Previous Chapter | Return to Table of Contents | Next Chapter

By "army formation" I refer to the most overt formations for social engineering and the body of officers and soldiers tasked with "legitimate defense", i.e. the armed body of men that are understood by liberal society as men who are part of the legal monopoly on violence. The social engineering crews, like military engineering corps, are only fully appreciated once the function of war as an engine of social engineering is understood. If the objective of war was to win battles, kill enemies, and build the fortifications to secure victory, only the last of those objectives is met with some success, and the purpose of the fortifications of society is extortion and intimidation more than anything else. If war were fought for its stated purposes, it would be a brief affair and we would do well not to threaten it so casually. Yet, here we are, with the language of war dominating this society, even though the war never seems to result in any victory, and this serves the war cult and fighting men well enough to continue the practice. A world without long wars would be a world where nearly everything humanity has practiced could not persist. It would lead to the outcome of mitigating the ritual sacrifice, as the wealth and energy spent on war is spent instead on productive enterprises, distributed based on need rather than ability so that starvation and all things that are a menace to general peace can be forestalled indefinitely. Such a world allows no place for aristocracy and its conceits. The sort of large standing army or social engineering projects we have lived through would become intolerable, and if such efforts were renewed, the reaction of the people, collectively and individually, would be to withdraw their support for the institutions, turning to something that isn't trying to torture and kill them for the sake of doing so. It is unlikely that such a world can exist, due to humanity's proclivity for creating pointless struggle and misery wherever it spreads. If such a world did exist, much of this book would not be sensical, or it would describe a fantasy scenario of one way a social enterprise can go horribly wrong. It would speak of a very different society than the one we have to suffer through. Should it continue, much of what humans have taken for granted can no longer exist. There would no longer be a "self" of high importance functioning as the excuse or imperative mandating this general fear, and office-holders would be tasked with little more than dull tasks that are completed easily and devoid of controversy. The chief office that prevails in such a society would be the office of one who demands neutrality in social matters, disdains utterly political matters, and sees the best world as one where the agents have little to do with each other. We would coexist mostly because of necessity, and while interactions may be possible, there would be little for them. Social interaction would, for the sake of the general peace, be indirect. The purpose of political writers in such a world, such as they would continue to exist, would be to maintain this condition and prohibit intrigues that would return the world to our present misery. That world does not offer much that is pertinent to our history. It would not be the "end of history". Events would still happen and would be recorded and remembered. There would still be suffering and causes for social strife. There would not be much we would call "pleasure", except trivial things enjoyed alone that are of little consequence for the situation. There would still be objectives to meet for the individuals and the social enterprise generally. They would, in that world, not become existential dangers that invade private life and insist everyone must bend to something foul. So far as there would remain any sense of "us", it would be a voluntary association, where most of humanity elects not to join without a very good reason presented to them. That world has never been a serious potential for humanity except at the smallest scales of social interaction, where necessity required such a thing. If such a thing did not exist, there would not be a "productive society", since it is the toilers that build the nation, receiving nothing whatsoever for their effort and usually tricked into working for their oppressors or seeing their labors stolen and converted into perverse parodies.

This appears like an idyllic picture of "pre-fall" humanity, but we know there was never any "fall" as such, nor would the world I described there be any sort of ideal or seen as such. It has always been a vision haunting the imagination of some of humanity who wanted this situation to be different. It haunted the lowest class, who have no intellect or standing to question their lot, and who have for their brief existence been ignored. The lowest class would be quite happy if everyone else kept on ignoring them, for we have nothing to do with the human project, and the one thing that gives us peace is to be free from human contact. But, at a basic level, all of us are the lowest class, and if we were to coexist, what would be possible? Certainly, technology that could heal and improve the human condition would no longer be possible, and we could have those things if humans really wanted them. Naive sense would tell humans that, however foul the history of humanity is, there would be enough self-interest in those things to limit the excesses of cruelty hitherto known.

The point of saying this again is to reinforce the central need of any army; cohesion of the unit towards a shared people. Everything done in social engineering requires working with the agent and its operation, rather than an imagined unit or whole of the force. To "pure social engineering", the individual agent and operation are irrelevant. Ultimately the only relevant outcome is "success", however, that is judged. Victory or defeat. Right or wrong. Solution, or no solution. It is very different for the biological nation. The biological nation didn't need any excuse or mission to exist. It was a simple fact of what it meant for life to exist and reproduce, and the biological nation did not have any meaning beyond that fact. It is a useful fact to remember, but nothing about the biological nation is socially engineered. The participants are there by default, because their sociality couldn't continue without that shared existence. The moment it ceases doing what it does, there is no nation, unlike the more developed concept of the nation proper which does not diminish just because its members stop acting as a nation. This happens because nations proper are historical constructs, even in the primitive forms of such, and we can ask questions about their history, whereas the biological nation is the necessary assumption we inserted just now to explain natural history. That is, the biological nation exists because it is inherently meaningful for this question of what life is and does, rather than nations being convenient fictions or conventions to be displaced by some institution. Nations in the sense the concept is relevant to human knowledge are always judged by history and can be doubted, precisely because they are rooted in an ability to make meaningful connections. The institutions of human beings, which start as "just ideas", become offices that command men and machines for this purpose of social engineering.

So begins one of the central problems of human history. Humans ask how to make institutions that are worth a damn, precisely because not one of these institutions speaks to the nation or the entities who are handed these things, yet it is those institutions that allow us to judge history and thus make meaningful connections. We might confidently assert that we don't need this dubious education, but the offices of those who would engineer society must command nations, for there is no other unit that can be picked up and manipulated that is "just there". Only after this step can institutions like, oh say, the army, speak of something other than a nation that they command. The first formation that can be commanded for this purpose is little more than the available beings in the nation. Since the men and women form in many senses distinct nations until they meet, based on the mores inherited from the animal kingdom, this usually meant that armies drew from the men, and where women were recruited for fighting, their functions were distinguished and never confused with the mens' function. The thing that these men would fight for would have been the women and their fellow men if they shared any fellowship. In other words, it is far easier to motivate men to fight for success in mating, defense of their offspring, and the continuation of their existence past their own lives. Had this struggle been about their own existence, such a struggle would have been futile, and for most of human history, mortality was a reminder that all of these campaigns to change the world eventually run into the cold reality that history does not work that way. This is obviously a poor excuse to wage war even for defensive purposes, and long before any such thing as a warrior instinct let alone a code is developed, the causes for the armies of men are far more elaborate than seeking women. It is worth noting this conceit about sex because such conceits are deployed to disorient and confuse the men of any fighting force, and if humans were asexual or they knew they were rejected from the sexual game from an early age, their attitudes regarding existence and any struggle for it would adapt. What would be the point of invoking some grand narrative of struggle if not only the individual were to wither and die, but anything they would join vociferously rejects every iota of that individual's existence? We can dismiss the claim that "life is struggle", because most of life has nothing to do with struggle, and if life can do nothing but scream for its existence, it will not survive against a developed threat. This degeneration of the motives of war and life is deliberate and calculated by the eugenic creed, purified to create the present conditions in which struggle is waged.

Throughout history, the objective of a commanding officer is to keep this peculiar institution, an "army", functioning when the expectations of life are generally "not war" and do not have any particular affinity for militarizing society, nations, or life generally. The trick appears like making water flow uphill, but there are enough motives in life to embrace some of the imperatives common to war. The motives of life for social engineering generally are among them. Given the freedom to act, entities like humans would see nothing wrong whatsoever with fighting for the causes they deem worthwhile. Humans can consider the cost of the struggle and any existential dread they might have about it, and consider that it is not some grand struggle to defend oneself or secure an existence for the future, which entails holding territory. But, beyond an entirely local interest, many who are arranged in armies don't think being there is a great time or an adventure. Perhaps some fools do, and those are reliable enough to be thrown at some enemy, but usually, this sort of struggle is a dreary grind, and the fighting men would hope that their commanding officer doesn't suck at battle since winning those things would be very helpful for their future existence and any treasure that might be plundered from the effort. Once started and under the watch of the officers and guards, the fighting men are stuck there, especially if they are ostensibly fighting an enemy army that wants to take all of their stuff. It is far easier to start these things than continue them, and easier to continue them than end them while seriously declaring victory. Starting the struggle is very simple for any instigator. Continuing it largely appeals to necessity, a consequence of the instigator starting this, and so the first excuse every child in a playground learns is that the other bastard started it. But, with the excuses and instigators out of the way, this activity is shit. There is little to suggest that fighting for this is a good use of any time or energy, save for fear of the commanding officer. That fear may be well-deserved and earned by some merit, but it's not like there is some Demiurge-like force that makes people enjoy social engineering. The "primordial force" that is summoned as the excuse is the force of the instigators and shit-stirrers who conveniently run away while making other people fight the wars the instigators start. Once started, someone is going to have to finish the fighting.

The instigator of war will never, ever be someone who has to fight and struggle themselves. The instigator's vision is to set the war in motion so that other men will fight, while the instigator is praised as a great leader and commanding officer—the greatest sovereign we ever had if the instigator has successfully edited history. If an instigator ever placed him or herself at risk of entering "the deep struggle", they have failed at what instigations accomplish. This of course purifies the role of the "instigator" in a way that aristocracy has always desired, when the more common situation precipitating a war is that neither party to the struggle liked each other much before it began, and they needed little motivation to relax the tenuous peace between them. But, that situation is not rooted in anything that can be naturalized or systematized. It would not be possible to keep a human society within a hair of total, unrelenting war, without the command of the instigators and regimentation of society becoming too obvious. It would become too clear, as it has in our time, that the war exists primarily to select who lives and who dies and nothing else, and any cause that the war was for is not worth this, least of all to the poor sods asked to fight for the instigators that reap all reward at the lowest cost possible. We may consider at a lower level that the instigator and the fighting man are the same entity, but the very act of social engineering in this way asserts a simple truth. The fighting and struggle are alien to the instigation and the excuses made, and the struggle exists to defend the instigation, without fail. Even if someone concluded after the fact or with foresight that struggle was genuinely necessary given the course of events, this someone would be able to distinguish the motives for struggle, and what instigating forces and entities set it in motion. This someone would also be able to assess from reasonable experience what will be expended in the struggle and remember that ancient aphorism of Murphy's Law—whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. After enough such struggles, the wise assessor will be able to know without having to think too long about what some struggle will cost. The "payoffs" or "pleasure" from this struggle are entirely alien to the cost of the struggle. Everything spent on struggle is effectively burned in a great bonfire for no benefit whatsoever. Someone might say that all agency and events are "instigators" of this sort, except for another great truth of the world. This is that much of existence proceeds without any "social engineering" or "struggle session", and all of the developed knowledge, meaning, moral intent, and genius of the world exists for purposes far removed from any such dismal science. We could, being aware of that existence, entirely circumvent the struggle and war by dialogue, and tolerate extreme dislocations because the alternative of war and pitched battle would be worse.

The goal of the instigator, then, is to make all alternatives to that battle impossible. The goal of the fighter is to remain intact, without any particular interest in these higher products motivating the fighter. If the fighter is a commanding officer, the commander is tasked not just with a personal want, but a want of whatever grouping of entities are available for the task. This is the unit that all deliberate social engineering has to work within the real world, rather than any preferred notion of self-interest or identity. The body of people available for and subjected to the struggle is not a nation that existed naturally, nor a body of volunteers or a target group of exactly who was preferred for the officers. Everyone goes into the struggle with the associations available to them, and once established, the struggle can only attract those who make the calculation, for whatever reason, of what the struggle's result will be. Struggles never attract by appealing to raw emotion or "bellyfeel". Such appeals are always making an argument with threats, claiming that failure to join the "correct" side will lead to imminent torture and death. Emotional appeals can only work in this way, and they work even for emotions of love or affection that can be weaponized by that beast of "struggle". In a better world, love and affection would not be weaponized because they belong to a sphere where struggle for struggle's sake has been repudiated. I return to my closing words in Book 2, where I exhort the reader: "Hate, my friends! Hate!" The only emotional response to this cult of forced struggle should be hatred of the instigators, and it is the instigators in particular who deserve this hatred. If there is no hatred of that, then love, which does not exist in the garish struggle we are forced to suffer, is forfeit. Love in the struggle is wholly a liability. The motives of those who are holding on to something do not need to be reminded constantly of what they are fighting for, or what they are defending. In the struggle, there is hatred, and it is properly placed on the instigators. In this way, the cohesion of some force you hope to hold remains intact. Hatred for the instigator is not the same as hatred for a combatant or hatred for the enemy side of a war. We can feel whatever we want about the enemy, who after all of the excuses, is just another sad ape drawn into this ritual. The instigators, though, always find a way to place themselves just out of reach, having successfully goaded the combatants into a fruitless struggle. These instigations can't be seen as a cold, rational calculation that "must" happen. In hindsight, our judgment of the instigators is cold and unforgiving, for it is a fact that these creatures are always seeking to create trouble where none had to exist. We have to approach the instigators as entities following a method that works for their purpose. That purpose is, for this chapter, alien to the question at hand. Aristocracy's insinuation has no place in any battle plan or any worthwhile social engineering project, for whatever purpose the engineer envisions. The plans for battle are drawn for temporal victory in the arena as it is available to the combatant, rather than the notions of "victory" offered as spurious reward by the instigators. For battle or any social engineering objective, there is only the cold, rational outcome of some course of action, and emotion has nothing to do with this. Other than hatred of the instigator, there is no emotional casus belli that is real. There are many excuses for the war's beginning and excuses for every policy of social engineering, but the dominant emotion is that same hatred. To the instigator, the classic excuse is that the instigated "started it", even though this is patently absurd given the instigators' deliberate shielding of themselves from all consequences. The right of transgression is an aristocratic shibboleth they will never surrender.

What results is specialization in war-making that exists less for any necessity of such, but a desired regimentation of the battle formation that is pleasing to the instigators. Only after this does the commanding officer look at what has been handed to them, and try to piece together some functional battle formation. The specialization of the warriors begins by punishing the civilian and the bystander, rather than the added virtue of the warriors. No battle formation can tolerate weakness in the fighting men, and so "smear the queer" becomes one of the many games, as do all of the hazing rituals. The same regimentation occurs within the battle formation, for the same purpose, before subcommanders are handed this and have to make this into something that wins battles. A hierarchy is established not as a chain of command, but as a pecking order of who can bully whom, which must not be transgressed. The value of this hierarchy is greater than any other requirement of battle readiness, for if it were rejected, the true purpose of the struggle session would be defeated then and there. There would be, for the instigators, nothing to fight for, and the fighting men, whatever their feelings or sentimental attachments, would bring the current struggle to an end and disband the formation once it is complete. Such a thing is incompatible with a standing army, which makes permanent what was in the past a temporary expedient or a thing confined to a class of warriors while most of the people had far less commitment to the joy of making other humans suffer. It was the standing army and imperialism arising as an alliance of the interests of the army and aristocracy permanently, backed by a constant stream of productive commerce and expropriation, that made the imperial mission, once the province of a subset of humanity who played this great game, the chief problem for everyone in the world. It is there that the development of the imperial strategy as a constant pressing of the nerve can be developed consciously and its results are seen immediately, rather than working through imperfect tools that were available to social engineers of the past.

The cohesion of battle-worthy formations is not my interest, for that is a long discussion about things that are not germane and would include common knowledge that is beneath the dignity of most men to even bother answering explicitly. What is the interest here is the development of imperial fighting formations; that is, I examine the apparatus that fights for imperialism.^[1] This doesn't usually entail the army directly, for "fighting" in this case refers also to the standing bureaucracy and armies of public relations ghouls. But, the fullest development of this militarization of society for imperial purposes is beyond the scope of this chapter. I instead identify developments since the rise of the standing army that gave rise to the colonial empires that demarcate modernity from what came before.

The caste of the warriors arises not from its virtue, but from the destruction of virtue of its necessary counterpart; the demilitarized and socially defeated serf. Class distinction of the warriors from everyone else is not a new thing, and in ancient society, it was the default. A codified submission upheld by imperial law, or what counted as such as imperium degenerated into the claims of warlords backed by a large Church, only existed informally in the traditional and patronage networks of the ancient world. The past submission of the laborers was premised on their personal fealty to a patron, who possessed some knowledge that allowed the patron to offer legal services or a store of wealth, or who possessed spiritual authority through the local religion and cults that held the client in a state of fear. The code of submission rested entirely on the personal claims of those who could offer patronage and a hastily assembled state authority that officially only recognized men of honor—men who could fight—as members of society. This would have to be questioned as commerce through coin became an accepted practice. The defeat of the workers came as the imperial model fully became the imperial-feudal model, where most of the people were effectively slaves to be traded like so much chattel in the world to come. The serfs were subdued and made to pay onerous taxation by ancient standards because, for the first time, the whole society was regimented to serve this goal. The serfs worked for nothing more than deeper slavery to the ruling ideas. This might seem like nothing new since the days of Babylon, except for one difference. The slavery of the past was the default of all men, and no notion of liberty could exist. The slavery of the medieval world was known to be slavery, and serfs were exhorted to believe that this slavery was an economic and political necessity rather than a state of nature. The liberty of the lords was the only liberty that could exist in such a world, and this was what "freedom" meant to them. A right to exploit and transgress was established in a way that would be offensive to the classical constitution, where the rulers were not marked by any such liberty and remained men with a lot of political power but men reliant on the support of legions to continue ruling. Someone might claim that this liberty of the lords had always been the effective rule, and the notions of freedom among the commons of classical Antiquity were not at all credible. No commoner from those times appears to believe they lived in any sort of "free society". However, the rulers of those societies were not granted economic and imperial favoritism as a way of life. There was not directly a faith in serfdom as a natural right of the lords to exploit and humiliate. That is what the medieval imperial mindset established when it could become a general rule backed by the authority of organized religion. Imagine a boot stamping on a serf's face forever, and that is exactly the order of the medieval world for over 1,000 years, with little expectation that it could or should be any other way.

In medieval European serfdom, the command and control of the Roman Empire endured on a smaller scale, however degraded it was. There was little that could be done to farmers, even if they were tenants on the estates. Slaves were not so fortunate, and slavery endured as the lowest class of serfs in medieval slavery. For all intents and purposes, the serfs were functionally slaves, save for a few who could cobble together enough property to call themselves "free". That freedom was constantly assaulted by the nobility, who were given everything by right of conquest and right of transgression, including the right to take commoners' wives at will. This right would be affirmed by the peerage and by the Church because the maintenance of the right of transgression was an overt necessity of the feudal order. Any concept of "rights" for the commons was anathema to the cause. It is this that endured for so long, and its ethos continued into modernity. The vanguard of what would become "the Right" embraces all of the worst humiliations of this order, for the express purpose of restoring the degeneracy as the point. But, that gets ahead of ourselves. For feudal society, the right of transgression was a necessity. Had the peasants and serfs seen that it was trivial to say no and frustrate the taxation and obligations they were forced to submit to, the basis for their society would no longer operate. Peasants would, and did, assert what they possessed, and violent reprisals would be initiated. Here, aristocracy makes a simple demand—"please stop oppressing us"—into an instigation worthy of suppression, while the nobility and priesthood regularly instigate and create havoc for the commons and the laborers to emphasize what rules and that this never, ever changes. Unsurprisingly, this regime is ruinous for any productive goal, and that was the point. It was more valuable for the imperial-feudal model to rule than it was for the empire to produce anything in any economic sense. That is the difference between imperial rule and the warrior caste of the past. The past ordering of the world involved city-states or barbarian nations extracting tribute from defeated enemies, or outright enslaving the defeated and claiming their people as property to absorb into the holdings of the victor. The new imperialism did not need the intermediary step of the slavery institution, for it could enclose the world and make conquered nations serve the beast and "do it to themselves". All that was needed was to establish tribute in the form of taxes and, most importantly, feudal dues.

The setup of the warrior caste feudal armies was appropriate to this goal. A small elite trained primarily in the art of war, commanding men-at-arms who were hired for a campaign. Medieval commanders avoided pitched battle and specialized in siege warfare, for the whole society, was one under constant siege of the class of the nobility against the public. Wars could be calculated to wreak havoc on the commoners so that their numbers and aspirations could be culled in that way. For the nobility and the caste granted favor, this was a great game. It did not enrich the nobles, but it extracted by force what would otherwise be extracted by tribute. Very rarely did a kingdom change hands without some diplomatic marriage. And so, war-making became "politics by other means", which would have been ruinous in any other time or seen as foolish faggotry. In other words, "War is Peace", for if this attitude towards war were abandoned, the commons and people would be relieved of culling, and would see that their intolerable situation did not have anything mechanical supporting it. It was the war machine of a degenerated empire. It operated at a minimum technique that prevented an invasion by an alien empire and could mobilize resistance on religious grounds, but beyond a primitive patriotism for the patron deity, in this case, the Christian God that was free to be interpreted as the Christian wished it to be so long as fealty was paid to the central institution, little was expected for motivation. The general depravity of religions, and the particular depravity of Islam, were motivation enough. The Muslim was similarly motivated by Christian depravity, even though the basis for his society entailed a different religion, which is not for our purposes immediately important but was not morally equivalent to the inheritors of the Roman Empire.

This is the model that the kings of Europe would inherit when Europeans set sail to conquer the Americas and establish holdings in the East. Yet, one key that would be prominent in colonial empires was absent in intra-European squabbles. The trading empire relied on commercial interests and an army of a different sort. This army was technocratic from its inception, and concerned with the sundry details of administration. The imperial-feudal model of society did not have directly any place for this army. They were sorted with the commons and the slaves, and their work primarily concerned the management of slave operations. It was a task beneath the dignity of the nobility, and unless it was a religious matter, it was not Church business. It had no place in the exploitation of the land that was the core purpose of the feudal interest. Feudal lords held land, and their relations with vassals were limited to those of means. The serf's loyalty was extracted by violent force and repeated humiliations, and nothing else was expected or possible.

The origin of the new class came from technical experts of Antiquity, who were by the expectations of that time slaves or tantamount to such rather than merchants whose command of coin was an office obligating them to the aristocratic law and demands of a society where conquest and battle determined how coin was deployed, rather than productivity or some other purpose of the coin. The engineers and men who would be called scientists by our sense were either experts from the slaves who usually became freedmen as the carrot to win their compliance, or they were men of the aristocracy who could spend their free time indulging in what they considered a hobby rather than a pressing need. This motley crew had no evident shared interest, nor could they assemble in any one place that spoke to them and them alone. They did find in philosophical schools a haven of sorts for their peculiar mindset, which occasionally asked why so many of them had to suffer, and so many of the "unworthies" were promoted. This applied to their immediate masters who were the pressing danger, but far more often their ire was directed towards the broad masses, who were always to this new class "residue" and an unsightly stain on history. This of course meant, in our reckoning, the orders of labor and the guilds, and the lowest class who were hated by all. Because this grouping had comparatively little to offer, their rise was entirely contingent on whatever need was present for the lords at the time, such as building a bridge or some creative siege engine. We move forward to the era of the Crusades, where longer campaigns against an organized foreign nation—a religious nation—became the necessary struggle of the day. This applied to both the Christians and the Muslims, with the latter already favoring both mercantile interests and men of learning whose machines would be a benefit to the cause of Islam. The Christians had a notable aversion to money and any learning outside of the priesthood, and it was the explicit task of the Church to mediate all learning and ensure that learning never taught anything heretical, which is to say, anything that would upset the status quo of exploitation.

The social changes begin not from within the empire, but at its borders and in the dealings between empires and nations. The first task was how armies would fight battles in the second millennium against aliens who did not play by the self-declared rules of the local aristocracy. The planned wars of a feudal aristocracy, which are common to a civilization's "internal affairs", allowed war so long as it did not override any boundary that would imperil the aristocratic game, and ruthlessly snuffed out anything like a peasant rebellion that did upset the status quo. If the imperial game was to intervene in alien affairs, the ruthlessness of extermination towards slave revolts was insufficient, because it always supposed the motive for slave rebellions was escape, and the slaves could not realistically appeal to a just order for the ruling order was in every way a glorification of injustice for its own sake. The evil cannot be made into the good. This is also the first tribalistic instinct when empires wage war against alien empires. The Christians saw the Muslims as monsters, and the same was true of the Muslims' view of the Christians. Yet, it was always clear that whatever their conceits about aliens, the Other was an enemy capable of reason and strategy, and so the same instinctive desire to crush the interloper and rip out its life would lead to few outcomes. As much as possible, the imperial game of conquest against aliens is a war of unrestrained extermination, followed by corruption to "make them do it to themselves" so that the rule of an imperial governor may extract tax. In practice, the victory of such a strategy requires engineering knowledge that is not germane to the political conceit at the core of the imperial mission. The Romans build fortifications and cities when waging campaigns against the barbarous North. When Rome is on the defensive, and the barbarians are the inheritors of imperial glory, the Germanic barbarians embrace rot and death and a peculiar racial affinity for their own, promoting drunkenness and malice among their own leadership so that the culls of the peasantry may continue. So begins the entire project of German so-called "civilization". The change is that it ceases to be an administrative matter or a matter of morale, and the established tactics cannot be reformed from within for they are insufficient. What allows the permanent introduction of a "new class" are specialized functions. Some of those are the functions of torture and espionage, which properly belong to aristocracy rather than the technological interest, and their development is carried out in parallel with other developments rather than espionage and torture being "drivers of history" in that way. Even in the present situation where intelligence agencies claimed a monopoly on truth and historical progress, the function of aristocratic espionage has been wholly to retard, to destroy, to denude, so that warfare returns to the low expectations of technique for aristocracy's preferred way of war. The specialization of torture and interrogation is not interesting to us here, since the aristocratic torturer and their running dogs only at most co-opt the work of technicians and soldiers.

What becomes a permanent fixture in the battle formation are those technicians whose expertise is drawn from the commons out of necessity. The qualities of technicians are not appropriate for fighting men. This is a simple reality of what it means for men to be specialized for war as opposed to men specialized for technology and the pursuit of it. Warriors may be students of technology, but they will in the end be warriors first, and will have to consider the technological interest a corrupting influence. The reflexes of a specialized technocrat would appear to a warrior as neurotic and diseased thinking. Such men are easy to frighten and would wear down from drilling and the siege environment war typically entails. Likewise, the siege environment which has been the sad fate of humanity, that the technology of the technological interest had a hand in creating, is not conducive to the mindset that seeks technology for its own sake. For the latter charge, this is deliberate; the entire point of the technological interest advancing siegeworks is to drive out those of alien social orders that would be hostile to the technocrat. This primarily is the technocrats' disdain for the orders of labor and especially the lowest class, but also their disdain for the warriors, to "make them suffer" and deny the soldier what soldiers want, which is for the war to be simple and straightforward for them and punishing for all other men. The hope of introducing technology to war in the long run, if technocrats think that far ahead, is to challenge the aristocratic monopoly on thought and history. This can be done for the commons' interest as a whole against a class enemy, or it can be an individual technocrat's bid to enter the aristocracy themselves and supplant members of the old aristocracy. In the latter case, the technocrat internalizes all of the aristocratic virtues and sense of what the purpose of humanity should be, and if the technocrat is lucky, the technocrat succeeds and carries on the world-historical purpose of aristocracy as a force, better than the old aristocracy that failed at the great game. But, the technocrat does not get to do this for "internal" reasons. The enemy technology is applied to is always an alien Other, or some element of society that is made alien by asserting over and over that it is alien. For example, if the workers of a society, who largely stay out of politics, are declared "residue" or unsightly ghasts to be removed, the conditions of "alienation" are established for the technological interest's intervention for this purpose only. This type of alienation is different from the concept of generally alienable labor or generally alienable products in exchange, for it solely concerns some enemy declared in a war setting, or some social engineering project that takes on the qualities of war. It would not be possible for technology to be introduced "idly" or as a hypothetical until the assertion of an imperial mission to conquer the alien is made. The alien threat may be vaguely specified and presumed to be a general aspiration of Empire, but the resulting technology always envisions particular foes for particular campaigns. If a general approach to such enemies is desired, that general approach has to consider all potential individual enemies, rather than assert what the enemies generally "should" be.

Nowhere is the change in battle tactics driven by "internal contradictions". It is always external, or treated as such. This is very important to understand how the change to social engineering occurs. A group is made into a target by the sickening rites of ritual sacrifice until it is "made true" and more elaborate measures are drawn up. Only aristocracy has a "right" to assign this status on this basis. For the oppressed classes, their enemies have always been an "Other", and there was no "us". There was at best an understanding that some lines are better not to cross because the participants of society knew what would happen as a result of this transgression. Aristocracy's existence has relied entirely on these transgressions to make it so, rather than any necessity of their class. It was possible because human beings are constituted as, and have always functioned as, individuals that can and will function on that basis, and no collectivity among them can be taken for granted. The "biological nation" that is studied in natural history is always understood to be a makeshift explanation for natural history because natural history does not directly possess a concept of a "self" or "self-interest" that should be relevant to the question. Had the interests of this crude "nation" persisted, all of these games of transgression would be immediately rebuked, and those who would insinuate that we must tolerate such would be rooted out, thus terminating the ritual sacrifice cycle before it began. The greatest victory of aristocracy, yet to be established but always hinted, would be to accuse anyone who would interfere with their "perfect information in perfect systems" that just so installs aristocracy's vices as the supreme moral code. All who would stop the ritual sacrifice would be accused of instigation, rather than the truth that aristocracy is from the outset pure instigation that disrupted a situation that did not need to be disturbed, where the participants were completely aware that aristocracy was in every case the guilty party creating suffering for its own sake. Aristocracy sees immediately that when a genuine need for technology presents itself for some battle, aristocracy must co-opt the mantle of technology.

It is unlikely that the course of history and our development of technology will happen as it did without aristocracy's malevolent intervention. If it were not for that, then technological progress would be the result of an obstacle the world presented individuals or the nation, rather than technological progress primarily working for humanity's jihad to enslave other humans. If not for aristocracy's malign influence to answer this question of its need for battle, technological progress would resemble more what the naive mind thinks technology should be—something to make our lives easier, not harder. What technology actually accomplishes, for battle or any other purpose, is not about making life easier in some inexorable sense that requires technology to eliminate entirely the drudgery of labor. Technology in its genuine form exists because tool use is part of what humans do to become "human", and because this technological habit became part of what we are, individually and collectively. We build technology and commandeer technology for our purposes, rather than any purpose that is mandated by any law. Still, the naive mind would have assumed that technology to solve some immediate problem would be more beneficial than technology that exists to make other people suffer. I can elaborate on this as a general rule stretching back to the mists of primitive times, to the development of barter among pastoralists, but at that early stage, no "new class" could exist. Only when city-states become empires can engineering be relied on consistently for this sort of project, with a clear expectation that there is a class of people called "engineers" with specialized knowledge that can trade that knowledge to exist in society. There were civil engineers of a sort to build temples and the wonders of the ancient world, but they almost always took on religious functions rather than imperial or martial ones. Even with the development of engineering for this task, it is another task altogether to move from the feudal wars of limited aims to grand wars with modern technology. The armament of medieval armies remains swords, lances, armored horsemen, and a few inventions and engineering constructs. The inventions like "Greek Fire" and the first uses of gunpowder are singular and do not lead to a general development of weapons along those lines. The engineering constructs are castles that are not easily reproducible or transferable. The castle is built at some strategic piece of real estate so that the land may continue to be enclosed by feudal obligations. These expectations change when wars must leave their traditional domains. When cornered, the animal decides to fight by some instinct against which its theories did not have a ready answer. If it does not decide to fight on terms favorable to that animal, the terms will eventually be chosen by its enemy. For this logic to result in a mentality where empires have to wage wars against aliens for expansion, there have to be aliens operating with a similar imperial mindset as the imperial power that contemplates this. It is not a given of nature that this is what animals do, and it is not for one imperial power to decide this. The animal here is not the "biological nation" of such entities, but the empires themselves, whose aims are wholly unliving and contrary to the most basic instincts of a living thing. The Christian was doctrinally obligated to seek dominion over the heathens, and the heathens of every stripe were certainly going to resist. Said heathens had empires of their own and a vision towards the world that precluded peaceful coexistence with the aliens, where the aliens' historical territory was forever inviolable. It might have been entertained that a world of distinct polities alien to each other could remain mutually ignorant and disinterested in each other, but the world had long ago understood Empire as the course of human history. So, sooner or later, some purpose for the encounter with aliens would have been found by one of these empires, and this would necessitate consideration of what to do when invaded by aliens. We could just as well draw up plans, however unlikely, for what humanity collectively would do in the event of contact with extraterrestrial intelligent life.^[2]

For wars of this nature, or wars that entail a need to win battles instead of carrying out a war, warrior aristocracies are a terrible way to manage the war effort, just as aristocracies are terrible at ruling productive enterprises or anything we would consider good. The default action would be to raise more soldiers from levies of the general population and hope to overwhelm the enemy with numbers, despite the social convention against the formerly disarmed men holding arms that they could turn against their masters. The way that is chosen, and that has been done in every army since was to selectively choose from the commons and lower orders soldiers adapted to a new way of doing business. The military men would be, moving forward, tied more closely to the funding arm of the enterprise, and require exploitation of the producers to feed these armies. They would require not just engineers, but technical knowledge of the soldiers themselves to operate the new machines of war. In short, all of the battle formations that would lead to modernity worked entirely against the aristocratic conceit of what war "should" be, and this came in fits and starts with each new adaptation war required. As much as possible, aristocracy desired to return to a "heroic age" where war was as it should be—a ritual of limited aims, where "War is Peace". It inevitably fails as new men rise, make themselves indispensable, and then fall victim to humanity's curse to reproduce aristocracy even though we should learn that aristocracy never, ever works for anything good.

It is here where the search of the technocrat for "master weapons" can be seen most prominently. That search is a proclivity of the technocrats for every purpose without the necessity of war. Had there been a world without war or instigators, the technocrats would still look for "master weapons" or "master keys" to solve problems. Here, the "problem" is war itself, and how to realize an aim that is fundamentally unwinnable; to convince humanity that the war efforts are for a cause other than the next war. Alternatively, the aim is social engineering to say that you can engineer society, rather than anything good that would come out of the engineering. A blind avarice for power at the heart of Empire is the guiding principle, for which every excuse is made. Nowhere is the "struggle for existence" posed this way intended to be won. The purpose of establishing these "ultimate weapons" is to restore the aristocratic ideal of war, where a caste of empowered warriors is elevated over the "muck" of the rest of us. This appears as the traditional three-class setup: those who "pray", i.e. reap the rewards, those who fight and are the enablers of the priests, and those who work. It is, in reality, the "aristocracy of the commons", where the merchants dominate labor, who in turn police the lowest class. The aristocratic order and the proprietors' domination of the merchants is in reality a recasting of that same struggle in the muck, except that it is conducted with the aristocratic conceits of social engineering taken for granted. For the struggle in the commons, necessity and opportunity are the only guides. If it were conducted there, the social engineering struggle is "winnable", for some objective that is rationalizable. Aristocracy's mission is to perpetuate the unwinnable struggle and essentialize it as good in itself. The merchant of the commons isn't given over to any such need. The merchant could, if he thinks about this problem, see the entire enterprise of war and social engineering as ruinous, and agree to a coalition of the merchants to "corner the market", and then declare unilaterally that the struggle is over. If this happened, the campaigns against the lowest class would have to end. The commons never had any real need for the thrill of terror and torture and were among the few who could see that the alien that is "the lowest class" posed no threat and was a potential asset. Aristocracy, though, lives ultimately off the terror inflicted on the lowest class. Aristocracy has been throughout its history a perverse mirror image of the lowest class, given over to depravity and an avarice particular to the lowest filth of humanity. Aristocracy's root was the very superstition that instigated the struggle of the orders. The commons would, if they retained sobriety, see that the struggle of the orders is pointless and creates the very inefficiencies they were tasked with solving in the social question. But, nothing polices the commons to "do the right thing" by any impulse. Empire and aristocracy could begin because there was technology and a rational approach to imposing the ritual sacrifice systematically. (Never forget that Labor is humanity's hatchetman, in the end, , and the commons are ultimately promoted laborers who have both an affinity for the favored grades of the laboring order and an incentive to pit them against the lowest class so that the struggle between labor and the lowest class can be gamed and controlled to create this condition for the profit of the commoners.) Yet, without the drive of social engineering and changes to real-world formations, all of this remains theoretical. The dismal science of Empire is not the only vehicle for realizing the ambitions of aristocracy. Empire is for aristocracy not the goal, but a "necessary evil", a limit the world placed on the avarice of all orders of mankind, each guilty of their peculiar sins and sharing in the collective sin of all mankind. It is here where Empire and its dismal priests step in and claim that Empire is in some sick way the "savior" of mankind, rather than the real savior being whatever impulses in humanity knew all along that this was retarded and could be averted by diagnosing the illness and observing the etiology of this disease.

The iterations that arrive at not happenstance, as if events in the world were merely stumbled on. Every new avenue of technological research is brought into line with this purpose if it can be co-opted and has little to suggest its independent existence. It is not this imperative that made agriculture possible or desirable, but it was a choice to proliferate a technology for social engineering purposes once it has been co-opted. It is the same with every new technology like gunpowder or the printing press. New technologies arise for causes that are not "instigated" for this purpose but for very different purposes, and efforts to "instigate" technological advances or assert a secular trend of "inevitable progress" are insane and stupid. If there is an incentive for "creativity" or "innovation", it is always immediately a perverse incentive, for those are the only tools available to social engineering when it comes to this. The best a social engineer can do is accept that humanity makes machines for purposes very different from those that aim to "change the world" in that way and that they would do well to remember this and defend conditions that are worth fighting for. Usually, the wise chieftain places the prosperity of his people first, and the social engineering goals, whatever the aristocratic game believes, are secondary. Without anything worth defending, there is no goal. The movement would become everything. That is sadly exactly what happened, for it was decided unilaterally that there would be nothing to fight for but more of the rot, and the chief product of society, what it emotionally valued and what it would fight stridently to defend, is the humiliation of the lowest class. There is no longer any doubt that humanity is guilty of that charge and cannot redeem itself. Every effort that would be made by labor is labor to create this machine that intends to make us suffer, and it is the first and greatest commandment that none may stop this. They may only "stand and die". That itself is the "ultimate weapon" that social engineers covet, to create a defensible position that is, on these terms, permanent and unchanging. It could only do so through permanent and total regression to the primordial, calling itself "the light" and "the knowledge". So long as there is something to cannibalize, it is a glorious reign for the social engineers, who accept fully that there is no point but pressing the nerve of power. Only in forgotten corners of the world does another way of life exist, and when it is found, it is snuffed out, perverted, and turned into submission to the same beast. This is only possible once "mediated reality" could be imposed, which required a study of the very media that made communication possible, by the same forces that advanced this idea of social engineering through war.

Return to Table of Contents | Next Chapter

Return to Table of Contents | Return to Chapter Start