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In Book 2 Chapter 14, I described war as a project of social engineering and went on to describe war as it would be seen as a purely economic matter. There is a necessary economy for waging war or any other social engineering project, but economics has little to say about social engineering itself. Most who waged war did not think they were "engineering" anything, even though that is how it played out, whether they were aware of it or not. In most situations, wars were waged specifically to bend the will of an enemy society. To truly see this, consider the reverse description; that social engineering itself is the struggle, and war is just one form that social engineering takes. The analogy of war has always been readily turned to for more reasons than sentimental appeal or the so-called "military-industrial complex". Campaigns are waged against poverty, drugs, sex, and even the weather, and they are planned logistically as if waging a war with battles. They are never actually prosecuted as wars with the same meaning as the genuine article. Some of the spiritual core of the war cult is an obvious conclusion of the concept of the political, alluded to during Book 3. None of this social engineering means anything as a struggle unless it is placed in history. Where I left off in the last chapter is the best place to begin with this description.

Before any other basis for social engineering can be considered, there is one basis that is appropriate to natural history. This is the "biological nation" that was described. Social engineering begins not by the designs of humans, but the efforts of animals to command their nascent sociality. For most animals, there is little more to be said, since the animal lacks any scheme of generally alienable labor. But, some "natural social engineering" takes place. The reproduction of their life and society is carried out towards some deliberate aim that made sense to the animals. Animals have no "just so stories" or ideology telling them to form packs or some other social grouping, and these behaviors are not encoded directly for no apparent reason. They arose from animals picking up on cues around them, and without nursing and the formation of the pack from elders, the animals are far less than their potential. This is seen when animals are held in captivity, and it is this behavior that herdsmen rely on to keep their livestock in tow. Familiarity with the habits of animals would be necessary for the work of animal husbandry to be carried out; and so was the domestication of mankind carried out in the same fashion, before any system or theory could be imposed as an excuse or illusion given to the slaves to believe that the domestication of mankind was natural.^[1] The biological "nation" remains only a potential, never realized as such or acted on, but because life meets each other for the functions of life, the nations exist. This is not the interaction of a band or "society" as such, or even the societal notion of tribe which only exists as a useful demarcation for understanding social information. A tribe is not a nation or any unit of particular importance, for tribes are really demarcations of information regarding something like mating populations, economically linked zones, and linguistically related groups that speak the same language. The "nation" in this nascent state is only the real outcome of that social information, which itself is an understood fact for humans looking at this. Even if a nation has no concept of "nationalism" and members do not like their team so to speak, if the relations are both realized and a future potential, the nation continues. Those who really do not like the nation will make efforts to escape the condition. How does a nation set itself apart? If they are humans, they modulate their behaviors very deliberately, thanks to that wonderful invention of generally alienable labor. For the animals, they make do with hostility and demonstrate their dislike, to the breaking point an intense dislike, for their ostensible country-folk.

The animal cannot "engineer" anything, but human beings immediately set out to engineer society in some way, to the extent that they can. This is what humans have to do simply to tolerate the presence of each other, for if they "believe in the system", "the system" will mock them and do what it has always done to those they deem stupid. (A Satanic race cannot change.) The engineering is carried out not because all is deliberate and calculated, but because it must be done. A man must shout for his life if speaking is the established protocol. He will not wait for a bell to tell him to wait his turn to kindly die. If the rules of the institution forbid this, then the clever human will work to circumvent this circumvention the institution imposes. It is much harder for men to fashion new institutions, and it is never a guarantee, but for any institutional setting that can be engineered, the members of that institution are always looking to engineer something favorable to them. Presumably, this institution, like the Law generally, exists for a purpose, rather than the institution being a beast operating blindly. But, it is never the institutions that are asked to change. Such a request is contrary to the purpose of Law and what institutions do. The institutions change the biological nation and accordingly change the more developed form of the nation among humans that is recognized as such. If it were the reverse, institutions would be made to conform to something a nation wanted. There are many problems with a naive faith that "nations" or "democracies" should control institutions, but that is not immediately pertinent to the point I wish to make here. The point I make here is that institutions and Laws, which are the only way social engineering plans can be codified, always look to the "biological nation" rather than to the more developed form of such, and they never really care about the markers of a developed nation like its language, culture, and religion. Efforts to alter something like the language by force meet predictable resistance, but something more basic to the nation—its place in nature and the world, and the basic sense of what is what—is always attacked ruthlessly, because the consequences of this re-ordering fall predominantly on the lower social orders, who were marked by the institutions for failure or success. Without this preference of the institutions among humans, humans would be left with "animal instinct" and the plodding pace of change it entails. Humans would not allow such "drift" to happen without taking note of it, and humans would not surrender to "natural change" that would be highly detrimental or confusing. The reasons why humans would form institutions in the first place would be to forestall what would otherwise be settled with a lowly brawl of efforts to "change the world", all of them predictably futile and intended to be so by those who always seek to capture institutions. Those who see the institutions as the problem have always been specifically focused on those institutions, rather than aspersions about some essence they hold or the notion of an "institutional nation" living among us. If there is a social class elevated over another in the same space, such that the two classes are nations apart that only occasionally meet, the wise architect sees the problem not as a struggle of nations for existence, but a struggle of an institution and its members that must be waged with the tools of the institution and the labor of the institution's officers. The grunt soldiers are definitionally shunned by the institutions, even when the institutions are democratic with the full meaning of the concept of "democracy". A democratic institution reliant on the support of its base will probably give something substantial to the soldiers, but the soldiers are not suitable for sitting in assemblies and becoming lawyers or institutional creatures. If they took on those functions, then the institution would still be divorced from its membership fundamentally. Even the favored officers of an institution are alienated from the institution that benefits them, and the needs of the institution become a force of their own. It takes willful ignorance for officers of the institution to fully internalize the institution's ethos over whatever nation they belong to, and the quickest way for an institution to lock ranks is to "nationalize" it, and teach its officers that they are a nation apart from their rivals. Mediation of reality itself is the logical progression of such a view, that came to the forefront wholly during the 20th century. For the animals' part, they didn't exist for an institutional conceit nor for "the nation". The "biological nation" of the animals was simply a fact that they might have some dim affinity for or against, but the animals' wants—and this is not at all alien to much of humanity's true wants which were for the genius and needs of their existence—were the reason why the nation existed, rather than the nation becoming a "going concern" that could assert its destiny apart from the lives of its members.

I remind the reader of the division of labor by function described in Book 2 Chapter 21^[2]. The labor of nations is not primarily extractive in nature when considering the functions carried out by humans to do this. Remarkably little is extracted by life to attain its sustenance, for in nature, humans only claim that which they can hold and utilize. Hoards of wealth must be guarded, and while wealth accumulation exists in these primitive conditions, there is no great imperative demanding ever-escalating extraction. The imperatives of hunter-gatherer society and the behavior of animals suggest something very different. The claim to extract from the land is protective and presumptive rather than active, and far from "mindless consuming", life will in some way manage the land in accord with a goal of long-term security and stability. Hedonism is a terrible survival strategy in any era, and even if the animal has no reasoning ability to see this, the native wants of the animal are for food so that its body's wants are regulated. The animal has no concept of hoarding, and primitive humans have only a rudimentary concept where they already can see the hoard as a liability inviting risk. The aristocratic norm of history has been to view the working and lower classes as extractive upon the land, for the chief product of the lower classes was agricultural products rather than industrial products as commodities. If economic affairs are viewed entirely as productive affairs in the abstract, all of the labor "seems" to reduce to extractive labor upon the land. This is trivially dismissed because the limit to extraction was rarely human labor. It was instead the wealth of the land in situ and whatever qualities of the soil allowed it fertility for growing crops, and the environmental conditions which every farmer had to learn out of necessity if the work of farming was to be viable. The laborious content of farming was not insignificant, but the dislocation of human labor in agriculture was entirely due to a pigheaded social program where labor was to be utterly oppressed and the conditions of life so miserable. War and plague would set off famine, and because farming was beneath the dignity of free men, so many starved, and farms were dilapidated for no reason other than maintenance of the pig-headedness. We would in modernity see the same play out with industry, where viable industrial machinery would do nothing because of a ruling idea that demanded mankind must starve to feed a leisure class and the aristocratic conceits. With all of that said the actual work of farming is most necessary during harvest, which consists of little more than gathering people to pick the season's crop. Much of the remaining work consists of nothing more than reproducing the conditions to allow the essential harvest. If the tasks of agriculture were broken down and systematized, it is not difficult to see inefficiencies and waste inherent in the process, and all of the ways extractive labor is disciplined that are wholly irrelevant to the extraction process itself. But, there is also considerable effort in this task that is necessary for the conditions available to farmers. Farmers plow not with what they should have, but with the tools available to them, and it is another task to obtain better tools. For the farmer, his task is not set to boosting the yield of the land or working himself harder for more product but obtaining the product of the land with the lowest expenditure of toil. Whipping himself more, or being whipped by another, will not make the land any more productive. If there are fertilizers that directly affect the yield for this season, that is a question of knowledge and technology rather than more labor producing much more output. The one requirement for the farmer is that he is attendant to the field to create conditions of growth and that he or some other labor is there to collect the yield. From the point of extraction, the crops must be transported, preserved, and reach end consumers, for them to be objects of utility. Someone can easily that large quantities of potential crops are wasted from spoilage.

I bring this up because a crass view of history judges extractive labor as unworthy of recognition as labor at all, with the serfs and slaves reduced to features of the land, "not really there", "out of sight, out of mind". This works precisely because much of the extractive labor force is not actively extracting. Instead, the lord sees the serf as yet another resource of the land to be harvested in total, as if serfs were produced and waited in situ to be collected, unable to resist domination. The true content of this labor is basic, unskilled labor. It is labor that cannot be disciplined in the abstract, for it cannot be divided arbitrarily. The land where crops are grown cannot be picked up and moved anywhere, and the processes of the environment can only occur over time. It would be highly inefficient to not use the forces of nature in agriculture and insist on "making" the world in the way an industrial laborer fashions a tool or some object.

This is the type of labor that comprises the laborious force of a "biological nation", rather than a given race or nation living parasitically upon the land, its labor irrelevant except as an "inefficiency". To the manager, agricultural labor would be kept in a coffin, awakened for its purpose, and then put back to death, only to be revived by some necromancy as needed. For the farmer, much of his labor is spent on toil that, if he had a technological mindset, he would want to minimize for his own sake. Unlike the manager, for whom toil is an abstraction, the farmer knows that without his toil and drudgery, he will not reap the best harvest. The farmer does everything in this arrangement. He breaks his back plowing the field, must monitor the land so that the harvest will be bountiful, and handles all of the sundry tasks of his own upkeep and various things that might have been expected of the village if the village had such a thing as social services. Absent any reliable institution, the farmer is left with his own honor among peers to obtain the expected social services of the village. For most of history, farmers are near the bottom of civic worth, and so his virtue to obtain these social services is close to non-existent. When institutions provide those services, the "services" are almost uniformly hostile to the farmer's position, working to steal his children and his wife from him regularly. If the farmer is female, the institutions are always eager for new breeding vats. Such is the "brotherhood" of the human race and its predominant institutions. We see here the first and obvious problem. The grade of worth for a laborer is almost always inverted from the toil and suffering the labor entails, and in many cases, the resulting products of the toilers are valued less by moral sentiment, and the products of the favored grades of labor valued more. When one learns that the favored grades of labor were there to build monuments to the rulers' glory and did little of genuine use, we see that perverse inversion was already dominant in the ancient civilizations. Barbaric and primitive societies fare little better. The judgment of civic worth has always been dominated by projection and shows that impress the mind and will of fickle humans, rather than what would be valued if we had to account for the toil and dire needs of a human being or their society. Nothing in nature or "market conditions" does anything to discipline this with any certainty. The victories in the "biological nation" are victories of the superficial, for the world did not share our moral sense of what was good, or right, or even rewarded the dubious labors of the favored supplicants. The superficial values that prevailed were always opportunism and domination if they were to follow the path of least resistance. Only out of necessity would any meritorious quality been asserted, and such merits were always under immediate attack in "natural law". But, eventually, those qualities did arise, and eventually knowledge and technology for their own sake are understood by creatures that can value such things, i.e. humans. Technology and merit themselves offer nothing of substance that can offer a good reason why we do this, and the primitive sentiments of life are not concerned with the nation as an abstraction. Superficial values can only exist "in of themselves", and never "for themselves" or for some ulterior motive that just happens to exist. If the biological nation is to be judged, then it would be judged both from the concept of the political as described in the previous book, and by genuine conditions recognized and interfaced with by the agents involved. The biological nation has no collective intelligence that can be asserted in the way that is invoked, that is oriented towards a singular purpose. If the nation functioned as a singular intelligence, then the invocation of a "biological nation" is inappropriate, and this construct would instead behave as an individual with its own wants. This is at odds with the reality of biological nations; that life-forms conduct their labor individually. An imagined "super-organism" would freely shed its individual members without sentiment or any good purpose, but biological nations do not exist on that basis and never could exist. I believe the reader can surmise that no biological appeal can defend the "national superorganism" for any life-form. Only humans can develop an ideology of self-abasement and "sublation" designed to create this impression, but like so many other things, it is a superficial value. It only becomes prominent within human societies when it is allowed, and then mandated, to be a value. Human societies can and do freely reject such notions, and are further free to notice when this is done since humans have a language to understand their condition and act with finer precision towards aims regarding it. For the ant, whose social behavior forms around hives, there is no "ideology", and to the worker ants, their existence is familiar to them rather than "technocratically imposed" in the way a human on a power trip might desire. We further recall that for many animals, "humanity" or its species' equivalent is not a value, and many of a given species will not reproduce and do not need to reproduce for the species to be viable. So too there are animals that are hermaphrodites, or with mating rituals that entail the death of the male in mating. It would be foolish to assume that "all men are free and equal" in all cases in any biological nation as if there were a natural force compelling egalitarianism. The values of an egalitarian society are upheld in humanity for reasons humans understand. The animals have an inverted problem; they cannot justify a lie that "all animals are created unequal" in some justified way that they would violently enforce in the society, nor can they exacerbate or create at will some social inequality among them. The animals' social behavior of domination is not carried out along class lines or with the conceit of "class" entrenched as the point of their enterprise. Instead, a stable system that is common for a given species is viable only on the terms of the world, rather than any "internal perfection" or "lack of internal contradictions". Like any system in science, there are no "internal contradictions" in the sense bad philosophy invokes.

The technology would be the "skilled labor", which is distilled from base labor and stripped of its "laborious" content. When looking at a natural historical construct like the "biological nation", technology is always cleanly extracted and understood as the automation of so much basic labor, which is effectively "nullified" by the introduction of any technology. In genuine labor that we execute every day, this is not so. Skilled labor cannot be freely reproduced without restraint, nor is the genius allowing this skilled labor a thing that operates without regard for the world where that genius exists. In natural history, though, our moral treatment of labor is irrelevant. Labor's most basic value is always reduced to some "substance of labor" that is ill-defined because, to nature, there is no "labor" as such. It is, to the theories of natural history, a pure abstraction, not even granted the status of technology which is a definite thing out of necessity.

It is the skilled labor that is the object of interest for those who study natural history and try to isolate any "economic" imperatives at work. Basic labor is ultimately taken for granted, and whatever basic labor exists in the "biological nation" is taken in total, with no barrier or struggle involved in it. It is over technology that the struggles of human societies occur, rather than the moral claims of labor which have always been ignored. Among the laborers themselves, their chief aim is a distinction of themselves from the lowest class, whose numbers may be set arbitrarily high or low depending on the qualifications to attain validity. The struggle between labor and the lowest class occurs "by some process behind the backs of the producers", thus ensuring that no matter what the higher orders declare, the ritual sacrifice may continue as befits the laborers' sense of themselves. The favored grades of labor play this game on the disfavored of the valid and recognize that a monopoly on this assignment is the shortest path to political power. That only applies to entities that are wholly aware of what they are doing, and even human beings cannot obsess this much over validity and claims to society. It is here that we find the proof of concept for much of what was written in the concepts of the political and the economic in the past two books. The struggle over who is and isn't "retarded" is at its true core a struggle over technology and command of it. To the technocrat, their struggle over labor is a necessary precondition for the struggle of technology to exist, and it is that struggle that the technocrat or its forebears like the capitalist must win, more than the struggle to command labor as such. In every "grand theory" of human society, the workers ultimately lose, with their sole real function being nothing more than being the hatchetman against the lowest class, and thus "labor is humanity's hatchetman, in the end". But, nothing prevents the workers from recognizing the struggle as a struggle over technology rather than a struggle over the souls of the workers or humanity. The struggle over technology is, to a scientific and rational sense, the immediate contest to be waged.

The remaining categories of labor by function—the mercantile, the fighting and deceptive, the scholarly, and the suffering—are predominantly in the hands of the upper two orders, never cleanly claimed by either of them. The upper two orders delegate these functions to the third order of the technocrats, but only so far and with full awareness that doing so invites peril to their cause. The suffering function is understood only as the liberty to inflict suffering on others, rather than any belief that suffering is intrinsically worth anything. For those who have suffered, they will tell you that their suffering was, in the end, nothing more than a sad waste of existence that could have easily been averted to the detriment of no one. They are all things that are wholly inappropriate for describing the "biological nation". Life was not created to suffer, nor is suffering its primordial substance. That was always a claim of ritual sacrifice and its values, rather than anything science deemed necessary. To the world and natural history, all of this suffering brought nothing good to anyone. The ritual sacrifice cult claims that suffering, war, greed, and the occult mysteries are life's prime want, superseding the lowly pursuits of any genuine labor. Technology, though, cannot be edited out of existence by anyone. It is a material event that has to be acknowledged to speak of natural history as anything other than some generalities about population groups. The necessary schematics for this technology are not a part of natural history, but its results are, and the student of natural history will ask why any event happened. It would be impossible to describe natural history without a history of technology. The crass minds claim to insert technology as the master of all of the aristocratic arts and treacheries and grant technology more power than it actually possesses. Technology does not "make the world move" in some essential way. The life-forms, or any other agent, that act in natural history act not "for technology" or "for themselves". No ulterior motive needs to exist. Technology only describes the abilities and disabilities of life, and none of those abilities necessitate an "ought".

The "biological nation" is not a piece of technology to be used and abused like any other, nor is it a unique exception to a world of technological dominance. It is simply a fact that no other natural demarcation would exist when describing life's behavior. Life is not demarcated by species or "type", nor by any rubric that would be used to parse history as a convenient narrative. For the most part, life-forms' superficial legacy is nothing more than their offspring. If we only considered natural history for the superficial, that is the "point of life"—for life-forms to spawn their successors, ad infinitum. It is not difficult to see that life in the real world doesn't mindlessly carry out that directive for a variety of reasons, one of them being that the act of reproduction is not an automatic, trivial, or fundamental act by any natural law. The true law of nature is that life is aberrant and very uncommon in the world, and nature gave no guarantee that life would be easy or that it would be granted permission to proliferate at all. Once established, life shows remarkably little regard for its supposed primary imperative of producing offspring. It derives ultimately from an impulse in the simplest life, which did little with its existence but reproduce by budding and splitting off. The sac of reproductive fluids is an organ that can be agitated, and at a basic level, that is all that it is for. That is an extremely pointless reason to exist, but the primitive animals are not consumed by existential dread or grant some spiritual importance to this task. They reproduce because there wasn't a good reason for them to say no to that prospect, once all of the difficulties of finding mates are resolved. The reproductive function of the female would be like the consumption of food for her purposes, and what is the gestation and expulsion of offspring but a variant of that impulse of life to split a part of itself off? The male's reproductive instinct can be the pressing of the nerve or a counterpart to the female's hunger. But, these crass stories say little about complex reproduction or the social behavior that results from that origin. They would be functions carried out periodically, leaving even a primitive life-form most of its energy for literally anything else. The result is that much of what life-forms do is something that can be valued with regard to the world or some prominent aspect of it, rather than any "internal" moral gauge that is natural. The conceits of the individual do not "make" morality in the way that is insinuated ad nauseum, but nearly every condition complex life would make relates to other complex life like itself, and those conceits, whether inherited at birth or the result of experience throughout life, would superficially appear prominent in moral thought. It is only in the superficial view that this is so, and a human child can see this for what it is. An animal's moral sense is higher than that of the crass ideologue.

Within the "biological nation", the default political behavior is oligarchy, if the superficial values are the markers observed by the historian. The true behavior is not reducible to a preferred notion of what it "ought" to be, for all of the agents are not wholly obsessed with "politics" nor do they exist for any necessary political goal. We are here only judging what it would mean to impose political economy onto natural history. The last resort of the eugenic creed will be to reverse its claim that political economy can describe history, except the eugenist, dishonest as ever, never renounces its imperial claims to the world and its claim to "change the world" in this pernicious way. Like any oligarchy, the prominent division is between the "in-group" and "out-group", and the most obvious indicator of in-group and out-group status is mating behavior. Without any taboo or insinuation in nature, in-group status can only be determined by apparent behavior and only exists so long as that behavior persists. Nothing about "in-groups" is natural or necessary, since the most primitive in-group would be for life to have no particular interest in such a thing, and mate with whatever is available in a place that is not trying to kill it.^[3] Even the mating itself is not particularly interesting. Mating season is an uncommon period in the life-cycle of most animals, only occurring once they have matured sufficiently and ending after the reproductive cycle of the female ceases. The older male is similarly exhausted after enough such activity, and for the purposes of the superficial, once he has done the essential act, his presence is no longer needed. Such a dim purpose for the male begs the question for him: "Why bother?" It is expected of a species that many of its males never take part in the reproductive game, and this is not at all unusual or unhealthy. The act, for the male, is less than worthless, save for a sense inherited from primitive existence that without reproduction, his death is indeed the final death, and there is no more succession in a biological sense. Even if the male succeeded, nothing in nature or "biological necessity" rewards the male for carrying out the reproductive act, as if some imperative from nature were fulfilled. The male would, if he were obsessed with the superficial, see the reproductive drive as a constant yearning that is never fulfilled because it was not meant to be fulfilled. There is no "endgame" to it that nature prescribed or cared about, and usually the consequences of reproduction are in some way terrible. They have consigned another life to the terror of living in a rotten society, and cannot say what good if any came from it in the end. The buck would be passed to his sons, who repeat the futile cycle and probably lose if we follow what actually happens in the animal kingdom. So, from the outset, membership in this "in-group" is a dubious prize. We then consider the actual conditions of a "biological nation", since they are not purely reduced to the mating act. The primary drives of the animal are to seek sustenance, which unlike the reproductive drive are constant and not things easily removed. Even to get to the mating sweepstakes requires considerable effort to show up, and the act is exhausting and resource-consuming. The eugenic creed inverts this by claiming that reproduction is automatic and production during life is "a burden on society". It is entirely those things done outside of mere sexual reproduction that allow any of this to go on. The inversion is deliberate so that a perverse aristocracy can maximize exploitation in all things, starting at genesis and continuing to death.

Awareness of this is not required for the biological nation to react in some way. Its existence as a "biological nation" is only possible because the social behavior has to involve more than reproduction and ritual sacrifice. This life does not because it had any wisdom to see the truth, but because the misery of such an ideology is wholly unappealing in itself. Life was not born to suffer, did not continue living to suffer, and this suffering did nothing to guide it morally or give it much value. It was challenge and accomplishment that allowed the animal to thrive, rather than toil and suffering for their own sake. There were actual challenges to meet, rather than the reproductive "challenge" which would have been a trivial affair of little importance if not for the monopoly and taboo that was insinuated among humans. Humans are even more aware of the challenges they meet in their existence. Not one of those challenges answers the question of reproduction, which if we had proper moral judgment would be done with minimal rigamarole and viewed as a sad and disgusting necessity for successors to exist. The reproductive drive could just as well be abstracted and invested in things without the essential act as such. We can write books or accomplish deeds we find useful or intrinsically interesting, and those would be our babies. Human babies invite danger and all of the games and sadism of the human race, but this is a peculiar quality that humans choose, and not all humans would have chosen this if they had a say in the matter. It was those of mankind that began the ritual sacrifice and saw this as their surest path to "eternal life" that damned the whole race to this fate, and this was locked in for good when the racial concept of "Man" was promoted, specifically to eliminate all "residue" in human history suggesting we never had to do any such thing. It is undeniable that ritual sacrifice carried out generation after generation, was the birth of the "human race" as such. It was that avarice that separated humans from the animal kingdom. Whatever "proto-matter" of humans was not given over to that was rendered moot and irrelevant, until it became the dominant ritual regarding sex among the human race. Sex is not an activity for the kind or gentle. Those who wanted something decent for their partner and their offspring encountered a human race that wanted nothing more than a vision of the world as a playground for rape gangs, and these were the warbands of primitive humanity. They had no redeeming quality or any interest in "redemption", for to them, the impulses of life were self-evident, "above God", and they only offered excuses with the utmost contempt to everyone else. All they had to do was monopolize any space, and the easiest space to monopolize was the reproductive ritual and mating grounds. For the most primitive forms of "proto-humanity", this would have been easy, because their mating population was not a wide pool. It was a small pool, and movement between those pools was limited. For the disgusting mating behavior of the ape forebears, incest, homosexual domination, malice, and orgies were the rule, where the foulness of their race could fester before it was "perfected" much as the Galtonites want to "perfect" humanity today. An ugliness greater than all of the filth of Sodom was the toxic stew that birthed the creature called "human", and that we cannot deny. The would-be aristocracy of mankind were those who were first on the scene to weaponize this filth, for it was the most readily available vehicle for domination and cajoling. The humans who wanted nicer things would be sniffed out, relegated, and left to their own devices once the rules of the mating game were imposed by the primitive constitution of human societies. Those who violated these rules would find their children were prey by the same instinct that sectioned off the mating game in the first place. Whether the men particularly cared about this "game" was irrelevant. What was needed was for this to take place and assert itself, for the superficial is what is prominent rather than a deep and necessary virtue of any race. The virtuous and good could have survived in these primitive conditions, but all of their virtues were systematically destroyed to join the "in-group", by the crude methods available to animal instinct. Even if they individually were good, that virtue did not pass down to descendants, who were after a time on their own to face the same terror of domination and the malice of their race.^[4]

If we obey "natural law" in a way that only looks at the superficial, we will always receive this result, and the worst of all worlds is the only world. That does not happen in the "biological nation", and every view of history makes clear that there is a process within the "black box", and the superficial is a poor indicator of what any such nation would do, with or without awareness. Even if the malice inherent in such a view of nature were not a consideration, and the reproductive labor was carried out more or less blindly by inherited imperatives, most of life's existence is concerned with local awareness rather than "political" awareness. The first obligation of a life-form is to itself. There is no built-in obligation of the biological nation whatsoever, for this condition only exists because individual life-forms are acting in such a way. The moment there ceases to be reproduction and the continuation of life, the biological nation is no more. It is split into its components, its interests, and whatever meager existence the members of the now-defunct nation make for themselves. Not one of those members or interests can be said to have any "natural" existence. If politics is the model, then the only entity that can be primary is the association. There was an imperious claim that "liberal ideology" proclaimed the triumph of the individual, but any investigation of liberal doctrine understood the individual mind as a condition that came from natural origins, rather than any essential need of such. That is, the body of the liberal subject, such as a human being, did not have any special or unknowable essence. The reasons why humans are constituted as individuals with reason and moral sentiments were always things that could be independently reproduced, and did not need to be questioned by the most dishonest insinuation. We might have a genuine doubt of "the human individual" or "the self", and such doubt was inherent to every concept of science that allowed the modern liberal idea to be sensical. Nowhere in that doubt can imperious assholes insert "me wantee" and the disastrous German philosophy into consideration, as if it had anything to say about our condition. The German ideology aimed to violently impose "me wantee", by interdicting this biological nation and saying it is something entirely different from the truth. It is, as I mention time and time again, pure distilled Lie. What couldn't be changed is that the nation was the only naturalistic entity that could be manipulated. It is that which social engineers would have to modify, rather than any preferred ecology or system.

If someone believed that this social engineering could be accomplished by technology and force alone, they are deluding themselves and will accomplish nothing. The lower three orders not only have no ability to impose social engineering but everything they would do to carry out this task works against such social engineering. For them, the nation is a reality they can only imperfectly act on, so long as they are confined to the proper functions of their order. The actual humans who do this are not confined to the orders at all, but every time they engage in "social engineering", they are temporarily envisioning themselves as the proprietors, whose claim to merit does entail social engineering. The primary task of the proprietor is to consolidate its claims to the world, and then legalize it by establishing the court, first by the caprice of a particular proprietor or alliance of them, and then by a stable court of lawyers and technicians whose specialty is the strange beast that is Law.

This begins not with civilization and despotism, but far earlier. The terror of domination in the animal kingdom has already been described. If the terror were for nothing but distilling life's prime want from social engineering, the result would be most unpleasant. This, though, does not withstand any judgment of merit other than the judgment of those who have nothing in them but the ritual sacrifice. It would not accomplish much except more of the same, and the proprietor will never command this in the final analysis. It is not an effective tool for what the proprietor wants out of social engineering, for such a creed will gladly attack any property that is unfit to service to aristocracy and eugenics.

Who are the first proprietors, but those of the nation who could assert it and did exactly that? They have at first no merit or distinction other than this, and so, the first utterance of property is a superficial claim, much as the study of natural history would indicate. The proprietor has no place whatsoever in natural history. It can create by its assertion and will a place in artificial history, and so, the doctrines of the proprietors throughout history are inherent in the genesis of property as such. All of these doctrines apply to artificial history, and so naturalistic claims are wholly alien to the proprietors' genuine aims. The proprietors never believed for themselves that nature granted to them anything whatsoever. Their doctrine has made clear that their existence is opposed to nature and the world, and that included all other such proprietors before they could form alliances and oligarchies of their own. The claims of property are very different from the in-group claims of those who wish a monopoly on validity or to defend their stake in this. The proprietor does not need "social proof" or "validity" as such. The deed bearing his or her name is the document attesting to their right to exist, and esteem must be commanded to follow from this. The name and the office of the proprietor is its bond, and it is only that at first. The proprietor resents being a cog of institutions or machines and has historically dreaded machinery altogether. He or she is above machinery, "above God", and above the moral interests of labor or the scheming of the commons, in their conceits and claims about themselves. This claim is necessary for the proprietor to begin in earnest the task of engineering society. First, it begins with the claimable property close at hand and then extends to the general theory of technology and society, where the proprietor encounters its bitter and eternal enemy—the commons—in a form recognizable to us today. This meets resistance, which prompts the proprietor to reconsider their strategy, seek temporary allies, and view the problem as one of struggle with victory in sight. The one goal, and the only goal that can be consistent for the proprietor, is to affirm the claims made. The rationale for seeking this claim does not need to rely on any will or appeal to nature, for such an argument is obviously folly. The only important outcome is that the claim to merit is definite, rather than merely a suggestion or a thought experiment. It is a judgment of history rather than intellect alone, and this applies to artificial history rather than natural history. If the claims were actually natural, then there is no struggle as such for the proprietor and no security whatsoever for the proprietor's claims. The proprietor would be reduced to a dumb agentur, and it would be the proprietor rather than the lowest class that is cast off as evolutionary flotsam. Seeing this, the proprietor does not need nature whatsoever. Its claim is that is outside of nature.

It could have been that property was declared by right rather than blind "might". Genuine strength, to be itself a meritorious enterprise, requires certainty of the proprietor that what it does will work, at least for the duration of the claim. It requires a going concern rather than merely a suggestion or the fickle want of such a thing. The right to property is not the same as moral right or justice, nor does it necessarily reward any particular imperative. What the proprietor needs is something internally consistent, so that the enterprise of the proprietor, which has no place in nature and truly no place in rational discourse, can continue. The proprietor has long been aware of this problem—how to rule forever and make water flow uphill—but is not given over to existential causes for the enterprise or some belief that this can be made automatic. A proprietor could see that the best claim it can make to secure property is to grant subjects in its domains the thing they wanted in the first place, without any aristocratic barrier mandating starvation.

In all of this, the aristocracy has no proper role in science and history whatsoever. Their function, which concerns its own peculiar history and secrets, is wholly superfluous to proper history and any reason for the enterprise of nations, proprietors, or anything someone outside of their clique wants. What aristocracy does is create a nation apart from the entire enterprise and, through repeated treachery, "make it so", so that they hold a monopoly on in-group status. It is the aristocracy that originates the fascist conception of "in-groups". In a democratic polity, the "in-group" only refers to those who share in the enterprise of existence, rather than any moral claim to oppress any other group, even the out-group that lives alongside the polity but is markedly excluded from it. It could very well have been that the "biological in-group" saw the out-group as wholly irrelevant, and "two worlds forever apart" would be realized right away, which works for both. The property claims make this problematic for the out-group since the aims of the in-group would have to be reconciled with an association that wants very different things—and at first, they are unknown wants of the out-group, for the "out-group" is not a singular association but every association outside of the association that judges membership. When describing public relations in the technocratic polity, this will be explored further, for the technocratic version of this did not rely on a series of just-so stories to make it true, but required an effort far more thoroughgoing than anything appropriate to this book and the current chapter. Because the "in-group of the biological nation" is not defined by any necessary by-laws, it is entirely appropriate for the in-group to see the elements of the out-group as people with whom cooperation is possible, even if they are never mistaken for members of the club. The out-group is not necessarily starving or deprived here. For the people outside of the group, their isolation may be a condition they chose due to finding the company of other people sickening and corrupting to their soul and what they wanted out of life. Or, the "out-group" contains an association far bigger than the "in-group", and this is a fear aristocracy must insinuate is eternal as part of aristocracy's monopoly on the right of transgression.

For all of these claims, the one thing the proprietor can rely on for this social engineering task is specialized technology—"the tools of the master" so to speak, which cannot be used to break the master's domain by the same logic. Contrary to the braying of aristocracy, forced ignorance is a terrible basis for engineering a society. Carried out to its inevitable endgame, the regime of forced ignorance produces slaves who can't know up from down or men from women, who do stupid and self-destructive things. In this way, "a Satanic race cannot change". It is not that information allows the engineered agents to act on their own volition, but that without that common information, the agents do not function as agents. They would have no indicators of what to do, and so they would be paralyzed. A death cult wants this paralysis so that no one can say no while the ritual sacrifice happens. The social engineer sees this death cult as a waste of effort that makes any social engineering impossible. If there is any value to occulting information, it is not because this occulted information is helpful for social engineering, but because there is a political struggle that cannot be resolved by any amount of social engineering. Social engineering does not substitute for or negate politics at any point. It also does not change a simple rule described in Book 2 Chapter 4. This is that if information in society were perfect—"perfect information in perfect systems"—there would no longer be a "society" as such. All of the agents would be able to foresee that the condition of "society" serves no use even as a fact, and there would be no ambiguity between them. There would be nothing to engineer.

All of the efforts of social engineer presume that no one involved has this "perfect information", and if they did, then it would not be the engineer that decides the outcome of society. Because everyone would know what is to be done, all that could happen is that a pointless struggle plays out before the inevitable outcome of society is imposed. At no point does the struggle, which originated in politics, become automatic by any information about society. Only when information is held as a monopoly of one person between that person and the Other does the struggle become "automatic". This doesn't actually solve the struggle technocratically or rationally. It is instead the imperious assertion of the master over the slave, which follows entirely from the master's whims rather than any good reason or even an artifice making it so. The entire project of the "master-slave dialectic" is a conceit of someone who wants victory to be automatic and easy by the power of bullying. It must turn to the one wellspring it has—ritual sacrifice—to make good on its claims. The ritual sacrifice is indeed information about the society in question, both between the "master" and "slave" and regarding every dyad in society, none of which were "masters" or "slaves" in that crass manner of thinking. If the ritual sacrifice is part of that "perfect information in perfect systems", then it is not the "master" that rules, but the ritual sacrifice itself. "A Satanic race cannot change." This of course presupposes that any such monopoly of information is active, or that ritual sacrifice is the only power in the world, which is not the true condition in which humans live. The actual, true master in such a world would not be the cult of torture and sacrifice, even though it would appear that way to the impressionable mind of the human animal. The true master, so far as any such thing can be known, would be a demonic egregore, which draws from a realm of superstitions and greater evils than the ritual sacrifice itself does. The "ruler", so far as humans are concerned, would still be ritual sacrifice, its cult, and all related institutions, but the rulers in this situation are madmen. They are only capable of clamoring for ever more ritual sacrifice to feed the beast. Such is the god of the German ideology. These madmen may, in their better moments, invent some "system" in which their deities hand down commands to the world and conduct their Great Work, and so the ritual sacrifice is viewed as a means to an end. If that happens, anything subject to science or independent inquiry is replaced with a peculiar family of superstitions that are inherently the property of an intellectual monopoly. It is this that the ritual sacrifice is for, rather than the mere display of public torture and humiliation. Ritual sacrifice does not rule "for its own sake". It can only rule in particular ways. For humans, this means that ritual sacrifice can only invoke one word above all others: retarded. Perhaps this can explain to the reader why I invoked that word in the title of this series because I was not just looking for colorful language to describe a contemptible ideology. There would be nothing other than this peculiar condition of forced ignorance that could rule, and so in the end, forced ignorance only could serve itself. If, however, ignorance were merely a condition that exists for subjective knowledge only, and the participants are aware of their ignorance, they are not obligated by any natural law to resolve that ignorance. It would be quite counterproductive to claim that any subjective knowledge like ours could have anything close to "perfect information", nor would such a thing be necessary for social interaction and cooperation to commence. We do not gain any strength or benefit ourselves by being ignorant, but an agent in society only has so much time and the faculties available to them to know things. Every social engineering program would have to work on the assumption that agents possess limited information and have to work with it, without asserting an imperious monopoly on what anyone is "allowed" to know. It would instead be understood that superfluous knowledge for a particular social relation is irrelevant until it is made relevant by such pernicious claims to control reality by controlling information. In other words, "retarded" made itself necessary by imposition alone, and the origin of the curse is from the foul soul of the human race, and a peculiar obsession of humans rather than anything general to the universe. Among humans, the invocation of this curse is not a foundational rule of their society or their project. Two children can see that such a rule would be stupid, until one of them or a third party insinuated that this was to be a thing, by summoning the foul gods of their race.

The social engineer's tools are not the tools of the Germanic "master morality" or other such foolishness. They are always tools premised on command and control of a situation, without regard for the subject's willingness or want for the project. If the subject does not want to live in the engineered society, it will be made to conform to the plan of the engineer, or it will be ejected. This appears superficially like the in-group and out-group distinction mentioned above, but unlike that, the engineering can be conducted without any regard for membership in the group or any association that is part of natural history or a genuine "nation". In some way, this will always happen, even when two ends of a dyad attempt to "engineer" each other. The result of such a "struggle" is destined to produce nothing more than waste. However, communication between the rival engineers is possible. The imperious social engineer expects all subjects to conform to the mindset of an engineer or to be reduced to flotsam, and cannot do otherwise. Even if the engineer knows the folly of imposing such a will on reality and those who do not want to submit to it, the engineer is demanding compliance for any of this to happen. The competing side of the dyad may stand its ground and say "You cannot have this", and make clear a counter-offer. But, after all is said and done, the engineer and the engineered return to separate lives, trying their best to ignore what has happened. The subject of this has an obvious distaste for being forced to do what it did not want to do. The engineer wants to believe that this time, the plan will work, for whatever purpose the engineer had in mind to make society more amenable to what the engineer considered useful. If there is any genuine dialogue between these two, the dialogue does not affect the result of any engineering, in any way that suggests that the struggle of a dialogue has any relevance to the question. A genuine dialogue between two minds or souls, recognizing genuine friendship or some condition of coexistence that is more than mutually beneficial, would occur apart from the task of social engineering. Two people may be very different from each other and would have nothing to do with each other in most times and places, and the result of this dialogue if it happens may be little or nothing, but it still can and does occur, for a want that is never a product of social engineering. If all of life were to be reduced to a social engineering project, and all society existed to be bent to it, that is not a life worth living or a society worth keeping. Both would, having seen the folly of imperious declarations of what society should be, see that the best result is for both participants to have as little to do with each other as possible. The engineer may hold some title, which becomes property, and the subject is more than happy to be rid of the alien that it did not ask for and did not need for anything. It is the social engineer that creates the hell, rather than some ulterior motive that "corrupted" the social engineer, or the unwillingness of subjects to get with such a ruinous program. The German ideology did not describe the real situation of the engineer, but distilled it to this malice and this malice alone, eliminating all other purposes of social engineering. Otherwise, social engineering would be seen as a product of a sick society where we were not able to relate to each other in a better way, but a product that nonetheless exists because it might forestall something worse, such as unlimited malice or the lurid rituals humanity had learned of throughout the ages.

The social engineer began in its crudest form from the commons, and it is there that the social engineer of today resides, having distilled the functions of government to what was most efficient for the apparatus to function. In primitive conditions, there is no property or merit as such, and no tools ready-made for engineering to amount to any grand change. Wealth may be accumulated and hoarded, and surplus may be appropriated. The habits of domination and malice were known in the animal kingdom. All of how social engineering could proceed were not the native interest of the proprietors but were the interest of technology which the proprietors coveted. The aristocrat disdains social engineering, delegating all of the mundane details of its avarice to subordinates so that the aristocrat can be fed more torture and "pleasure". It is a crass belief that social engineering is the interest of the proprietors and their close relation, the warriors and soldiers who would be the basis for making such claims. But, social engineering is not war by other means. Why the warrior fights, and what warriors entirely do, is never reducible to social engineering, even though that is the essential act of war—to impose by force a change in the enemy society, whatever its nature while maintaining the cohesion of the warrior's own society for the effort. Many times the warriors of a society find themselves at odds with the ruling ideas of that society, and warriors are set against the very people they ostensibly fight for and with. The virtues of the warrior do not have much to say about the social engineering task. What is prized in the warrior is not specialized knowledge or technology that is proprietary. The warrior's merit is due to a reckoning of history that established merit, and the warrior can never undo a demerit. History does not work that way, where it can be sublated or redeemed. That is not possible within war, and it is not possible within social engineering in any serious inquiry on the matter. "Once retarded, always retarded." The warrior's interest in this, as simply a proprietor of these honors, is so that the warrior need not suffer fools, to carry on with the practice of war and collection of the spoils. "It's not personal", he says, even though it was very personal to the poor soul he just raped and plundered. There is no redemption because redemption was never a concept appropriate to war. You win or you lose, and the result is there for an annal to record. Editing the annals is just intellectual cowardice. It is never more than that. There was no greater purpose to the war. Any greater purpose than victory had to be supplied by an alien source. That alien source is not monopolized by anyone, no matter what aristocracy claims about the universe. The conduct of war itself, in all of its aspects, has no greater purpose or worth, and so too is the social engineering bereft of any inherent purpose, or a purpose that can be found anywhere in the "circle of life" and the five-caste hell we have operated in for too long. We can see in the five-caste hell reasons why, for nothing more than a conceit of knowledge, it did turn out the way it did. This is necessary to speak of an origin of the body of armed men, which is the classical concept of the state's machinery rather than any notion that the state was actually made of magic, ideology, or some virtuous spirit of labor or genius. As technology, the state's machinery is no different from any other machinery, and what was state property can be usurped, privatized, or if it is human capital, break free from its servitude and assert what the state and society now are. So, we are left asking where this body of armed men comes from.

The toilers create the nation. We may argue about its genetic material or some origin other than toil itself, but not one thing in the world was "ready-made" or granted so freely if we are thorough in our conception of what genius really is. The toilers need not be men or the agents of the "biological nation", but the agents, like everything else, came from the muck, and so in that sense, they toiled for the nation to exist, atop all of the other alien toilers that were exploited in the past. This is the classical excuse to say the Buddha's lie "life is suffering", but it remains a simple fact that toil is the genius that allows this natural historical entity of a biological nation to exist. Labor proper is those of the toilers who were able to assert that they were something more than toil personified, who attained by some virtue a right to call themselves laborers rather than yet more muck. The technocrat scuttles this as soon as it can, declaring that only technology liberates men from the muck, and embracing a low cunning and opportunism common to their proclivity. It is a crass version of history that the warriors and proprietors hold the same low cunning and nothing more, and the aristocrats another low cunning that allowed the most venal and rotten to rule by insinuation alone. This is faggotry. Very often, the technocrat's low cunning wasn't carried out in pursuit of a political goal, but because technology could make their life easier, and there was an inherent advantage in sharing this knowledge so that a source of labor's mischief could be circumvented entirely. For the lowest class, this "get-rich-quick" scheme is very attractive, and it would have happened for the first inhabitants of the muck to escape the world of unlimited, "natural" toil, where they become the first evident sign of life and a "biological nation". But, there was no getting rich quick or a sense that such a goal was the point. The point of technology to make life easier is at first a simple outgrowth of life's stabilizing functions, not to press the utilitarian's torture button as befits the god of their filthy race.

The social engineer does not hold a monopoly on toil or imperiously declare who shall suffer and who shall not. The social engineer itself toils to make real its project in some way, and the project is not contingent solely on assigning quotas of toil and misery. The important role of toil in social engineering is that, if we weren't working against the general condition of toil in the world, social engineering as such wouldn't be possible. Social engineering without some toil or effort would either be superfluous or an imperious decree that belongs not to technology but to aristocracy and its conceits, which have no proper role in engineering anything but its own rituals, for the purposes of those rituals. It is not true that all toil is social engineering, for most toil for purposes entirely unrelated to any plan for society or any greater concept of a general theory of technology, or a general theory about how the world should be. Labor, the more elite version of toil, has little to do with a "grand master plan" or "Great Work" imagined in the technocratic mode of thought. The laborer regards the world on his or her own terms, whereas the toiler is pushing itself to work without any say in the terms of this labor. If the laborer decides when he will or will not labor, even if that decision is coerced, it is only toiling when it is pressed upon and made to conform. The pure toiler, whose social rank is defined by such, has no say whatsoever in the condition. The toiler, the lowest class, is told from cradle to grave "There is no hope, there is no end", and similar such sayings. Terror is the rule of life for the lowest class, from which there can be no escape. In Egypt and Babylon, the favored slaves were still favored, and in the way that they could be free, they were free enough to know their privilege and the right to attack the lowest class at will. The difference between labor and the lowest class, even among slaves, is stark and immediate. But, none of this was automatic or given. Did the laborer have any good reason to do this, or show much interest in the project? Usually, the laborer does not think of this problem, and could even see that the lowest class needs to be protected, for the laborer knows that once there is no one to kick around, they are next to be eliminated, knowing the proclivity of the human race. It is possible to imagine principles like this in force for any agents, rather than this being a peculiar human problem. Someone has to toil. That is the nature of the social engineering project, rather than a malice introduced from above. I concern myself here with the ordinary toil of existence, rather than the toil of ritual humiliation and torture which is a peculiar evil that is not germane to social engineering and plays no worthwhile function in the elevation of the body of armed men.

Why is social engineering toil? It is not a state of mind or subjective experience. It is instead a truth about social engineering itself as a concept. If we had the relations we wanted, the "toil" of social engineering would be minimized. There would still be sacrifices, tradeoffs, and necessary actions that are limitations on what the participants of the nation would have wanted or found most natural to them individually. Social engineering would still have to answer moral values that the members of society hold. The "pure technocrat" finds all such moral aims repulsive, while everyone can see that moral aims are "corruption" to the conceits of the higher orders, who have their own special morality. Social engineering does not answer questions about the genuine collectivity of any association. The social engineer works with technology and information, rather than the collective purpose of the association or any sense of camaraderie, which for the engineer only exists as abstractions. That collective spirit of the association says nothing about social engineering just by itself or the necessary functions of the members of the collective, and such a collective spirit is only described as the whole function of the unit, rather than its disparate parts. The engineer can reference such an abstraction and impart knowledge of it to the members of society, but the "collectivist" impulse has nothing to do with society proper, and so it only has political force through the abstractions individual minds hold and act on. Even if the abstraction is understood as the chief unit of political action, it is always known that the collective cannot function without its members, and the members can never be "sublated" out of existence. The social engineer would be tasked with ensuring compliance with the formation collectivity implies, or encouraging the best conditions for the whole of society as the engineer would see it. The engineer cannot be presumed to automatically have the best interests of the collective or other people in mind. Any engineer seeking that goal has to first overcome its own biases regarding society, and be able to render the collective as an abstraction that is most suitable to describe its function. The exercise of this is not merely a question of intelligence or knowledge of the fact that guarantee success. The engineer overcoming conceits must answer the question not in theory, but in the real world regarding the society to be engineered, for whatever theory is believed to operate, social agents resist this engineering, and even if they didn't, the engineer has to overcome any conceits that would obstruct the success of the project. Likewise, the ruled who are subjected to this engineering have to toil at least to conform to the project. Any toil for toil's sake is not for the purposes of this chapter relevant to the engineering problem. It would be purely a waste product of our ruinous social constitution, and that is one thing a social engineer could remove if any such enlightened goal were sought and believed by anyone. The point of social engineering would be to accomplish those aims without the waste of extra toil, obfuscation, or perversion of the moral want that would be the engineer's want. Nothing tells anyone that every social engineer should have the same want, and in this false universalism we see many of the proclivities of the technocrats described in Book 3.

The state and the political task are not social engineering tasks. The political general fear has nothing to do with social engineering, except as an abstraction that itself enters social communication and relevant information that is conveniently removed from the engineer's reality. If the engineer had any emotional reaction to the same general fear, that impulse is not relevant to the social engineering task. The toil is a particular type, to create by labor technologies that facilitate what the social engineer needed a society to do. This can be operative for the collective, for a unit or "linkage" within the society, or for the individual relating to other individuals in a network. All of these eventually reduce to the same thing; that the engineer recognizes that society is comprised of these individuals, and no other unit can be said to be the proper agent. The social engineer's task precludes the generalized functions of technology, and it is expected that this social engineering task exists without regard for the "orders of the circle of life" altogether. The social engineer has to resolve the struggles of society in some way, and the solution is not mediation or compromise, but final action. This act is not bound to any legal requirement. The creation of Law is instead a type of social engineer, and Law presupposes this type of social engineering. I mentioned in Book 3 Chapter 11 what "Law" entailed, and claimed that imperium was the basis of workable laws within the concept of the political. Here, imperium is one type of social engineering. It takes the imperial apparatus time and energy to enforce the imperial power over life and death. All that social engineering produces need not be Law, but all Law originated because there was a social engineering task requiring this remedy to prevent the alternative to Law. It is not a given that social engineering is tasked with efficiency or justice. A social engineer can choose to create malice so that the problems of society are not resolved or are made impossible to resolve. For the engineer though, any program of general, systematic malice is a system that works in some way that can be discerned, and for the engineer, the malice is as natural as any other plan drawn for engineering. The engineer figured out this plan before implementing it, and this is a peculiarity of social engineering rather than the insight of labor generally. Whether the plan works entirely as intended is another matter, but any social engineer is obligated to think of all consequences that result from the effort, for the question posed does not tolerate a limited answer. If the social engineer only works with some institution or frequently recurring interaction within society, it is not on the social engineer to answer questions for the whole of society necessarily, but within the domain that was engineered, the engineer has to consider anything that can go wrong, and all of the things that can go right, for this practice to be one someone would risk anything to do. Anything less than this consideration will be called an obvious invitation for malicious actors, and even if the social engineer can get away with imposing a shitty plan for society, this does not pass without notice. Such faith in the public's stupidity is a terrible way to engineer any society, as we have seen for the past 100 years.

When making the plan, the tasks of social agents are handed down. The wise engineer has figured out what particular humans can do and the likelihood of someone losing interest in the project, and if the system fails, it's on the engineer first. The bulk of the engineers remain in the order of the commons or some equivalent, while labor and the lowest class are enforcers that only sometimes interact with the technology. There are then those who are elevated with tokens of authority to command others, for this was a social plan that worked for humans and their impressionable minds. The body of armed men exists because humans are impressed by the investiture of temporal authority in men, and then because this virtue was essentialized and made proprietary. The body of armed men cannot operate unilaterally, for they would lack a funding stream or any real connection to spiritual authority. Even if the "armed men" appeared superficially more benign and claimed they opposed exploitation, they would still be armed men for the purposes of social engineering. The token of authority and right to act, even if limits are placed on it and this was for the public good, is what distinguishes the body of armed men from the rest of the populace, rather than any acquired knowledge that justified this body of armed men or its members, saying that they held virtue and right to command others because they had guns. Every time the token of authority is not enough, the social engineer must know how to use its guns and all other tools of control, which also involve bribes, humiliations, and things long expected to work on humans. Humans have no monopoly on this behavior. It is not the type of domination that prevailed in the animal kingdom or one that proceeded by any instinct. Such instincts are wholly inappropriate to the body of armed men that conduct social engineering or arise from the entity called "the state".

The particular political claims of the state and its officers conduct social engineering, but this engineering applies only to the political class and those who are immediate subjects granted freedom and agency to act politically. The social engineering conducted on the political class cannot operate through the same cajoling and brute force that social engineering on the lower orders has been done. Free men certainly do not tolerate such an invasion. That bribery entails a very different social relation, some of which are the subject of the next chapter.

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