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What I am about to describe is not a regularly recurring model or one that can be transposed cleanly onto any other entity. There may be entities like it in history or hypothetical entities that can be understood as things like it, but the imperial-feudal model of society—a "mode of production" so to speak—is a singular example. Only one such entity has existed, in some form or another, since the ancient civilizations of the Near East. The introduction of commerce in the form of state-issued coinage around the 8th century BC might be interpreted as the birth of an "imperial mode of production" in the sense that a "mode of production" is believed to exist as an economic concept.

The classical interpretation deemed the first "mode of production" was titled "slave society", from which all other modes of production must follow. This, though, shows the theorists' affinity for slavery and a desire to see slavery expanded and universalized, rather than any necessity of slavery as such for the "mode of production". Slavery is an institution concerned with a particular legal social relation of property, rather than a "mode of production" with its own imperatives. Slavery in history existed alongside the free laborers and merchants, rather than as a unique exception upon which productive society had to rest. Slavery has origins more ancient than any "mode of production" or the imperial-feudal model I set out to describe here, and the chief aim of slavery was not production or commercial gain, or even the claim of human beings as a type of technology or machine for some ulterior motive. Human beings and their labor can be appropriated by any number of relations. The chief aim of slavery throughout history has been to assign grades of civic worth, rather than a peculiar attachment to slaves as personal property or a private claim of the owner. No slavery in human history has persisted without it being a singular "institution of institutions", for without that tradition of slavery, the concept could not be intelligible as a relation that should be defended, nor would such a concept be particularly productive or useful let alone necessary. The master is never for a moment "dependent" on the slaves. If need be, the master would excise the slaves entirely at his pleasure, accepting the loss of any condition slavery brought to him, and the world would go on much as it had without the peculiar institution. Slavery, by its nature, places the slave in a position where its life is wholly at the mercy of the master. The most basic claim of slavery is not temporal, but spiritual, and it is that spiritual claim that every slavery in human history harkens back to, for it was known to the Babylonians and Egyptians that slavery was the default spiritual state of humans. In most of the world, slavery of some sort was either the default, or the question of "slavery or freedom" was irrelevant to their understanding of what people in those societies did, and the notion of a peculiar "slave status" had no meaning. The landlord ruling over peasants does not own, spiritually or temporally, the peasants in the same sense that Babylon claimed the lives and souls of the subjects. The landlord could capriciously decide that some peasant is now property or under the lord's command and control, but slavery to be slavery implies a spiritual commitment to the practice, rather than slavery being merely a contrivance for command and control. If the goal was command and control, then so long as what was commanded was done, the social and legal status of the laborers did not matter, and it would not be out of place for the commander to share in the toil of labor alongside the slaves. While a private want of the landlord for luxury and a personal conceit of his greatness might be a spiritual commitment for his part that he enforces despotically, "slave society" implied a spiritual tradition where this was the presumed default of everyone, no matter their status. In "slave society", no notion of "freedom" can be allowed to exist in a genuine sense, and the freedmen granted manumission are given precisely one and only one piece of blue sky as their ultimate "carrot". The freedman is entirely at the mercy of the whole society for the tradition of slavery to be relaxed, and the freedman in every slavery was never confused with a citizen who was born free and always free—"once retarded, always retarded" doing its work when slavery is a spiritual institution beyond its temporal claims.

Slavery in "slave society" was not primarily about productivity in any respect. Where slaves were not available, freeborn labor was the expectation. This is what the peasant and citizen-soldier were expected to supply. In addition to maintaining the family farm, which was understood as the only sound basis for a settled society, the peasants could be conscripted for both labor projects and, if necessary, fighting under the leadership of their lords and the generals of the state. Not one society where slavery was the dominant interest relied on slavery for economic purposes. Instead, the slave power, whatever form it took, asserted its interest for its own reasons, rather than those of the society where it held influence. Slavery was always alien to the expectations of a productive society because the chief aim of slavery was not that slavery existed for an ulterior motive of the good. Nothing of slavery was ever necessary, or a thing whose removal was truly unthinkable. History showed what happened when the slave power was dominant and lost its supply of new slaves many times before—the result was entirely expected death and torture, which the slave power arranged in advance and intended to affect not just the slaves, whose lives were always forfeit, but the formerly free who were pushed to offer themselves to any slavery. The slave power in any society never limits itself to the chattel it takes in conquest or at the auction block where foreigners—aliens to the polity—are traded like so much livestock. The familial relations in Rome, as was common through patriarchal societies, understood children as the slaves of their father, who served his father, up to the patriarch who was by custom the head of the family in political society. The politically necessary executor was not the father by virtue of his seed impregnating some woman, but the pater familias, or the lord to which the peasant farmer owed allegiance. However the familial relations were arranged for a given society, the family unit was under the command—effective slavery—of the family's monarch. In practice, familial relationships were never treated the same as chattel slaves, even though by law this was understood as the arrangement to all, and remained in force for the Romans throughout the existence of the imperium. To wider society, the Babylonian core of slavery and conquest was still in force and remains so up to this day for all realistic intents and purposes. Nowhere in human history was "freedom" the default or naturally ordained condition. The liberals of modernity understood well the institution of slavery, for it was extant and prevailed in the colonial enterprise of the late 18th century. Not once was slavery as a legal status abolished from the historical record, and to this day, slavery is the greatest institution "too big to fail".

If we are to look at a "mode of production", what happens at the true base of society is the same regardless of social relations. The toilers create the nation, rather than any conceit "from above", and how the toiler's toil is worked out not at the apex of finance, but by all necessary technology and labor-power assembled for the task. Whether the labor is slave, free, or any other relation, has little to do with the end product, other than what the relation says about the beings who labor. For most of history, the masters had little to say to their slaves except beatings and threats. Management of the slaves was delegated to specialists, who were in many cases the freedmen, but also came from the ignored laborers of the free citizens that had to take on the insulting grind of industry to have food to eat. The assembly of industry proceeded without regard to the funding mechanism or legal intervention. So far as a "mode of production" is shown in the historical record, it has largely pertained to the most relevant "germ" of managing wealth. For most of history, the land-holders ruled their territory and the people on it, and commerce was unseemly. The free trade arrangement from 1776 and onwards inverted this thinking, and the commercial interests were the primary link between labor and political society, in the form of capitalists or managerial bureaucrats. The real change in production came not from the interests that related to labor, but the extent to which labor and the lowest class could be invaded and stripped of the one possession they held; their own bodies, which remained theirs regardless of the legal claim slavery made. There remained no effective social engineering vehicle to make men into something other than men until the 20th century, and the success of that endeavor has been dismal, to say the least. It is more appropriate for the next book in this series, for the transition from "barbarism" to "the technocratic polity" entailed far more than production or the historical matter described in this book. What changed in the 20th century was not just the true basis for a productive society, but "why we fight", and the imperatives men and women were now to follow if they were to be good citizens. Even after this transformation, the funding mechanism and economic facade remained capitalist, and officially, labor proceeded by the imperatives of need and avarice. The capitalists did not invent this. They only formalized the slave relations that had prevailed for most of human history and abstracted them into systems that could in principle be calculated and automated. Not one of these things speaks to why empires make the decisions they do, or where the empires rose to become empires rather than domains of slavery for slavery's sake.

What does it mean to hold an office? Very often, behind the curtain, despots promote their family and buddies into the ruling faction, and a similar process plays out for all of the other interested parties in society. There is not at first a "public interest" explicitly stated, or any notion that such a thing is separate from the despot's will or exists apart from it. Civilization establishes the city and for all intents and purposes, the court of kings and priests is the state as an institution. This is clearly not the entirety of office-holding or the treatment of office, and the esteem of offices is not and cannot be purely an ideological token. Offices hold power because they are attached to technology—institutions, operationalized subordinates, all of the structures and physical machinery built as the tools of the office, and the influence of the icons of the office—that allows the office holder to be more than some person with a fancy title. The obligations and virtues of the holder of that office are less relevant than the technology of the office, regardless of the nature of the regime or any personal favors or patronage commanded by the office-holder. The only reason this office means anything more than giving a guy a neat shirt is that this office holds some technology and represents some technology that the office-holder does not immediately hold but that is associated with its function. Even the fancy suit is technology, and it looks very different to see the officer in uniform than it does to see the officer in casual wear or generic business attire. The representation of technology is very important, for it is in office-holding that the officer shares in the power of something greater than the personal authority of the office. The power-sharing would not work if an office did not coordinate with other offices, even when the offices are set against each other or they are offices of rival factions that have every reason to oppose the others' existence. This might be imagined as an extension of the low cunning of mafias to sense who is "in" and who is "out", as is common to the democratic instincts known to humanity, but in a crude democracy, power-sharing is not a feature of the office or the agents involved. In a crude democracy, office-holding is irrelevant, and it is the laborious output of the men—whether they are "regulars" or officers with distinction—that the democracy lives and dies by. The association in a crude democracy has no inherent "oneness" of the demos. The people with power in a democracy hold power as people, which means they exercise power individually and when joined together in operations. There is no necessary "individualism" of democracy nor is there any necessary collectivity of the "demos". Democratic society is only united when the morale of enough people favors this democratic condition, and there was never such a thing as "pure democracy" from some imagined primordial start. Democratic society can exist with a small number of "democrats" who really value it, so long as there isn't a significant force in the society opposed to the motion. Once established, democratic society relies on traditions understood by that society whether it is democratic or not, and one such tradition is that even people who don't particularly care about "democracy" see in democracy an expectation that they can have wealth and standing because such a thing is expected in a democratic society. The people might be cynical about democracy as an idea, but when they do not have that wealth that democracy entails, they will notice the difference. What the Party could not do in 75 years—get people to like communism, which in the Soviet Union was a democracy for a few people in the Party but grim and unfulfilled promises to everyone else—the conditions of social despotism or, worse, imperially-mandated anarchy, can accomplish in less than 10 years. Office-holding is inherently technocratic. From the moment offices are established, they deviate from the expectations of association and serve the interest of offices themselves. In other words, the institutions exist for the institutions alone, just as Law only exists for Law in its purest form. Whatever claims lawyers make about the origin of legal force, the most immediate source of Law is office-holding, even if the "office" is an ersatz creation for some particular issue requiring a legal remedy. This includes the very establishment of "Law" as a concept with any more currency than some other force in the world. Once established, office-holders rely, whatever their pretensions may be, on traditions of a given society for "office" to be a relevant category. Nothing in nature or "imminent necessity" grants to office any power whatsoever. This leads to a very confusing mess when someone tries to judge the true fount of any office and what can be done with that office. Ultimately, the office-holder's true "fount" is nothing other than the genius of whoever or whatever holds this office, rather than our notions of what the office is supposed to be, but genius cannot create ex nihilo any such thing as an "office" or inherently hold the status of an "officer". Whatever its fount or the full extent of powers exercised by the office, it appears imminently as a collection of technology, which has the first standing under Law. There is no court without a judge, whatever the nature of the "judge", and judgment is out of necessity a singular outcome, or else this court would remain forever inconclusive. So too does an office-holder and the technology associated with an office exist for purposes, rather than the office just sporadically appearing one day in a way that disallows anyone to ask the question.

When someone mentions the creation of state-issued coinage, some will make the mistake of fetishizing the coin itself. What is the coin, except an extension of some office, whether it is a state office like the treasury or the private office of a merchant who must maintain their establishment? The convention that this token is worth anything exists not because it has any inherent value or because an institution can entirely compel any scrip to be valuable simply by declaring it so. It is not a convention that readily makes sense as if it existed in nature, because nature did not provide any such token, nor ascribe to it any "official" value. Someone could issue tokens of value in the form of cowry shells or some etch on a primitive ledger, or an account of credit that exists entirely because someone is trusted to hold this information. This doesn't have the same meaning as currency, including the more primitive commodity-money, because the office of the issuer cannot establish itself as a fixture in civilization. Before state-issued coin was normalized, this function was held by temples and priests, whose palaces distributed products based on the caprice of the priests, while precious metal was an expedient for foreign trade that could be issued in civic life without great certainty that this ingot means anything special. The development of state-issued coinage coincides with states relying more on fulfilling requisitions through a developed city's economy rather than by conscripting villagers to pony up whatever goods the army required. This developed economy could only exist when the sophistication of manufactures was such that this division of labor was more pronounced in classical society than it was in ancient society. The proliferation of ironworking, the further development of cavalry and military doctrine, and so on make this use of coin far more effective for states and the officers who must find these supplies, and the coin supplies the officers who command civic life. The old aristocracy is wary of the corrupting influence of coin, as is the base of society, where trade in livestock and agricultural output remains the economic interaction after money was introduced.^[1] What coin offers to an office-holder is something similar to a leap that was possible with symbolic language. Symbolic language allowed humans or proto-humans to contemplate what it would mean to "be" something else or to "do" anything from a list of potentials communicable in a language that was shared with other animals, so the proto-humans or early humans could for the first time hone peculiar specializations. It could conceive of generally alienable labor, whereas the animal could only act with its abilities and would have no concept of "being" anything. The animal is simply itself, even if it were injured or transmogrified. We can see the proliferation of coin changing the way office was conceived and exercised. In a more primitive setting, the office-holders, such as they were, held prestige and esteem within their communities, and this was how they were able to command men. Currying favors with bribes, while it certainly happened, did not carry the same weight that it would in societies with widespread currency. The bribes of an older society, which continue up to today, would be vices like drugs or access to women for sex, rather than promises of financial compensation. Even if someone in this society understood that merchants exchanged precious metals, those precious metals did not command men through fear or impression of anything worthwhile. It might work, and it might tempt someone who doesn't quite get what "money" is but is sucked in by a shyster, but the expectation of office-holders, whose career depends on making sound judgments, is that tomorrow will be like today, and today will be like yesterday and established wealth and merits mean more than a promise that suggests indirectly that it is exchanged for something. That primitive sense remains intact as coin proliferates and the potential for bribery, among all of the other things coin can do, increases. But, coinage presents—specifically because it has proliferated rather than because it might—a whole new set of incentives for the officer and ways to influence others.

It is presumed that most people in the society will need this coinage in some way or another, or want the things that money can buy. In turn, the diversification of labors in that society becomes more pronounced, since now any trade can offer itself for coin, and this is preferable and likely an intended purpose of states issuing this coinage. The state and officers issuing this did not think "Gee it would be great to have money so tradesmen can get their hard-earned coin for justice". Our old friend Plato has already inveighed on the ability of us lowly commoners to know justice, describing commoners are grubby and easily persuaded or threatened. It is rather that the demands of the army require a growing supply chain as technology and war-making advance. Then there is one thing that certainly made coin attractive. Coinage or some unit of account can pay for slaves, and change the master-slave relation into a financial one for the first time. Slaves can be an investment, rather than something simply taken in conquest for various reasons. Through the proliferation of coin, the workers of a society, free or slave, can be bent by Mammon, and Mammon placed his conditions on the nature of such power if it is to be invoked. But, none of this just happened because money was there. Money is held by officers with the right to conduct commerce, and this included free men (and competency to know the true meaning of money now became a requirement for a man to remain free, which will have terrible consequences much later in our existence). The right to conduct this commerce was not equal to all who held the franchise, and it has never been "equal by nature" in any sense that can be enforceable by law. If you have fewer rights than another officer with some title, "your" money can quickly be seized and no longer "your" money, and there is nothing under the law or custom to be done about it. In principle, coin was just that, and it was not imbued with any more power because a particular officer held it. An officer's handling of the coin is much different from that of a consumer or a "free agent" producer, and should never be equated with such. At any time, the state can set whatever rules it likes on what can and cannot be done with money by law, and this custom will hold if established. All of the "right of transgression" in the world may appear great to a philosopher, but because coin is an extension of office-holding, it will never be wholly "made of magic", in such a way that coin is infinitely transmutable to desires, volition, or some notion of utility. If coin were entirely a contrivance on its own, it could be made into anything, but there are too many things in the world that money cannot buy. If "everything has its price", then nothing really does, and the sham is up when everyone realizes they can set their prices as high as they like and circumvent the contrivance. The use of coin as an extension of office-holding works both ways, in that the respect of coinage can be compellable by force. This is why it was states issuing this coinage, and very violently introducing it to public circulation for its purposes rather than the purposes of particular individuals.

Office-holders cannot make their tools and the world around them as they please. This is a quality of office-holding rather than human beings themselves, who will in the end make history more or less as they please, within the confines of all potentials available to them and what outcomes are determined by some divination that is only obvious in hindsight. The office-holder is beholden to traditions and its origin in the real world and its history, and has to play the game social engineering and patronage required of the officer. We may have thought that we hold these particular tools for our own purposes by nature—and there is nothing in the world compelling us to play that game—but the tools only exist because there are offices established for a purpose, even an ill-thought purpose. It is not the vague externalities of the world that compelled anything related to office on their own. It might have made sense that some forces of the world, like the patterns of weather, tied people to the material world. None of those externalities were constants or expected to persist. The full listing of influences on the mind of a human being cannot be dismissed, for human beings are not by nature "officers" or "agentur" or enthusiastic about the task. Outside of "state business involving the nation rooted in our history and traditions", human beings can act however they do. If however they invoke a tool that is particular to office-holding, and it is the office that holds authority to act by the norms of that society, the tool only works as it is "allowed", and there is limited ability for intrigues or insinuation to make that tool into something other than that. It was less about the coin itself, which is, in the end, a contrivance and one that can be counterfeited, than it was about commerce itself and what commerce dealt with primarily, which was pieces of technology that would otherwise be cumbersome to obtain or construct independently. Outside of that function, coin does not command the sort of authority or loyalty that might be ascribed to it. If coin purchased merit, it could only do so through promises of these pieces of technology, or by selling vice or the promise of vices in exchange for coinage. There are then two types of technology coveted. One is "dead labor" of the finished products. The other is the "technology" of human labor itself, however, it is packaged and sold.^[2] The laborer itself holds some "office", even as a slave, though not all slaves will be laborers as such, for the slave is chattel to be used and abused in any way.

These offices are far from the sole content of the world affecting decisions. As much as possible, the officers seek to remove the agency of non-officers so that the officers can do whatever their office requires. Whatever the man holding office would want cannot change that offices work for a purpose prescribed by them, and can only be expanded if the traditions or some scheme behind the backs of society allowed this to go on. A man may simply switch offices, where before he was merely "comrade" and now he is "general secretary" and saw the power that office could hold if it was used right. We should not forget that these offices are held by men and women, even if they are non-entities who become enamored with the office and its trappings. They are most relevant not for the offices themselves, but for the society where they arise changing, for offices only disappear with some effort and their historical existence is difficult to deny. Offices imply there is some official capacity, or a quasi-official capacity like a mob boss, inherent to the office. They would not apply universally to men, where every person is deemed an officer in uniform. Even if the society exhorts this value, officers are only officers when their title is elevated in some way over "base labor".

Imperial office begins the full repudiation of the "biological nation" and its replacement with the state as we know it, with all of the expectations of state society formalized and its inroads into private life regular and mandated. Without the offices of Empire, the ability of states to enter private life is severely constrained. In the past, the patronage of the priest, who held the souls of the enslaved populace—slavery, remember, is the default for the Babylonians and Egyptians—was how the state and its officers intruded on private life. In practice, extended clan networks were the interest of the people, and the priests held the populace in thrall through vice and terror. Law was arbitrary and an extension of the ruler's armed forces, with little expectation that this law was fair or consistent between rulings. The growing intrusion of imperial offices begins something more recognizable to us. Families are now an institution that serve the state and are consciously the backbone of the state's existence. Without fathers siring sons to fill the offices and daughters to make and raise more sons, a sustainable empire is not possible. The family becomes an arm of the state in miniature, granted a degree of independence only so long as it fulfills state expectations. This appears at first as an extension of tradition and incentives that arise because of new offices like "the treasury", "the bank", and the need of all families to enter commerce regardless of whether they disdain it or hold landed wealth.

It was well known that without wealth, a base of recruits for the state was not possible. The state has two options. One is for the state to break off parts of its wealth and gift them to members of society in good standing so that in this way, a new citizen is made. However much the subject may have been a self-made man or woman and did all of the work, and the "distribution of wealth" was nothing more than the state permitting that which this person already held by possession, the state's presumptive claim, even in primitive conditions, is that it determines whether someone has standing to serve the state in any way. The other way is for the state to compel by conscription whatever person or body exists in its domains to serve the state, and for the state to supply whatever tools are needed for this to work. The state then sets normative expectations of this corveé which landlords are compelled to accept, expectations for men conscripted to fight for some campaign, and presents a model of society that appears to work. Both of these options may operate in tandem, and in most cases, they work alongside each other. The independence of free men is tolerated so that a base for conscription is possible since the state does not wish to intervene in the rearing of children. Child-rearing is a pain, especially in constrained conditions that denude anything a child would require to grow into a capable adult. The establishment of offices begins the Empire as a historical entity with a sense of its own history, which now records the history of offices and the officers. The state as "the state" soon follows, but the state is an instrument of imperial ambitions rather the the Empire innocuously forming out of the innocuous and "just there" state. How does the imperial office differ from any other office-holding? It possesses the first means of commanding commerce rather than claims to wealth alone, abstracted it to a unit of account, and most importantly, a general theory of this worth—civic worth—is established and can be imposed by tradition and the customs of the society doing this, and the men who hold office can extend patronage generally rather than on an ad hoc basis. The society becomes a society of favor-giving unlike the favors of the past where favors only worked in particular contexts. The basic form of government, which is after their finery is removed little better than a mafia, becomes more formal. Mafias become assemblies of statesmen, and the mafias of society adapt to this. The mafias' sense of honor and duty acknowledge the new conditions they operate in, and the new relations they must make with the legal authority and aristocracy for the mafia operation to continue. No mafia embraces revolutionary defeatism or expects that it will survive if it must rail against the dominant society and the whole world forever. The mafia's most effective course of action is to reckon with the world as they best understand it, rather than what a mafia would prefer the world to be. A mafia that is particularly stubborn may hold to its interpretation of the world, especially in a society where lying about the nature of this social enterprise and the state is profuse. This describes the behavior of particularly stubborn religious mafias who have their way of doing things, which has for their interests worked fine for centuries and which they see no reason to change due to external pressure or conformity with the ruling ideas and ruling gods.

A great difficulty with establishing an empire is that "office-holding" was never worked out as a practice, and so a sovereign relied on relatives or trusted confidants to hold a city or neighborhood. It might be possible to informally maintain this network, and the family of the sovereign is the ruling family and "in-group". Realistically, no one in the society has any reason to respect this, and the offices become formal and entrusted with particular obligations. There is no prescription for how these offices are arranged, and it is not purely a question of state authority or the constitution of a state as such. The presumptive claim is that a sovereign, whether it is a man or an assembly of men holding the state jointly, must account for everything, regardless of whether it is a "political" matter. The proliferation of coin does for these offices something which can universalize them with a single token, even though this universalism is symbolic and far from perfect. Officers are supplied with coin, accumulate this coin, or accumulate things like human beings whose labor can lead to profit-making enterprises. It would not require currency as such to do this. What became possible is that the avarice Empire entailed could be generalized and, most importantly, imposed on barbarous conditions, rather than confined to a small urban elite and the city-dwellers who were in effect slaves of the temple. This required both technological advances and the accumulation of political knowledge of how people could be manipulated to agree to any of this, especially if they attained awareness of the world without the cult of abject slavery that was common to the world. What became possible was that the hinterland could be mobilized, and barbaric warrior formations were less effective against trained and equipped armies. So began the consolidation of imperial ambitions, often initiated by a conqueror or confederations of tribes. Money can prevail because the trend towards doing this mobilization was already happening at the outset of classical city-building, around the time Carthage, Rome, and numerous trading outposts were established. Currency would be a very convenient tool for the ruling interest of those cities, which then penetrates private life as the demand for taxation increases. This process continues with new technology to the present day. It is not a secular trend, and money as such has ceased to be the chief motive by the start of the 21st century. In our time, money is primarily utilized as a psychological terror against the subject, while its issuers can effectively make as much nominal "money" as they like, choosing who lives and who dies. It is not difficult to see the true intent of the terror, and claims that any of this is profit-seeking are laughable in the 21st century. The last vestiges of that world are virtually extinguished by 2000, replaced with whatever this is supposed to be.

It is this office-holding that is the "germ" of what I will call the imperial-feudal model of normative economic and social relations. I caution against looking at this as a general rule, for there is only the one model of this throughout history, originating in Babylon and spreading to the Greeks and the Romans, who are the example of these relations becoming general and overriding the civic constitutions and national interests of the Roman Empire. Once office is established, all that has been described in the "biological nation" up to now is something for the officer to understand and manipulate. Officers cannot make history as they please, for they are beholden to the technology that makes office-holding possible. This not only means that officers are beholden to institutions, but they are beholden to machinery and the limitations placed on such. This is very different from how history would have occurred if people lived for their genuine wants, which is what we wanted in the first place. The office was established because it could be established, and there was an Empire that desired such a thing. At the apex of all "modes of production," there is an avarice that has no ulterior motive or "need" to exist. All such imperatives are willful choices of the Empire. For imperial office in the earliest stage, this office-holding is represented by claims on wealth and command, rather than claims of exchange in commerce as they would become in modernity. In other words, the pre-eminent institutions were slavery and the family, the latter understood as the patriarch's leadership of the family unit, which would be the holder of slaves until there was a public state holding slaves for state business.

What all of these offices allow is an inroad into the private life of people who would otherwise have nothing to do with the state or the central temple. They do not themselves command all that exists or anything close to that. The core contingent of states and empires are not beholden to offices in this way. They are either willful participants in the avarice of empires, or they have been drawn into service to the empire for reasons other than office-holding. For example, men who are roped into association with secret societies and mafias are beholden to serve the empire for reasons that have nothing to do with any office or any claim to money. Earlier I wrote a footnote on guard labor and the qualities that recommend men and women to become guard labor, and this very much applies to the secret societies and ways in which men are obliged to serve associations rather than institutions or offices. Such guard labor is a necessary tool for offices to enforce any of these edicts and laws. What the law of a society grants to the holders of the state and the court is an unquestionable, overt invasion of private life, rather than one that only exists by association and insinuation. It could be as simple as the associations of men making their activity overt and hoodwinking the world so that all learn by example that the terror is absolute and eternal. This doesn't work too well because it is a grossly inefficient tyranny, and the moment the hoodwinked refuse to play the game, history returns to a morass of struggles. The damned of the Earth, having nothing better to do, can make this struggle interminable. The rise of office-holding suggests, for the first time, that there is a method to this beyond violence for violence's sake. Every state or imperial project has its mode of operation, or its "system", whereas before there was just one long struggle of interested parties who wanted a part of the world. The office-holders can choose violence, or they can choose peace. They can, if they are capable, choose anything available to them from the preceding chapters, so long as they remain aware of what office can and cannot do, and the world in which these actions take place. If the office-holders are aware of this and the office-holders choose honesty in certain respects, the ruled have some expectation of what will happen, and how the lower orders will have to navigate this world. If the office-holders choose dishonesty and habitually lie about what they do to the ruled, then the ruled can expect at the least that the state and all of its institutions will always lie, and can only lie in ways the world has allowed. Either way, the power of an office is never "absolute" or "above God" in the way sniveling retards insinuate. If the office no longer resembles what actually happens in the world, then the ruled will interpret office-holders of a different sort that carry out the functions of office that relate to them. What happens in an occulted society has little to do with the poor who are evicted from the world, until that occulted society decides to impose its values on the rest of us. We down here would do better to interpret the office-holders for what they have done to us, rather than their own claims about their essence. Whatever institution or secret society they are members of is of little interest to us. We only care because their bullshit has finally come to us, and it could never have turned out well. It is the overt "system" we concern ourselves with here since the shortest route to rule would be its overt offices rather than covert insinuations.

When speaking of the "Roman" system, one thing to always remember is that what we think of as "Roman" was usually co-opted when the Romans defeated a civilized rival, such as inheriting the Carthaginian trade empire or the vast wealth of the East, eventually capturing the very important domain of Egypt that remained "not even a province" but the personal claim of the Caesars, for such was its necessity in maintaining the most effective and working model of the "Roman system". The uniquely Roman contribution to this shrinks as Rome, a city-state noted for its martial prowess and lack of creativity, becomes the key administrative cog in a vast empire, where Greeks and Syrians operate the machinery and provincial governors become emperors and favor their countrymen as close advisors. What was it that was "Roman" about the Empire by the third century? The true legacy of Rome is that it was the conqueror, undefeated for many centuries on the battlefield and surviving through events that would have ruined most aspiring empires. It did so by successfully absorbing offices held by foreign powers, rather than violently imposing an alien "total system" on the conquered to tell them they were essentially something else. This has been the most effective method for the imperial-feudal model of society. Wherever possible, the locals are recruited as compradors, and the Empire has no particular conceit about its ideas or "ideology". The only ideas that Empire requires are not open to debate at any time or place, and those consist of avarice which is at heart a spiritual matter rather than a temporal one. The need of the Empire is to crush the souls of their enemies, and their enemies include all of the subjects in the "core", rather than any notion that the Empire shares any affinity with any nation. From the outset of its city-state, the republic stands opposed to "the nation", only summoning it as the supply arm of its aristocratic government. It was a collaborative government of aristocrats rather than a despotic government, and for that purpose, it was a democracy of the rich and entitled. It was not a "democracy" in any sense except for the obligation placed on land-holders to fight for this, with the sole promise being that the state wouldn't be so stupid as to undermine its basis for new soldiers, thus allowing the family farm to continue. From the moment slaves could arrive in large numbers, the republic followed its imperatives and did what it always did. There was not even a "golden age" for most of the people of the city. High republican Rome was as much a cesspit as the imperium, offering a grim watch to defend the city for most of its citizen-soldiers, who served and then lived out the remainder of their life with a strict obligation to uphold the aristocratic game. If we look at Athens, its democracy was little different. Every free Athenian was obligated to join the Elusinean Mysteries or the secret society of the Athenians, and like any secret society, their objective was to establish the "in-group" and violently attack those who did not belong, stripping them of anything they once lived for. Unlike the Romans, whose virtues were waging imperial war and administration, the Greeks did contemplate the nature of their new thing, this "democracy", and how it might have been different if arranged another way. The Greeks could compare their city-state to its rivals in Greek civilization, and neither the Greeks, the Romans, nor any of their contemporaries celebrated ignorance for its own sake. That perversion is a modern disease. The Romans, even when the "Romans" were far removed from the city of Rome, did not think too long about new master systems or consider that an exercise to be debated. If there was thought on the matter, it was a thought of the administrators on how to manage this very large thing, rather than a philosophical pondering about the Empire. The Empire's soul was well established by the time of the high republic; the aristocrats won because they were strong and stubborn, and while they weren't stupid or unaware of what they were doing, the aristocratic expectation about the Roman system persisted more or less unchanged until the Crisis of the Third Century. Very early in its history, the character of the Roman project was clear to Romans who knew what was what, and the new innovations were primarily about what could be co-opted, rather than selling Romans on a grand vision. Political leaders in republican Rome won elections and the honors of office not by selling ideas or visions, but by winning battles and attaining tangible results, and this ethos continued all the way to the bitter end. Only with the rise of Christianity began Roman experiments with "ideology", and the ideology pertained not to Rome but to Christendom and Christians around the world. Even with that accomplished, the imperial system, even if in its most reduced form, operates on the same general idea up to early modernity. Officers win prestige by their accomplishments, and whatever the philosophical ideals, politics was a well-established pattern and the basics of political trickery were more important to a Roman politician than a grand theory of any sort. There weren't too many suggestions from Roman writers that the Roman system could or should be any different until state acceptance of Christianity, which is very different from our time and from contemporaries like the Greeks who imagined wildly different social and political orderings, or Hindu gurus who had their particular system to sell to the gullible, or Chinese scholars who struggled over what their empire would do beyond the central tenet that the Emperor and his bureaucracy was here to stay. Roman administrative planning never had a consistent policy change until the rise of the Dominate, and one feature of the Caesars' rule was that the thing Augustus set in place was nearly impossible to alter in function, and every governor was more interested in his own spoils. The whims of a particular emperor might change some policies, but the Roman aristocracy abhorred even mild changes to the Roman system until this Roman system failed spectacularly late in the 3rd century.

Even though much of the Roman "base" was inherited from those it conquered, these things had to be assimilated by a Roman emperor and tied into Roman law, so that Roman governors could extract the tax. No sense of "cultural Romanness" appears to be relevant to this system, and this would be the same with every imperial system we could imagine. A cultural or racial basis has been hilariously ineffective for empires, and this was one reason such an understanding was promoted to insult the intelligence of those living in those empires. Above all, the imperial system, whatever it is, stands opposed to any notion of a "biological nation". If an empire attempted to extol the virtues of "biological nationalism", as the Nazis and eugenists did, the result would be the ontological opposite of anything a "biological nation" entailed. The biological nation, so far as it persists, has little interest in any "empire" or the state as such and does not heed directly any notion of rule or theory of government such as despotism or republicanism. The only interest of the biological nation, so far as one exists, is that it continues to exist for a time, splits off into new nations, or absorbs extant nations similar or dissimilar to itself and that its members continue to carry out the functions of life. The biological nation exists for nothing at all, not even itself, and so its "interest" is fatalistic from the outset. This is expected, and a reason why very early on, empires explicitly rejected a "biopolitical" basis for their existence. Ancient empires existed by the will of Heaven and the gods, and the emperors and favorites of the society sought the patronage of said gods or some favor from Heaven to validate their rule as the shortest route to securing the imperial vision. The Romans are no exception to this, and their religion borrowed extensively from the aristocratic pagans around them. There were peculiar inventions and superstitions the Romans understood, most being things that were amenable to the Roman understanding of war and administration. There was not in the uniquely Roman religious innovations any essential ingredient that made the Romans necessary for world history, but it should not be presumed that the Romans were wholly uncreative or without an independent understanding. The Roman system arose from the Romans' experience with their neighbors, rivals, and the barbarous nations they would have to fight for the empire to exist. The Romans themselves began as a confederation of tribes whose conditions were essentially barbarous, and the establishment of civilization did not require a primordial "gene" to allow this. Cities could prosper in Italy due to the pleasant climate, and cities allowed fortification and the further development of commerce. There is a Roman innovation where, early in its history, the kings are thrown out and a collective assembly claims imperium, electing two consuls every year and maintaining this for the express purpose of aristocratic power-sharing. The election of consuls provided many ambitious Romans the prize of prestige, and the Romans saw most keenly the value of office-holding not just at the top, but in the offices beneath the consul, the religious offices and cults that received state backing, down to local officials. In practice, elections were a corrupt affair, but the aristocrats' distrust of each other prevented "parties" or "factions" from arising, and there was nothing for the factions to unite behind. The Roman sense of politics was for personal aggrandizement, and so if there were factions, they entirely shifted to whoever was the biggest kid on the playground. One did not vote for factional loyalty, but loyalty to the man who commanded clients, and there was enough incentive to keep patronage intact to regard the process for what it did. Roman consuls led the armies of that year and their ambition was to claim victory. The individualistic behavior that would have been seen as human failure was utilized for the state, and the republic is ruled by a great fear as all such governments must be in the end. Nowhere in this structure was there a notion that "goodness" carried the day in a sense that favored the well-being of the people or anything other than victory. Such a fear may be found in other governments, towards the same or other imperatives. Rome's rival, Carthage, promoted its merchant class to high office, and their claim to victory was to grow richer and bring more trade to the city, with warfare handled by a staff of rotating generals. Like Rome and any republic, Carthage is ruled by fear, and the traditions of the society work because the general fear has grown more palpable as the state's influence must expand to match the capabilities of technology and arms at that time. It must be remembered that the fear never "makes" an officer do anything. Officers are familiar with the fear for they use the fear to their advantage to win and hold office and make use of office for any purpose. The general fear is the eternal excuse. It works the same way in any country. It is helpful to note here that in a republic, the general fear is a far greater motivator than it would be if there were no competition for office or favors among the aristocracy, which are handed down to the lower orders for purely superstitious reasons. But, despotic societies with a horrifically regressive social norm, like India's caste system, are ruled by fear for the same purpose, with far more ruinous results. Despotic societies can rule by cruelty and have no reason to moderate the general fear, while for a republic, fear dominates the entire arrangement. The republic likely exists because the general fear had, for a variety of reasons, presented both an imminent threat and great opportunity for potential office-holders, and so aristocracies took that opportunity the moment such a thing could be exercised. In every case, aristocracy does not care what type of government nominally rules or the technology it uses, for aristocracy has always found a way to foment the terror while the favored are granted impunity.

Long ago, the imperial course of humanity was set, and so the Romans are the inheritors of a tradition that would have produced a similar system in many places touched by it. This was never a universal system, as if it could be superimposed on alien nations or reproduced by an assembly line. The history of Babylon cannot be trivially reproduced, and all of the standards of Rome cannot be trivially reproduced. Nearly all of the ways Rome could prevail were remembered, and Rome's legacy was transferred to the Catholic Church and the successor kingdoms of Europe. They remain, to this day, the imperial knowledge base, modified over many years with every new invention. If the Roman system were superimposed on American Indian or African tribes, it would not only not work, but it would be an intolerable imposition on the aliens' manners. When Rome conquered a rival, very often the Romans had little interest in "social engineering", and their efforts to accomplish this met limited success. Mainly, the Romans saw compliance with Roman law as greater than any compliance with a "Roman theory of mind". To the Romans, Roman law was the law that worked best to describe imperial affairs, rather than an arbitrary cultural bigotry of theirs. What was valued by the Romans was literacy. They were students of philosophy, but rarely masters, and when Romans did take philosophy, they were usually Grecophiles or took a great interest in the aliens Rome encountered, rather than looking to Roman history for philosophical insights. It must also be remembered that the Roman sense of the heavens was polytheistic, and so it was not at all unusual for Eastern aristocratic gods or mystery cults to make the rounds in a Roman city. Romans liked to see similarities between their own pantheon and traditions and the alien gods they encountered, with the storm god Jupiter being the standard interpretation of "the big man in the sky". The death of the old gods was not seen as the death of Rome itself, for Rome could just as well adopt foreign gods as their own and maintain the same structure. What was Rome, really? It was "the system". Every empire in history has its "system" which can trace its lineage to some empire in the past. It may not tie to the singular example of the "imperial-feudal model" human history gave us. The Chinese Empire has no such tie, and upon closer examination, there is not a parallel growth in Chinese history to what happened in Rome. There are some common building blocks, of the sort I have described here, but what was built in China was a model, now defunct, particular to it, that met the wishes of those who held the empire. The imperial-feudal model of Rome was "not for export" or a thing the rest of the world considered automatic or inevitable. Civilization, it was concluded, was not for everyone, nor was the spread of civilization the necessary goal of Rome. If later colonial history is any indication, Empires loath to introduce too many new clients into their "system", and new clients are only integrated partially as was the case with Rome's clients and the dealings of the Chinese emperors with barbarians. When Europeans established their presence in the East, the Europeans judged the Asians to be "barbarians" with the most denigrating language, and the feeling was mutual. Yet, no "racial essence" or notion of anything like it was the distinguishing quality that was truly relevant. What was essentially different is that the "system" that eventually became colonial trading empires encountered another system that had long established its own expectations of how they relate to foreigners. We will see that the chief aim of the "free trade Empire" of modernity was to break open and dissolve those foreign powers. Because I cannot spend too long describing the rest of the world, this book concerns only the imperial-feudal model of the Romans and their forebears. Some ascribe to East Asia an "Asiatic mode of production", but for the same reasons that the concept of a "mode of production" is not appropriate, an "Asiatic mode of production" fails to comprehend why much of the world resisted this foreign intervention, and to this day much of the world does not believe in the inevitability of the free trade ideology. Given recent history and the abject failure of all things "capitalism", why would anyone want to be part of that? But, I am getting ahead of myself, and even if the rest of the world were willing to join this global empire of the 21st century, eugenism and its dictates made assimilation into it a total impossibility. For the eugenists, the objective is total extermination and malice for its own sake. For the Romans, it was a far simpler proposition; barbarians had little of value for the Romans except removal of the threat barbarian invasion posed to the Empire, and the Romans would face difficulty conquering neighboring empires that were tied into the greater imperial-feudal system and were well acquainted with Roman and imperial tactics and the interests of the empire.

The injunction to "expand or die" is a simple truth of empires for spiritual reasons, rather than any ulterior motive or "material motive" that would be resolved technocratically. The objective is simple: rule the world. Every empire in history has been a singular proposition for all that exists. Each empire has its preferred notions of how to accomplish that. Very rarely is that goal annexation by the state and law of that empire, which is difficult to accomplish or hold for long. But, the imperative to expand is not really a monetary problem, as if the substance of Mammon is the major source of our woes and if you magicked money away we wouldn't have to suffer ever again. What is at stake is the prestige of officers and the means by which these officers can attain that prestige. Without a want of the officers to do this for their career, none of the monetary incentives line up with a result. The chief aim of those who live in monetary economics is to circumvent the middleman of money, regardless of where they are. Bankers want to translate money into assets they can hold and security for themselves and are under no illusions about what money is. Merchants translate commerce into something that will allow them to attain office, which leads to wealth, security, and a rise in standing. That was how the capitalist could become something more than a capitalist and free himself from the burdens of that office, taking on the much nicer offices of the new liberal aristocracy. End users always saw money as a barrier between them and what they want, and would just as well work out whatever trade arrangements they deem suitable, or hold productive assets and security to use them so they are freed from obligation to any other producer. If someone could grow food in their home, they would be freed from any interaction or dependency on another person, and need only tend to that home and its conditions. It is, in particular, the prestige of imperial office that makes this demand, rather than offices generally. Someone might imagine an empire that stays in place, immobile and eternal, but it is a simple fact that empires are a going concern, and it is from Empire that a "going concern" can exist beyond some idea a man of business holds. If they are going concerns, they will ask how to rule for a year, for a lifetime, or for many generations after they themselves are gone. Without this, the empire cannot function as an empire. If someone is autistically obsessed with "me me me" and cares not about future generations, that's great for them, but they won't make empires. They will only make faggotry and would, absent enabling, not be our problem or anyone's problem. If they are enabled, there is an extant imperial apparatus allowing this; and there are ways empires can utilize this low cunning and enabling behavior to perpetuate themselves, without any concept of a "need" as a rational proposition. If such enabling and faggotry are the goal, then the result of human history is a foregone conclusion, and while we may ask why anyone would live in such a world, "faggotry begets faggotry", just as surely as evil begets evil. If the lowest ethos is embraced, then the imperial value the officers seek is faggotry itself, which entails torture and humiliation. The more rarefied torture products would be merely faggotry multiplied, "by some process behind the backs of the fags". This, however, is not really how it works in any economy, from the most primitive to the economics of free trade to today's technocratic setup. What does work is that the prestige of an officer is measurable by some objective merit, rather than a notion of substance or comparisons. Someone has more prestige than another person, and this establishes rank within the imperial apparatus and a sense of which officers can command what.^[3]

Why there is a singular "imperial system" is that all contending parties, in one way or another, recognize Empire as a global proposition. Whatever their regional "system" may be, based on their history, all Empires are beholden to their competitors. This becomes more prominent in modernity as I intend to describe, but it can be seen in rival empires sharing a border in any era. The imperial courtiers of any region or nation recognize the dominant regional player and dominant institutions that cross regional or national borders, rather than maintaining a fiction that their domains are inviolable or self-contained ecosystems. The imperial courtiers never play for their "team" but for the greater imperial mission. So long as the class of imperial courtiers is happy, they are content with permanent antagonism and games of brinkmanship, if it is only the poor who are sacrificed in wars. The imperial courtiers studiously avoid each other, and this is done for more than a class affinity between aristocrats or an indulgence of the imperialists. The game between regional empires can only be maintained by collusion of the participants, and the participants here see not their "team" or some ideological affinity, but their personal stake in Empire and their network of clients that benefit from it. The imperial courtiers are aware of regional interests at all times, but in the purest form, the Empire could have gone on just the same if the faces of the ruling class were all Chinese faces. If the essential purpose of Empire were maintained, it would not matter who or what rules it. In practice, it is not possible to insert another nation or society into the position of the rulers of a region and expect a seamless transition; Empires are not fixed ideological constructs or fixed technology, so the advance of technology cannot be denied, and the results of wars and conquests are not wholly irrelevant. It simply remains the case that imperial courtiers across nations recognize each other and would have to. This is slightly different from the aristocratic game, which is carried out purely because of the affinity aristocrats hold for each other, but as it turns out, aristocracy as a force is at the core of every hitherto known empire, and the indulgences of aristocracy have been the chief reason why empires exist and carry on as they have. If empires were governed primarily by the other orders, their chief relation would be universal and lasting peace, and eventually, the imperial system of both would be intertwined and "assimilated". The resulting empire from this union need not be a political union or felt as a "union" or even an "alliance", but the subjects of the empires would see that there was no real reason to wage these destructive wars and far more to gain by exchange and communication between the subjects so that standards of comparison were possible. And so, for the imperial game to continue for aristocracy's purposes, its ultimate aim is to ensure that the subjects are always interdicted and never, ever compare their experiences and knowledge, lest the subjects escape the "middlemen" of the imperial court and aristocracy. Since there were already distinct orders of humanity by the time the imperial-feudal model was possible, the same would be true of proprietors against the other orders, of commoners against the other orders, and of workingmen against the other orders. Only the order of the lowest class rejects entirely the imperial formula, for this game has always been a convenient pretext to humiliate the lowest class so far as the lowest class has seen the beast or sees the imperial contest as anything relevant to their lives.

What is "humanism"? It is the imperial cult that the Romans understood—humanitas—and a strategy for their relation with barbarian people who had no reason to ever buy into the Roman imperial values. It did not matter to a barbarian that the Romans had baths and literature and all of the qualities of civilization. For that matter, it really did not matter to the Romans that civilization was valued for some essence or a notion that technocratic civilization would absorb the world and make it a giant ball of light, or "a million points of light". The Romans valued civilization and thus humanism because civilization was their vehicle for office-holding and how their technology would best operate. The Romans didn't need to make the rivals "Roman-like" or identify with Rome. What was necessary was for clients to play ball with the Romans, which meant the Romans had to be able to offer either the "carrot"—the values of civilization which the Romans possessed in abundance during their golden years—or the "stick", which was the legions coming in to beat the de-fanged barbarous nation on the terms the Romans fought best in.

This applied to clients of Rome, rather than a drive to "humanize" the whole world. Christian universalism, based on the Roman concept of Empire, would arise for very different purposes, and even here, the Christian understood universalism not as something that obligated all people to moral equality, but as a judgment that God had no favor for one tribe or identity over another, and that all of mankind were eligible for redemption in theory. In practice, as mentioned in our chapters on religion, the lowest class were not eligible for redemption, and those nations that were too alien to be educated in Christian manners were effectively barred from redemption since they didn't "really" understand the Christ. Also excluded, explicitly by the Christian understanding, were non-humans of any sort. This forbade redemption for any space aliens that might have heard about this strange human cult around the Christ, and it also appeared superficially to forbid any notion of an aristocratic "super-human" elect. It is this that the Christian could point to as something for the rest of the people; that no matter how learned or virtuous someone was, whatever pedigree they came from or whatever orders of the priesthood they elevated to, none of that counted for any "points" on the Bridge to Total Freedom Christianity established. There is a slop version given to the plebs as a corrupted form of Christianity, where the only rule for redemption is "Do you believe in Jesus Christ", without any obligation of knowledge, scholarship, any expectation of what a good Christian was supposed to do, and above all no study of the evil which is the most necessary task of any religion for us in the mortal realm who cannot dwell in purely metaphysical constructs. We see here, plain as day, the necessary Satanic cycle that had to be introduced into Christian thinking, which was always latent in the religion. It was latent in part because Christianity inherited Roman humanism, and in part because the Christian theory of knowledge and cosmology was not tenable. A good Christian could question their own theories of knowledge since they were given the dodge "God works in mysterious ways" along with many other dodges and systems of mental cheating. There remained within the hierarchy and laity strong resistance to doing this. Since that veers away from the topic at hand, I leave that to the reader to know.

Can anything be salvaged from the demise of humanism in our time? I do not think there was ever anything so great in it that made it indispensable. We have been cowed by a great general fear of what happens when humanitas is wholly abandoned and the worst of the worst transgressions are regular, so much that many will be scared back into some preferred holdout that preserves the old but cannot contemplate the new, ceding the ground to this disgusting, Satanic siege we live under today. The best that can be salvaged from all religious traditions is to study them as historical events that can be judged with science, and this includes the doctrines of humanism. Somewhere in humanism, there was a vision that humanity did not need to live like shrieking banshees and rapers, and that this did not require so great an accomplishment that we must consider it forever out of reach. This is a vision and approach to the problem of ritual sacrifice that was peculiar to the Christians and to earlier Greco-Roman society, whose peculiar history raised the question in a way that wasn't raised elsewhere. In the rest of the world, ritual sacrifice took on different meanings, and these concepts rarely translate perfectly to the religious understanding of those in the East. The concepts are certainly sensical to any human who contemplates the questions religion and philosophy pose, and Easterners have made their commentaries on them just as Westerners comment on the Eastern religions. Perhaps an answer can be found in people who look at the idea of nailing men to crosses for religious crimes rather strange altogether. To understand why the Christ was a central figure requires some knowledge of Babylonian Satan-worship and the lurid cult surrounding it, and that has really been the core imperial creed "above God", and above base humanity. It is this that provides the genuine motor for the "imperial-feudal model" I describe, from which free trade and the present empire are exercised. If other parts of the world competed with or played the game of this imperial-feudal model in a direct confrontation, they would in some way become beholden to the Satan, and this is one of its insidious vehicles for spreading the general fear. If, for example, 21st century China, already strongly influenced by the intervention of free trade and Communism, decided to become a true rival to the imperial system, they would do so knowing that they would either transgress the holy of holies for the humanist religion and concepts of such, or they will succumb to the same disease presently afflicting the present Empire. All signs suggest the latter is what is happening since no notion of Chinese national identity or Chinese history holds that great an appeal outside of an interest of China and its historical neighbors. I would also think that by now, educated Chinese scholars asked this question before I did and know it better than I ever will, and do not need my input on anything. One way or another, the centrality of Eugenics for the present Empire should make clear that it is no longer a choice to eliminate this or that from the historical record, and this applies to the history of those domains that were absorbed into the imperial system. The imperial system has been essentially the same one since Babylon if not before, picked up and adapted during the period where rival city-states and then nations could rise. It has picked up a virulent adaptation, the eugenic creed, which will corrode any other idea but Eugenics, until Eugenics sits at its apex as it does now and cannibalizes all historical sense, or ties it to a fictional history as aristocracy always does when it writes the history books. But, there will come a time, I believe, when Eugenics is exposed to the world as a disease worthy of extirpation, and that will happen, long after I am gone. This is not something that gives me any great satisfaction, for before Eugenics is done, it will create horrors greater than anything I could write about in the time I have left, and it will certainly leave its mark on humanity forever, locking in the worst of its qualities. I have little faith that the "next thing" will be a kinder or better world. I do, however, have the satisfaction of knowing that this particular disease, which took the name of humanitas and tied it to a racial doctrine that is wholly inappropriate and contrary to any concept of proper humanism, will be a historical artifact that all fact and reason will judge as retarded, and it must always be remembered as retarded if we are to speak of it truthfully moving forward.

The final piece of the "imperial-feudal model" is one that did not exist at the inception of such a thing, and only came about from ad hoc reforms that answered the problems imperialism created. If the imperial objectives were to become a constant pressing, then the levies of citizen-soldiers or peasants would not be sufficient, and a general staff of elite officers would not be sufficient. So too were mercenaries, often employed in ancient wars, unsuitable for the task, for many reasons that would be clear to students of political history. What was needed, and what secured the imperial-feudal model's existence, was a standing army. This is what the Romans created, and it was a uniquely Roman invention at the time the Romans did this. It came about because the Roman system could no longer provide its citizen-soldiers with plots of land to defend, or any stake in the state they fought for. The new incentive, introduced by Marius, was for the commanding general to secure loot from the defeated rival, and to pay the soldiers with this loot, which included land taken from conquest and the remaining public land that was supposed to remedy this very problem in the past. The standing army sold the legions as a career choice, with 20 years of service granting the legionnaire a retirement pension and land to call his own. This usually did not materialize or the land given was less than desirable and immediately threatened by the large estates that a free farmer could never compete with. But, the landless men had nowhere else to go, and Rome faced rivals that threatened the imperial claims of the Senators. Once the standing army is complete, the imperial-feudal model of expansion is clear. The standing army defends the imperial claims and the aristocracy shares in the spoils they stole from the world.

The operation can be understood as a feedback loop that intends to be a positive feedback loop. The army becomes a standing institution with its own imperatives, where the pay and bonuses must increase no matter what, which means new plunder must be available. The elites of the society are tied to this operation and must personally enrich themselves. Both stand opposed to the people, who have no stake in this operation whatsoever. While empires existed before the Romans and Empire describes the general condition of such entities, complete with their own dismal science, the standing army brings into being "imperialism" as a basic concept. In the past, empires would raise war and then retreat from it but understood their basis to be primarily productive, which meant for most of history that it was rooted in the land and farmers, who were out of necessity free men supplemented by slave labor. Imperialism gave rise to the estate of the aristocrats that were supplied slaves, which required a standing army to secure and protect. It was not enough to merely be exploitative or mercantile, as the Carthaginians were. The standing army was the key structure to make it work, for once the standing army existed, the imperatives of that army became a reliable institution for securing rule, and had to be fed with coin rather than promises of a sacrifice cult or a warrior aristocracy. The standing army is not an aristocratic structure. The legionnaires or appropriate soldiers are drawn from common stock and usually must be to attract a sufficient number of recruits for operations to continue. War is a terrible business model, but as a way to rule large empires, standing armies create not just a constant threat from the emperor (and a threat to the emperor in the event of mutiny), but a bedrock institution that is expected. The free citizen-producer, whatever his vocation, is depreciated. The slave, the soldier, the specialist, and a diverse division of labor regimented to preserve the imperial apparatus, can develop for the first time. Similar processes can be found wherever imperial apparati developed, but they all followed the conditions of those societies, and all of them were wary or outright rejected large standing armies. For most of these societies, conscripting common stock soldiers was about the worst thing a general could possibly do, unless the levy was necessary for a campaign with many pitched battles, as was the case in many Chinese civil wars of the time period. It is the Roman model that is handed down to modernity, and it is a model that would be emulated by its rivals out of necessity. It was never transmitted or reproduced in full, except by the inheritors of Roman domains, and for many rivals of Rome, reproducing the Roman system would repudiate anything their own imperial missions stood for. Gradually, standing armies and the Roman concept of office-holding would be reproduced, but much of the world explicitly rejected the European "track" of imperialism as the Romans practiced it.

Most of the empires of the world, though they in principle claimed the whole of the Earth, did not have an "imperialist" vision that relied on economic imperatives, or encouraged republican officials to conquer for personal glory. All were disciplined by barbarian nations like the Huns and Mongols, whose imperial mission was one of establishing brutal despotic rule rather than entertaining the games civilized aristocrats played that brought their own civilizations to ruin. Imperialism has always been a game of the civilized, commandeered by aristocrats and those of the fighting men who demonstrated a political mind and saw what ruled the hearts and minds of humanity. Sadly, the civilized judgment was true in the final judgment of humanity; that they would be cowed sufficiently by the imperial apparatus to be made to "do it to themselves", at least long enough for the imperial apparatus to do its damage and leave our present world a husk depleted of any potential for this to have a different outcome. This victory of imperialism did not come as easily as its ideologues brag it did, nor was it inevitable, nor is it complete as of this writing. The imperial disease persists because it can, and it has adapted far beyond the Roman apparatus, so much that a "standing army" as such is no longer a requirement. But, it is here that the historical thread of "imperialism" truly begins, rather than some innate quality of human beings that made it so. Before this time, the ambitions of those who would destroy the world for the imperial cause were limited. In many cases, the imperial claims to the world had no particular interest in the lives of the smallfolk, and if they conquered new lands, it was a campaign that the empires believed would end in peace and an end to resistance. Imperialism is the true birth of a world where war was indeed eternal and could become truly total and envelop all that exists, rather than merely make claims to the land while leaving its people mostly intact—perhaps as slaves and broken of their ambitions for freedom, but still free of mind, for such an invasion was not a very worthwhile venture. Then in other cases, the imperial claims simply judged most of the world to be full of barbarians who weren't even worth conquering, and the expectation was that the barbarians would continue a ritual of paying tribute to the Heavenly Ruler, who by his grace "allows" the barbarians continued existence as long as the face of the Emperor is maintained. That strategy appears to be more sensical for a ruler, for it doesn't expend vast quantities of wealth and energy on a foolhardy and contradictory campaign to "change the world" in a most ruinous way.

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