31. The Social Question, the Inauspicious Beginnings of Socialism, and the Wheel that Never Turned

Two questions plagued European society: the political question, and the social question. In the Americas, the political question had been settled in favor of the republic, for there was no ready-made aristocracy or proprietor class that had any special claim to power. The social question in the Americas was left vague and it was, per the American Constitution and similar documents, not a question to be answered by political means or by mobilization of the people. This is the key distinction between the American and European revolutionary idea. Nationalism as a force was particular to Europe, its history, and what would have been needed for the continental European project of reformation to succeed. In America, the drive towards union was wholly unlike nationalism or nationalization of any sort. The aim of the Americans was for men to be independent and avoid social gatherings, save for those mediated by the occult societies of the new political masters that forbade anyone from acknowledging what was right in front of them. The type of nationalism and paranoia about it that rose during the French Revolution would have been anathema to both the ruling and ruled parts of the American social settlement. So far as social reform was a concept in the Americas, the path to that reform, and this is by no means a failed strategy given how history has turned out from our vantage point in the 21st century, was for a community to break off from mainstream society, obtain some land to call their own, and create a new settlement around a novel social plan. This idea was the first idea of the social reformers in Europe as well, but in the European political and social situation, there was no place for anything "outside society" to exist without being attacked ruthlessly by both the conservative order and the would-be revolutionary vanguard. In the mainstream, the social question was a complete nonstarter in America, because if those who framed the Constitution were going to start regulating social life openly, it would never, ever have been for a good purpose. That at least was a paranoia Americans did understand. The other part of this, the political question, was not contentious in America at all. The nuances of American political thought do not reduce it to "liberalism", and few Americans cared to know what a "liberal" was or that they were apparently "liberals", but if Americans were asked if they preferred the rule of kings, despots, sultans, religious mobs, or some other such arrangement, nearly every man, woman, and child would find such things wholly against anything they believed in or wished to see. Europe, on the other hand, grappled with this question every day. The conservative order of Europe was the order of the most abject and disgusting forms of monarchy and all of its vestiges, and it is a great travesty that any part of that was restored or even allowed to persist. The greater political upheavals that will result from this political question I leave for the next chapter. The political question and the social question do not directly intersect, where it was the political question in Europe that made the social question take on a wholly different character. Those who sought to answer the social question by and large would have nothing of substance to contribute to the later revolutions of the 1840s. The social question at its heart was not a question of whether social classes should exist or if everyone should be "equal". No such thing as social equality could be admissible or a worthwhile proposition without drastic changes to the human constitution, and while there were writers who for the first time considered that as a potential, those writers were almost always on the liberal side of the political war, and their true aims saw such a reformation towards social equality as a hazard to avoid rather than anything to aspire to. Those who did aspire to social reform asked instead a much simpler question: "why must we die?" Why was it that the wealth and toil of Europe was spent on ruinous wars, first among each other and then on more ruinous wars to subdue the nations of the rest of the world? Why must so much death be condoned and praised when we clearly could not have to live through that? When taken further, the question becomes one of the individual's constitution—of what it means to be human—and of the constituent parts of society, which is to say, the institutions that prevail at the base level such as the family or the worship, the school or the church, and all of the ways in which human beings socialize or refuse to socialize. While there wasn't a great "social question" in the Americas, due to the "fuck you, I'm eating" policy that was well understood, Americans as much as anyone asked if the social forms humanity had known up to now were the best we could do or even desirable to keep at all. In Europe, the social question remained for a few reasons. One is that there were more people, packed into a smaller space, who were adopting industry and warfare in greater formations that made the social question far harder to avoid. The second is the memory of the enragés during the revolutionary period, which never went away from the French and European milieu. The third is that the political conservatives and all they stood for knew that they had to modify greatly the culture of the people if they were to prevent democratizing revolutions. No one in America doubled that knowledge should be freely accessible when it came to science and technology. Only political knowledge would be curtailed in America, and the Americans were not lied to so profusely about the existence of a republic and what governed that republic; the knowledge to be curtailed was that of the secret societies and clubs where democratic decisions are really made, and that fact in of itself was no great secret and expected by the American commoner. In Europe, scientific and technological knowledge generally was deemed a menace to the rule of the conservative order. This was at first an instinctive assumption of aristocracy, and then became the formal policy due to a terrible invention I have mentioned repeatedly in these books: the German ideology, a monstrous concoction of anti-scientific koans and practices that stunts the brain of anyone fool enough to let it infest their country.

When the political question was answered in the negative, when the French Revolution was defeated, the social question could be asked once again, within what was permitted by the restored Bourbons. Even this much was anathema to the thinking of the arch-conservative order, but in France, the memory of a nation of citizens remained, and so did concepts of rights and a free press endure as a value partially upheld by succeeding French society. The social question could be asked by those who saw the social question resolved not by violence or extreme political means, but by reform and a very different vision of what was morally upright and desirable. So begins the doctrines of modern socialism.

Two ideas develop apart from each other. The first, the Owenites, stem not from a reform of free trade or political society, but a reform of the behavior of the lowest class itself, who were consigned to workhouses. Robert Owen, a textile manufacturer, saw in socialism not a grand restructuring of society, but asked a simple question of how work in a firm like his own could be organized. It is to Owen that the English habit of socialism can be traced, and it maintained a moral pressing that would remain at the core of English socialism up to the present day. The objective was squarely focused on the lowest class of wretches, whose labor was consigned to the workhouses and judged the lowest of all mankind. Owen's vision considered not just the working environment, but the entire life of the workman, and so we see here the origin of English socialism's want to abolish private life in one form. This could be for good, promoting moral education that Owen saw as necessary for a Utopian vision of society, and it could result, as critics of Owen decried, in turning the whole of England into a great workhouse, whose workingmen are reduced to the condition of an abject mental and spiritual slavery. Owen envisioned a world without drunkenness and licentiousness, a world without personal avarice for the workingmen, and most importantly to later English society, a world of impeccable cleanliness, which the lowest class was the exact opposite of. Owen can be seen as a forerunner to the later sanitation movement, and an inspiration to the eugenists who, rather than improving the conditions of the lowest class to make them what they were not, saw the culling of the lowest class and encouragement of all lowest class vices as the most desirable action, towards the same goal: the creation of a clean, rationalized society. All throughout, the Owenite experiments were primarily interested in detachment from the outside society, whether it was the New Lanark mill or the New Harmony social experiment established in America during the 1820s. The American experiment failed in large part because individualism prevailed over the type of socialism Owen thought desirable, or so the freethinkers of the colony believed. The more obvious culprit for the failure of the colony is that it never acquired skilled labor that any new settlement required, such as construction knowledge or any knowledge or interest in building maintenance. What was missing, and this was something the recruitment of lowest-class and castoff vagabond elements entailed, is a lack of knowledge in the sciences, knowledge of technology, and lack of any moral guidance except that which the Owen family could bestow upon the residents of this new community. These things were mistakenly believed to be simple enough to reproduce or things that could be brought about with education. Instead of looking at the mechanical failures that would be evident to my own understanding, the failure was seen as one of the very idea of the cooperative society that would bring capital and labor together as partners rather than adversaries. The Owens took the lesson of New Harmony as evidence that it was time to promote birth control, and after New Harmony dissolved, some of its educated members continued to live in the area under private property and saw science and naturalism as their primary focus, which the surviving members of this group contributed to as their past-time. There is a great problem with any lowest class social experiment that I can attest to: the lowest class do not want anything to do with "society" based on a lifetime of abuse from such an entity, and so, their first action is to remove themselves from it as soon as possible, and by the expectation of cruelty and sacrifice, they either die or find some miserable existence that they may struggle for, never hoping for much in this mortal coil. When hearing of a world without drunkenness and a world of cleanliness, they could only really see that they did not belong in such a society and were not of it, and regardless of the effort put in to change this, none of the adult members would change long established habits, and the young did not take to the kind of public education that was still experimental in that day and age. If such an experiment were conducted in the 21st century, and this will never happen, the educator would do well to remember the greatest motivator in education is an unthinking, terrible fear. That is how any of the scum around me in my time could push themselves to do anything, only to encounter this sadistic, Masonic society that glorified the most rank stupidity and chuckling, proving that this is all humanity really was for. That, I suppose, made the experiment rather foolish, if you know at the end of the rainbow is just more ritual sacrifice. There was no way to know that with any certainty in the early 19th century. English socialism would maintain all of the lessons of the Owenites and take them to heart, mostly for ill and coming away with the belief that socialism truly was unnatural and a thing for managing the lowest class.

SAINT-SIMON'S SOCIALISM

I opened Book 2 with one of the first statements in Saint-Simon's L'Industrie, and I shall reproduce the quote here for good measure:

"We regard society as the ensemble and union of men engaged in useful work. We can conceive of no other kind of society.

Men engaged in industry, whose association forms the true society, have only one need: liberty. Liberty for them is to be unrestricted in productive work, to be allowed free enjoyment of what they produce.:

- Henri de Saint-Simon, Declaration of Principles, L'Industrie (1818)

This statement has stuck in my mind as I write these books, because it encapsulated so succinctly the arc of history I am describing. What was Saint-Simon's socialism born from? It was born not out of fantasy but a naive desire to accomplish something good, or at least the appearance that such a thing could be spoken of. The course of modern history, brief as it was to this point, brought a lot of ruin and little in the way of material progress. An industrial revolution had taken place, but it did not take place in the way imperial histories suggest it did, where a light-bulb went off and everyone believed capitalism was totally a productive system greater than all others. We know this because the history of the French Revolution is that capitalism was a failure, and only by many ad-hoc and necessary inventions of the leadership and the determination of the French nation did the apparatus of the French government and society accomplish anything it did during the revolutionary period and the period of Napoleon's Empire. So too had capitalism, or free trade, proven to be a failure in Britain. Its sole accomplishment was a cannibalization of the old peasantry and the continued cannibalization of the urban workers, which was to the thinking of Malthus the only historical progress to value. Very clearly, such a ruinous condition begged improvement not just in a vast revolutionary change, but in the most basic and simple social units that were presently being destroyed at the insistence of the new imperial logic. I should make clear that it was an imperial logic and specifically the rentier-serving doctrines of Malthus and similar proto-eugenists that are to blame for all of the easily preventable ruin that came about as a result of industrialization. Yet, industrialization did happen. It was seen in Britain, and it was seen in the fledgling American country, where industry became one of the interested parties vying for position in the new country. Industrialization was really the result of novel qualities demanded for the first time in history, rather than a "mindless" push to create more quantity for no particular reason. The extent of the market was limited by what could be useful. Really, in the basic goods of society, industry was already sufficient to meet demand, and the workers had no reason to ever work harder. All they would get for their effort is wasted hours, since it was important to the free traders that workers never have any free time whatsoever, and their time would be filled with "junk labor" intended purely to exhaust the worker and justify the torture and extermination of the lowest class. There was no imperative anywhere to improve productivity per worker, nor was any such improvement seen for many decades. It was only when the competition among capitalists became harsher, and the liberal order gave way to the imperialistic, biopolitical creed (see Chapter 32), that capitalists began to investigate just how effectively they could push their employees. This took place first with a crude managerial instinct that sought to squeeze ever-more-blood from the already degraded workers, and then by scientific management as the sorting of the population was asserted and believed to be the foregone conclusion of their enterprise. All throughout the history of capitalism, the sorting of the working class, and to a lesser extent the orders of the bourgeois, was the primary imperative, more than any profitability or race to produce more goods. When efficiency increases were found in industry as the result of technology, this improved technology was only considered precisely because it would lead to an elevated democide of the "lumpenproletariat" or castoffs of the laboring class. This could only happen once the liberal idea effectively ceased to hold any political advantage and the logic of petty-managers asserted itself as the dominant drive of this enterprise.

My belief is that Saint-Simon presciently saw much of this ahead of time, however naive his expectations and whatever his real aims and loyalties were. At this time, the notion that profit was some manna to be extracted without consequence and unmoored from any orienting purpose was not taken for granted. It wasn't really the thinking found in Adam Smith's writing, if you understood Smith's loyalties. Socialism suggested first of all that individual profit and the search for such was never the point or even a necessarily desirable goal. Men were motivated by self-interest, but nothing about this self-interest required them to associate interest with a monetary goal or self-promotion, or the accumulation of some office. Adam Smith saw spiritual authority invested in the university, where the intellectuals would be the moderating force and uniquely shielded from the regular functioning of firms. The university itself was not and could not be a profit-seeking enterprise. It was always parasitic upon profit, as it should be; but this regulatory function was the chief aim of the free trade system, and the motivations of lesser men were to persist in the world and little more. For the socialists, spiritual authority was invested in the scientists, and to a lesser extent in artists and creative persons. This would be the key distinction at first. Where the capitalists were favorable towards the imperial institution as the intellectual and spiritual authority, the socialists saw science generally as the authority, and the men and associations engaged in science were valued only because science allowed independent verification that could be done in principle by anyone. If we understand the industrial revolution as the offspring of a scientific revolution and the interests of the scientists rather than the intelligentsia as an institutional body, we best see what really animated the French socialists and similar strains of socialism. Increasingly, it would be scientists and people in the professional fields, whose knowledge and particular skillsets were necessary for the reproduction of society and the production of any genuinely new values, that were coveted. This would be true of successive variants of socialism, even those that abandoned any notion of world peace or brotherhood among mankind. It describes the later French socialists, it describes the core that Marxist politicians had to appeal to if they wished to realize any of their visions beyond the essential act of seizing the state. In some way, it described the professional core of fascists and "national socialists", who were drawn from the teachers and university fixtures who identified science not with an independent thought process of human beings, but with their institutions above the liberal institutions and the preexisting biases they held about the human condition. It could be found among an increasingly evident group of liberal socialists, all of whom had ideas that were not at all incompatible with the original socialism, and that really saw no great problem with communism as it existed in the 20th century. And of course, it could be found among the eugenists like Francis Galton, who identified science with eugenics and eugenics alone, and saw in their "religion of science" a creed that would enshrine their class if they so chose to do this. Whatever the aims of socialists for human brotherhood or world peace or any other goal, they relied on an assertion about human society; that it was understood best by science rather than philosophy or the humanities as they existed up to that point, and that mankind was on the precipice of a profound transformation. Just what transformation was happening is an answer none of them could agree on.

Part of the confusion was that class distinctions were taken to mean something more than they did, and the true origins of class distinctions (so far as there is any natural reason why classes should exist) were obfuscated to writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. A "new class" of technicians that did not figure at all in hitherto known history as an overt force of their own asserted themselves not because a political idea allowed it, but because technology and the science required to utilize that technology best required that. That was a condition the world itself placed on humanity, rather than one chosen by any human will or a natural law that operated independently in all times. If it were a natural law, then the scientific revolution would have occurred far more naturally and evenly, and it would have been automatically accepted and hailed as inevitable, and it would have recurred in a uniform fashion in every nation, and could be reproduced easily and effectively freely in any nation. The idea of "natural law" is that this condition can be imposed on a nation as a simple fact and that it may be imposed without regard to the conditions of that nation, the country they live in, their geopolitical position, their relations to other nations, or any want of the people for such a revolution at that time, in that manner. But, in all cases, the need for science is not mandated by anything in the political constitution or political thought at all. It is instead a condition that was needed if a nation wanted to build things like artillery or naval vessels. Science in the genuine sense was not defined by an institution or a method that could be inserted anywhere to "move history", as the thinking of crass minds believe.

I mentioned earlier in this book the phrase "Science is the motor of history". Socialism is where this concept comes into the discourse, but it is clumsily understood by the crass mind. It was not necessary to make such an assertion as if it were a natural law, or a thing that could be imposed unilaterally on history. Science, like anything humans do of their own volition, is a choice, and it is not conducted in any uniform manner that makes it "real science". The only proof of science is when its results are demonstrated in the material reality we live in to our satisfaction. Does your artillery fire? Do your machines work as your understanding of their principles suggests they would? Practice cannot be the sole criterion of truth, but it would be a necessary criteria if science is to mean anything at all. The reason "science is the motor" became a phrase is because the industrial revolution was a scientific one, and the political revolution in America and France pertained to industry in a way that couldn't be denied forever. So too would the trajectory of the society coming out of those events be determined by the growth of science and a necessary growth of industrial product to feed these scientific endeavors. There is a limit to what science can do to "move the world" simply by its conduct, because humans are limited creatures and science itself is as limited as the humans who conduct it. The scientists did not recreate the world in any way like they pleased. While men of science sometimes became politicians, more prominently in the French Revolution, the revolutions were political and the most overt condition of commerce and the money supply was the chief interest of the day. They did not believe money served science or some other abstract entity, and they were not as the crass histories proclaim immediately obsessed with the accumulation of currency just because Mammon said so.

Nothing about the socialist idea was democratic in any sense. It was, in all serious formulations, a technocratic idea, and the new class it identifies and draws to it is the technological interest. The conditions for this new class to exist, first because there is demand for such people, and then because those people assert a greater share of control over government, would have occurred without any "socialist" idea as such. The reason socialism or something like the concept did gain currency is because the argument for the authority and rule of science could never be premised on individual genius or individual property. Science pertains to nothing less than the whole of the world, and much like every imperial and state claim in history, spiritual authority will be closely linked to temporal authority. The answers for the scientist are not in the individual, who can easily be seen as a fickle creature by science, but in the world and in the larger association that people create; that is to say, society in the widest sense we know of. That is in no way limited to human society, but to any and all conditions that affect the social agents. Anything less would mean the scientist is shirking a duty to the truth. While scientists do not need to necessarily care about the truth, science as a vehicle for political power can only rely on the truth. There cannot be a single convenient fiction if the objective is to be a spiritual authority, rather than a practice guided by spiritual authority. Nothing prevents science from fulfilling this role, so long as science is set on some principles that are communicable to the parties involved. That is to say, there cannot be a "super-science" that is the property of an elevated class or institution, if the scientific authority is to be a genuine one that anyone else should regard. This doesn't prevent esteemed bodies of scientists from being more credible than an ordinary person, but the esteem is not in of itself "science". The wisest and most esteemed scientist would still have to operate with the same facts as the rest of us, and if the wise cannot defend their esteem—if they are not meritorious on the terms science requires—they can be dismissed as an authority. Science is egalitarian in that sense because the truth was always in the world, and not invested in any particular institution or body with "special rights". This of course only applies if we truly believe science in the genuine sense is the spiritual authority. Men can rule by science and use the scientific method for themselves, while insisting to the broad masses that the ordinary man is incapable of science and must defer to authorities with this vaunted knowledge. What these rulers cannot do is create reality by decreeing that it should comply automatically to this assertion, as if the rest of the world were obligated to obey science. The ignorant masses can reject science altogether. The masses could only seriously challenge this spiritual authority if they engage in science just as the wise do, and if the ordinary man is not able to compete with the wisest and most esteemed, then the ordinary man is in a permanently inferior position. The particulars of posturing within society are irrelevant to the truth, but the posturing and mind-games that are played within society affect greatly this treatment of science as a spiritual authority. The aim of establishing science as a spiritual authority is to find the necessary arbiter of truth that does not require endless relitigation. We can easily communicate the principles a scientist is following and expects others to understand, so that those principles are understood even if we disagree with them. For science to be a worthwhile pursuit, a great many principles are implicitly agreed upon because there is a society where this habit of investigating the world is required to navigate that world, and so philosophical charlatanry to say "black is white" has no value whatsoever. A child could see through the disgusting mind-game, until they are beaten and broken into accepting the imperious mindset that we are familiar with today. Nothing about science prevents this mind-game from affecting the spiritual authority of science in society, or spiritual authority among humans. We know now that science would suggest humans are finite and malleable, and history proves that humans are uniquely vulnerable and have been mind controlled into accepting a nightmarish regime. Such a regime was only possible because all spiritual authority, the highest spiritual authority, could be invested in science, and science demonstrated that mind control was not just possible but trivial. What is not truly possible by science is reality control, or the belief that a scientist can unilaterally declare reality by these mind tricks. Whatever the method of mind control, the slave necessarily retains its native knowledge because that native knowledge was necessary for the mind trick to be effective. Usually, the attempt at reality control is a linguistic game that is the favorite excuse of pedagogues for the ritual sacrifice—and that is truly the central rite of the human race, that it was born from ritual sacrifice when a child "talked funny" or "looked funny", all of which are symbolic representations. If this did not happen, then the ritual sacrifice wouldn't have the power it holds. It did happen that way though, and it happened many times over. The proof of this is recreated in every family, every school, and the regular pedagogical methods of the human race throughout history. No greater hatred is shown by humans than the hatred towards those who "talk funny" and thus were attacked on sight; the thrill of torture has always been maximized. The danger of science as a spiritual authority is that, for the first time, the thrill of torture could be maximized not just as a local pleasure of the sadist, but as an engineered quality of the society and all aspects of that society.

The mere fact of ritual sacrifice does not guarantee its success. This then is the central claim of those who denounce socialism, rather than any legitimate grievance against socialism.^[1] At the center of the faith in "the primacy of the individual" is the faith in ritual sacrifice of certain individuals as something above all other interests. It is above the state, above any notion of social order, and above even the true political motives of the interested parties. Arguments for "rugged individualism" were never premised on anything rational or any worthwhile moral quality that any society respected, but the main legitimate argument against socialism is that the members of society do not like society, do not like human company, and the overriding aim of most of humanity is to somehow escape society. I hope in this chapter I can further explain many of the pratfalls of socialism that are possible, all of which were realized by the time I write these words. Why do most of the people despise this socialism? The reasons why are clear if you've followed my writing up to now. The lower classes correctly fear and loathe society because of this history of ritual sacrifice, which need only be invoked repeatedly by transgressors until the society is wholly intolerable. This is why the first modern socialism had to answer this question in two ways. The first is that the first and most important aim of socialism according to Saint-Simon was to elevate the conditions of the lowest class, so that their existence is not so dire. The second was a naive faith in Christian brotherhood and an antipathy towards ritual sacrifice that was well known among humanity; that the aim of establishing socialism was precisely to prevent the sort of ritual sacrifice that is invoked and practiced so that society remains an tolerable condition.

It was this assignment of spiritual authority to science, for this purpose, that truly made modernity into "modernity", rather than just another event of a history where men waged wars and did particular things to win power. It could happen not because it was a natural law, but because science finally had an existence that could perpetuate and be communicated to the whole society, rather than science being something men and women carried out as needed. This happened because of the means available to humanity that did not exist until this time. The intellectuals claim this monopoly on science and knowledge before it can form as a force unto itself, which has always been the liberal political idea; that is, that science and institutions are one and the same, identified with the class of the commoners and their interests, rather than science existing apart from any class or any particular interest humans have about the world. It is an objective fact that men conducting science could discover technology and knowledge that had a far more dramatic effect on war and every other thing human society did than it could accomplish in the past. Past societies did not know of fertilizers or develop a proper theory of the steam engine and how heat and electricity could be summoned; nor did past societies extend science's purview to the study of society, politics, and ultimately psychology and the very obvious mental limitations of these jabbering apes called "humans". The intellectuals have always proclaimed that there is no limit to their intellect, despite there being no reason why we must respect that. The inheritors of those intellectuals crow about "unlimited human stupidity" while always exempting themselves, showing the snark and disgustingness common to their race.

What came to be called "socialism" is really this attitude towards science, which had to look at the society of human beings and its conditions rather than any necessary individual or unit comprising it. It is a simple fact that society can only be understood as information pertaining to social agents that in of themselves have no necessary "society" to speak of them. For this social information to be intelligible as "society" in any sense, the agents have to be related to each other. Because society is an informational and artificial construct rather than a natural one, the unit of interest was then the institution. Even without an explicitly declared "socialism" as such, the peculiar thinking about institutions that socialism entails would have arisen, and this worked against the liberal idea that institutions were ultimately the tools of men and men out of necessity had to be considered a thing apart from these institutions, and apart from their surroundings. Socialism in other words did not align with all of the hitherto known political ideas that were admissible, which always dealt with individual agentur conspiring against the whole of the world. It would have been the same if the stated goal of this scientific revolution had nothing to do with improving society and instead was looking for nothing more than a vehicle to pure power through the scientific method. If someone is thinking of power as something that is entirely within the purview of proper and true science, then their inclination would have to tell them that their inquiry has to serve the good if their inquiry is to lead to anything other than disaster. We hold it as self-evident that a child can see what the licentious, idiotic world of unlimited backstabbing for its own sake, where the essential act of torture and humiliation are the gods of mankind, creates, and that the child can also see with little effort that hitherto known human history has been nothing but a litany of such ritual sacrifices, and that the dominant political ideas select for such malice because that malice was desirable "for itself". Science could not avoid seeing what is obvious to a child, but the ruling political ideas were "we fooled him, we fooled him, tee hee hee" and nothing else. This would be exploited in all ways by the ideologues of the future, but to someone who truly cared about describing the world, this would have been a necessary understanding. Even if someone had no objective to change the world, and even if someone had orthodox political views and believed in the right of liars to transgress the "retarded" (which means everyone who isn't part of the club of liars who revel in lying), if they wished to rule through science they had to see that the central ruling idea of deception and malice could not be sustained forever, and was always ruinous to any material, productive, or real condition that would be valued except Lying and torture themselves. Since a significant portion of humanity never would or wanted to learn anything but that essential lesson, socialism was doomed by an ever-present large part of the population whose proclivity was always to keep the ritual sacrifice going at all costs. This would be in the end what any science had to acknowledge. We today know how it ends. One way or another, humanity would have encountered the eugenic creed, and that is particular to human history. Unless humanism were itself wholly averted in a short time, with limited means to understand what that would even mean, this could only lead to a final confrontation of the eugenic interest against all others. On the surface, this appears as a confrontation with the proprietors and their interest in landed property claims; but as we know, all of the proprietors' claims are only relevant because of an aristocracy that insisted on torture for torture, cruelty for cruelty. The eugenists, though they would be a formation from the middle-class commons, enshrined a purified aristocratic value set as their only political conviction. The true political idea of the commons "for-itself" never materialized in our history. Socialism was an attempt, however mad, to even ask the question of what a political idea for the commons—in my model, the technological interest—would have been. Of note here is that labor as a group had no real want or interest in "socialism" in any sense. Labor could appreciate its meaning since they work with both science and technology and are affected by both in the course of their existence. For labor, though, society as institutions and technological constructs was a thing to be avoided at all costs. The chief aim of the association is to continue functioning as a mafia, and to never relent on their core need to decide who is in and who is out. "Labor is humanity's hatchetman, in the end." Even when the doctrines have nothing to do with a stated socialist doctrine or the traditional aims of socialists like world peace, the rule of science would invariably appear "socialist" because the whole of society was the necessary unit, even when the socialists understood society as an assembly of individuals and institutions that had to work together for their mutual self-interest if they were to work collectively towards a value that was shared by more than one person. Conversely, as the "century of the self" was asserted for technocratic and eugenist reasons in the 20th century, the "individualist" doctrines had to appeal to an imagined socialist endeavor to ensure that society become as licentious as possible, for the shared and overriding goal of an interest that had to engineer society and institutions rather than individuals. Interestingly, while the "individualists" of the 20th century used outrageously socialist and Marxist phraseology and were the first to impose on others social obligation, the socialists of the 20th century became wary of these invasive institutions because of the obvious ruination that resulted from them, and the total lack of any value in such a society other than torture and death. A shared and institutional goal of torture for the sake of individual and collective enjoyment and the essential act was still a socialist goal, but it persisted entirely against anything socialism could mean except a self-evident and circular logic that because society was found rotten and cruel, it should be nothing but rotten and cruel, just like the souls of those who decried any authority that would say no to that program.^[2]

THE THEORY OF REVOLUTION

The revolutions thus far were never theorized before they began. They were, in their true origins, intrigues of specific men to attain a political and social transformation that suited them. This mostly meant that those men asserted something they already possessed, and the rest of the society—the ruling order and the masses—reacted to this assertion. Nothing would suggest that there were any necessary pattern, let alone a natural pattern that predicted scientifically when these revolutions will happen, or how they can be instigated without failure. In the first, the American rebellion, the majority of colonists have no interest whatsoever in any revolution and see this as yet more bullshit to make them suffer, and those who join see it as a game played because they could play the game. No matter who won or lost, none of them were retarded, and that is all that really mattered to humanity. No necessary self-interest prompted most of the participants to join a revolution, and for many who would rise, they were beholden to a few who really managed the game, often joining the cause because this was apparently the thing humanity was doing now. The true schemes of men, whether they are in the ruling position or grasping for any position, do not concern the state or the political for their own sake, or "in of itself" where men are reduced to political agents behaving as they're "supposed" to. Most often, the real game is not for this or that nation or this or that office, but for rising in the degrees of the secret societies and associations that have been mankind's chief proclivity. No material interest of the "biological nation" or any grouping of people that has no "political" content but is an association of their choosing is involved in the revolutionary act, when all is settled. The real club, the real community of those who are "in the know" always takes precedence over whatever revolutionary game is ostensibly played, and this is true regardless of what threats are made or what technology is available to the participants. Those who are threatened into political society where they can only live with a knife at their throat in perpetuity are never "in the know". The entire purpose of the game is to not be such a cowardly person. The crudest theory of revolution, which is to say, the theory of the instigators, is that there are those selected to live and those selected to die, and a group in the middle whose fate is not determinate "as it should be", but who are for all intents and purposes selected to die along with the losers. Every revolution, from the regular "revolution" of deciding which slaves will be tortured today, to the choice of which child is selected to survive and which is to be humiliated in the home, is premised on this simple fact. It is never, and never can be, premised on the belief that the oppressed will by some magic reverse hitherto known history with nothing to back them. Such a thing isn't even pined for. The goal of the oppressed, and this is consistent through human history and over every society yet known, is to escape the cycle altogether, where there is no knife at the throat and no realistic possibility that such a thing will come without warning.

For most of the masses, revolutions were things in progress that they could join or at least allow to go on, for they saw no particular reason to uphold the old regime even if they are not going to gain anything out of the event except continued survival. The proper attitude of the masses towards revolution is apathy, for they know before the first self-gratifying speech that none of this means anything more than a change in the name of their masters, and uncertainty about which arbitrary edicts are to be followed now. The sense of most people in these events is that, whatever intrigues may happen, there is really not much these associations can do, and what the associations are going to do that really matters is not going to be a good thing for the ordinary person. No promise is worth anything, and in many cases the revolutionaries not only made no promise but preemptively shut down the notion that any of this revolution will improve the common conditions, Any such change to society would obviously be far easier to implement through peaceful, orderly government, if such a thing were ever a desired program. How this government is established does not require any revolution, or any great political movement whatsoever. Such a government could in principle be selected by the members of society—all of them—looking at each other, seeing their condition, and concluding that someone could step up to carry out the program that was wanted in the first place, without any controversy or intrigue or any dickering over merit or virtue. If no one is willing to do this basic thing, it could just as well be agreed that government offices could be assigned by lot or by taking any volunteer willing to expend their life on a dismal task that offers little personal reward. Since that outcome is anathema to the "great game" that revolutionary instigators care about, and that the rest of human society is obligated to care about for no good reason whatsoever, such a program is the absolute last thing the political revolutionary, or the politician in regular order, ever wants to accomplish. This grody, disgusting position, where all politics must be the most fickle and petty intrigues for a dubious reward, is the basic and Absolute position of the conservative order; but not one revolutionary party in human history could say they have done significantly better, and in many cases, the revolutionaries do worse and even glorify something worse. The only thing that may discipline any politician is that there is a sobering condition outside humanity entirely that the polity has to answer. If the goal were to seek political change so that this sort of actually useful policy may be realized, whether because a particular person thought it was desirable or because the viability of the society this polity pertains to requires it, there is nothing in the "theory of revolution" that speaks of it, because it is a chronic failure of human polities to ever answer the general fear beyond a bare minimum. As always, the greatest fear of human beings, more than anything else, is other humans, and at a far earlier stage of formation than the revolutionary moment, the resolution to that general fear was already decided to be the game of intrigues that has been played; that is, to simply let the nightmare of human history continue, where "there is no hope, there is no end". When the rallying cry of a revolution proclaims from the outset "there is no hope, there is no end", it is not very hopeful. When revolutions appeal to "nature", whether a false conceit of such or the study of nature that the authority of science requires, the very proposition of nature precludes any ending or even a beginning. This was not at all necessary, because the revolutionary party can and often does dismiss "nature" as a cause that justifies all. Revolutionaries hold spiritual convictions that arose from something far more than the lowly muck that is our natural origins, and the revolutionaries cannot speak to the ghasts of humanity whose lives have been nothing but muck. It is the disgusting wants of the conservative order, filled with slugs who stand for nothing and glorify nothing, that are the null assumption for any "science of revolution". If not for this, then the conditions of revolution would be permanent and pressing on reality, which creates its own obvious maladies for a human society, and this does not resemble our observation that revolutions are singular and local events. The ordering of the political institutions is made, and usually resolved by a small number of people who would be informed and have some program that serves their interests primarily and views the society as cattle to feed those interests. Even a revolutionary who proclaimed that the cattle should be treated kindly or even that free men could be made out of the cattle still presumes at first the masses are cattle, and cannot be otherwise.

Could it be otherwise? Not for revolution. Let us consider what would happen if knowledge proliferated enough that the masses really were stirred to create political change of their own accord. This is not a "revolution" as such because there is no new ordering of institutions, no new deal made by a few men in the associations. The mass uprising means only one thing: "we are done". Whatever the habit of the workers' associations to conspire against the lowest class, in this matter, they are functionally like the lowest class in how they have been treated, and what their program would have to be. The chief aim of such a revolution would be to end the cycle of ritual sacrifice and instigation for good, and never speak of this social experiment again. All of this could be independently verified by enough people that it would become a self-evident fact for all to acknowledge. The program would be very simple: land and wealth for all, so that individuals can exit "society" as much as possible. The political matter would be prohibited, and the formation of large associations with large armies would be suspect. Since this program was for the valid, if someone could not swim as a result of this settlement, they get nothing and there is nothing further to say. The dispossessed and condemned would have nowhere to go, as they always have. The same methods of instigation to foment intrigues would persist, no matter what creative machine or pact was made to mitigate this. There would be little left to do in such a world, and no great aspirations unless some instigator has a vision that most of the people have no reason to regard as worthwhile or tolerable. The chief result would be nothing more than a redistribution of wealth so that no great centers of it exist, and whatever centers of wealth in shared projects remained would be accounted for and a matter of public record. No expectation that this will be permanent can be set, but the whole society would learn this history and never forget it, and it would not be too difficult to see the same old tricks once again. A society of conspiracy would be the result, and like any conspiracy, there would be degrees of initiation and historical knowledge, since the knowledge is vast and not everyone can or should task themselves with this historical knowledge. If there is not a limited association or party where this game is played, the default is to assume that every human, every entity that could be a potential trouble source, will be, even if the true wants of the masses were to have the things they actually wanted out of life. In all cases, rule of fear and guilty until proven innocent are the expectation. The rest depends entirely on the technology of that society, which includes the very bodies of the social agents, whether they have political rights or not. Here is where the eugenists introduced an idea: "no sacrifice" means that the lowest class, the "source of the problem", must be destroyed. Must be sacrificed, so that there is no more sacrifice, no more ugliness, no more who "deserved it" for an unspoken reason. But, the eugenists' unwanted innovation to the theory of revolution was never needed or asked for. A child can see it for what it is, until that child is beaten and made to lie to itself. Far from believing in the institutions of a revolution, the result of such a transformation would be to accept that revolution and politics has no solution in that way, and never could. The intrigues would always seek to set beasts against each other, knowing the political struggle must never end and never result in anything tangible. In this way, the wealth of a society can be expended maximally, for the sake of upholding the conceits of the intriguers and nothing more.

This theory is alluring to aristocracy, but it fails for two simple reasons. First, history does not work that way. Second, the true motives of human beings rather than their political motives will affect what they actually do, which is why most people regardless of rank look at revolutions with appropriate cynicism, and those who have this revolutionary zeal do so for reasons that aren't political but spiritual and obsessed with a certain trajectory for humanity and the social project. The result is that, even if revolutionary mania gripped a society for no apparent reason, it would be resolved and the cycle of regular rule would be reasserted, with remarkably little change coming from the event.

Past revolutions did not get far because they were purely political affairs between men, or spiritual affairs that had little to do with some desire to invade material reality and the homes of those who had no interest in any of this. The revolutions of the future would seek to instigate, to foment all of the conditions of depravity, and the revolutionaries scurry away from the carnage while the true beneficiaries sweep in. So goes the political theory. This runs into obvious problems that the wants of human beings that could really instigate them usually involve substantial wealth. People of all classes want food and security. They want peace, and if the option of peace across nations is possible at a remarkably low price, they will all ask eventually why any such intrigue should be tolerated. They would ask if it weren't possible to evade the monarchs indefinitely, and live outside "society" as such. The true interests of most of mankind are those of the lowest class, that always viewed this entire situation as a pointless travesty that brought them nothing good. If someone truly believes in instigation and transgression, such things are unnecessary. The masses of humanity would be quite happy to terminate this unwanted condition of political rule and intrigue forever. It would require one and only one thing: no more sacrifice, no more humiliation, and no more toleration of instigators. This is a very simple condition that is sensical to nearly everyone, yet to speak of it is beyond the pale. The cajolers insist there must be something more, but there really isn't anything more. The most basic needs of life are the most pressing.

This socialist idea, this "industrial revolution", changed the calculation. Social meaning of the past revolutions was assigned to them by ideologues, rather than those who lived through the events. The revolutionaries did not pretend this was for the broad masses with any seriousness; their political program was for them and and their interests, and really did not involve the vast majority of mankind or the nations involved. It remained a game for the middle class and up. Further, the revolutionary governments are governments like any other, who have to hand off whatever they're doing to actual living human beings who have lives. The revolutionary government did not need to impose some condition on reality or on individual people; it needed men who could fight, plow the fields, and build the real conditions of a society. And so, however ruinous a revolution may be, at no point does the revolution exist to create death for death's sake, or any great amount of torture in the world. The revolutionaries simply do not care about such trivial externalities as the simple conditions of existence, for theirs is a middle class program with a middle class mindset. Socialism both recognized that this was the true condition of societies undergoing revolution, and raised the insinuation that the basic needs of life could be stripped away not just by the caprice of filth like Malthus, but as a rule of political life where the deprivation of the poor is the point, rather than merely incidental to political events. To some extent, deliberate malice had always driven the political decision of mankind, for their hatred of the ritual sacrifices and anything that looked funny has been a constant. What was new was a way to scientifically assert and make true the Malthusian belief about mankind, where all is filth and disease, and the first way to eliminate the idea that there can be an existence "outside society" at the level of a country, if not the whole world. Socialism was always inherently "totalitarian", though that word like so many is a weasel word. Science does not abide by any self-asserted limitations on its practice, in the way some Germanic ideological retard insists it should be. Not only would this question be possible; it would be inevitable.

The later revolutions of 1848 would be predicted by prognosticators, but when they did happen, they happened not as great set pieces, but as assemblies of interested men who, much like before, asserted what they possessed and what had been accumulated over the preceding decades and generations. It is the conservative order that was always vapid and disgusting, living entirely off rent and the blood of innocents; and yet it was the conservative order that instigates and insinuates. The conservative order of Europe did not rule for anything good, did not rule wisely, and never had anything but scams for humanity. And so, the liberal revolutionaries in 1848 were not convinced they were overturning the world, or undertaking any socialist project. Their project was one interested most of all in the petty bourgeois, who were already squeezed between the imperial, colonial apex of the new Empire and the hungry masses. Because there was nothing to tell that middle class it could not have some of the nice things that their kind in France and Britain enjoyed, they made a go at removing the utterly useless conservative order, so that it may be replaced with something at least halfway functional. There was no great happening or overturning because there really was not much to speak of. Revolution was never the program of the broad masses to address their grievances, and it's hard to see why this insinuation was ever made. The people suffered, as they always did, but there was only the faintest idea that it could be different, and that idea remained purely theoretical. The faintest idea was that people required some condition compatible with life if they were to work, but the political ideas would always take it for granted that the political class and working class were two worlds forever apart, and not one idea, socialism included, suggested it would be anything different. It was a good thing they were two worlds forever apart; better that than false egalitarianism between two peoples who would never have any reason to coexist. Rather than learn the lesson that perhaps the politicians should not disturb the lives and nascent associations of the workers, the revolutionary interest learned the exact opposite; that in the next effort, the broad masses must be dragged into a project even more alien to them than the last one, with even less reason to even tolerate it. The liberal revolutions vowed mostly to ignore the masses. The revolutions after 1848 were to drag the masses into the fire, and insist they are supposed to love it. That is the sad tale of civilization, and it is not new. It is the call of all of the old gods, and of Moloch and all of the other favorites that were the true deities of the political class, revolutionary or conservative. Not one of those gods spoke to us, and why would we ever have anything to do with their gods, or Christ-Lucifer the terrible?

The insinuation of the instigators is that because the question of humanity's basic conditions can be investigated scientifically in all of its aspects, the most opportunistic behavior is inevitable. This is caused superficially by the utilitarian sham I described throughout these books. They are at heart the result of a conflict between the proper conduct of science and the technological interest, which has always been opportunistic and desirous of the latest fads over any genuine investigation. Socialism would always been tainted by this disconnect. The one thing that would mitigate the problem—the peaceful and open proliferation of technology without any pressing for more technology for a monopoly—was forbidden because the conceits of the commons told them to always seek advantage over their traditional enemy, the laborers. In turn, the laborers had a natural antipathy for the technological interest as a force unto itself. It was necessary to emphasize the individual and humanism over the proper scientific judgment of history; and this is why the intellectuals scoff at anything that is not "humanistic", even though humans are nothing special in the universe and do not abide by any special rules. If there is a study of humanity in particular, it can only begin if humans are at a basic level no different from any other animal, and their technology is in its entirety nothing special in the universe. Humans are quite capable of reverse-engineering their own technology, but this has to be negated as a possibility before it begins for the cajolers to continue pressing history in the way they prefer.