes can be envisioned. It can be "Right" against "Left", both originally referring to factional interests contesting the democratic polities, even though none of the politicians were doctrinaire "leftists" or "rightists" in that sense, and most of the people had no buy-in with the conflict. The contest between the Right and Left in European history was generally one of the institutional prerogatives and what is to be done with the era upon them, where common men could for the first time participate in political matters as equals and the broad masses were not just literate but could communicate with each other about the horrific lot they lived in, and do something about it other than hope for a nicer lord to conquer them. The Right and Left originally referred to very real interests that concerned enough people and pulled in those who had no interest in the distinction because the technology of the day necessitated that distinction. It took ideology and the beastial ambitions of the European order to create a "full spectrum", where nothing outside of the given dichotomy was admissible. These are attributed most often to the European Right, since the program of the traditional Left was a program questioning the very struggle that created the Left as a political force, to win it and do the next thing, whatever that turned out to be. For the longest time, if you asked most people, politically active or common workers, whether they were a rightist or leftist, they'd look at you like you were a crazy person, or punch you in the face if you showed the kind of insolence fascist polities coddled and protected. But, by the time fascist politics supplanted mass engagement with the question, the Left/Right distinction ceased to describe the genuine situation in Europe, and it never described how this question was answered in the rest of the world. The important thing is that two conflicting aims can be identified, and the whole of the world may be subsumed in those aims by parties that care not about the ostensible aims. The civilized extol the virtues of barbarism and "normalcy". The parties of the left adopt, without knowing why, all of the philosophical and cosmological positions of the traditional Right. The "barbarians" nurse an inferiority complex and this is the excuse to drag their societies through a transformation, though in the places where this works, the "barbarians" lived in civilization and culture much like the aliens they emulate, and said aliens—white Europeans—overtly embrace a parodic version of themselves and revel in the rot of their civilization. It was possible because "normalcy" could be insinuated as a historical and social condition, rather than what normalcy would have meant if we viewed history from afar and with a scientific approach.
Nothing about the economic task is "normal" or can be normal. Some point of comparison may be made that is for the society commonplace. What is the baseline for money having value? It is because there is a bank, treasury, or some institution issuing this money. There are good reasons for a polity to do this, but it is a noted exception for the institution issuing this token. Nothing about nature required us to "normalize" this exchange or suggest that it had anything to do with natural laws. There may be behavior between humans or within them that is regular and, for all intents and purposes, natural to them. But, none of that natural behavior is intrinsically "normal", as if it were granted special sanction to be the baseline for comparison. The economic task, however, it is conducted, is conducted regarding exceptional conditions rather than regular ones. Exchanges in economic behavior are definite exceptions rather than the rule. They always require some condition between people that is communicated or communicable, even when the exchange is that one party surreptitiously steals from the other and hopes the other does not realize this. Nothing obligates this victim to respect the steal and the grift of the thief, yet that is what "normalization" insists we must do. There isn't even a "normal" or "null assumption" where no exchange takes place as such. The entire premise of the economic matter is that the agents involved in this live in an irregular world where there would be imbalances to navigate, rather than a world where someone arbitrarily decided to start exchanging for no good reason or a mere coincidence of wants. If the economic task were a game between the agents and otherwise described nothing, the importance attached to it would be different. We would see that the game is superfluous or could be conducted in whatever way suits the agents involved, within a few limits such as knowledge that physically impossible actions will not become possible with more money. The condition of "no exchange" only occurs when someone has ascertained that there is no thief of this value within the domain of the agent concerned with such. This is a very important distinction, rather than presuming that by nature, "all men are free of the vice of exchange", and that is normal and thus default. All of how these conditions can be understood are definite propositions, so there is no uncertainty of the parties involved that exchange or exploitation will happen. If either is mistaken, then we looking at this afar can see an exploitative and unequal arrangement, and unequal exchange is by far the common economic behavior rather than exchange between equals. If we were equals, we would not be bound to commercial enterprises mediating these interpersonal relationships, nor would an exploitative order be justifiable or worth keeping out of some sense that the world must continue in this fashion. Very likely, due to what political society is, the conclusion of equals would be to studiously avoid each other. This is, absent any collusion against other orders, exactly what aristocracy does when it engages in struggle. Aristocrats recognize each other and those who will be fellow travelers, and grant each other exception from the general condition of turmoil they aspire to create for everyone else. Other orders can, if they choose, play the same game. The lowest class often sees, despite everything, that they have nothing to gain from kicking each other down so that the same thieves from above can continue doing this to the world. If they cannot bypass those who want to mediate reality, they would studiously avoid people who have done nothing to them, where interaction is likely to result in nothing for either and would create suspicion and liabilities if it were detected by a third party. These considerations are not merely confined to economic or political matters. They are a consequence of this strange "normalcy" or lack thereof that can be imposed on any historical system.
Nothing about Empire or the "dismal science" is normal, and when seen for what it is, this is a horrible idea that no one should tolerate for a moment. Very often, the Empire does not attempt to normalize outright the dismal science, but distract from it or present the world as something other than what it is. To even lie about the dismal science would be so incredible that the subjects would laugh at the effort, and all of the carefully planned lying that empires always implement would be undone. It would require extraordinary effort to "restore normalcy", which is to say, restore the illusion of such through some construct like ideology.
Eventually, there is a status quo against which all people can compare facts, knowing that this situation is active. This is the beginning of political thought as we know it, where before it was a vague general fear or impression of strength that was entirely temporal and transient. The matter to be normalized need not be elaborated upon to be some existential matter, but all such things exist in a world that was never "normal" or provided any ready-made facts or standards of comparison. The way the world works is understood by subjects regardless of efforts to insist it "should" follow another interpretation, and people only understand the world, as well as their faculties, allow. But, how people understand the world should not be underestimated. Only when the dismal science has succeeded at imposing itself on reality and thought itself do we arrive at this sad problem we found ourselves in during the past 100 years, which continues to plague us in the 21st century.