26. 1776

I begin this chronology not at the start, but at a year where the world of old gave way to something new that had never been done before. A brief background on events shortly before 1776 is helpful for establishing what the American rebellion was at a surface level, or one way to understand why the "modern encounter" happened at all. While this is not information that is likely new to the reader, it is important to remember what was immediately on the mind of the American rebels, politicians in the home country, and the results of introducing Company rule to India that were, predictably, famine and death. It is most necessary in this and the next chapter to break readers from any lingering notions they hold about capitalism or liberalism being productive or favorable to life. Both of those things were from their founding impulse democidal, and this democidal impulse is transposed purely onto the Americans as if it were imminent and "just so" by some wicked moral fiber of the American "race", though no such thing as an American race existed and racial ideology of the time was a far cry from the eugenist revisions of it in the 19th century. The first capitalist democide is seen in India as a direct result of the Company's destruction of nascent industry and imposition of starvation policies.

To know the "modern encounter" is to know the colonial operation, rather than presume that colonization happened for spurious and random reasons in nature. How does an island country that possesses no remarkable military prowess overrun the Indian subcontinent, and hold operations throughout east Asia? It was in the East where the people, wealth, and money could be found. Europe possessed men, some wealth, and a history of martial conquest, but the rewards of Empire were found in the East. This begs the question of why the states of the East did not utilize this wealth for themselves in the "competition of nations", since they clearly had knowledge of politics and history. For a long time, the colonial operation was obfuscated by racial essentialism and arguments that are entirely alien to the corporate government that was the true Empire of the Europeans. I cannot in this writing describe the full scope of colonial development and why this was possible. What must be understood is that the "colonial system" was a scheme of corporate government from the outset. Nothing about colonization served a "racial" or "national" interest whatsoever, and so, the rule of the Company in India, and its operations around the world, was one that attracted compradors from the colonized countries and played existing hatreds off of each other.

The language of the "biological nation" that was humanity's assumption about the origin of political rule would be manipulated early to insist that this corporate government served some interest of the nation, rather than corporate government being the purpose for itself and the "national" character of it was a historical artifact. This language was helpful for the interests that benefit from this corporate government because the men sent to wage conquest were not the men who ruled in the home country. Very often the men sent on these expeditions were miscreants of the nobility or had no noble title at all. They were expendable in the eyes of the European order, and could be sent to the other side of the world to carry out the grisly business of commerce with hostile locals. Of those sent, the merchants quickly established their supremacy over the immiserated wretches, who were the "residue" of the European population, usually indentured servants or slaves and the most disreputable of their lot. The crowns of Europe claimed their cut of colonial operations, but this could be negated over time as the merchants gained greater force at the royal courts, eventually reducing their tax burden to nothing at all. Instead, the governors of the colonies restricted trade with foreign powers, but this had no teeth to enforce it. In effect, the colonial operations in the East and America ruled themselves, and answered to no one. Why the crowns allowed this had more to do with a greater imperial ambition than an immediate benefit of wealth or status. The crowns and warlords of Europe had to receive funding for their regimes, and so they hit upon the brilliant idea of granting the merchants a free hand in the colonies, without any expectation that the colonies produced a financial surplus for the crown or the mother country. Instead, the debt for some future promise of victory was created as a giant, unpayable IOU, and this could sort of work as long as the colonial operations continued and the home country could suppress its local population. This sort of operation only works if the colonial operation succeeds on the terms it sets for itself. This really only requires the colonial outpost to remain intact rather than any objective of profitability. But, because the corporate government had no lands of its own and no "society" or base that could sustain the government's existence, colonization could continue largely from profit. The trading companies had to produce a surplus of currency or some value of economic importance for themselves, which meant they had to be an operation that fed the men who were given this charter and held colonial office. The corporate government had to embrace a quality of life that we know, but that was not wholly accepted at the time. Life is parasitic upon the world, and in the East, the colonies had very large "partners" that did have large populations and all of the things that would feed this profit. The objective of the colonial trading operation was never "just business" for the Company and for their partners among the colonized countries. Business and technology were proxies for conquest, and conquest was a proxy for technology. The two fed each other. This might have been observed in past empires, but there were many differences in the 16th century that marked the beginning of the corporate state proper. One is that developed religious authorities and concepts of spiritual and temporal authority were established among the colonized and colonizers, and even where this discourse did not happen, civilization by this time had diverged too much from the typical life of the barbarous nations of the world. Everyone conducted political affairs as if the imperial model was here to stay, or would be made to reckon with that reality in short order. The other idea on the rise is that civilizations could colonize another civilized partner. In the past, imperial leaders usually left intact familiar and useful administration in cities they brought into the imperial system. This was far more problematic when a vastly distinct social and religious structure was to be "subsumed", especially when the parent country was thoroughly Christian in its attitudes and was embroiled in an existential struggle against alien religions. It would not be possible to convert hundreds of millions of Hindus to the worship of Christ by commanding it so, the way it was possible to assimilate European pagans into the Christian system with the cooperation of kings and chieftains whose loyalty to the old gods was weak. This was the task colonization in East Asia had to accomplish—to bring people with a long and very different religious history under the domination of something entirely alien. The Dutch and English could not readily convert to Hinduism or Islam with any seriousness, and then speak of their loyalty to the Christian mother country. Even if the colonial administrators would style themselves as such for appearances, the reality is that the non-Christians believed in things that were entirely contrary to the very imperial mission the trading companies had to establish. Either the trading companies had to de-Christianize their parent and deepen an already-extant religious revolution in Europe, or the heathens of the colonized countries would have to be subdued, or a combination of both would corrupt the precolonial arrangement as it was understood.

Corporate government arises in this situation where highly developed civilizations manage affairs that are increasingly alien to them. The corporate government does not appeal to tradition or the classes of the old society, and it eschews entirely religion. The corporate officer can be a Christian one day, a Muslim the next, and a Hindu when required, and sees no contradiction in abandoning these roles like articles of clothing. This was not possible for empires of an older type, where overt religious traditions were expected for the offices to mean anything. In the corporate government, the offices exist for whatever is expedient, and the funding stream for that corporate government is always an alien society that is already developed. The corporate government of this type abhors producing anything, whereas older imperial governments were tied to the landholders and the crops that land produced. We might find antecedents for this in past empires, particularly among the Romans who co-opted much of their empire from what they conquered. But, the Romans could not freely co-opt alien cultures as they pleased. Where the Romans' vassals were already adapted to settled society and laws, the local elites continued and only paid their tax to a Roman governor. The barbarians had no association whatsoever with the Roman way, and so the Romans exported Roman civilization where before none had existed. There was no way for the Romans to invent a government so insidious that it worked through the vices of the conquered, and in turn the conquered could export their vices to the mother country. Corporate government was the solution to this, first for a situational expedient, and then as a generalized rule. The feuding Indian warlords could be paid and brought into the business of the Company, especially the business that involved selling drugs around the world, and this partnership with the compradors emboldened the Company to make demands on the "mother country" that it always saw as an alien anyway. The corporate government successfully avoids the idiotic trap of "culture war" before the Germans invented such a retarded notion. The corporate government is not entirely made on a whim, as if humans simply didn't conjure such a concept until modernity. Corporate government relies on technology and record-keeping and some line of communication, and a culture of scholarship to reproduce the type of people necessary for such a government to perpetuate its values. At the very least, it requires a generally literate populace, or a populace that could become generally literate with little effort. The expense of printed books in the past limited general literacy, if the body of literature granted to the literate philosophical and political knowledge or knowledge of developed science. Beyond the production of the printed word, the knowledge of the colonizing civilizations had grown to an extent that granted to literate men far more advantage over the illiterate than they held in the past. Machinery allowed gunpowder, the very printing press that would produce written works, cannons, seafaring vessels, and all of the things that this corporate government would need. The rise of this "new class" of technically minded officers was foreseen well in advance of its realization, and its time arrived by the end of the 17th century. There would be among the candidates for this business discussion of what it meant to pursue science at all, and how best to refine the scientific inquiry. Where this knowledge could arise first in the world, it would spread beyond any civilizational or national borders, and so the would-be literati of the world readily recognized each other and, by some foul instinct, conspired to strengthen their holdings against all other contenders. What this meant was that corporate government was reliant on a general theory of knowledge and a theory of intelligence that past governments did not require, and often saw as a hazard to avoid.

This can be seen with the operations of overseas trading companies, the empires they acquired, and the sort of people who could make those operations happen. The new class did not exist fully formed out of something primordial, nor did the empire furnish the social changes by any anonymous force. The commandment given to us today to believe it was created by happenstance or "just so" was always a contemptuous lie that a child could see through. The first parts of this apparatus are the necessary offices—the clerks, translators, navigators, mercenaries, and their support staff that could maintain outposts in hostile, alien territory. Usually those outposts remained just that, and were always facilities to house the officers without regard for any "native" support whatsoever. Everything the trading company acquired was through trade, extortion, or investment from the mother country. Failure meant abandoning the witless subordinate at sea. Betrayal, assassination, and all of the malice of "good business" was the norm, expected and meritorious behavior for such people. All of this served some purpose for the men employed in this business and those positioned to reap all of the benefits, and it had to function against real opponents rather than recreate the world as it preferred it to exist, and so flagrant violations of reality were not possible. What has happened, then, is that a "new world" was superimposed on the old, on foundations that had no basis in "organic history" whatsoever. The past organs of the state originated in some way from the tribal associations in humanity's history, and then from religious orders that were understood as something distinct from the state. The new corporate government had no intrinsic spiritual authority like religion for itself. It instead inherited religious traditions and a considerably advanced culture from its forebears. That religion was wholly unsuitable for what corporate government needed of its officers.

OFFICE-HOLDING IN CORPORATE GOVERNMENT
or
WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN?

The offices of state do not begin as shining beacons, where the officer holds all of the power invested in them by a simple legal declaration that it is so. There is no "philosopher-king" to assign imperiously what anyone is or what anyone can do in nature. There is not even a philosopher-king to assign the offices to do what the philosopher believes they reasonably can accomplish. The office of any institution is just that—an office that can be used and abused by its occupant. The powers and duties of an office are merely suggestions, and the state is dependent on the loyalty of officers to the vision of the architect of the state. The primitive state is never taken for granted or "just sort of there". The primitive state is the design of particular people who have a need for such a thing, and so too are the offices of Empire the design of would-be emperors or the scheme of some agent within the empire that holds its own agenda. Once established, they are only really the tools of those who hold the office. Administrators of the officers must resort to fear, bribery, sentimental appeals, and all individual incentives to police the officers, and as a result, it is very easy for the managers of society to consider the officers members of distinct classes, whose members are functionally identical to each other and have no necessary link except the connections the administrator would prefer them to have. Any relations or conspiracy among the officers is an unwelcome intrusion to what the office was established to do, and no consistent rule for these relations or conspiracies can be found. Associations of men are contrary to the habit of office-holding, and that habit is what allowed formal institutions to exist rather than any of the habits that associations entailed. What was missing was a general theory of political activity for the agents involved that was divorced from associations and the secret societies that were the true ruling power of the ancient world, so far as the ruling power did operate in the shadows. There could not be an elaborate charade of office-holding that existed purely for obfuscation. If an office existed, its temporal power was apparent, even if real decisions were made in secret by officers the public never could access. There was not a general rule of "secret officers" of this sort that ruled behind the curtain. That could not proceed in earnest until the human agent was sufficiently understood as a "political machine" that could be manipulated in precise manners. The corporate state begins that process that would be fully developed and internalized with the technocratic polities of the 20th century.

Past theories had to work through the particular men that were available to carry out the powers and duties of those offices. Efforts to control those men were a poorly understood practice of psychology, and these judgments were made on the basis of some vague virtue that certain men possessed to command other men. This worked when the basis for the Empire was in militaristic organizations or religious superstitions, or governors ruled their domains with a mostly free hand due to the inability of emperors to impose anything from a central authority. Where central authorities are emphasized in ancient times, the rule of the emperor is openly and avowedly despotic, and the chief aim of the emperor is to ensure by force that his governors follow commands from the central power, and that the emperor's bureaucracy serves at the emperor's pleasure. The bureaucracy itself is governed by a hierarchy of officers and stringent requirements for incoming bureaucrats to conform with a doctrine that is expected of them. The canon expected of new bureaucrats was rigid even by the standards of education, which served the central authority well but produced dubious outcomes in the quality of administrators, save for one thing: the standardization of education and mandates for compliance allowed the bureaucracy to remain an indispensable institution and the imperial regime of a despotic ruler can remain intact over a large area and follow the same general scheme. Here, corporate government is discouraged, for any "corporate government" would itself be a challenge to the emperor's authority and particular role in despotism. The challenge for the corporate government of the trading companies required a few things. One is that the trading companies were drawn from the commons and populated with men who had no special right to rule beyond the charter granted to them, and their aims were contrary to the central authority of the warlord. Two is that the officers of these corporate governments despised religion and especially Christian concepts of mercy, while glorifying Christian cruelty and malice when it was a suitable expedient to motivate their Christian subordinates. The corporate government stood opposed to the old religion, and would also be opposed to the traditional interpretation of organized mass religions of the East, and especially the religious role taken on by a despotic Chinese emperor. The third is that the agency of the officers of these companies could not rest on moral virtue or righteousness, given the nature of what they were doing. They were hunters. To imagine the conduct of the trading companies, consider those who believe primitive humanity mandated a world of endless rapes and humiliations and that this was morally upright and good for itself, and all of mankind should glorify the essential act of rape. Before there was a "system" or excuse by Reason for their behavior, the only answer the officers of such an operation want to hear is "MORE". Arguments of probity that would apply to a conventional state are anathema to the corporate government. If the Company fails, the men—those who sneak away from their death at the hands of aliens—return home, perhaps marked as failures at business. The activities of the Company are "over there", and can be written off as an abstraction, their interactions with the alien regarded as affairs to exploit pure, philosophical savages. The distance of corporate government was greater than the distance between Christians and Muslims in the traditional religious war, for both understood the other as men who followed a monotheistic religion and shared many of the same scriptural stories, and who fought in manners and for causes that were similar. They were sworn enemies of each other and knew that, but the conflict had been established for centuries, and was unlikely to change given the extent of the domains of both and the overall aims of their respective empires. The corporate government is the first that was truly unmoored from traditions but ruled over aliens who held firmly to those traditions. When Islam and Christianity were imposed, their full dominion was impeded by the old ways, but paganism was never organized as anything that could resist the new ways. The corporate government did not just present "new ways". It presented a fundamental break with hitherto known humanity and a specific break from humanity as a spiritual animal, and it sought above all to dissolve longstanding religious taboos. The corporate government needed to be able to manufacture a religion, and then another religion, at will to meet short- and medium-term social engineering goals, and its officers were not to adhere to any particular religion except the spiritual core of their true "Great Work"—to plunder for the sake of plundering.

Corporate government can never be a convenient fiction or a subordinate, as it may present. There is no way to separate corporate government as a distinctly inferior sphere of activity, where "real government" of the older type can control it. If the parent of the corporate government wishes to utilize such a type of government, it is beholden to that corporate government, and the "old ways" have nothing to negotiate with to suggest that the corporate government remain a distinctly inferior type of government. That decision entirely rests with the corporate government, if it is willing to remain in a subordinate position for some ulterior motive. Perhaps the corporate government simply lacks the means to do much about the ancien regime, but in this case, corporate government is simply weak. No agreement or pact that involves the overall public trust can contain the corporate government. This is quite different from the verbiage of a colonial charter, where the colony is explicitly a colony and sectioned off from its parent. Colonies may adopt corporate government, as the British American colonies did, but they are only colonies and were for most purposes isolated from the mother country. This did not stop the Americans from railing against Parliament and holding the leverage to do so, but whatever rabbling came from the colonies, the force of the colonies as a power unto themselves was limited. They had no army and a weak population base, most of whom wanted no part of any seditious activity. What is it that allowed the colonies disproportionate power over global affairs? It is simply this; that corporate government was a position the mother country desired for its own purposes, and so, those sympathetic with the aims of a global corporate government were among the intelligentsia of Britain. Just as there was low enthusiasm for independence, there would be low enthusiasm for maintaining the Crown's legal hold on the colonies as it was previously constituted. Men did not see the cause of keeping the colonies under the Crown as meaningful or worth their lives, treasure, or any sacrifice whatsoever. That was an idea, and never was it an idea that inspired anything productive. What aims the rebels had were quite irrelevant to most people in the mother country, since even if the rebels won, they would have to do business with the Bank of England and there was no independence from this new beast that arose: free trade. Corporate government, once established, fully embraces the essential purpose of the political and the state as described in my earlier writing. For the first time, the essential act of the political and the economic can be cleaved from our murky understanding of the human condition. In some way, this had always been what actually happened. What was different with the corporate government is that there were large assemblies of men who acted consciously and with total purpose in accord with that terrible essence, rather than men who retained an attachment to an earlier and now outmoded notion of humanity. This was not so much a sudden discovery or a line that was transgressed willfully. The conditions allowing such a corporate government to be viable, and then desirable for a great purpose, required tools that were only partially available at the time corporate government was established. What did change is that, for the first time, the holders of this new state had a general theory of how to proceed—to establish the conditions of a "total society" and the type of state that can effectively rule it.

Any imperial office had to be broken down, just as life is, to its essential functions, and those functions had to be imbued in nature itself and granted fundamental power. The corporate government has to be at once both a feature of nature and "above God" and above any one man. This it pursues not because it genuinely believes reality works this way, but because that is the shortest and most effective path to worldly power, if such a thing can become a general theory of politics and history. If successful, the holders of office become placeholders, and it is the firm and the institution that is the true "office-holder", and its human officers are cogs subsumed into the total machine.

If this sounds like a progression from the republic to "the next thing", you are correct. This was the shortest route to a post-republican society, and one that met the demands of political power that were held by men. The problem with this is that it retained all of the human bigotries of past political forms, and insisted that these peculiar qualities of men were natural and eternal, even though we can easily tell that humans are nothing special in the universe, and the aims of Empire to enclose the world are insane and pointless. The advance of corporate government is that it understood, at first imperfectly, that the functions of political office-holding had nothing to do with the virtue of particular men, and could be stripped entirely from men. The men who would hold these colonial offices certainly believed they were an exception to the rule when dealing with social inferiors, but in their conduct towards each other and their view of what humans were, the new corporate state created soulless and empty bug-men who made no excuses for the terror. If the officers were to be soulless cogs for the Empire, they were going to apply the same to all who lived in their dominion. In principle, "slavery is eternal", and the presumption of absolute slavery of humanity is inherent to corporate government. From the moment a post-republican society was conceived, it was necessary to circumvent any progression of history towards outcomes that were inadmissible for the world-system corporate government required.

The corporate government did not mandate scientific despotism with full knowledge of its outcome and the intent of such being the goal. The power-sharing of a republic is the ideal of corporate government, and this it took for granted and naturalized. What was desired were the qualities of a republic that were conducive to command and control, but nothing of the republic that allowed individual virtue to interfere with the Great Working. A naive believer would presume that God or something tantamount to it would be the true "Big Brother", and this was merely a convenient fiction for those who relate more readily to a person than a disembodied entity. The corporate government must be, in the final analysis, One and only One, and all must bow to its central ideas. This is unlike republics and despotisms of the past, where "ideology" or any central belief of the state was of no interest to the rulers. The rule of past executives was either the rulers' virtue or the caprice of the rulers alone, and the only justification offered to the rest of humanity was that fear ruled this world and there was nothing to be done about that fact. This was no longer sufficient for the type of command and control rulers desired. It would have been possible to maintain "rule of fear" or some traditional custom centered around superstitions upholding the general fear indefinitely, but such a society would be woefully unproductive. The officers and those whose labor was to be useful for something have no great motive to do more than the barest minimum.

Had the corporate government been overcome but its core advance been adopted, human history could have led to a very different outcome. The corporate government existed for Empire, rather than any good reason why such a government should exist. In the same breath that corporate government was born, the concept that such a government was to be avoided at all costs was prominent in the minds of enough men. The ruled had no love whatsoever for corporate government, and the potential officers for such a corporate government had no inherent loyalty to the corporation. There would be those who already had interests contrary to corporate government, and their purposes were varied while the corporate government was a singular proposition. There would also be those who saw that the corporate government itself could be contested, and its offices could be repurposed for very different ends. There would also be those who saw an alliance of interests in the modern society, and for the first time those alliances could consider the construction of new institutions by some plan rather than by inertia or the decree of someone who has already won the throne.

Past interests of a republican society or a society descended from the republican tradition emphasized social class and the institutions of such. Past interests of despotic society emphasized the local and transactional relationships. In the modern world where corporate government was a force, the central organ was not the social class that formed institutions for their naked class interests or the transactional feudal relationship. It was instead the constructed institution, where new classes of men could form out of the wreckage of the old society. These new classes were tied to technology in a way that no past organ in human society was. Where the objective in the past was to capture institutions of a class or abolish them, the new objective was to capture definite institutions without destroying them or their wellspring. No one seriously considered abolishing the trading companies without retaining the colonial infrastructure and their essential purpose. Those who did were clearly abandoning any imperial mission that could "change the world", and while so many did choose that course, they did so knowing that they were giving up on the world, and so their mission in life was a personal matter that might be shared with like-minded people but that was inadmissible for the general struggle that would take place in modernity.

It is important to remember that there was no "mass uprising" calling for modernity as is popular to write in the narrative theory of history. There were new men who gathered together in a conspiracy to form some corporate government or take over one, and there were the dispossessed masses who struggled to exist in such a world. Those dispossessed masses were required for the first time to make contact with the political ideas of the state and its institutions, which were always alien to the interests of the masses, their individual lives and any associations they made in the world apart from the state and Empire. Mass uprisings in the past like slave revolts and peasant revolts almost entirely relied on some grievance that could be resolved with violence, but had nothing to do with "changing the world" or any foolhardy mission like that. If the goal was to change the world or impose some ideology, that was a funny way to address the real grievances of the people against the state, of which there were many obvious ones. It was instead the interests of corporate government and its imposition on the minds of everyone that prevailed in the narrative theory of history. This was not a good arrangement for corporate government in its native form, because it left open a proposition that corporate government and Empire could not ignore. What if the great multitudes of those who had no desire for corporate government made instead the direct antithesis to corporate government and its imperial ambitions, and the offices now existed to forestall permanently the imperial aims and any such structure invading private life? Such an outcome would be the end of the "grand narrative" altogether, and it would effectively accomplish the end of the "human" project. There would be no more false promises, and no sound basis to continue the struggle of classes and bigotries such a thing entailed. The interest to not live in such a society would override all imperial treachery and insinuation. In time, all of the assertions of aristocracy would be undone, for they never served any purpose of most of the people, and the only beneficiaries of aristocracy throughout history were those who enjoyed the thrill of hunting and torturing other things. All of the study of corporate government inherently contained the method by which such a construct would be permanently abrogated and then neutralized. This could be done to terminate modernity and reimpose feudal relations, or it could be done by the same new classes that rose with corporate government because those new classes and their allies in the general populace saw no good reason to continue the imperial creed, especially when their lives were imperiled by it and nothing useful came out of it. The existence of a "new class" of technical workers could not in of itself forbid the adoption of technology by people outside the monopoly, and the first action of the working masses correctly attacked the machines of the new class while holding on dearly to their own machines. If the masses were to contest the political in the long term, they would have built their own machinery contrary to the imperious institutions and their habits, but in effect, the masses would have contested in this situation in the same manner as the bourgeois and aristocratic orders. Crucially, the masses would have refused offers from either faction to join the "struggle of classes" that was alien to anything they cared about, until such a time that defectors from the internecine struggle of technocrats against aristocrats wiped out both factions mercilessly and without further need for discussion. There was no other path, and while that possibility was destroyed irrevocably with the establishment of the technocratic polity and its allied interests, the fear of mutually assured destruction was the greatest fear of the contending classes. Had the latter path continued, it would have ended permanently the very republic that was born in modernity and would consign monarchism and nobility to the trash bin of history. It would have created a wholly different condition that was unprecedented. If that happened, the laws of political and economic history would have been laid bare, developed, and humanity would reject them. They would then see that humanity itself is the problem, and that the history of "humans" is what brought about this ruinous condition. It would be possible, on the power of such a new thing, to end the human condition, without paying heed to aristocratic braying about a "master race" or any notion that the new world entails mass death and terror for spurious ideological causes. There would simply have been a new understanding, which probably would be accepted given knowledge of humanity's sordid history. Then there would be a future that was not consigned to the laws of history handed down to us by the imperial masters. That society would know of very different laws of history, and would reject political intrigues altogether. I have given some expectations of what that society would be, and there would be more to say of such a world in the eighth and final book of this series. I note it here because it is at this time in human history where such a world was for the first time a goal that could be realized, if anyone saw that goal as desirable. That potential is now gone, or if it does exist, it will only exist when humanity really wants their society to be different and asks what must be done in the conditions of our time instead of the conditions of the late 18th century, when corporate government still competed with the old ways and the rival ideas that were haphazardly formed among the people. The fear of such an outcome motivates the imperial officers to do everything they can to make such an outcome inadmissible and then physically impossible. This could not be done with the revolution, but only materialized by recruiting the foulest forces of humanity, much as the necessary functions of office were distilled to their essence.

Is there a single iota of good in corporate government? There is not one. Is there a reason why this "had" to happen? Really, there isn't. It was the will of Empire to make such a thing, for its purposes. Empire was always a choice for humanity rather than anything that had to happen by any natural law, or anything that served a purpose other than Empire. Once it has been born, it operates on its own principles and its own special morality, and so too did the empires of the old world, which the corporate government succeeded and made indispensable for the study of history. Who made the narrative theory of history? Empires did, for imperial purposes, and it is the imperial disease that insists history can only be this. What good Empire itself, or a particular empire served is really up to us. There are arguments to make that Empire is what humans do at this stage of their development, and that whether it was necessary or not, Empire was desirable for various reasons that are in the end the strange fetish and fantasy of the human animal. Nothing about Empire "required" the corporate government, because at the outset, large factions in the Empire is trying to fight against the incursion of such a thing. It was always a choice of men desiring Empire for their own projects, because they saw corporate government as preferable to alternative models of Empire. It would be entirely possible for Empire to choose a different strategy. The world where humanity does overcome corporate government and lives happily ever after can be an imperialist vision for the future, and nothing would fundamentally change about the imperial project and its purpose. What cannot change is that it was always possible to distill the functions of life, office, politics, and economics to what those things do, without the intermediary of a particular person or entity. Humanity had always known on some level that the invocation of such intermediaries was an excuse, and not a particularly credible one. There is no "God" that functions like a temporal, imperial entity, and if there were a "God", it is bizarre to presume it conforms to a just-so story for the benefit of these fucking Satanics. Even the nascent understanding of the gods or a universal "God" did not refer to such a mediator if anyone took the teachings of religion seriously. Gods were either something indicating a complicated truth or reality that would not come naturally or trivially, or they were daemons with a history that itself is not natural or trivial. It was a choice of modern corporate government to supersede the Christian godhead and insist that the corporate structure and interests were truly "above God". That deliberate contempt for the old religion was always a choice because imperious retards—and they are retarded—wanted a quick solution to acquire more money, more avarice, and the cruelty of their filthy race and the filthy race of the English in particular. The rejection of the old "God" was not a denial but an affirmation of a new one, and the affirmation did everything to avoid the original subject matter of Christianity and disregarded basic understanding of such. Why was this? Because Christianity, like many old religions, contained within it an understanding of this evil, and that understanding was anathema to the sort of reality control and control of life that was required by corporate government. The new "god" of corporate government could not have been another iteration of the understanding of evil that religion entailed. Where there is corporate government, there is a denial of the most basic sense humanity acquired. Corporate government alone insists "humans are naturally good" and other such retarded, asinine koans. That was the chief purpose for its animosity towards religion, rather than any actual grievance with religion or a short-term desire for Church property.

The belief that humans were naturally good is not a liberal assumption. The liberals, like political thinkers of any era, presumed humans were either morally neutral or inclined towards malice if not some higher evil. Personal virtue and concepts of honor remained not just as relevant as they were, but took on an entirely new meaning. Corporate government preceded the liberal revolutions and the adaptations of the incoming liberals to this new situation, first of dealing with corporate governments and then from dealing with the realities of statecraft and power. Throughout the liberal revolutions, corporate government loomed ominously, and to acknowledge too frankly its functions and purposes would have undermined the revolutionary project from the outset. The men who waged a political revolution had desires outside corporate government, and understood as statesmen always did that the basis of politics was not the grand narrative but the associations of men, almost always conspiratorial.^[1] What does corporate government desire, except to mock the public good until the very "public" is choked to death, leaving behind a husk that can be filled with the right ideas that the corporate government upholds? The corporate government must insist there is no such thing as evil or the Satan, and that the only evil is whatever impedes their world-historical purpose that they claim, at first privately, to be self-evident. Everyone else, from the liberals to the ordinary people who tried to stay out of politics, saw such claims for what they were. Not the Americans, not the British, and not the French, believed in such a simpering natural goodness. That was peculiar to corporate government, where the inherent and primordial goodness of their officers really spoke to their right of transgression alone. Otherwise, the officers of a corporate government had nothing. They had no noble title, no technology that presented a clear and present unanswerable weapon, and they were not particularly intelligent or met any meritorious metric that obligated all to support them. They did not speak to the broad masses or offer those masses anything real, and in a better world, such men would have been ignored—if only evil allowed itself to be ignored.

The invocation of "human goodness" is really a presumptive claim to a monopoly on goodness generally. All that is good, like all that exists, came from the world. Human beings are a tiny part of that world, but history already judged humans as morally wanting, and corporate government takes that to heart when it concerns other humans, particularly humans that it rules over. The evil in humanity that preceded the formation of corporate government had to be distilled so that the ruled were nothing but the evil, and the officers of corporate government were gradients of "pure good", with some officers carrying more goodness points than others to establish the monopoly on good within the company. In other words, moral education and moral philosophy took on a function they did not possess in the past and were carried out towards aims that would be alien to the moral thought of past empires. The enforcement arm of corporate government would be this belief about morality and ethics. The older sense of shame and taboo did not enforce too much before relying on violence or material necessity. As much as possible, the corporate government operated entirely on this moral sentiment and a drive to monopolize "goodness" as the property of its officers. This meant that any goodness in the world and the environment would be drained and placed in the person of the officers. "Two worlds forever apart" applies here; the officers of corporate government declare their monopoly on goodness to be a heavenly domain, while the base world is forever mired in evil and malice. This is of course an illusion, for the true world where events happen would be sectioned off for the exclusive domain of aristocracy, and the "heavenly realm" of proprietary goodness is an inferior domain for the lower officers of corporate government. There is then a world apart for the losers and subjects of such a society, where there can only be evil, suffering, defeat, humiliation, and every other failure and shame of the human race. Those losers are told simultaneously that there is no real world where events happen, and that "the world" is some way is nothing but the evil and the malice they live, and the proprietors are presented as the voice of God and Nature combined. The losers are aware there is an "unknowable" force that guides the proprietors, but it is haram to name it. This "contradiction" serves two purposes. The immediate is that the losers give up on questioning the monopoly on goodness. The second is that the monopoly on goodness becomes essential knowledge that can only be attained by intelligence and "pure reason", and so the efforts of humanity are disproportionately spent on the pursuit of intelligence and information. So long as a monopoly on intelligence can be maintained, corporate government can persist indefinitely, and there can be no argument against it. More than the virtue of any particular officer or the machines they build, the monopoly itself, the objective of Empire, becomes life's prime want, and all labor and all ambition is to be directed towards it. To do otherwise is retarded, the worst thing that can ever be. It might have been presumed by some that this treatment of intelligence was peculiar to our time and humanity's limited faculties now, and was not how humans always operated. But, when we peer back into history and see humans for what they are, the corporate government and its ethos tapped into something primordial, for that is how humans distinguished themselves, starting from the humiliations of family life against the defective child. What corporate government introduced was not something new, but the exact opposite. Now, a regime that eternally regressed to the primordial was installed and could perpetuate itself as a germ in the world, where before this germ was always local and had to reckon with a world where events were consequential. All that was necessary for this corporate government was raw material or fuel. Such a government cannot "fail". It can only be failed.

Still, the corporate government remains a government. Whatever its guiding principle is, the corporate government still exists in a world where it has to account for itself on the world's terms rather than its own. In eugenism, the impulse to dominate through intelligence takes over and exceeds anything the officers might do to regulate it, for the officers, the ruled, and any higher knowledge would know better without the eugenic creed. Corporate government by itself remains an instrument, but it is conscious of its moral orientation, whereas past empires were oriented towards victory in battle and claims of merit over wealth. It is the transition from mercantile hoarding of wealth and gold to free trade and a general theory of technology that corporate government made possible. Without corporate government, free trade remains merely a fiction that works against the incentives of the preexisting society. A free trader may admonish peers to adopt the ethos of free trade and frugality, but it would not take long to see that free trade is ruinous to a domestic or national economy. Free trade was only sensical as an imperial project that placed at its apex a corporate government that was not tied to the base of society or the world proper. It would seek either to rearrange the world in an image that suits the holders of the ruling company, or it would become clear that on its own terms, the corporate government does not function and it would be replaced with another entity—perhaps another corporate government, but one without free trade. The new government could dispense entirely with economic claims and excuses, or it could recapitulate the economic claims without any mention of freedom or agency. The free trade concept relied on genuine liberty of the officers of the company and all who are deputized by those officers—in effect, everyone with the right to use money was expected to be an officer following the company's prerogatives rather than their own. In this way, old expectations of patronage would be overwritten with expectations that the deputized agent was a client of "society" in the abstract, and the public good. Somewhere in free trade it was recognized that there was a genuine condition of a society that was not contingent on an economic excuse or justification of any sort. Humans were engaged in society largely because they were made dependent on that arrangement, or because social production created benefits that were useful on their own without any imperial or economic doctrine requiring it. There were then historical ties that bound any nation together, whether that was a nation in the crudest sense or a more developed sense of the nation. The corporate government is prevented from its excesses so long as it regards a world outside it and must produce something. The moment that is transgressed—and it is only a question of the will to do so—corporate government persists only on its own terms, and whatever exists in the world to feed it is all material to be consumed, and consumed it will be. A type of government that relies on a pinky promise not to do things we would consider stupid is not reassuring if our goal is security and the corporate government can best secure itself by destroying all that exists but itself. It would require further advances to impose a "total system" and insist "this always works". The corporate government's officers are inclined to believe "this always works" until they, individually or collectively, face the inevitable consequences the world reserves for such transgression. If, however, "all hitherto known history is the history of class struggles", then a habit that existed in the republic that elevated social classes could become absolute and make all other struggles moot. The class struggle is definitionally unwinnable, for to "win" it on the terms the republic allowed, an abstract exploiter of some sort must be supposed and tolerated for its own sake. Could a single, unitary class, if such a thing exists, persist entirely off of exploiting and degrading each other? Of course not. So too would it not work to envision a mass of humanity absolutely detached from the world and comprise of pure spirit, unless the goal was regression to the primordial and the result corporate government entailed. The only way this would have been resolved would be to look at the system imposed on the world in total, distancing oneself from the human condition, and seeing clearly that it was human history and the human spirit that was the problem. Humans chose class society and exploitation for spurious causes, because it never occurred to such animals to say "no", despite all of the efforts of the world to demonstrate humanity's folly. The only resolution for the class struggle was to override it completely for a higher purpose. This would never be possible so long as the lowest class existed to be tortured, which was an unspoken shibboleth that none of the contending parties dared to breach. It was taken for granted that such "should" happen, and so—if the contest exists entirely on the terms established by the model—there could be no other outcome than the sad story I have told thus far, that we in the 21st century shall witness. Of course, history does not work that way. It never did, and in the 18th century there were more than enough humans who said in no uncertain terms history did not work that way and the result of this folly was sadly predictable.

A GOVERNMENT OF DOPE FIENDS AND PIRATES

What was the key then to the success of this corporate government? It is one that had existed since the wine cults of the ancient world: vice and the commodities that represent it. Certainly the Dionysian cults of old worked by the same logic as corporate government for their purposes, and were adjacent to every ancient imperial project. The partisans of this will always snarkily insist this is "just so" or automatic and reflexive, as befits a failed and foul race like Man. We need not invoke the magic of the drug or the essence itself to understand why. If there were no drugs or no sex trade, the same foulness would be mediated by like-minded people who insist "this always works". The mafiosi know that this doesn't always work, and the smart mafiosi understand keenly why this doesn't work and, like any sound engineer remembering Murphy's Law, know that some chucklefuck will break something that did not need to be broken, to the detriment of the mafia association. The cults of excess are not the business of associations or the workers, but begin in what would have been the "new class" or technological interest. It is the producers broadly that have excess income to spend on such luxuries, and that middle class that is most easily enticed by any fad placed in front of it. The same elements can be found in those countries subjected to the rule of an alien government. The fad-chasers possess little loyalty to nation or even to themselves. In their most crass existence, they chase little more than fleeting pleasures of drugs or something providing immediate sensory stimulus. That would be to naive experience the "ultimate weapon". It is less that men are ruled by desires or questions of the soul, but that men are ruled by things that take the place of desire or want that would have existed if sobered by knowledge of suffering and the evil. It is in the lowest pleasures and cunning that corporate government finds its necessary mechanism for perpetuation. It is a deliberate inversion of high-minded morality and virtue that was once valued. Virtue is the last thing a corporate government wants to promote for the general public, and among their own officers, virtue is suspect. Virtuous people would resist the encroachment to do evil for the Company, and the Company must drive down the conditions of subjects. This the Company doesn't do for economic logic like capitalism, but for political purposes that every officer the Company employs, from the highest administrator to the lowest whore and to all of the native compradors that would be necessary for this operation. The lowest vice has long been a way for humans to bond over their shared crapulence, but now, that vice is distilled. Why would it have to be so? It really could have been some other vice, or a silly hobby. The lowest vice presents the best value for the cost expended. This the astute observer notes from early childhood, where the bully always wins and must establish an institution that codifies that victory—a boot stamping on the face of the defeated forever. While torture would be the "ultimate weapon", torture is difficult to commodify and package in neatly organized corpuscles that can be summoned at will. The simpler implements to deceive, cajole, and ruin human beings are the most immediately necessary.

The corporate government does not rule men, machines, or full moral sentiments. It does not rule land as such, or hold any concept of "territory" that it must defend and guard. It is, in short, "politics" distilled to its essential act. Virtue is expensive and must be hoarded for private use only. Public virtue, of the sort that many human societies relied on, must be discouraged and dissuaded at every opportunity. The reason for this is not because the corporate government consists of new men, or because they are personally monstrous or actually thing "greed is good". The officers of corporate government do horrible things for a horrible cause, and do not intend to ever cease doing that, but this is all a business proposition. Their personal attitude, and perhaps friendships they maintain privately, are the same as any other human would maintain. The race for venality in corporate government is a public matter. This venality cannot be taken for granted, for the cogs in the machine and all of the little people of the nation have no good reason to accept any "corporate government" or any of the hitherto known farces of human politics. What the corporate government must rule with is the shortest possible route to making others go along with any of this, for they cannot rely on old rubrics aristocracy told themselves about the stability of rule or the timelessness of the land or those tied to the land. This could have worked through simple pleasures or "happiness", promoting a cloying, bubbling lifestyle that was, out of necessity, something more than a decoy to paper over the nastiness of the human condition. But, empty, shallow pleasures do two things. One is that they are on their own highly unsatisfactory, for the content will ask themselves if there is anything more in this life or anything in the next life that they might believe in and act on. The second is that the things that are most pleasurable usually entail possession of something that will be valued past the immediate moment, however silly it may be. What is pleasing to the human animal is usually dull rather than a moment of excitement. As anyone can figure out, the typical aim of the human animal is stability and security, and pleasure usually meant comfort. While comfort would be the cheapest to provide in a vacuum, humans did not arise in a vacuum, and such comfort would be contrary to the corporate government. Left to their own devices, the ruled would see the society around them as something to avoid in favor of the comfort they possess. Comfort would lead to the expectation that the many things that disturb that comfort are to be deterred before they become an imminent threat, and because there would be no imminent interference, even a simple mind would find ways, preferably the cheapest ways, to deter those who would impose pain. For example, the comfortable subject would walk away, or find others like itself that want the same goal and lock out the instigators and insinuators. Pleasure and pain are of course not the true masters of moral thought, but if it were what we know to be pleasant for humans, the human body itself emphasizes stability for its own purposes. It would not be difficult for the subject to adapt that instinct to the niche of civilization and the world where human communicate and conspire. Pain and torture cannot be negotiated with in the same way. If comfort or "pleasure" are offered, they are offered only amid a world of abundant pain and torture, and only after the subject has been primed to believe the world itself is full of evil and comfort is a premium product that must become a monopoly held by those who instigated and glorified the general condition of torture in this world.

Narcotics provide both the pleasure and the pain. Opium soothes nervous pain more effectively than nearly anything else, and withdrawal from it is painful. The long-term degrading effects on an addict's body are even more painful. The more important thing for narcotics are that they are easily commodifiable and the trade in such has been throughout history held by cartels. Growing opiates requires at the least the establishment of agriculture and transportation, and because the effects of opiates are well known, they have been for most of human history illegal or taboo. Humanity had already a working theory of how narcotics and substances pollute the preferred functioning of a human body, and every religion worthy of the name will preach that such commodities are a vice to be avoided. I believe the reader does not need further elaboration to figure out why this was so. Finally, narcotics are stabilized commodities rather than services that are rendered immediately, such as prostitution. Narcotics alone cannot be the lifeblood of a corporate government seeking to monopolize such vices. Prostitution has been controlled for as long as the practice has existed. If it is not controlled by pimps or temples operating the sex cults of history, it is controlled by the prostitutes themselves for their purposes. But, selling humans as commodities leads to all of the difficulties any slavery encounters, and humans are not as freely reproducible as drugs.

It was most fortuitous for the Company that this trade in opium already flourished in the East, and so drug kingpins only had to be found and elevated. First, any law or custom opposed to opium dealing would be quickly banned, and every law or custom encouraging vice would be elevated in the name of "freedom". The only freedom on anyone's mind is the shortest route to power when regarding this. It should not be forgotten that the trade in drugs and vice would be known to the Hindus, and was already encouraged to maintain the ugliness of the caste system and its institutionalized ritual sacrifice of the lowest class. So, corporate government was evil meeting evil, and finding the preexisting evil accommodating for the free trade ethos. Had there not been a drug trade, it would have been necessary to invent one, and Christian civilization already knew and dealt in vices and convenient excuses to impose them on the heathens (inferior races, as the hidden doctrine of the religion and aristocracy always made clear).^[2] We should also note here that "traditional" or "national" governments are in their nascent forms much like the corporate government, in that the demos, its orders and secret societies, are not inherently comprise of any special men or special situation. The territorial demos is disciplined by the reality of their political situation, where their domains are fixed and largely settled. The corporate government's invention here is that sudden, drastic changes in claimed assets were possible and desirable, and the corporate government had no need of a "capital" or "metropole" from the very start. The free trade Empire, and the British Empire generally, was lousy for Britain's independent development. The coal and the workers were found in Britain itself. Its chief imports were cash crops from the Americas, luxury items from Asia, slaves from Africa, and things that generally represented a drain on the economy or an unwelcome cost of industry. The promise of textiles from imported cotton was not the real industry that catapulted the Empire to greatness, and the textile industry remained low-level for many years. The way it worked was no different than the home handicraft of seamstresses, except now the seamstresses were crammed in a factory, worked and used in every way as de facto slaves for all purposes. For the working classes, Empire only accelerated immiseration and produced no tangible industrial benefits whatsoever. What was the lifeblood of this Empire? Vice and malice. Immediately after the imposition of free trade, democidal policies and instigations of war throughout the world followed. This is because free trade, as mentioned before, was merely the guise and temporary policy of corporate government, rather than the theory of liberalization itself being inherently guilty or a thin excuse for what human avarice always sought.

Nothing at all about corporate government is "accidental". The concept relies on careful measurement of the agency of its actors, whether they are officers of the company or the ruled, including the lowest of them. It would not be possible to conceive of such a government without agency dominating every human interaction. For most of history, the agency of most humans was irrelevant. Slaves were explicitly excluded from agency, even when the wiser masters understood the motives and minds of slaves did not conform to any preferred ideology. They lacked political agency and they lacked any expectation that they would be agents when interfacing with any publicly acceptable institution. Corporate government would be different. The lowest man had in principle all of the agency in the world? Why? It is so because it is a government of dope fiends and pirates! The officers of such a government are themselves "the lowest of men" and deal in the lowest vices of men. More importantly, they do so precisely because they understood acutely the position of the lowest class and ritual sacrifice. As prevalent as ritual blood sacrifice is in human history, it was politically marginal and uncouth to mention. Past empires, even the bloodiest of them, understood politics only as the domain of the valid property-holders, which excluded most of the "free" populace in practice. What agency free men held was only from their membership in armies or as clients of the political class, and this abasement was expected and explicit. Corporate government brought with it a new concept of property and agency. The old orders of landholding proprietors would, in the long run, be expropriated, in favor of proprietors dealing in stock that is not tied to any direct temporal claim. It could have been accomplished through free trade, or through numerous other contrivances, including versions of "socialism" that were thoroughly in favor of such a government and the sort of interests it would elevate. If it is viewed solely by this ulterior motive, the free trade system and the whole of liberalism appears as nothing but a thin excuse for these dope fiends and pirates, and that was what most of humanity at the time said all such talk was. After seeing the outcome of history, I see no reason to disagree with that assessment of liberalism's ulterior motive. Where such a narrative does not work is that there were greater reasons why this could work, and even the filthiest dope fiend had to work out some sort of "system" that would allow this state of affairs to continue in perpetuity. Simply asserting the untrammeled right of transgression to make the world howl would not in of itself possess the true mechanical force of the world, nor would such a culture allow the surplus of society to be directed towards anything but the shortest route to more rot. It would not allow the technological advance that was inherent to the broader coalition of interests that could rise politically in the 18th century, within and outside corporate government. Nothing obligates the dope fiends and pirates of corporate government to glorify the worst they do. Both the effete officers who publicly claim they are apart from the vice and the purveyors of the worst vices themselves can see that the exultant death cult we live under today is a pointless world that, without a vast preponderance of machinery working "outside the system" to keep the torture cult in place, would provoke the necessary and most brutal retaliation. At the very least, the agency of any who would strike back had to be accounted for in a way that past governments never had to do. The nasty habit of desperate humans to claw at their enemies when all hope is lost had to be abrogated. All such resistance had to be "gamed" before it could be snuffed out. This was foreseen in the same theory that brought about corporate government as a viable proposition over the traditional aristocratic fuckery.