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Tradition and customs have no place in the "biological nation". The entire purpose of reducing human existence to biopolitics was to strip away those traditions so that social engineering could be done entirely on terms set by Empire and the dismal science of Empire. Biological politics was chosen as this tool not because it was the only tool available, but because it was amenable to the peculiar conceits of humans, who were already inclined to think of genealogy and aristocracy as the dominant and paramount values of their societies. It would have been possible to conduct this social engineering through another vehicle, like a direct appeal to the general theory of technology, a theory of energy, or a metaphysical interpretation of world history. It could not have proceeded by politics for its own sake, because any complex politics is the result of something that never occurred in nature. Where patron-client relations are merely "voluntary", tradition and customs only exist in a meaningful context where the actors understand such a concept, applying it not to a "nation" or any demarcated polity, but to existence itself. Tradition and custom, then, are fundamentally moral judgments rather than technological artifacts. The particular "forms" and "symbols" of tradition are only relevant because they hold meaning to someone, and this meaning has to persist from the past to the present day. If a tradition no longer matches present conditions, it cannot survive nor can it be a reliable guide. The body of traditional customs is never fixed by any establishment, even if it is presented as such since the "ancestors" whose ways we follow are always the aristocracy's ancestors rather than our own in the public arena. The Roman example of mos maiorum is the example that most readily conforms to the subject matter here, but it should not be mistaken for the sole notion of tradition in Roman society. There was a tradition for the plebs and a tradition for the proletarians, and the old rural Pagan traditions were rooted in superstitions that largely failed to enter the aristocratic historical record, for the ways of the farmer were a thing exploiters loathed and denigrated at every opportunity. It did not matter if they were conquerors like the Romans or merchants like the Carthaginians. Farmers who till the land, usually as slaves, invariably are near the bottom of the social hierarchy, but also have the most reason to adhere to traditions, since their connection to agriculture and transmission of knowledge is the one thing the farmer holds that not only allows the farmer's own self-sufficiency, but allows the farmer to have something to offer to pay off the brigands calling themselves "civilization", who are not only too lazy to farm, but too stupid to do it correctly, and they really are stupid and incapable of grasping basic things like "crops require water". The rulers of civilization never seem to really know why their idiotic "Jehad" creates famine, since it can't possibly be their perfect system, and its perfect information that no one is allowed to acknowledge as the source of 99.9999% of humanity's woes. (One-millionth of humanity's woes left to us is still a lot of woe we can place on our own faults, but I feel given the historical disparity of population and size of hierarchical units, that this one out of one million ratio is roughly correct if we were to follow a genuine measurement of "woe" as a substance of its own. Sadly, it is our frank admission of guilt that aristocracy always pounces on, for their exultant shouting for more atrocities goes to 11 on a scale of 10.)

Social engineering is premised ultimately on force, whether it is mechanical or pseudo-mechanical in a way that reifies it as "super-mechanical". I.e., social engineering can be understood as simple cause and effect, or it can operate "dialectically" in a way that is sensical to humans, which is really a more complex mechanical interaction that linguistic thought renders more effectively through stories between two objects, usually with one being the object and another being the subject in the linguistic rendering. Patronage and the Law are premised ultimately on voluntary interactions between the agents, however, it appears that this "voluntary" interaction is coerced. There is no mechanical force directly compelling any Law or patronage to persist in any sense, even an assumed relation that is near-automatic given the imperatives both participants would follow due to what their bodies are and do without any realistic ability to control that. For example, if the patron withholds water and food from the client, the client will starve without finding some way to exist in the world. It is the holding of a total monopoly that presents the force, rather than a direct force of the patron compelling the client to starve or "be" something other. The monopoly is never granted by anything in nature, and it is the expectation of the agent that "life finds a way", no matter how desperate.

The tradition is premised ultimately on superstition, the taboo, and the degrees of initiation familiarizing subjects with the causes of why and how the world or some part of it operates. It operates only for those who have already ruled out their personal, private conditions and relations as an immediate source of their woes. Tradition only can operate when standards of comparison with other things in the world are possible, such that meaningful causal chains can be ascertained independently of a purely "rational" sense of agency. That is to say, tradition is not a metaphor for a very complex rational understanding of the world, where some thought process of the agent is the "kernel" for understanding the world through a few simple instructions. That certainly exists "under the hood", but that is not what allows tradition to be a sensical concept. Tradition operates because the agent is aware that there is a past and "ways of our ancestors" that can be ascertained for any particular social situation. It is no different for the man in isolation, who has a "social awareness" of himself in a world where he does not belong or have any relations with anyone like him. That is the simplest example, for traditions start from an individual's recollection and are spread by entities with an understanding of the concept. They do not exist in the world as free-floating spirits or "world-spirits", and cannot. Social engineering is accomplished by worldly forces—even if we surmised the origin of the force was supernatural, all meaningful force regarding us either only takes place in the material world familiar to us, or posits that some part of the agents is "supernatural" and abides by some physics similar to the physics of the readily accessible world. Patronage and Law pertain to relations in that world, and to abstractions that can be reconstructed independently without any "special knowledge". The concept of "tradition", while it can be reproduced by great effort, is never so freely reproducible that traditions can be manufactured from prefabricated parts as if they could roll off an assembly line. The relations of patronage and Law can be principle be changed by diktat, assuming the authority to do this exists somewhere. Tradition does not change by diktat, and this is what sobers Law if it were to run amok and its rulings were treated as philosophical "Absolute Knowledge" rather than a tool we built for ultimately local purposes and our rational knowledge of the world. Changes to tradition have to account for the entirety of the world they relate to and the entirety of the body of tradition. Perhaps one taboo can be changed from experience, but all of the superstitions and taboos of a society are public knowledge for them to be potent enough to function as tradition. If there is a taboo against eating pork, there are reasons why that taboo exists. It is never an arbitrary whim, even if the original reason for the taboo has long passed from the world and tradition has yet to catch up with modern mores among the public. The tradition is not one with the demos or nation, but it is only understood by an acceptance that there is a nation or demos, and the very existence of such a grouping, however it is constituted, is a necessary precondition of tradition. The tradition does not apply singularly to the nation in question, but applies to the concept that such things exist and can themselves become part of the tradition. The names and historical meanings of tribes or groupings of people are necessary for building reference points for the superstitions and taboos relevant to tradition. This makes it something very different from the religious superstitions as a concept mentioned in Book 3, or even the superstitions of the more developed nation which are particular to the political norms and expectations of that nation or that polity. Traditions do not pertain to a particular nation or any necessary political outcome. They are this historical understanding that I have attempted to reconstruct in these recent chapters, which begins with the "biological nation" and must become something more to describe what historically relevant societies do.

The first traditions arise from patronage itself, and so they have some institutional basis before they become something more. Tradition is not confined to a historical reckoning of these relations, in which the patron decides unilaterally what is and is not a tradition. That has always been the conceit of those who insist on commanding reality in this way and mediating all that happens in the world. Where the tradition arises is not from the assertion of the patron or struggle of the client, but the recognition of both that this situation exists. It is a situation riddled with traps, hidden clauses, excuses, and many things to fear. It is, in other words, something where the evil may lurk. Therefore, tradition and religion have much to say about each other. Tradition is not religion, and tradition by itself has no answer to or theory of the evil. Religion without traditions, whether they harness existing traditions or create their own, would find their inquiry into the evil is hampered if the evil pertains to the actions of human beings. It is in the study of the evil that traditions answer questions appropriate to the dismal science we have described. But, the traditions and normative expectations of human society are never reducible to a morass of evil impulses, however often such a tradition is invoked to inspire fear in a population. Traditions also speak of the aims of goodness or some other moral goal that can be seen in the social situation. All such moral aims pertain not to the social agents or efforts to engineer their relations but to the world and the ability of social agents to assign meaning to all that exists in their historical domain. Tradition can only look to history, or treat the present and future as if they were historical constructs to draw upon; for obvious reasons, this has almost entirely concerned the past or a presumed past condition that grants the relations of the society an extra legitimacy that cannot be easily challenged by lawyers or patrons. It is at the same time something believed to hold merit and can be claimed as property, and it pertains to the moral aims of labor that resent and resist the order of property. But, tradition is never confined to these two orders. The traditions of human societies are an outgrowth of their natural history rather than a preferred notion of what the society should be. If someone wishes to override the tradition, they will have to defeat the tradition and extirpate its influence on the present. Nowhere are the traditions "primordial" or things existing trans-historically. They only arise in sufficiently developed societies, where the concept of such a thing can be appreciated. This has meant for us that tradition is a uniquely human construct, in any sense that "tradition" would be valued. The ingrained memory of generations after generations of animal life, or the full sweep of history, is not the same as a tradition. Traditions are not a fait accompli of history but originate in the critique of history that the critique of humanity's conditions. The tradition is, in other words, our first insight into these conditions that does not follow from the premises of mechanical history or any history we have described thus far. Even though it is a thoroughly historical product, the tradition only exists because we could doubt it, and we could ask if the traditions were different. A tradition is something different from superstition or taboo, or their more developed and reified forms that exist under religious law. Superstitions are only the origin of some traditions. In other cases, the tradition is invoked as a metaphor for some very complex interaction that the members of society are familiar with and could independently describe. They might only describe the parts of the tradition they can recount and so an individual's judgment of the tradition might be simplified or erroneous. It is very unlikely that most members of society can reproduce perfectly the tradition in their person, or preserve an active tradition in society perfectly without corruption of the record. But, in all cases, the tradition is something valued because it can be reproduced and valued for its own sake rather than for an ulterior motive. Very few things are added to the traditions of a society, nor are all traditions "always valuable". They are only valuable because historically they were proven effective. Once they cease to do what the tradition did in the past to be valued, their value is suspect. If, however, a society is understood primarily by these traditions, and its imminent relationships are incidental to that, it is not a trivial thing to remove them or edit them. Every tradition is proven over time or it is quickly abandoned as a bad idea, or it persists by some terrible compulsion in humanity to continue doing things that do not work until, after even more needless struggle, the tradition is removed, often without a good plan ready to go in its place.

What tradition supplies are not idols or totems or fetish opposite, but the exact opposite. They provide the context for humans in society to make sense of this thing which at first appears as a confusing lot of abstractions. Nothing in the native hardware of human beings, or their most obviously sensical interactions, would tell them to reproduce any human society by some inborn quality. The hereditary material, so far as it is "hereditary", is primarily from traditions that have been reproduced time and time again. At first the tradition is a habit formed by us superstitious humans, who already have ways to acquire habits out of necessity as part of our learning and education. We may have a tradition for ourselves that is at odds with the surrounding society. The traditions worthy of note, though, are reproduced at the level of societies and in particular relate to the nation, whether we speak of a "biological nation" or a more developed abstraction of such. If traditions are adopted by institutions, individuals, families, or some social formation that isn't constituted as a "nation" in any sense, there is a primitive tribal sense that is always at work with traditions. It is possible to form an ersatz "nation" based on institutional traditions, or even in principle make such a "nation" more or less arbitrarily. If you imagined a selection of human beings plucked from wherever they were and planted on a deserted island, something would result, that has little to do with their former affiliations if no one expects they can return home. This thought experiment, one of the Robinsonades, never actually happens in the wild, but it is reproduced by institutions frequently. Strangers who would have little to do with each other are brought together in peculiar institutions like the school or the workplace. Even in these social experiments or engineering projects, there is no escaping that traditions arise despite the engineer's efforts or the influence of patronage.

The institution does not create the traditions ex nihilo. The traditions do not create the institution or bend institutions by some law of nature. They do not interplay in any necessary struggle. Institutions are always the devices of human beings and are created like any other machine. Traditions are not mechanical at all. They do not by themselves hold any "force" as such, even in the way that superstitions are reified as mechanical things. What is created with traditions is knowledge and meaning for us. The institution relies entirely on its logic, and all institutions in principle can and must be reducible to programmatic instructions. Traditions operate entirely unlike this. Traditions cannot by their nature be programmatic instructions. They would be the kind of thing that allows a user to consider those programmatic instructions to be "computing" or "acting" towards any concerted purpose. While it is possible to interpret the institutions without traditions, as we must so we can navigate a constantly changing world, traditions are always there to judge institutions or the actions of men by something other than the arbitrary whim of Law.

There is no inherent merit to traditions, nor any reason to believe tradition is inherently good or worthwhile. Traditions existed because they were once "new traditions". The "new tradition" is something very different from those that enter regular circulation. The traditions exist because they were products of labor as labor, remaining so without any abstraction or mediation. The established traditions may be assigned a name and used as objects, but they are recognized as traditions because their basis in labor was a demonstrable fact. Aristocracy creates no traditions of their own. Aristocracy only corrupts what workingmen and workingwomen created. Traditions are further the product of the order of labor and those who conduct labor against the proclivities of their order. The lowest class has no traditions nor need of them, and very often the traditions that stick are those that excluded the lowest class by design. For the lowest class, "appeal to tradition" is worse than having no argument. The tradition is usually the thing the lowest class rails against out of dire necessity. Ritual blood sacrifice was a tradition that originated in labor. Aristocracy quite liked it, but even in this, aristocracy perverts and corrupts that sacrifice to serve its queer aims.

Had associations not been rooted in anything historical, they would remain little more than opportunistic mafias, whatever their claims or superstitions. They would have nothing to defend but temporary patronage, efforts to force the world into compliance, and the wealth of the world that, once established, cannot be created freely. The associations would devolve into bickering over the smallest distinction. It is this that aristocracy wishes to impose. The aristocracy wants to tell associations that they have no history, no traditions, and no standards of comparison whatsoever. Aristocracy then inserts itself as the sole arbiter of traditions and makes it illegal by tradition to question this status, even though the presence of this aristocracy is a queer thing that serves no purpose to the association. Aristocracy has its own traditions for its kind, but even among their own, aristocracy trains its members to behave like jackals, for the cult of the self and self-indulgence is obligatory. Those traditions of the aristocracy were themselves pilfered from the lower orders, for aristocrats rarely deigned to work directly for their aims. They had philosoper-slaves to think for them. When the aristocrats must write their own theories, they are the most ridiculous self-gratifying bullshit a human being could ever have read. Only at the most dire need do aristocrats manage to make even their own ruinous traditions something functional enough to maintain the enterprise. The aristocracy only ever establishes its traditions to the minimum possible to continue the spiritual cycle, and then declares that no innovation may be permitted, except to create more of the same. If the ruling ideas are capitalism, then only capitalism may be eternal and every other notion of exchange must be sublated into capital, even long after there is no longer capital as such. If the ruling ideas are socialism, then aristocracy insists on the most insufferable form of socialism it can impose, and forbids anyone from calling bullshit on a socialism that abolishes "society" as something the rest of us are members of. If the ruling ideas are war and bloodshed, aristocracy insists on the lowest technique of war and lowest causes, then scurries away after instigating the latest blood sacrifice, laughing about what they do to the world. The ruling ideas are never the ideas of the rest of us. The ruling ideas are those that we are commanded to "respect", and the moment someone of the lower orders acts in accord with those ruling ideas, their compliance is not enough. It was never enough.

The aim of labor regarding this matter has been to establish their own traditions and keep them. They did not need someone to tell them what they should be, or someone to tell them about the wonders of efficiency or technocratic conceits about what society should be. The true aim of labor has been for its traditions to align with the world they live in, and for labor to be adaptable enough to continue without corrupting their sense of what is what. In other words, labor always seeks "new traditions" and keeps them new, rather than establishing them as objects or totems. The traditions that are by historical reckoning ancient would remain new up to the present day, for they would be actively understood and applied to the present situation. This is at odds with the reality that traditions will pile up over the years, and not all traditions apply to all situations equally. Something old and arcane would probably not be known to most in the association, but it would be expected that a record of the arcane tradition would be available if the laborer wanted to be assured that some unusual situation was in line with the traditions. Unlike laws which can never be contradictory, traditions will encounter contradictions, and this does not change their validity. It is on the keeper of traditions to reconcile when and why all traditions exist, rather than any necessary judgment from above to select which tradition is valid. There is for every tradition a historical cause for its existence, and a purpose for its perpetuation, and each tradition is a separate animal from the others. They can never be conflated or sublated by any trick of language or deliberate campaign of lying.

If the traditions become unwieldy, and they are too onerous to keep, this presents a problem for society. There is no rule suggesting this must happen or that all traditions must be destroyed. They encounter these crises either because the traditions were unsound from their genesis, or because intrigues were instigated to "teach the controversy" and make them face a crisis. Usually, though, new situations require a society's laborers to develop new traditions, to counteract the instigators or repair the damage of a poor foundation. If it is decided that the foundations are no good, that is an architectural issue that a reasonable engineer would detect. "But," you say, "isn't social engineering part of the problem?" Yes, it is, and traditions cannot be invented willy-nilly or introduced on demand. New traditions can only come about because there was a meaningful, moral, and spiritual reason why they could do what was needed. There is no guarantee that the new tradition is the right one or inherently better. They arise for the situation, rather than any notion of a teleological goal or a law of nature compelling their existence. They are, I remind you all, creations of humans and only relevant to us. An alien with similar intelligence and faculties as ours has no connection to human traditions nor us to theirs, and it would be a very new situation for humans to encounter aliens with their own traditions. Perhaps the two would understand each other rather than do the usual thing humans did with alien contact among each other. It would not be possible to engineer a new tradition to destroy the old. It would be possible instead to assess frankly the damage an old tradition has caused and seek the answer to the problem not in "the theory" or a totality, but in the world proper where this takes place. We would ask instead what a bad tradition is doing to the world, and what it does to the human beings who have to live with that tradition.

If for example, we see Eugenics as a tradition, it is most certainly ruinous during the 100 years it has held untrammeled power over our lives, and yet it remains "too big to fail". What Eugenics did, stated explicitly by the eugenists, is declare a monopoly on tradition and the taboo. It launched a pre-emptive strike against the masses and always insists on pre-emption in everything it does. It is a tradition like any other, with its origin and history and its believers. It has chosen to choke history so that no other tradition may be exercised, and eventually, the human subjects' ability to make meaningful connections is severed irrevocably. Eugenics did this with considerable knowledge of what traditions were, how to commandeer them, and how to spread them. Their knowledge is not mine, but it is remarkably similar and would have been so because they saw the same philosophy I have 150 years later. What the eugenists did they have modified during the reign, and they have consciously declared eugenics to be a tradition above all others. It is spiritual, temporal, and personal authority, the first such doctrine to claim that the three are unified irrevocably. "The personal is political", and the spiritual is also political, while the political is spiritual and represents the person of the eugenist. It is, as I have described it before, an essentially Satanic view of human society and the human subject. Eugenics appeals constantly to tradition, perverts it, subverts this, and carries out the essential act of "making tradition" in its way as one of its own traditions. It is not the first ruling idea to attempt this, but it is the first that rooted its practices in a method that emulated genuine science, with full knowledge of what had to be subverted in genuine science to attain this goal—if, and only if, the members of society do not somehow resist this.

If traditions served the interests of the lower orders, they would not be invoked as "traditions" with inherent legal right or right of force. They would only be "traditions" in the sense that they are understood to be rooted in history, beyond past experience but something that experience might replicate or find meaning in. Generally, the rule, as is the case with engineering generally, is that if it isn't broken, it should not be fixed. If someone sought to override traditions that have become onerous, especially if they have been ingrained in the muscle memory of so many of us, it would begin in the same place that holds all truth—the world itself. Among the traditions is a habit of science that has worked for humanity, in various forms, since its primitive existence. We learn about the world because this is among the many things we have done, and there are many good reasons to do so. There are also those impulses of curiosity that belong to the lowest class rather than labor and science. I speak not of the toil and humiliation the lowest class has been reduced to, but its true wants. One of them is a want to not be viciously attacked by those who instigated this conflict. Another is a habit of finding affinity with things in the world, including other humans and seeing no reason to abandon that affinity out of some belief that killing or humiliating things is inherently meritorious. History has made it clear we can never find the latter of these around other people and must hide our genuine love of things in this world because the assholes decided we weren't going to be allowed to have anything. It really was about that, rather than any ulterior motive of the eugenist tradition that was the most effective at stripping us from the world we were always a part of. We were here before the assholes who decided to do this to the world, and we won't die any time soon. More of us will exist. The eugenists themselves have bragged that the humiliations will never end, and so, there will always be the damned of the Earth so long as these ruinous traditions of aristocracy prevail. The two are irreconcilable beyond any appeal to reason or sentiment.

Traditions, however vague they may be, are the starting point for most of our inquiry into the world as humans, with the first being a concept of the creature "human" that is something other than a type of animal. It might be possible to invent an understanding of the world free of traditions, that operated solely from metaphysical knowledge or trans-historical superstitions. Such a thing is in principle necessary for the traditions to exist. This, though, would be very cumbersome, when nature did provide humanity a great wealth of knowledge. The knowledge was never "ready-made" to rational sense, but it is knowledge we inherited whether we learned it or not. Just as the truth is in the world, the traditions are ultimately in the world. The hearts of human beings are as much a part of the world as the trees and the sky, but unlike many parts of nature that are fixed in location, humans like any life-form travel as they can. Ecology stands opposed to these traditions, and seeks to supplant them with "false consciousness". The traditions are never the endpoint, nor can an argument appeal to traditions solely to be sensical. The traditions can be questioned and usually must be if they are set on proper grounds for the inquiry we seek from them. If the question was about what was immediately valuable, the answers in the world are more immediate than "tradition", and if someone invoked tradition to solve a physics problem "just so", they are assholes. Such arguments are not the result of stupidity, but of malice. If we ask how we are to learn physics, absent a clear pedagogical path provided by the master to the slave, we look to traditions and then look to those around us. Without traditions, if we merely looked at other humans and mimicked their present behavior, we would miss all of the context. This is even more the case with humans who choose deliberate and flagrant lying and hypocrisy as their way of life, where lying and malice are traditions and have to be regarded as such. After that step, we would be able to better ascertain who would be a useful authority on physics, so that our inquiry into science maintains doubt about the intention of a pedagogue even as we recognize such pedagogy is necessary for our formal knowledge to be as it is. It would be highly unlikely for someone's personal worked-out system to be compatible with, or match the contents of, established formal systems that have been communicated between humanity. Those personal worked-out systems are then entered into the record, and it would be a social matter to decide if the personal has a legacy. To disconnect someone from traditions entirely as a concept is to negate their existence—"negate the negation". To confine them to alien traditions amounts to the same thing, and to confine them to their own is to deny them a world where their traditions can maintain meaning. Everyone can have their own personal beliefs about the world backed by nothing, but without a worldly connection, they will not be sustained.^[1]

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