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I set out to write a book detailing the rise of eugenics as the visible height of the ruling ideas and institutions we live under today, and this has proven to be a more difficult explanation than I thought was needed. On the surface, it seems to decent-minded people that this should be easy enough - Eugenics, the movement of Francis Galton which lorded over death and destruction of countless millions and bragged that it would inflict much more death and suffering, should be opposed on all the grounds that make sense. The arguments make more sense to those who have no benefit whatsoever from this arrangement, but the defenders of Eugenics have not in any serious manner defended their project on any moral, scientific, intellectual, or practical grounds, and even many who advance its agenda cannot say with a straight face what exactly they are doing. Only in hushed conspiracy is the reality of eugenics ever spoken of, and great secrecy surrounds a clique of intellectuals and their hangers-on who have been the vanguard of this movement. Its advocates disguise themselves with some other ideology, whether it is fascism, some form of socialism, liberalism, anarchism, some religious argument, or an ideology glorifying depravity for its own sake. It has become clear after 2020 that the advocates of this movement do not want to allow the idea that they can be opposed at all to be an admissible thought. The author has to ask why this happened and to answer this question, he had to answer the question at the level of society, the state, and institutions. The investigation led the author to a terrible conclusion - that this movement, which seemed to wage an offensive in the past 50 years, has deeper roots and further reach than anyone knew. The full extent of the ruling interest involves much more than a cabal of eugenicists, and those who play their part in the nightmare are sometimes useful idiots, or only partly aware of what is going on, or pursue other aims entirely and are made for one reason or another to accede to a clique and a certain mindset that dominates. Its origins as a formal movement are documented well by now, with the writings of the original eugenicists available on the internet. An imperial doctrine of the 19th century appears at first to be the quaint obsession of certain aristocrats that went horribly wrong. We are told that this beast does not exist or that we cannot speak of it, yet every institution has for the past century been dominated by its logic more than any ideology, economic motive, material condition, or political force. The roots of why this is so entail something much greater than eugenics. In working through the web of interests to determine why the world turned into this, I found that it would not do simply to write a denouncement of one movement. It was necessary to start with a common reference point that is not so controversial or unreasonable, and here I started as many did with the division of labor and economic thought. This is a common fallacy, but one that must be investigated to sense why the logic of eugenics came to dominate economic thinking, and through that vehicle asserted its idea above mere economics. Economics was one of the vectors eugenics would require to perpetuate its idea, both because such a project is very expensive and requires many moving parts, and because the basis of economic thought in moral philosophy would carry over directly to the eugenic creed. This, too, proved to be a daunting task. The author is not a great polymath, but a fairly ordinary person of humble means with no more than an internet connection and some old books to help him make sense of this. He does so not because he has a political mission or intends to be a leader of any resistance, but because the question is for him intrinsically interesting and a personal matter. Simply put, he has no reason whatsoever to go along with eugenics, and has elected to be one of the fools willing to write what he knows, pissing into the wind with hope it will do some good.

After a number of rewrites, I decided the best way to produce this writing would be to release volumes, developing first from ontology to describe not just eugenics, but its consequences and the likely trajectory of future society. All of my writing will be an incomplete work, and I do not count myself as a scholar nor someone who will cite sources or references in hopes to please an academic or historian. It is in describing an ontological view that I find the best vehicle to introduce what, exactly, happened to make this possible. By no means can I say that this ontology is the unvarnished truth or above criticism. It is, however, the ontology and metaphysics which is operational in how those who spread propaganda must operate, and how economic and political thought largely constituted itself.

I would like the reader to see this not as a grand thesis or a gospel, but a text that may elucidate some things that have been commonly confused in discussions about anything coded "political". I encourage the reader to investigate themselves the claims made, and to know the meaning of terminology used rather than succumb to word association as these arguments typically devolve to.

The ontology suggested here is not me revealing the unvarnished truth as revelation, as if I've discovered some grand secret. I would not wish the reader to think this is a full description of the actual world, let alone the only one. One of the most infuriating tropes for me is the treatment of theories and science as "whole systems" or ideologies which resist any inquiry into their mechanics. The purpose of this writing is not to declare how the world works, but to explain the ontological thinking that allows reality control to operate. That is, if we imagine a philosophy like Ingsoc from Nineteen-Eighty-Four, we would not take Orwell's presentation of it at face value and say it is just-so and always effective. Much of the exposition of that ontology is delivered in an exposition where the protagonist is under torture and humiliation, and Orwell's biases are well known by now. The book is an intelligence test to see if the reader can pick through the world and spot the obvious errors not in the thinking of the Party, but Orwell's claims about the nature of that world, which are always presented by unreliable narrators and the protagonist's biased perspective. Winston Smith is needless to say an unreliable narrator, narcissistic and possessed with an infantile anarchist mindset that is calculated to resonate with people who are not intended to get Nineteen-Eighty-Four's purpose. There is a reason this book is mandatory in most high school reading curricula, outside of the residuum who are not taught anything at all. If you thought Winston was at all sympathetic, you did not pass the intelligence test.

What I present is the likely thinking that would lead someone in that world towards that ontology, and ways in which it resembles things that either already happened or were to happen in the future from the publication of that book. Many of the steps taken in the decades since to advance that ruling idea are ideas that were seeded at the formation of the national security state, and each generation would be marked by stages of social engineering to suggest that the ontology of a state capable of reality control was the only possible ontology. Many of the claims made in this writing are not new, and many of them are things that have already been sussed out by enough people. I feel it is necessary to start here, and allow the readers to judge for themselves the meaning of this ontology and metaphysics. Starting here is the best starting point to elaborate on how further writings in this series will unfold. I begin with a simple model, elaborate that model into something large, and describe those elaborations not as part of a whole system or dominated by contradictions, but as aspects of the model emergent from a simpler germ, or a cruder model of the world. In this way, it is possible to construct models in a way that allows the reader to analyze them, and reassemble the meaning contained within for their use.

Anything I write in this series should not be taken as a whole "system" or theory, but as a number of understandings which can be pieced together to form a general understanding suitable for the question I wanted to answer. It is not a general theory to answer scientific or intellectual questions, but a way to "de-bullshit" many things that have become commonplace in the past century. This is something I learned through trial and error to do for myself, as I had no philosophical grounding and in no serious sense any formal education or introduction into the class of the intellectuals, nor introduction into any society except the vast wasteland of those who failed at all things. One of us fools had to write this down, and I am not the only one writing at this time and attempting to answer the same questions.

It is through the exchange that is possible in a limited way on the internet, and the ways in which internet writing has been policed and disciplined, that made this book possible. In another time, someone like me would not be able to write or distribute these words on any large scale, and it was standard to ridicule anyone outside of the proper institutions if they dared speak of anything. The institutional influence of ancient education and later the Christian churches established this pattern, abolishing forever the quaint character of the "poor philosopher". Only in faint forms has the poor philosopher re-emerged in bourgeois society, and it has almost always been the cast-offs of the bourgeois with some means and a following rather than the true residuum that can write. I lived in an unusual time that allowed me to exist, let alone write this account. There will never be another time like it in human history, for this was a critical period in history - the period where humanity's fall from grace was truly secured. The story of the Fall of Man in Genesis may be interpreted in retrospect, if not already, not as a story of the origin of the human spiritual mind, but predictive programming to establish a state of affairs which is happening now and entering a new, planned stage. I believe it will not surprise the reader to discover that the United States was an essentially Satanic country. The iconography put on its currency makes it clear what has long governed behind the curtain, and this explains the strange religious stance of the Americans compared to the rest of the world, more than some material explanation making American religious practice and its strange civic religion a just-so story. That, though, is for a much later explanation, if I bother to construct one. It is not my immediate interest to do so. Since I am not and never have been a Christian, this is all metaphorical for me, but it is an interesting story to recount. Spiritual authority, which had long been necessary as a motive for human behavior, has been deliberately attacked on multiple fronts, save for the spiritual authority of a particular clique - the religion of Francis Galton's Eugenics being the visible institutional front more prominent than any other.

To understand eugenics requires one to understand the imperial science and the projects underway in the British Empire, and their association with the Americans from the founding of the colonies. I am not writing a history book, and so historical narratives will not be frequent and will always be broadly focused. A wealth of history from sources is available for reading, and they would possess the record of writings from those who founded the empire and cite them properly. I can look up some of those references, but I do not wish to be bogged down in questions of historical accuracy of a particular narrative. I leave it to the reader to judge for themselves if this model and the claims made match any history they are aware of, rather than authoritatively dictating what happened in the past. I believe I am right and have no reason to lie or obfuscate the past in this regard, but someone will certainly disagree with me, may misinterpret something I wrote, or drew incorrect conclusions about history from claims I might have made without careful consideration. For reasons that will become clear, it is very easy for an incomplete model to be corrupted by intruiguers and cajolers. That is why I desired to start here rather than with economics or history or eugenics itself.

So, if the reader finds disagreements with the following writing on philosophical grounds, I would entertain them to a point, but the purpose of this is not to write a philosophical tract or engage in internet debates. If someone wishes to explain how I'm doing it wrong I can take critique, but I won't spend too much energy responding and will not respond to rank dishonesty. I have to carry on with more useful endeavors. Ultimately, our source for metaphysical knowledge is not a theory or moral persuasion, but the world itself. We can choose our interpretation of the world, but all interpretations come with inevitable consequences, whether we are aware of them or not. The world will assert itself in the end, whatever happens and whatever we think about it. I have placed at the center of my thinking knowledge itself not as a "thing" or an idea held above the world, but as a process in the world with an ultimately physical origin. It is not purely confined to physics or our conceits about physics, but there is no thought in the world that is not the consequence of physical forces at its most basic origin, if it is to be a "real thought" rather than something we suggest in an exercise. Thought and "mind" then are not ideas at all, but inherent to the emergence of consciousness. The way thinking animals constitute themselves and can govern their actions is not by some unknowable source, but because physical thinking creatures manifest a will to act within the confines that are allowed. The more elaborate our faculties, the greater the versatility, but an emphasis on inborn faculties or simple informational processing capacities misses the point of what the will and knowledge actually are. For Eugenics, this is deliberate and at the heart of everything Eugenics does, its governing ideas and its praxis. Francis Galton refers to his mission as nothing less than a "Jehad", and given what has resulted from this, we should take his holy war as a serious claim.

- "eugenics-kun"
May 2023

The first observation is that there is a world that exists. There is no further knowledge that can be ascertained based on that alone, and the truth of that proposition is a given. Without this proposition, no further investigation is possible and nothing relevant can be said about anything, anywhere, for nothing would exist at all and this proposition would be an impossibility. This is the simplest possible basis for all further investigation.

It must be clear that from this observation alone, nothing at all can be said about this existence. There can be no theory of what it is, no understanding whatsoever, no past, no future, and nothing but the singular proposition "existence". It is not relevant whether this claim is made about a material world or an idea like God. It is impossible from this singular proposition to derive any further meaning, nor any basis to make claims about causality or the existence of other worlds outside of that knowledge.

By "the world", we refer to all that exists - all potentials, all "hidden worlds", any existence that a charlatan would claim is unknowable except by mystical knowledge. In other words, what is known in today's parlance as "the universe" or "the all". There is only the world, about which we initially know nothing except that it exists. This would include any God, which would necessarily be a part of it - but we have nothing to suggest that "God" exists, or "Heaven" or "The Force" or any other such concept. We would be reduced to a tautology that "All is God" and terminate reason, if we are to replace the universe with "God", in whatever form we conceive of such a thing. There would, then, be no contradiction between "the world" and "the God" in this view, unless the God were a distinctly inferior aspect of all creation, in which case it could not be itself the prime mover. Such a "God" would not conform to any expectation we would hold about it, but would be something entirely different. This interpretation of God is not important for our work, but it will be revisited in the future to touch upon why such a godhead would be inserted in place of the world.

For any meaning to be derived, we make the first supposition - "it is knowable". Knowledge, of course, is yet to be defined in any meaningful way - we cannot assume our knowledge is relevant to anything, or that we know what we believe we know. We cannot be certain if this knowledge is anything other than a jabbering in a virtual space, no matter how much sensory information we may glean from our experience. None of this sense-experience brings us closer to knowing any fundamental nature. We may, in searching knowledge, do nothing but chase our own tail, and in many cases this is exactly what we have been made to do. For us to speak of truth, it must exist outside of us or our notions of what knowledge is. Truth is not a proposition of knowledge held by a person, in the sense that we would appreciate the concept. After all of our guesses and suppositions, if we are to say anything meaningful about the real world, we have to accept all of us and all the things we can know exist in the same world. Our own judgements of truth are irrelevant to reality and the truth is the world itself. But, the world itself does not concern itself with forms ready-made for us. We do not see the name stamped on a thing we observe that is universal. There are truly no forms at all that are universal. Even our concepts of "observable universe" do not truly encompass all of the world, for the world contains all of our subjective conceits and all of the potentials held in our imagination, even if they remain potentials without a physical existence matching our imagination of the form. Whether humans or any intelligence in our world can know anything is irrelevant to the proposition that "it is knowable". If aspects of the world are not knowable, then it would preclude anything like us existing as anything other than an aberration, and all existence is absurd. We should not jump to the conclusion that we exist, or that our consciousness suggests anything about the nature of the world simply by virtue of consciousness making some assertions self-evident. Aspects of the world are knowable not because we think, but because knowability is a precondition for any stable arrangement within the world to be isolated and for anything meaningful to be said about it. At first, in our fevered imaginations, this is merely a supposition that this is possible, rather than a direct road to the truth of the universe. Even if humans can never know the full truth, or if humans can know nothing at all but what is in front of them, there would be some way in which the universe can persist and there can be anything stable. If this did not happen, then all that exists is equally absurd. It would not merely mean that logical impossibilities are possible, but that logic and any consistent pattern would be impossible or merely a suggestion. It would be tantamount to saying "anything can be anything", and forsaking that anything stable can exist. The ideological and political reasons for making such claims today are not difficult to see, and those making such claims do not intend them for themselves - they are always a weapon to be used for political purposes, or out of an inertia that suggests habitual lying is the right thing to do or a way to push a win button.

Again, it must be clear that at this point, "knowledge" is a supposition that there is anything at all to read into existence other than the fact of it. We have no mechanism to derive this knowledge that can be guaranteed to exist "in nature" or by any super-truth that is handed down to us. We cannot trust our own senses to be reliable in all cases as a universal truth. We cannot even be certain of our own existence or if our thoughts are "real". We instead hold that there is truth to be found in the world, if we are to say anything about that which is universal and about that which is said to be real. Our understanding of truth and falsity is only possible if we accept there is a world in which those conditions can be tested. This includes the world of any thought experiment we would construct for our own purposes, and any truth or falsehood that can be determined a priori. If we hold truths to be a priori truths, we insert some mechanism from the world, rather than a mechanism purely designed by force of will that is imposed on the world. We may choose to lie to ourselves or construct an entirely fictitious version of reality, and we reading today know how humans lie to each other about basic reality and basic facts on a regular basis. What is missing is a consistently understood, simple, and accessible understanding of why this works. It is the habitual lying of philosophers, institutions, and humans in general that prompts me to write this book, in hopes that the repeated lying of humans can be counteracted most efficiently and we can maintain conversations that are worthwhile and constructive, instead of the dogshit we have been forced to accept with threats and lies attached to noncompliance with the grand deception. There is no fixed format for knowledge and we cannot be certain that there is a particular "thinker" - only that, if anything is knowable, thought as a process has to be possible, whatever it may actually be. It is only by working backwards from the sole window available for knowability - thought as a process - that we ascertain that there is an entity that can know in physical space, i.e., us. But, without any other information, we do not know what "we" are, or our nature, and should not make suppositions about the nature of all the world based on a particular entity and its thought process. What can be understood from our perspective is that this experience of thought for us is the only possible avenue to ask questions about the world. Before knowledge and information or anything like it is considered, thought begins as an indeterminate process allowing for knowability. We suppose out of necessity that thought does not merely exist as an inchoate force which is itself unknowable. Knowledge would be a product of this process, which at first we have no way to know much about other than its existence. We may deny that there is indeed "thought" in the world as such, and that all of the sense experience we would draw on for knowledge is illusory. Even if that were true, the mere existence of the world suggests that knowability is a pre-requisite for anything substantive to exist. Without that, the imagined blob of indeterminate existence would be impossible. Not even a point of energy described as "the all" would be possible. Thought may be an ephermeal phenomenon of little consequence to that world, and in of itself thought is not identical with knowability or the more sophisticated process that is knowledge. We would have to leave behind the conceits of the "knower" or of thought as a basic energetic process, and speak of knowability generally.

The keyword here is metaphysics, the oft-maligned. But, asserting things about fundamental nature by thought alone is erroneous, unless we confine ourselves to the simplest starting point for this explanation. Metaphysics is traditionally at the end of educational courses, and this is done on purpose so that the initiates, led into education by the promise of secret and occulted knowledge, are given at the end a metaphysics where they are to vow to uphold to occultism inherent in education and the university, and never speak of these meanings to those who are not granted permission. For us, who are detached from the university and initiation into any of these mysteries, to rebuild our native understanding of the world on our own terms, we must start by investigating for ourselves and reconstructing appropriate metaphysical views. Even if this is only done in a crude way, it is a necessary step to speak of building any further knowledge base about physics, science, politics, social relations, spirituality, or any other system we might imagine.

We yet lack knowledge as such or a general theory of it. We only possess a crude precursor of knowledge natively, if we are able to ask the question in the real world - that is that we here and now have eyes, ears, a brain, and so on, and conscious experience is processing this question of gathering knowledge in some way. It cannot truly be turned off - we cannot refuse to sense forever without consequences to the human body and experience. It must be accepted that this thought experiment we conduct here only exists for us, and it must exist for us to truly think about the question. We will make these crude metaphysical understandings not because they are written into nature or provided to us by a thought leader, but because they are the necessary foundation to ask questions about anything we hold to be universal or transcendent. Even a child will ask questions about the nature of existence, even if they are silly ones; if they do not ask these questions of another person, then they will in some way ask these questions and answer them sufficiently so that their own thought process may continue. To deny totally this learning of metaphysics happens at a local level, without pedagogical prompting, is to deny that there is thought or mind at all in the subject. This, as you might have learned in life, is intentional and deliberate.

This acquisition of metaphysics did not happen rationally at conception for us to think at all. We can think purely from instinctive reactions and actions of a cruder sort, and this is the necessary starting point for an organism like us to formulate the concept of "why?" and "how?" that allows an inquiry into something more than immediate sense experience. It is only when a human asks these questions after some development of facutlies that construction of metaphysical concepts can be formal. We may suppose there is an "unconscious acquisition" of this going on beforehand. We begin this inquiry not at the start of life before anything else can begin, but to refine what we already learned through cruder methods. Therefore, we work backwards from our present position, first to ask questions about natural history - for example, "where do babies come from?" - then to ask questions that do not have a simple causal answer, like the nature of existence itself and any God that may or may not exist. For us to attain knowledge first implies that there is some existence to be known, that is not a trivial tautology. We may construct faulty ideas, and without any certain empirical proof for these metaphysical claims, faulty conceits about the world can remain for a long time. Any metaphysical view, like any physical or natural claim, is subject to critique and may be proven demonstrably wrong by some fact. This may be difficult, as metaphysical claims are not things that can be proven by finding some particle or thing in the world telling you it's true or false, nor are they easily inferred. We can, though, suggest certain metaphysical claims about what things are is either faulty or do not provide useful understanding of what those things actually are based on our real world observations. All of our metaphysical claims must fit into a real world in order to be useful as a guide to truth, and they are the foundation for our understanding in science or any spiritual understanding we may adopt. They must also be internally consistent, and thus all theories of science will follow from metaphysical claims in some way or another. This is true even of so-called positivism - the claim that all genuine knowledge is derived from sense experience is itself a metaphysical claim, and a very limiting one that places the thinker in a mental straightjacket when apprehending the world they live in. All theories of science follow from axioms, among them the axiom that there is a natural world in the first place that is the proper purview of science. What exactly this natural world is may be debated, and a wall may be imagined to segregate abstract political concepts from the purview of science; others may consider, in my view correctly, that humans and their thoughts are natural manifestations in the first instance and so, at least at the base level, science is appropriate to describe psychology, sociology, politics, history, and fields considered humanities rather than "real science". This use of science to describe processes that only have abstract expression must be made with certain caveats about what science can actually say, and this is a fatal flaw of positivism that has been weaponized in today's discourse, creating disastrous effects everywhere it has been tried. Incredibly stupid people have made pseudoscientific and clearly political claims to justify their selfish wants over what any sense or reason would tell them about the aforementioned areas. The same pseudoscience is extended to science that does not directly relate to humans, so that there is an alternative version of physics, math, language, and so on. Most crucial, and by far the most politicized science of all, is biology, as biology would come to form the theoretical basis for the true ruling ideas of the 20th and 21st centuries - that being of course the doctrine of eugenics, a pernicious doctrine which must be described in a later writing. It is easy to see why grand metaphysical claims are made regularly for political purposes, and these always seek to displace a native acquisition of this knowledge or native understanding for us of what authoritative metaphysics claims. The entire purpose of this disinformation is to make metaphysical claims impossible to know, so that mystification can be maximized. Metaphysics then does not obscure knowledge, but is what makes discernment of knowledge in science possible. We can only know that which is supported by principles of what we suspect the world to be, and though science loathes to acknowledge metaphysics, metaphysical claims about light and particles are made regularly in today's science without being called such. Unlike true metaphysical claims, these are things which can be proven or disproven by empirical evidence without great difficulty, but like any metaphysical claims, they too become dogmas rather than things we suppose may or may not be true. Metaphysical claims about being are themselves subject to the same criticism, and must be criticized at some point to ensure that we retain fidelity to a truth that is outside of us. If we do not do this, truth becomes nothing more than an authoritative barking of received wisdom from thought leaders, and this is a disease plaguing the institutions for the past century.

The starting point of proposing existence is accepted on faith, for obvious reasons. We must step outside of any notion of causality or anything else other than this proposition, which at first is just that - something exists. This may be a big something or a small something, but we take "the world" as a whole out of necessity, and believe there is only one world which is the true world. That world encompasses all possibilities, about which we can from this view know nothing. It is the beginning, end, and all that ever could be, and it is reducible to a singular proposition. At the same time, it is immeasurably complex, and we may believe it to be infinitely so. The primordial existence does not care about infinite regress or our limitations on knowledge. It does not care about what we think about it. It simply is, will be, and is eternal, and yet it is nothing at all but this singular point of light. This is a contradiction not in the proposition of existence, but in crass thinking about what it is and the nature of things in general.

I refer to this as "primordial light" because the Luciferian image of the creative light in a time before time is a trope revisited often in spiritual thinking, and invoked because the image presents a powerful and stark contradiction to those who have been mystified by it. It is, of course, a lie in our experience. The Luciferian, primordial light is an image invoked to regress the mind of those who believe in it to a state where they are pliable and suggestible. Any mesmerist would be aware of this trick, and it is as common as dirt. But, it has an allure because, by crude reasoning alone, it is impossible to truly know anything about the world but this image of the primordial light, which is unknowable and yet at the same time contains the fount of all knowledge, all wisdom, all truth, and so on. The unspoken assumption of a prime mover exists not just in religion but in naturalism, not because it is rational but because it is accepted that something cannot come out of nothing. This makes sense for causal reasons and a belief in history, which we must accept for reasons that will become clearer in this chapter. Even if history is declared to be bunk, the assumption of a prime mover is still made, though it is placed outside of time and reason, and a thought leader declares "it is unknowable", shouting this dictum to the face of those who are not initiated into the mysteries that allow them this access to the unknowable that a thought leader holds as property. For this assertion to be true, it maintains that the lack of knowledge for those outside of the know is absolute, even when it is clear that ordinary people never needed this super secret initiation to know things for themselves. The primordial light is presented as something so ancient that it cannot be questioned, and that it secures a rule that was always there in spirit, realized by the current sovereign and the institutions aligned with it. It is everything, nothing, and anything the holder of the occult wisdom wants it to be at any given time. It's a very effective trap and a scam if you can continue to sell it. A full accounting of religious history is not necessary at this point, nor will it appear anywhere in this book, but the primordial light was the original religion of Egypt and the implied religion of Babylon and Sumer. It is invoked often in pagan philosophy, as a stand-in for what would be filled by monotheism and organized religion in the future. The religions, even the most ancient, entailed more than this primordial light to be real and useful instruments, but this is always an image summoned for the impression it makes, and there has been a part of humanity that is primed to accept this primordial light as a spiritual authority above any reason or any other temporal authority. Religion proper expounds on this, and often entails a theory of religion and its spread. This is most evident in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic views of God and Satan, which constitute not just an image of the godhead but a theory of spiritual revolution and the politics inherent to religion. It is from that tradition that we really understand why the dogma of this primordial light is socially relevant. It finds its modern analogue in the "religion of science" and Unitarianism, where it is made explicit and weaponized, with full knowledge of its implications. Attempts to form a "religion of the world" to displace old thought usually invoke the primordial light, in some way or another. This may be done out of some belief that it leads to good will, but usually it is an invocation of strength and imperial legitimacy, as the project for a world religion is something of interest to today's imperial project more than any spiritual authority from below.

The primordial light though faces the same problem that we face if we abandoned the conceit that there was any such light and accepted existence at face value. It does not allow for any meaning to be derived, not from investigation and not even from revelation. Any meaning would imply a complexity to this light which is impossible, unless one accepts flagrant contradiction in the fundamentals of nature. This condition is controlled insanity. This is more inscrutable than the original condition, in that the primordial light not only can't be understood, but resists understanding.

There is a simple reality in any case - if there is no differentiation within the light, then there cannot be any form or meaning in it that is appreciable. Even if that differentiation were inscrutable to us, placed in some understanding beyond all possible knowledge, it would have to exist. The same is true of various claims which place the truth of the world behind a curtain, to claim that it is only accessible through occult knowledge or "gnosis". Whatever is behind the veil must have differentiation within it to be anything other than a nonsensical concept. It need not conform to any concept we have of matter, causality, or so on, but there would be something that differentiates parts of the world from each other, and that allows differentiation to exist.

What may differentiate a thing which is whole and unitary, absent any compelling reason it should be more complex? If the primordial light is truly infinite or at least very large and singular and truly pure, it would only be reducible to one point of arbitrary brightness. There are two ways in which differentiation is possible. One is the existence of different essences, which must be inherent to the world in some way. This however has the problem that the essences would be bunched together and still indistinguishable, in the same point. There is only one proposition which allows for the existence of this light with variance within it in sufficient gradients that differentiation is possible. That proposition is non-existence, or void, that coexists with the light.

"Nature abhors a vacuum" is an odd statement, considering that nonexistence is the inherent counterargument to existence. If existence could be disproven, the only alternative is void. Not only is void necessary to speak of differentiation, but it is the only way in which a barrier between things at all can be conceived. For something other than a point of light to exist as a unitary thing, there can only be a lack of light, or a lack of something in one part of the whole that is present in the other. Without any other idea except the primordial light, this at first is simply differentiation in the density of light in a given part, or an arrangement of the light that is informed by the existence of void around it. This is not merely a statement of physical void, but any limiting proposition on the proposition of existence. For existence to have meaning beyond "it exists", the proposition of some non-existence is necessary for primordial existence to differentiate at all. Otherwise, there would be no way to suggest a finite light that is not the whole of the light, or a barrier between the two parts of this light to consider them separate propositions. The void is not a "thing" but the lack of "things", or the lack of substance. The concept of finity short of a concept of absolute finiteness of all that exists requires that there be "non" excluding one part from another, even if the two are side by side, or the "part" is a given density of light over something we will come to call "space". It applies to abstract concepts just as much as material things. One way to understand things is to know what they are not, or those propositions of the thing that can be ruled out or falsified. The primordial light does not allow falsity to exist in any sense. It only allows a unitary "truth" of existence. This is another reason why the image of the primordial light is invoked by cults of power - it overrides all doubt by appealing to a faith that what is older is bigger and stronger, and this appeals more to the lizard brain than any faculty of reason. Void allows the first concept of falsity, and thus of meaning beyond "it exists because it does", and in doing so, truth becomes something more than a bland statement of tautologies.

There is no particular reason why the world "should" exist in any particular way, that would be hardcoded into it necessarily or by something outside of it. We may imagine that the material world is not what it seems or is animated by some hobgoblin, but that merely moves the question of what the world is to a space beyond our reasoning and has no explanatory power. When we speak of "space" we should not be confined to space in a physical sense and the familiar three dimensions, but all concepts of potential and all that is possible. Speaking of these things as "dimensions" as if they were spatial and physical is inappropriate. There is instead a question of what dimensions can be understood in things as a general rule applicable to broad classes of objects. General rules like space and relations over time do not exist arbitrarily, but exist because there were reasons, perhaps inscrutable to us, that made those characteristics of things stable enough to materialize consistently. We would be hard pressed to describe the world in any stable way if we did not detect causality, as all of our thought and language processing relies on identifying causes and effects. This is not a proof that causality must exist in some form we defined beforehand; rather, it is that something in the world created what we understand as causes and effects.

There would be something we would see as an effect that doesn't have any explicable cause, and this does not have to be a singular event. It is entirely possible for forces to come into existence without being caused, and we don't ask "what moves the force"; there is not, logically, any reason why a subjective will is caused to move a body's arm. We can attribute the will's existence to some force and speak of the will as something that can be manipulated, or that exists because of cause and effect, but the will of a person exists because they are aware of cause and effect and seek to control and alter it as much as they can. Without any compelling reason to believe otherwise, the will of a human is only acted on by its internal motives - that is, we do what we do because we think that is what we want, and what we want is not totally commanded by a material origin, but by considerations that fit with our abstract and subjective view of the world, and things we worked out by reason or subjective thought. There was no material or naturalistic reason why we have the motives that we do - that is, there is no natural or inborn "purpose of life" that must be appreciated, like the reasons we do what we do were handed down from on high. The reasoning for our own behavior is self-contained and particular to us. To the world, all we think and do is just another example of matter in motion, and the world does not place any relevance on human conceits about their will. Our concept of our will is something which did emerge out of prior conditions, but once we can assert ourselves as something distinct from the natural world, we become something very different, and manipulating that will is not as trivial as moving some atom or impulse or pushing a button to control the human like an automata. The managers of slaves have long sought exactly that - a way to bypass human will to make men into machines - but humans resist this tendency because humans live not to be machines but to carry out the functions of life, and one of those functions of thinking life is that it remains autonomous, even if a human would willfully surrender their thoughts and will to another. Aligning the will entirely to something outside of us has inevitable consequences. We could detect the origin of the human will and thought process in the material world, but this origin is not a slave collar that compels present behavior, in the way a manager might imagine. Once free and autonomous, the human will do whatever its facutlies allow it to do, absent something acting on it here and now that constrains it, and discerning a motive for the will is not merely a question of material history or crass incentives. Humans, being aware of the trap, have motives that are not reducible to a simple assertion of physical force, but concern concepts which are not immediately evident. Humans react to a world of ideas and concepts, and construct for themselves and each other motives that don't necessarily make sense to nature. If we wished to deconstuct human motives, we would ask questions of psychology, of social values, of what money and economic behavior is, of what inspires human emotion and passion, of what is moral and right, and questions of a spiritual sort; but all of these motives cannot change that, absent any truly compelling reason, the human will and brain is constituted in such a way that what we will is the prime cause of human behavior, before we can speak of a materialistic or psychological reason why it is so. All of our concepts of politics, socialization, and legal or moral behavior, are contingent on the belief that humans are deliberate and willful actors, even when humans are compelled by forces outside of them that we know very well, like the existence of states or economic deprivation.

I do not intend to ascribe to will or humanity any unique ability to violate causality, or make that foundational to the real universe. All of our conceits about ourselves are, in the end, limited by us being animals with limited means to affect the world. I use this example because it is the most obvious way in which our concepts of causality are violated, and it is an entry point for psychological manipulation and mystification. Humans are made to blame themselves for things which are clearly the result of outside compulsion, while their vice and cruelty are naturalized and made sacrosanct. Even the word "responsibility" enters the modern lexicon as a way to mystify the existence of a technocratic, invasive state that constitutes the true governing power of the 20th century. We are made to "respond" only to that which is instigated by the predatory forces in society, and to the institutions which hoard vast material resources and are comprised of people who are just as willful as us, but the will of the state and the institutions is somehow above humanity and above the world. We are only ever made to be "responsible" to the aggression of those institutions, rather than things we actually do or that which is actually our obligation to another person. An obligation to offspring, which may have been a moral consideration or a matter of a parent cleaning up their own mess, is claimed as "responsibility" when the state makes a marked effort to invade private life. Never are the schools, social workers, day care workers, authorities, and rulers of society that direct them, made to claim any "responsibility" - because they imagine themselves as the prime movers and will, and their subjects as livestock to be controlled. Even the word "responsibility" displaces concepts such as duty, obligation, honor, and so on, and replaces it with a purely reactive concept of ethical behavior. It is insidious how this wordplay has been used to morph concepts of social obligation into that which supports a permanent tyranny, and this comes at the root from wordplay that manipulates our sense of cause and effect, which is something the thinkers of the 20th century were aware of doing. None of the verbal manipulations at work today arose accidentally. Thought concerning causality was seeded into the concept of physics itself, and this is where a panoply of magical thinking arose around quantum mechanics, in which concepts of reality were made into pure thought exercises rather than the thing physics actually refers to. This "debate" was not a serious scientific inquiry, which was carried on in the halls of academia concerning far more particular matters, but an injection of the new ruling philosophy into the public vernacular, by claiming the very deliberate and willful corruption of language and thought was ordained by physics itself. It is absurd if you think about physics or reality for five minutes, but it did not take long for this wordplay regarding physics - wordplay that had long been used in biology to justify eugenics - to be claimed by states and ideologues for their very political purposes. Over time, many in the halls of academia seem not to get the joke, and this pseudo-religion is another great filter, which is intended to entrap students and wear down their faculties, so that the true science is pursued as an occult practice. Those who instigate this do not want science to be conducted as an open inquiry and never did want that.

Causes and effects themselves do not need to be attributed to a singular cause like physical motion in general, or philosophical "motion" of a uniform sort. We can, for example, identify causes leading to effects that are not the result of actions, but characteristics of a thing which necessarily lead to the thing's behavior that are inherent to it. For example, we can speak of a valve in the heart as a separate thing from the heart as a whole, and attribute to the valve a causal effect for the whole system of a heart, without suggesting the valve was entirely foreign to the heart. Our concept of the heart implies that a valve is a part of it, or at least a potential part of a functioning heart. The existence and action of a valve or some part of a machine could be independent of the heart, but the valve would not be functional in the way we expect if it weren't part of a system that utilized that piece of biological matter. We might imagine a part of some machine being common to many other machines, like some ball bearing, but the ball bearing's function in a particular machine is a cause of an effect particular to that machine, rather than ball bearings always having a limited function because they are a part of a particular machine. Parts and whole machines are versatile, rather than reducible to a few functions. We attribute to physical objects many properties which do not limit their purview to an intent we hold about them, even if we functionally only consider the object because we intended it to be something, like a machine engineered for a particular task. A creative mind can find multiple uses for an implement or rig a solution to some problem out of seemingly useless objects.

We should not limit causality then to a uniform or singular motion, as if a whole were guided by a spirit with singular intent. This applies to any system or any whole, from the smallest particle to a whole planet or galaxy. We may attribute to the whole certain causes and effects of the system, and causes do not always act over time alone; nor are causes always immediately apparent, if for example we are to speak of historical causes of some event which is understood as both an abstract idea and an actual happening that occurred in the past and can explain something about why the present or future is or will be predicted. Motion of physical things and motion philosophically are two different propositions, and types of motion can be understood with distinct characteristics in both cases. I mention this about causality now because it can be described with many buzzwords like "emergence", or it can be constrained to a physicalist sense of causality, but causality is ultimately a relation between events that we apprehend, rather than an actual "thing". It may simply be the case that certain motions are inherent to the matter we interact with. This does not say anything about matter fundamentally - we can imagine matter that is not in motion. If we did, though, it would abide certain characteristics if we wished to test its existence with the methods of science.

This world may be interpreted as ideas, or as a material existence. The result, in the end, will be the same. By the fact of existence alone, nothing about that existence can be ascertained, without supposing something were true for the sake of a thought experiment. Regardless of whether someone is there to conduct this thought experiment, and regardless of any subjective experience, thought experiments may be proposed to suggest something about this existence beyond the mere fact of it.

Suppose there is a hypothetical observer that is aware of all facts, all potential information, all causes and effects, all the matter and ideas in the world that are at all possible. This hypothetical observer is not burdened by any barrier to understanding what a thing is at all, and is not only omniscient but has considered all thoughts concerning existence. Therefore, it can answer to anyone or anything that asks it, with an answer that is appropriate for its own knowledge base, and knows how to explain everything in existence. The one thing it cannot do is expand by its own volition to faculties available to whomever asks it so that answers beyond its understanding are comprehensible. That task is left the other mind, and while the hypothetical observer can give hints, it cannot compel knowledge into whomever or whatever is asking it questions. For now, no one is asking questions, but the hypothetical observer's omniscience can explain all the things us who read this book have already known and their true meanings. This omniscience does not face the problem we would face with infinite regress, where we can never arrive at fundamental causes without entering an infinite loop in rational processing. The world itself does not face this difficulty inherently. Even if we were to assert there were fundamental atoms through metaphysics or that there had to be such things, we would either be reduced to a singular form to describe every system, or we invent a pantheon of essential forms basically by whim to construct the world. Our starting position is that there are no forms at all, but simply matter and void arranged in particular patterns, out of which apparent forms are understood.

We cannot be certain that "we" exist to conduct this thought experiment, or that "I" exist in any way that is truly self-evident, from facts alone. We only know that there is a world, and that more knowledge is possible. To begin formally asking the question "what is the world" requires stepping outside of ourselves and accepting that there is a world that is knowable, and that everything that can exist is knowable. Whether it is knowable to subjective experience is irrelevant for the thought experiment. No subjective experience is possible without acknowledging a real world it relates to. The nature of that world may be argued by subjects, but there is a truth that is outside of any subject. Without accepting that reality exists outside of us, there is no further purpose to discussion and we can believe whatever we want about the world. This position is solipsism, and it is trivially debunked. A solipsistic view of the world implies that there is no truth at all, and thus does not permit the existence of any subject that can question truth, or that subject exists in a fantasy which is of no relevance to reality.

There is a thinking that claims the world of sense is an illusion, and that the true nature of the world is "unknowable", and only accessible through thought experiments. We cannot be certain of any sense information being "real" for its own sake, but we can also not be certain of senses existing in the first place. We cannot be certain of our own existence. The subjective experience, again, is irrelevant to the question posed. The omniscient observer can sense a world and reality, and so that observer is answering the same question we would ask of the material and physical world for any world. Moving the question behind a curtain that human knowledge may never know does not change that the question would exist for the hypothetical observer.

To speak of something "unknowable" affecting anything that we can regard as real, it is necessarily a thing that produces some interface with the reality we are apprehending. The unknowable that can never affect us in any conceivable way remains unknowable. There is a great mystery in the reality that we can ask questions about for us, but to speak of something we don't know affecting the reality we attempt to know, we suggest some relationship that is knowable. Whether the knowledge is obvious, or something a subjective observer can access directly, does not change that some knowledge can be inferred from this "unknowable" source. Our knowledge of the "unknowable" source would then include the knowledge inferred requires the proposition that there is something to know about the unknowable.

It is inferred from the observation of existence that observers are possible. If it is known something exists, it follows that it is knowable, but we lacked any further lead to give us this knowledge. Even if "observation" did not take the form of our sense and thought about the world, we can imagine the "observation" of some particle interacting with another particle or the world as a whole, and to speak of this particle's interaction is to speak of a world it interacts with and exists in. We can imagine the hypothetical omniscient observer asking this question for itself, with existence being completely void except for the hypothetical observer, or for the whole of existence itself to be the observer in some sense. In the case of existence being void, this "hypothetical observer" would become the whole of existence, for there is no observer. It is still possible for this hypothetical observer to not exist, or only exist as an abstraction for the thought experiment. If the hypothetical observer sees "there is nothing" and that there is no more to say on the matter - literally - then that is it and no further investigation is possible.

Thought experiments only tell us something if their results are confirmed, and no contradictory knowledge would oppose the result. We continue this thought experiment with that in mind, and that until confirmed by our knowledge, the thought experiment remains an idle speculation. Without such an experiment, it is impossible to gather more knowledge of what anything in the world is. It is possible to reject this thought experiment and propose a different one at any time, but the thought experiment proposed is not too controversial. The thought experiment is structured to make the smallest number of assumptions possible.

The hypothetical observer detects a universe with void and matter. Of the void, nothing at all can be said of it other than that it is nothing. Of the matter, nothing at first can be said of it except its existence. No different essential "types of matter" can be discerned as given, and if there were essences of matter that were different from one another, it implies some way to relate them so that it is possible to say "this is one type of matter, that is another", and all such essences are for the observer's purposes "matter" in a general sense. The number of material essences ultimately is explicable by a quality that is knowable, and if the quality exists, it may be compared against another quality to differentiate it. This knowledge of matter is inaccessible to us, but the omniscient observer can know the distinct qualities created by different essences, in order to detect which essence is really at work. All different essences of matter, then, are reducible to a singular essence of matter for the hypothetical observer, and so different essential matters are irrelevant. Different essential matters is unnecessary to describe the variety in the universe, and it is far more likely that there is only one essential matter that grants to all things their substance. It may appear that there are many essences to us, because we cannot perform the full reduction the hypothetical observer can.

Why space appears to us as it does may be answered simply; that for whatever reason, three-dimensional space, or what appears to be such to us, created stable systems of matter, and any dimensions of space beyond that did not manifest in a way that we would appreciate. There was nothing fixed about the nature of space, but space itself was arranged in this way as the simplest possible way it could be arranged. The argument for discrete space or an unorthodox space is one that requires an argument that we would be able to understand. Nothing about the spherical surface of the Earth was philosophically ordained to say that the space of a spherical surface is special. It is rather that there are reasons why the Earth formed as a sphere rather than some other shape, that follow principles of physics. The formation of spherical planets and stars is an emergent property, like so many others, and this spherical shape is not a perfect form of a sphere, but the most natural result of the accumulation of matter that constructed the Earth. We may debate the validity of this origin story and history. For now it illustrates how these concepts of space may not be what we naively assume, but came out of origins which are not too difficult to understand. There was never a time where anyone in the world thought the surface of Earth was flat with any seriousness. Mapmakers since ancient times had to navigate a world of considerable size, and observational evidence of a horizon indicated a spherical world. The Greek philosophers did not discover this spherical shape. By the time they write, this knowledge was common, and likely the same views were held by intellectuals in Babylon and Egypt. There wouldn't have been any reason other than naivete to suggest it was wrong, or at worst the surface of the Earth was an open question. In any event, the particular type of space does not matter, so much as the proposition that there is matter in space and that there must necessarily be void to speak of space.

The hypothetical observer senses cause and effect not as events in the moment, but has seen all that ever was and all that ever will be. Causality, then, is not a hard limit on the observer's knowledge, nor does causality tell us anything about the nature of the universe. What the hypothetical observer can do is tell us a few possible things about causality as we would see it. We might crudely conceive of causality as motion, in which one cause creates one effect over some time, and leave it at that. Causality, though, is more than a simple dyad of causes leading to effects, and no cause can be truly separated from its effect. The effect must flow from the cause. Cause and effect are separated in our understanding. We separate the two necessarily to speak of anything moving, and between cause and effect is something we never quite arrest. When we speak of cause and effect, we isolate the causal event and freeze it in time, and do the same for the effect event, regardless of the time-frame of the cause, time between cause and effect, and time-frame of the effect. Cause and effect in a description is a logical understanding of two propositions, between which the change occurs. In logical terms, there is nothing between A and B, because to describe the process would defeat the purpose of describing cause and effect.

Causes and effects are only relevant to reality if they substantive. We are only, at first, concerned with material cause and effect. At this point, the entire view of the universe to the hypothetical observer is a material one. We do not have any "ideas" or forms that we can name, nor anything other than matter. We have yet to identify patterns in that matter, but some may be seen just from the shape of that undefined matter. Shape, though, does not grant to matter any meaning by itself. There is nothing to suggest any preferred shape of matter should be emergent over any other. The causes and effects we list are not "real things" in of themselves. Each cause and each effect is an isolated frame of time and space, and we can imagine a cause leading to an effect over a long period of time, or a cause leading to an effect close to instantaneously. "Instant motion" is not possible, where cause and effect are fused. We can speak of a cause leading to an effect simply by being there, for example the cause of a support beam having the effect of keeping a building in place. If we do, though, we are implying a line of causality that, while not passing over time, implies there is some process by which we explain the support beam of a building, and why this works in architecture. Causes and effects imply a chain of reasoning to allow us to know what can do what. Mechanical motion in physics does not require a logical explanation to tell us why a force moves an object. In the natural world, objects move on their own not because of a hobgoblin, but because once in physical motion, we have no reason to believe that it would stop moving on its own accord, by some law of the world that arrests all things. Movement is something objects do. The force as an object is something imagined, so that mechanical sense is maintained, but there did not need to be a reason why an object in motion stays in motion. The illusion was the imagined stillness of a "thing", however we imagined it. We had to consider an object as if it could be isolated and made still, so that mechanics in general would make sense, but we did not need a spiritual hobgoblin for the procession of events to continue. In the imagination, it is as if there were an arbiter of the whole world that somehow conformed to our expectations of what things are, and we assert that the forms we conjured in our mind are the reality, rather than the actual causes and effects and actual things in the world.

We can then name multiple causes leading to multiple effects, all of which act on and spring from a locus of a single thing we are arresting. This thing may be material or it may be an idea, but for now, we only see the material world in our hypothetical observation. What may be a cause - a force moving the thing in space, or something inherent to its construction, or some property that acts over time, or some cause that is not immediately evident in its function towards the thing - does not act singly and is isolation. Instead, all causes act in concert at the locus of this "thing" we have defined, and out of the causes on this "thing" are the effects, which also are multiple. Effects themselves become causes, and can coalesce around another "thing" to continue the cycle, however we construe it. Logically, we describe causes and effects and that is the only thing we describe with language. If we were to somehow stop in the middle of the cause and effect cycle, we would be freezing in time and describing the cause-effect chain in progress, which itself can be attributed to causes and effects acting on some thing. We can do this ad infinitum to imagine cause and effect acting continuously. A cause is not a singular instant and time and has no defined duration; the cause is instead described as some mechanism leading to effects, and this mechanism can only work alongside the other causes. There is no hobgoblin processing the order of which cause will happen first. They always happen simultaneously and independently of each other, and each effect is simultaneous and independent as well; or we know when a cause will lead to an effect we have described, if we are isolating two distant time-frames and saying, for example, a caterpillar's life is the cause of a butterfly, and metamorphosis is an intermediate step which we may describe, but we don't need to in order to understand that butterflies come from caterpillars in some way. The metamorphosis, itself a complex process, is a thing we can investigate, but we don't need to observe metamorphosis in action to infer that it happens if a caterpillar turns into a butterfly while we aren't looking. We can build a theory of why this happens based on principles suggesting the possibility and the likelihood of realization, and then test that theory. To test the theory, we might observe the animal in nature, or in conditions of capitivity, and the conditions of this experiment are very relevant to its validity.

It is the transition between cause and effect acting on a locus that is "the thing" we isolate in the material world. Our hypothetical observer sees this thing with perfect fluidity, because it does not suffer from any delay in knowledge that we would have. To the hypothetical observer, the locus being acted on is the thing it would describe to us, rather than the causes and effects as the object and its consequences. Causes and effects are different from the thing-in-motion and this is understood. The problem for us in language is that we have no useful language for describing things-in-motion, or rather, language to describe this locus of causes and effects which produce a system for us to observe. "Motion" itself is an imperfect metaphor, and this is a common trap of those who would reduce cause and effect or even physical motion to a crude force acting over time, as if it were inexorable. The fact of this locus's isolation is taken as an effect, or a cause, and we seek either its corresponding causes or effects in order to describe its effect on other things.

This is not a definition of "what things actually are", but rather it is understanding how we as humans describe any thing, any concept we arrest. We understand things by what they do, rather than what they "are". This does not say something about motion or causality being imbued in nature, but that this is our understanding of most things, and we would have this understanding even of that which is transcendent, or does not conform to a crude model for causality. If we were to understand things purely through "being", we would be left only with metaphors or allegories rather than things that we can interact with, or we would interface with the world in an eerie and mystical way rather than the plain and direct way that would be most sensical to us. Games can be played when "being" is emphasized over "doing" - when we detach forms from any function, and the forms are manipulated not by things we understand but by some working or myth we either conjure like magic, or that someone works on us to mystify what is happening. The hypothetical observer does not have our confusion in this regard - it does not need to arrest anything, for it has seen in full detail all potentials of a thing, however it is defined. For us to hold any idea about a thing in our mind requires it to first be arrested in some way, so that its actions are predictable in some way. We only have a limited concept of a whole arc of movement - we would have to describe processes as if they were frozen ideas, and so we say a computer "runs a program" as a shorthand of saying it is performing a number of tasks computers execute to create a functioning machine and output.^[1]

We have yet to describe then the "thing" itself. It is a simple rule that there are no forms in nature, or no preferred system that is hard-coded at some metaphysical level; nor are the forms of things reducible to simply what is available with crude sense and measurement. We only know matter as a thing which grants to things substance that makes them real; and it is only matter and substance which makes a thing real to our hypothetical observer. This need not correspond to mass or any physical indicator. It is rather that to the hypothetical observer, the material world is at first glance the only world, upon which any other thing we describe as real must derive. This is troubling for our hypothetical observer, because this finding suggests its existence is an impossibility. The hypothetical observer, though, is something so sublime and clever that this does not deter it from its helpful function we have given it. As mentioned, causes and effects are multiple, acting on a single locus, and all causes, "things", and effects are substantive in order to be spoken of as real. We may describe void in the systems we isolate, but this is only to separate the substantive portions of that system from that which is empty space, and while this can have an effect due to substantive things moving through empty space and informing the outcome of a system's existence, the void does not possess any quantity or quality.

It is in this "thing" that matter gains its defining characteristics that separate it from other matter. A system of matter, which as-is cannot be defined as anything meaningful, becomes meaningful through its actions. We define things by what they do, rather than what they are. Being, strictly speaking, is not something that stands apart. For something to be, it is merely doing the act of "being" - which is to say, existing as a locus of causes and effects which constitute the "thing"'s seemingly static behavior. Even ideas held in the mind are "doing" something to grant them their understandable meaning. For something to "just be" is for it to be reduced to a token, a symbol bereft of reality, which can be substituted for anything else through wordplay. The real doing of something cannot be substituted for with wordplay, because it does not correspond to any word we use. We instead derive meaning from words that comports with our genuine understanding of the world - that it is a world of events, rather than things, and we merely isolate certain events as "things" so that we can express this concept in symbolic language. Since symbolic language is the only elaborate tool we have for expressing ideas, and any other signal like gesticulation we send to another person will be interpreted as ideas before it is acted on. The idea may never pass through linguistic processing to be associated with a word as we know it, but there is a barrier in communication where messages must be interpreted.

There is not a barrier in the direct doing that material things do. There is not intrinsically a barrier between our thoughts and the world. There is a natural separation, because thoughts are not material things and cannot be treated directly as such, as if one electrical signal in the brain corresponds to exactly one thought. However, all of that thinking we do corresponds to some activity in the hardware of the human body, and it is the task of thought and consciousness to assemble that into something that is meaningful. That meaning is then acted on in some way, or ignored, so long as the mind did sense and interpret that signal. The mind does not interpret every signal sent to it, and could not, because human bodies have limited capacities no matter how developed we may make them. But, the mind manifests from that body to become something more than simply a brain pattern and storage in gray matter. The mind would have to be more than that to interface with a real world as it does, and make use of technology - which includes the symbolic language that separates humans from animals. We create and emphasize the barrier between our mind and the world, and to some extent this will exist in any creature that we consider to possess consciousness. The importance of this to our entire book will be apparent shortly. Our hypothetical observer does not have this difficulty. It understands the distinction between matter and the realm of ideas and minds, and the connection between the two. It is the doing of things, that locus between causes and effects, that allows a connection between the ideas we hold about the world and the actual world that we interface with. Consciousness itself is one such locus, and a very complex thing which is not quite material. There is no physical location where we can find "consciousness", as it is shunted into a virtual space. How this happens is very important, but it must happen. It is important to mention this now before moving on so that the crucial doing of a thing is understood to be the reality, rather than any of the words we use to approximate it. If words were the reality, then reality would be meaningless. If reality were mediated by words, it means reality is infinitely malleable to thought control and thus irrelevant for any question we pose about an existence that no thoughts can control. The error of such reality control is hopefully evident, but the purpose of this thought experiment is to explain why this reality control works and how it has been implemented in today's society.

Saying "doing is meaning" is not something you just say like a mystical slogan. It is rather to say that the characteristics of a thing are what define it in our understanding, and we use words necessary to encapsulate an understanding that is for us very intuitive. We only have symbolic language to develop formal knowledge and logic, and it would be impossible to conduct logical operations if we referred to the doing of things as the true meaning and made it mystical. This is instead important to note because there is an error in many logical systems, in that we do not really know what we think we know. We instead make best-guesses in language because that is the tool we have to communicate ideas to each other. We have very acute understandings in language when we actually communicate with each other, or read some media and contemplate its contents for ourselves. Certain subtleties and understandings can be conveyed in writing that are not immediately apparent, and a voracious reader learns to pick apart the subtext of written language. Someone adept at oral communication and knowledge of gestures and facial expressions can interpret in spoken words more meaning than someone who interprets them flatly. The error of dialectical thinking is to confuse the dialogue for the meaning itself, rather than the dialogue arriving at meanings because we lack suitable language to encapsulate an idea we do not know yet. The error of logical positivism and positivism generally is a sureness that models we construct are the true reality, or we are eager to ignore any information or any sense that the model we possess may be wrong. There is a reason why in both cases, scientific paradigms progress one death at a time, and institutions stubbornly hold on to wrong ideas because political and social stakes depend on maintaining the lie. Sometimes these wrong ideas are mistakes by men who are fallible, and other times - I dare say often - the lie is deliberate, either because someone is a charlatan or because a very large thought-form of deliberate lying has perpetuated itself in communication, and substituted the lie for the native understanding our own sense and reason would tell us. The difficulties in science are well known but will be expounded upon later. Not all of our knowledge is scientific, and there is a great deal of political knowledge that is wholly in the realm of ideas communicated between people. This political knowledge is real, in the sense that people do communicate it to each other and act on it, but very often political knowledge is intended to occult, to obscure, to project strength and violence against another, and towards purposes that we would not consider a pursuit of scientific truth. The political knowledge has real consequences because people will act on that knowledge, and many times the political truth is more important than being right about a scientific truth for the actual task we use our conscious mind to accomplish.

The "thing-in-motion" is a system with traits we can understand, rather than a whole "thing". There are no "true forms" of material things at all, and there are not even simples as such. There is just matter, which grants substance to anything real and a measurable quantity, and the motion, which grants that substance qualities we can say something about. "Motion" is too limiting a concept, since cause and effect does not concern simply the passage of time as an inexorable trend. To borrow a trend in spiritual philosophy, I will refer to this concept as "spirit", though it should not be granted religious connotations. This is simply a short-hand that can make sense, and it has been used in the past to describe such a thing, though not in the way I have.

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The "thing" here is still vaguely defined. It can be called many names - the object, the system, the event or the phenomenon, the form, the noumenon. Each of these terms refers to a different conception of the "thing", of what it is, but all of them converge on a goal of someone asking what all of this is - how an observer can derive out of the proposition of existence the existence of many "things", rather than just existence as a whole.

The hypothetical observer - and thus anything we consider "subjective experience" - does not have any substance because observation or "mind" has any connection to fundamental reality at all. The only thing that can be said is that the world exists, and that is all that exists. "The world" would refer to everything that is possible, including that which is unknown to us. To speak of anything existing within the world necessarily implies something that observes and is outside of the extant thing, yet this cannot be outside of the world itself. There is an obvious answer then - "mind" and conscious experience are tied to the world, yet disconnected from its entirety. This should show that "mind" has no fundamental connection to the world, and is an ephermeal quality that is only relevant to us. To the world as a whole, all that exists may as well be absurd, and wouldn't align with any conceit we hold about it. But, the mind is a real thing, rather than a pure fiction. It could only be real if it can be spoken of at all. So, if "mind" can be understood, it does not tell us anything about the world, but it tells us something about ourselves and why we think or sense at all.

None of us willed ourselves into existence ex nihilo - nor did the hypothetical observer. That observer is posited by us, or something like us, with this quality of subjective experience. The starting point of this chain of reasoning is not the distant past, but the time questions about the world are asked. We can only ask about the world from where we are in it, both in space and in time. Whether "time" or "space" exist in the way we assume is irrelevant - we will see the world as temporal events and so for us, to ask where we are now, we imply that there was a past and a future that is speakable. It is only in the moment that the inquiry can begin, and we consider that the present moment is not all there ever is, that will be abolished once the future arrives. We observe not because sense reveals the "true world" but because all sensory organs, like the mind which is sensing the world rather than existing apart from it, are connected to the world. The conceits we hold about ourselves are not connected to the world at all - they are even less stable than "mind", since we can easily abandon conceits about ourselves and we still continue breathing and living. We cannot help but think of ourselves as the hypothetical observer if we want to ask the question of what things are, and what all of this world is, and so we would attribute to this hypothetical observer our biases, no matter how much we are aware of those biases. It is not because we lack intellectual integrity that we do this, but that the first indicator we ourselves have of the world is that we have sense and a mind. We know this to be a trap without having to think too long about the matter, because there is a world much larger than us that has been here long before us. This is so simple that a child can understand that he or she is lacking knowledge, and so the questions a child asks almost axiomatically are "where do babies come from?", "where does the world come from?", and so on, so that a history and cosmology can be constructed. Therefore, the first metaphysics is a philosophy for us, rather than something in the world at large. We are not truly beholden to the world to supply us with thoughts. We may be things created in the world - we could not be otherwise - but once the mind is established, it is only constrained by a few limitations. What we do within those limitations is within our control, and has to be so. We cannot help but exercise will if we are at all conscious, even if politically and socially the individual will is negated and invalid. This, of course, is getting ahead of ourselves, but it is worthwhile to suggest something about the mind now that has been considered after considerably inquiry, from our vantage point where we are much older and learned about the world and society. A child discovering the world does not have this understanding built into him or her or hardwired into their brain and body, and the infant does not have any such metaphysical knowledge that the child has that allows the child to ask formal inquiry. There would be something seeded in the thinking organism that allows for this inquiry to begin, but where does it originate - what is the genesis of consciousness that allows subjectivity to exist in the first place? It is here where great folly is made, and the extent of this folly can only be described in detail with a very long work, which is beyond the scope of this book. I am only here to explain my own thinking, so that the greater work of untangling this mess can be undertaken, if not by me then by some other poor soul who is similarly dissatisfied with the answers the ruling institutions allow.

We observe a world of events because we ourselves are a series of events. That is what life is at a basic level - certain processes being done continuously throughout the lifespan of an organism, that conform to the expectations we hold of life. This does not tell us that the universe is "fundamentally" comprised of events, but that we see the world in the way we were ourselves constituted. We can imagine a world where causality does not work by some scheme we devised for our understanding of history. There is no physical place where the past is happening now, in pristine form, or at least we have nothing to suggest that time travel is possible. We have no evidence that there is any "time" to travel through - time as we know it is a relational concept, and memory is stored not just in ourselves, but in physical evidence. We see a world of objects not too different from ourselves, in that they can be understood as the confluence of events, of which we can and must build a historical record. Nowhere in nature is this causality written for us to see without question. We have to assemble for ourselves an understanding of history, and while there is in objects an insistence from what we know as the past, non-thinking and non-living objects which do not consciously react to the world do not regard history as we do. To a lifeless rock, whatever happens to it will happen. The peculiarities of life, and in particular animal life with central nervous systems which react to the world, are the basis for our own rational understanding.

We may think this is circular, but our own sense of time and space has never been locked in or hardwired in such a way that we can say that the world is fundamentally what we see. Time, for instance, could be imagined as a dimension through which we travel, or a series of "instances" we capture in snapshots, or it could be a purely relational concept and something that we detect to mark causes and effects, which operate in some way that is not tied to the passage of "time" as some inexorable force in the world. We have no basis for "absolute time" or a universal frame of reference, whether speaking of time or space. Relativity is a principle in physics that we have come to accept. Yet, we can accept that we are all observing the same reality, and that the bias of the observer does not change the world. What happens will happen, however it may be construed. We are no more privileged than the lifeless rock in that regard. The difference for us, as thinking creatures with subjective experience, is that we will react to the world around us and seek to affect it for our own purposes. We could not do other than that, if conscious experience is to be anything at all.

So far as we are reliant on our rational faculties alone, we are chasing our own tail for finding any common, universal rationality. What we can learn, and this does not require a great insight, is that those rational faculties arose from some process that was at one time outside of us. We did not always exist as we do. We can accept this very easily in our knowledge of the natural world, but proving it to our satisfaction as a universal trait of all life is not as simple. Thinking animals are not equal in their capacities and the knowledge they have attained, and do not share the same view. We can assume for the sake of argument that humans are carrying out this inquiry in the spirit of honesty, but this is not what humans do and not how humans have conducted themselves. Humans by nature are liars, and only with great difficulty do they manage any true honesty in their conduct towards each other. Towards the world, humans are adversarial. The reasons why are things we have learned throughout our lives, and are for now beyond the scope of this investigation. I am assuming the reader is acquainted with the human propensity for deception in all things, and has discovered how and why humans lie about everything and anything when there are political stakes and the stakes of survival in a hostile world. The world as a whole has no use for the lies humans tell each other, and so we are making this inquiry by investigating the world directly, rather than through the intermediary of a pedagogue telling us what to think. I would hope the reader continues to read this or any other work on such matters with a critical eye, rather than latching on to the latest guru or fad, which I would abhor being.

We can take the existence of the world on faith, not because it is rational to believe the world exists, but because whether we wish it or not, there is a world. We don't yet know about our place in it, if any - if we are just an ephermeal creature, or a mind detached from the world and imprisoned in the world. We can't even be sure "we" exist, because not only was there a time where we didn't exist and a time in the future where we will no longer exist, but "we" exist in various states throughout our lives, switching between them every day. We fall asleep, where most conscious experience and rationality are dormant unless we are roused from sleep; yet we often dream, or there is the sensation of temporary nothingness in a dreamless sleep that is not quite non-existence. We can figure out that truly "not thinking" - not experiencing nervous activity - is not sleep, but death. Should the brain activity cease, the life functions rapidly deteriorate, and there are those who are revived from this temporary death and report the damage to their functioning. Everything about "us" suggests that any vaunted position of the mind philosophy may dictate is an absurd fantasy. We are nothing special, and we may doubt our own existence or that "we" are what we think we are. Some check with reality is in order to eliminate a pernicious stupidity in the ruling ideas of today. Some "thing" is sensing the world, and there is no reason to believe that the subject is apart from the world in any way. That "thing" is not the body, or some organ we imagine apart from the body that is the essence of the body, but something else altogether. The "thing" is not something that simply is, but processes which go on that sense the world continuously to produce conscious experience. Conscious experience is not defined by attaining a threshold of rationality, but exists because we are animals interfacing the world and who are sensitive to events around us, in a way that cannot be easily denied. It certainly cannot be denied for ourselves, and it is not easy for us to truly disregard this sense from another. Even if we do not care about another person's feelings, a sense unlike the five organic senses we know is aware of when another creature like us is watching, and the various relations we would have with it, whether they are friendly or hostile. It would be folly to ignore this sense purely out of some conceit we have about life or thought, and ignoring it too flagrantly produces ill effects in our own sense of other people, and ultimately the world itself. Not only are we informed by our personal experiences, but we are informed by our experiences with others, and by events in the world that are not social. The division between us and everything else is never fully established, and we mark a distinction between living agents like us, animate objects that are not like us - like other life forms - and the inanimate and non-living things.

If we were to ignore our sense of self and separation from other things in the world, we would continue to see the world as one large interconnected system, which could not be fully reduced to ideal objects isolated in some experiment. How we demarcate separate "things", whether they are conscious, merely living, or dead, relies on our judgement rather than any division between things that is truly mandated by nature. It is not that "all is one" in a monist sense, but rather "all is many" - that however we understand the world, there are always aspects which can discovered upon closer inspection, or created out of the things we do know to create something new. What is not our decision is what relates the various things we identify to each other. We may doubt our conceit of space, but we cannot deny that some aspects of a system are closer than others, by some principle that is understood for that system. Our understanding of "life" is not a mutable one, unless we are to redefine "life" to mean something very different from what we conceived in the past. Such adjustments would not be readily accepted by anyone, nor would our knowledge of what is and isn't a living thing. The same can be said of other types of systems. We may attempt to find some grand organizing principle for all systems - for example, we might have a claim that all systems are physical, or all systems are energetic or heat-like - but any such grand theory would be limited at this point, unless the general systems theory is a metaphysical one. All of these reductions come back to a conceit we hold rather than what the systems "fundamentally" are. The same is true of our understanding of systems as events, or loci of events. Yet, this is the easiest way for us to understand what actually happens in the world - we understand things not by what they "are" but by what they do, and the functions build our concept of what a thing is, whether it is physical or abstract.

A system, as I will understand it here, is a set of relationships. Formally, the relationships are between things, but here we have yet to define a "thing", and so we have relations between parts which are at first unknown. It is the relationships themselves that describe to us the overall form of a thing. If we seek to describe this thing, we describe those relationships as what the thing does, to attribute to it characteristics. We then summarize this concept with a word that symbolizes the concept, and grant to that word a range of "true meanings". We have a word for dogs, but there are many varieties of dogs, and we have particular characteristics of the species generally, and a whole science pertaining to canines to classify their breeds, and a whole science to raise them and train them, and a history of dogs. There is no way to understand "dog" as a singular meaning, rigid in form. Even if we were to accept an axiomatic definition of "dog", the context of it in any world that is real, and the context we place it in for our mind's knowledge base, is dependent on a history, for us to connect this word token "dog" to its appropriate meaning.

When we seek to understand something, rather than simply digest a word and translate it to meaning, we are necessarily examining this system we have isolated. When we look at all relationships to understand it better, we encounter a difficulty in that the system is connected to many things. In fact, it is in an indirect way connected to everything else, in order for us to place the thing in its proper context. Yet, it is indeed a distinct thing, because we did isolate it. If we were to untangle all of these things analytically, we would be caught in an infinite loop to truly "know" what something is. At some point, we cease doing this and our satisfied with our understanding of the things we see, believing that our understanding, knowledge, and actions are appropriate for interfacing with a real world. Our hypothetical observer does not face this problem and sees everything, and it does not face a problem of conflating everything with everything else. It is also well known that in language, and in our true understanding, we have to compare anything we detect to other things in order to build useful definitions. We have a number of understandings that are basic enough that we do not need to recall a dictionary definition to know them when we see them, and act as we would expect. Thorough, formal knowledge requires reference to other things to adequately understand the thing we see, and this creates a difficulty when there are no forms as such; we have to assume a vocabulary to build a basis for formal knowledge, and if this vocabulary is fixed, it limits how much we can investigate. A small vocabulary of base words could be used to construct a very complex rational understanding. Computation theory has shown that from a small instruction set, very complex problems can be solved algorithmically, and we also have a sense of problems which are unsolvable like the Halting Problem. We can prove that they are unsolvable, and could teach a computer to rationally determine the solvability of problems if it were adequately able to process meanings in any way we would consider suitable. The computer, it must be understood, does not actually "think" or possess consciousness. It is a machine we built to perform a rote task we would have done manually, and this is the original "Turing machine" - a human with pencil and paper performing the instructions and writing down the results, for the purposes of demonstrating the theoretical machine's operation. We still need a base vocabulary, and without forms as such, we have none. The computer, though, is doing these instructions if it is a real machine. An electronic computer is designed with certain parameters so that it does the thing Turing's machine does, and this was not as simple as it seems. To perform the instructions without fail required careful regulation to ensure that fail rates were low enough to be reliable. Even with this, failures are known to happen for computers, and because a computer is not conscious, one byte in error will turn the entire program into garbage. Humans tend to correct this, or do not fatally fault if they do not correct processing errors.

The way we can sort through these relationships to define an thing most efficiently is to know the proximity of relationships, so that the closest and most relevant relationships are emphasized in our definition and casual understanding of things, and that which is not most relevant can be disregarded as noise. We may know on some level that there is more to the thing and that each thing has its own history and existence, but if we define a simple machine, we know the parts and the intended function of the machine, and we have some mechanical knowledge to know what happens when one part moves and impacts another part. It is not necessary to read into its whole history to know the practical meaning of the thing, and that there may be other machines with the same function. For any system, no matter how large and complex, we can sense which causes and effects are more distant or a weaker determinant. We may not know the full characteristics of the thing we are observing, but we have an ability to look into the nature of a thing and ask deeper meanings. It is because of that ability to think of something deeper that modern chemistry could be known. These arguments in modern chemistry were not bold assertions from on high that matter must philosophically be comprised of particles, but that there was evidence for the formation of what were called "atoms", before there was further knowledge that these "atoms" were not philosophical atoms at all and protons, electrons, and neutrons were postulated and demonstrated in experiment. These concepts of particles are themselves not fixed things or dogmas, but understanding of a thing that was postulated and refined over the years in physics and chemistry. Whole societies or knowledge systems are no different from simple machines in this regard. We may develop mechanisms to streamline our understanding and study some aspect of a system, but in principle, this systems analysis is scalable and can break down to smallest descriptive units. For a society, the unit of importance is the individual social agent, or a person in our socialization. There may be baseline units to speak of a large construct. There cannot be society without properly constituted agents that engage in social behavior, and the social behavior of humans is distinct from that of ants or geckos. There are a few laws of social behavior that apply to any social agent generally, and we would be wise to distinguish human societies from animal societies, without making a leap by our bias towards humanity. There are fine details which mark good systems analysis from the bad, and there are bad writers who make sweeping generalizations about things which are not supported in the small details. We would also be wise to remember that no system we see is a world apart from other systems in full. Systems may have no direct link that allows for easy comparison, but all these systems must fit into an overall understanding of the world. A system that is discordant with our knowledge of the rest of the world has to be questioned, and a thorough understanding of the world can relate many systems of knowledge and classify which are relevant to which spheres, and what can be learned about one from another that may seem unrelated.

We would see cause and effect as the most obvious indicator of what things are - causes and effects act on objects, and must do so in order for anything real to be caused or effected. This itself is a less-than-adequate understanding, but for every quality we identify in a real thing, we seek some indicator of it based on evidence we can sense in some way. In a world of blind men, who do not detect color in the way we do, someone might develop an instrument picking up this light radiation or some emanation that would report to him what we would interpret as color, in order to attain information about an object that wasn't obvious to him. The blind man in a world of the blind might be able to build a creative contraption allowing this wonderful new invention, "sight", that is exciting and becomes the latest craze in the academy. If he's being smart about science, he is not jumping up and down like a maniac about the true dogma of this new science, "sight". Very likely, this man is building on knowledge regarding this phenomenon of visible light that would exist in the historical record to build a formal theory. If no historical record from institutions is available to him, he would sense a need to start one, if only for his own work.

For us to have any useful definition of things, we are implying that there is a past and a future of things, even if cause and effect may not be what we think they are. This is not because we are tethered to history or moved along by its inexorable progress, but because this is what things including us do. Without past events leading up to the formation of thought, there is no rational processing. Without a future, there is no outcome to anything we do. A world with purely the present would be a world without true thought and a world of zombies. Consciousness would be an impossibility, because it is at the least dependent on synapses which have at least a small lag time. We are able to compensate for this lag without great effort, because we developed in a way that intends to maintain equilibrium and homeostasis. It makes sense for us to conceive of our conscious thoughts as orderly and whole, rather than disjointed and influenced by an external actor. It makes sense for us to view ourselves as "us" because if we saw ourselves as an assembly of impulses, it would be a terrible sight with terrible implications. The brief interval of past-present-future we consciously process is lumped together as "now", even though if we thought about how we think, we can probably break down why we think the way we do, without a pedagogue telling us how we think and arresting our own understanding of ourselves. It is taxing to constantly consider this, and so we don't often do this, but for answering this question, we would have to rule out our own biases when we ask the question.

Consciousness cannot exist "ex nihilo" - it too is comprised of basic components from the material world, just as anything else would be. This has led vulgar materialists to try to "discover the secret of the mind", as if the mind were some special type of matter or substance that possessed unique qualities, and must possess it in order for the world to have meaning. We see here yet another example of the reactionary harkening to the primordial light, and this is an explanation for political purposes rather than any truth. It is far more likely, and in line with our experience of the world, that conscious experience is something that results from a particular formation of matter which is capable of it - that is, an entity which interfaced with the world, feels emotions, and is oriented towards goals either because those goals were designed by someone, or because those goals were a thing the entity did by instinct, which required it to become something more. The further explanation for this "mind" must wait for another chapter, because our particular example is not the only way in which we could speak of "conscious experience", and this too has led to confusion when ideologues insert their stupid political myths into a material world with no need of them. The political myths are not of use to us, either. It is simple enough to know for now that we are conscious because we feel and act in the world, and cannot do otherwise if we are to remain conscious. That is what living animals do to interface with the world - they develop consciousness, which exists only in a virtual space for us rather than any physical location we could isolate. The consciousness, to be realized, relies on some real process. This process is not limited to a particular body or self-contained. The mind proper is not merely the body of a person, but its memory, its history, the tools and property it can call its own, and its history of interactions with other entities like itself, which take place only in shared dialogue between people. This last one is very important for our understanding of what the "self" is, since it acquires political characteristics which cloud our judgement of something so basic a child can understand it. For now, we are removing as best as possible the fetters of our bodily limitations and social values, so we can relate to the actual underlying world with the best possible understanding. This requires us to simply ignore ourselves at least for a moment, and place ourselves as best as we can in the position of the hypothetical observer. This would be a necessary step for someone to develop their own understanding of the world, regardless of their belief in the hypothetical observer's actual existence - in short, we would require a conception of either a godhead or some governing idea that is presumed to have the answers that we lack, if we are to begin any line of inquiry beyond that which follows from crude instinct. Without the hypothetical observer as a possibility, none of this inquiry is knowable, except as an exercise in self-indulgence. It is not that the hypothetical observer has to actually exist or possess a "super-truth", but that there would have to be a concept that there is a way to view the world other than the subjective experience, even if we do not have immediate access to it, and that the world is knowable if it is to be anything at all. If at first that which is outside of subjective experience is anything short of "everything", then the inquiry is incomplete; and it is presumed that there is some order or some way in which the world is arranged, for anything consistent to be observed. Perhaps we can argue the true nature of the material world, the fundamental truth, is that it is chaotic and irrational, and we only suggest an order that is suitable to our senses because we make sense of something that wasn't meant to be sensical. It wouldn't change that there is consistency we detect, and thus there is a way in which the chaos could be ordered.

If we are to abandon conscious subjectivity and see the world through the experience of the hypothetical observer, any reduction of systems to a core mechanism is a convenience for explanation, but only that. If we say "all is causes and effects", that is close to our everyday treatment of things - that "things" are really loci of causes and effects which comprise the system, and we observe things as what they do rather than what they "are", with being simply being a particular type of doing. This is inadequate since we don't have a language for "things-in-motion" that allows us to work with them as logical propositions. We can only arrest ideas that closely resemble the thing we actually want to see, and arrest ideas of the relation between parts of the thing and the thing's relations with other things in a hypothetical model. We can include the quality of an object being movable, either in a physical sense or in a philosophical sense, but this is not the same as truly sensing the uninterrupted motion of a thing. We instead reduce this motion to a proposition that something acts on an object to create the effect of motion, or that things move on their own power or by some inertia that is a quality of a thing as we can understand it. We include in causality all of those things that we consider potential causes, rather than "motion" in a cruder sense like all motion is physical. Understanding the world being in motion in a physical sense is a useful short-hand for developing an understanding of systems in nature, but it is highly inappropriate for abstract thinking, where impulse action and reaction are liabilities that threaten the integrity of the thought. If we imagined a world of motion in all things and that it was inescapable, that has the effect of streamlining the progression of the whole world to a conceit we hold about it. What we can do is accept that motion in this philosophical sense is something things do, and if we are to know anything about these things, we are asking "why does this do that?". Analysis is the first and most obvious way to derive knowledge from the sense of things, and effective analysis requires us to assemble a general axiom of what things are - that is, there would need to be some metaphysical concept. Humans in our experience have a sense of space and time that is very difficult for us to separate from in our thinking, even if we try to. We can, in some way, do this as a thought experiment, but many failures arise from failing to sense the implications of rejecting space or time, or the implications of our casual understanding of space and time. If we are to truly break down space, we understand it as the relation between objects we use to describe where something is, whether we speak of physical space or some virtual space we might imagine. We would for ourselves imagine a filing system for us to fetch something from our memory, because as mortal creatures we only possess so much memory of the world, and all of this memory is read from some source or assembled anew. There is a reason why space would exist, if we are to speak of this relation at all. It did not just-so happen to exist. We may never know why it exists, but if we try to envision a world without space, we would envision a world where all things are jumbled together - again, the primordial light, in which anything can be anything and yet everything is nothing.

If anyone is telling you that "motion is contradictory" or that there is a grand narrative of "contradictions in nature", that is hogwash and should be ignored. Motion is, for us, something we observe in material systems all over. There is no hobgoblin moving a particle, and insisting that it continue to move until the hobgoblin tells it to stop. Moving is something certain material systems can do on their own accord. We understand physical things as things which move, rather than passive ideas being. Without any identifiable cause, there is no reason to believe that an object in motion would not tend to stay in motion. The changes in motion we observe do not arise from contradictions or philosophical tricks, but from causes we can analyze if we set ourselves to the task. It is an imagined stillness of things in the world that is the supposition we can't support. This is not because of a mystical belief that the universe is always changing, but because we see the procession of motion even when an object appears to stay in place. The cause and effect that occurs when someone touches an object and feels its presence is itself premised on a mobile force interacting between the hand and the object. The touched object would have to possess substance and some force pressing against the hand, for the hand to not pass through it as if there were nothing at all. We could imagine a world where this did indeed happen, and we don't have to make it a thought experiment. We pass through air and an atmosphere as we don't notice the minor perturbations of gas. We know that the air in reality is a vortex of many moving particles, or at least we learn that knowledge and build our understand of gases in physics and chemistry on that basis, but we usually simplify the composition of the atmosphere to measured quantities of some elements, the density of the overall atmosphere. We do this because we know the tendency of gases to dissipate into the air, such that the atmosphere is mostly uniform in its distribution of gases; or we know that certain substances rise while others fall, knowing what we know about physics and chemistry. We know there is air, and we might guess at certain qualities of it, but we did not always possess a theory or understanding of why gases behave as they do, and such an understanding is not immediately obvious from simple principles a child could see. The existence of a solid object, like an apple, is quite obvious from simple principles, because if it weren't, it would be difficult to imagine a child learning to identify any solid object or any fixed image and associating it with a word.

This is not to say that this concept of contradiction is meaningless. A common example is the problem of Zeno's Paradox. Numerous versions of this exist in the original telling, but the paradox concerns the concept of an infinitesimal. This is a problem not for describing the real world, but a problem for our models which must resolve a problem intellectually. A modern day computer programming equivalent can be structured as follows: Suppose we are playing a game in a two-dimensional field, and a single pong ball moves and reflects off of any surface it touches. On each frame, the ball moves at its velocity, and checks if it has collided with any wall. Because movement occurs only once a frame, the position of the ball changes "instantaneously". However, we want to maintain that movement is continuous. If there is an impact, it would logically occur in the middle of this seemingly instantaneous movement. Upon collision, the point where the ball would impact the wall is determined. Its remaining velocity is calculated, and the ball's course is altered by reflecting off the wall. The ball then repeats this process, checking for any other wall it impacts. The problem that is there may be an infinitesimal distance between two walls. If this happens, the computer program will lock up in an infinite loop. There are two ways to resolve this. The first, naive approach, is to sacrifice the integrity of the simulation by not preserving continuous motion, or including a mechanic which reduces velocity by so much with each collision, or limiting the number of collisions in a round with some caveats to resolve the loop while sacrificing integrity. This is what is done in many computer games, and exploits due to this imperfection in mechanics are known to any speedrunner or bug tester. The second is to resolve this scenario with calculus or a suitable solution checking for the case of infinitesimal distance, which is possible for any competent programmer without too much difficulty. The former is often done for expedience, especially on older machines and consoles, where there are constraints on resources that value efficient processing over meticulous accuracy. This is a problem for the computer program, because the computer program is algorithmic. No motion in a simulation on these computers can be continuous. We always preserve the illusion of motion, because the real world is not algorithmic and doesn't update every frame. In Zeno's time, the argument of motion being continuous or discrete was a thing for philosophers, and so Zeno makes the argument through such paradoxes that movement is in fact impossible. There were solutions to this paradox in ancient times, but the most obvious answer to the paradox came right after Zeno's presentation. Another man in attendance stood up and walked out, disgusted at the entire argument, and in doing so, made clear the absurdity of the entire setup. How these thought experiments are constructed is very relevant to answering the questions posed. In Zeno's original paradox of Achilles and the turtle - there were multiple versions of this - Achilles and the turtle are understood to be in theory just like their real object counterparts, and there is no argument that Achilles or the turtle did not possess free range of motion by virtue of being living things and physical objects.

Crucial to this problem is defining what reality is, what motion is, what time is, what an "instant" is, and how we conceive of the material world and the ideas we hold about it. In any language or expression humans can understand, we only can present ideas, or gestures that are interpreted as ideas. The only way we have to understand anything is to express them as ideas. We have no language that can purport to speak to the material world directly and answer questions with final truth. In science, in simulation, and in our own understanding of the world, we only possess models based on ideas. Our human faculties are then used to process those ideas and expressions to derive meaning. We do not do this uncritically, but rather we do this in a way that suits our own aims. The nature of human thought, or rather, the thought of anything in the real world, is considered in the next chapter. In any discussion of the truth, we first have to grapple with this inherent limitation in our ability to express the real world, which itself can be a challenge if we are unwary. We then have to be able to discern for ourselves when someone else is lying, and whether we can trust any information that is conveyed to us by words or ideas alone. We have to be aware of any doubts we have of our own senses and abilities to assemble knowledge, and these doubts are always possible. We have to be aware of anything that is imposing forcibly an interruption of this process where we assemble meaning and truth from ideas.

These "things" we identify, from the simplest to most complex, are all systems, and we understand them by viewing the relationship of parts to see what this thing does. This is more than the sum of its parts, but a description of mechanical causes and effects which create something that is not indicated by its parts alone. New things arise out of causes and effects that did not originally exist, and could not have existed without some prior conditions that allowed them to exist. If we ascribe a new quality to a thing, that is something we understand. The real changes involve a change in quantitative, substantive things, rather than merely a change in interpretation. For us to judge new qualities coming into being, we can only judge based on the quantitative change in things; that is, nothing real happens without a material cause. Once an act is real, it is understood through this spirit or motion, and the words we use are intended to point to that rather than a definition that is formally pleasing to us. We may use ideal forms in thought exercises, and we tend to do this because it is far easier for us to do this to communicate what we intend. All of these ideas we communicate must relate to something substantial if they are to be appreciated and acted upon; even if the ideas were fantasy, the fantasies are pointing to things that we encounter in reality, or that we could encounter, or that speculate about a possibility that might be real or tell us something interesting about the real. Fantasy which remains purely fantasy would be an idle exercise that amuses us, but is set aside when substantive matters are at hand. This applies to our question about what the world is, rather than what we would value in our time and action, which is not interested in the question of truth necessarily. Never are the systems truly arrested in time. This is not because the things are inconsistent, but a failure of us who only have our ideas of the world to tell us what this is, and the faculties of sense that are available to us. We do not have a direct connection to the material world, where the names of things are stamped on them. Forms are assembled by us in our minds, which either resemble the things, or the forms are marred by our errors in reckoning with a material world which must be accepted as the true reality. There are some general characteristics of systems as I have described them, based on the propositions laid out, as they would be seen by the hypothetical observer:

-Material reality can be subdivided arbitrarily into divisions containing matter, void, and "spirit" or the motive of the matter. The matter is the substance of a division, while the spirit grants to the substance qualities. Void affects the motion of matter, but void by itself lacks substance and quality of its own. It can only be accounted for in the description of substantive action in a system as affecting what does happen. We can divide matter into "inert" substance and spirit as a type of matter that allows us to envision force as something separate from inert matter if we wish, or we could ascribe to all matter the characteristics of spirit - the result would not differ fundamentally. This distinction is what would divide a "mechanistic" tendency of things from a "vitalistic" tendency, but we can easily envision vital things affected by a force that is outside of the "thing" proper. We can in principle consider a world of "inert" matter which is moved by spirit only in a metaphorical sense, and this concept of spirit was something entertained by both religious thinkers and thinkers in natural science who believed the prime mover was some form of God. We could also imagine a world that is in actuality "still", where apparent motion or causality are illusions for us, and all of our descriptions of motion are really metaphors of a more direct sort that make the most immediate sense for us. In any description, the points made about things do not change in a way that is not communicable to another descrption, and so none of those descriptions say much that would disprove a derivation of logic or being from a procession of events. We can describe every piece of matter or every "thing" as an essence that just is, which does not allow for analysis of any sort but allows events to proceed through causes and effects much as we describe here. In that view, the essential nature of things ultimately says nothing of importance about the laws of nature, and so in that view, science as we would know it is impossible. In the pure essentialist view, the laws of nature would be something outside of scientific inquiry entirely, and so any attempt to form logic from observations would be overridden by a declaration and diktat, which changes from time and place. In short, essentialism is at the heart of reality control, and the most perfect reality control would enshrine absolute essentialism and the role of an unknowable regulatory force that is described not even by metaphor, but pure imperatives. While this can allow for a valid understanding of the world and does not necessarily conflict with a pseudoscientific view that is largely similar to our understandinof scientific knowledge, and no essentialism can be so pure in our minds without intensive training, such a view conflicts with claims we established earlier, unless the authority dictating this reality is implicitly accepted as absolute. Since that authority cannot exist ex nihilo without many caveats, and certainly cannot make the claim that anything can be anything without suggesting particular qualities about this regulator, it is not something I wish to describe further, and in any event, those with such a view would in their minds perceive this as creating for the slaves a distinct ontology, where they are locked out forever from knowledge of the regulator and left to "figure it out for themselves", without any faculty that would allow for knowledge to proceed except at the will of those who command thoughts.

-The observer can ascribe to each division any qualities it can conceive of the division possessing. The qualities are not "true" things; they are descriptions that the observer can assign meaning to. The underlying motion or spirit is at a base level real, but its true meaning is at first indescribable.

-It can further divide a division arbitrarily, as if it were affected by these principles.

-Two divisions can be conjoined, and all aspects of them disassembled and rearranged to form a new division, in any way imagined.

-Divisions need not be exclusive to each other; a division may contain part or all of another division, and there is no problem of overlap in any definitional quality. The division is merely a convenient device for isolating some aspect or portion of a whole. The division, then, is defined arbitrarily by the observer in any instant.

-The demarcation of divisions is not a spatial segregation, but a segregation of connections and behaviors observed. It is that which is most relevant, rather than any fixed notion of what the division is. It is decided arbitrarily what, exactly, the thing "is", but the underlying substance and spirit cannot be changed. Spatial proximity is a sensical relation of events and so it is often easy to expect a thing to exist in some contiguous space, but this is not necessarily a rule and not all things are defined as having a clear spatial dimension, and many things will move a focal point imagined as a "center".

-Qualities and quantities identified in any subdivision are fixed once defined. All aspects of the subdivision are definite qualities and quantities. It is from this that any consistent meaning of a particular subdivision can be understood. If a subdivision's qualities are described differently, then it is a different thing. Different interpretations of the same thing are all, together, encapsulated in any thing as we may understand it.

-Interpretations of a thing which are discordant with any real spirit or substance of the thing are ultimately errors of a subjective observer, which may or may not be corrected, and have no inherent bearing on the substance or spirit of a thing.

-There is no quality without a quantity of substance implied. The quantity has no inherent quality other than being a quantity, which can be understood by a set theory of numbers and some unit whose definition is understood by observation. For example, a meter is not based on any philosophical principle, but is a unit we understand as the baseline for measuring length. The hypothetical observer does have this limitation as well, as there is no philosophically determined unit of quanta.

-Quanta, then, are repetitions of a proposition of some quality's existence, or a proposition of one quality's mixture with another in the same "thing". Quantities of inches are measured separately for the length of a thing to be measured, for an example; we do not measure an inch twice because that would defeat the purpose of a proposition of a thing's total length as a dimension of a solid object or some measure of space. The mixture of two qualities in a fluid would be difficult to segregate into two fluids of the different qualities without knowledge of how this segregation can be affected through a process, and in practice we would look at the fluid as a mixture of the two qualities, and understand how those qualities interact in accord with mechanics of fluids we understand. For example, oil rises above water, rather than dissolving into water; particles of some solid dissolved in a water may be said to be a water fluid containing a mixture of "orange" and "grape" flavoring. The meaning of this mixture is implied by those qualities in combination with each other, rather than just the existence of the two qualities. There would be a distinct taste of the mixture compared to the taste of each quality separately, for this example. Where there are quantities of two or more qualities in the same thing, we require some knowledge of how those qualities interact within the thing to adequately describe the whole thing, and this implies an ability to segregate those qualities in a model and imagine them independent of the original thing, even if these things are not possible materially or in a real world.

-Quanta of real things are always considered to exist in some division. We ask how many grapes are in a pile without counting grapes in other piles, or we ask how many grapes are in a whole city or whole planet. It is impossible to speak of quantity without specifying some location or division where they would be counted. There is no quanta that exists absent a context to know what is counted and where it is counted. For example, "7" absent a context is not a quantity but a concept. "7 apples" is a proposition of a number of apples, but without a division. "7 apples in the store" refers to a proposition of a real quantity that can be verified. We may understand by our context what a concept of a number is pointing to, or why we are working with that concept of a number towards some real problem.

-No division "outside of the universe" may exist, without itself being in the universe. If a division is imagined in some other plane, it implies that there is some relationship between the two planes that can be understood.

-The division's causes and effects meet at loci which are the "things" or "parts" of a system, and description of what all those parts do operate in concert to describe the whole system. All of the describable parts must possess some substance to be "real" things, even as figments of an imagination. Imagined systems are only possible because there is a corresponding real thought that is understood to whomever is thinking of that system. There is no real thought without a substantive thinker that can think. This is the only way in which there can be thought that can ask the question. Without any corresponding substance to thought, there could be no sense and no processing and no consciousness. The parts of a system may be arrested, broken down, or elaborated upon to explain longer-term causes and effects that are not immediately apparent.

-All causes and effects are subject to investigation to determine the truth or falsity of the event, and these taken together are compiled into our knowledge of a system. Assumptions or self-evident realities form the basis for understanding formal systems and logic, and would be necessary in order for logic to proceed. Systems with internal contradictions or discordant truths cannot be real, but are rather products of failed understanding.

The most basic understandings arise because thought is not something apart from the world, but something that emerged from the world; and so, ideas we possess about the material world, no matter how elaborate, are only possible because of some material condition which made the idea possible. It is not possible to hold ideas that are not possible to actually think for any thinker. The hypothetical observer is not limited by this, but any language it would use to describe an idea to another thinker has to consider this limitation. There is for any thinking entity a limit to what it can think, based on its faculties and how it constitutes its thought. This limit can only be overcome once it is possible to at least model the limitation and conceive of how it could be exceeded, and then that which exceeds the limit has to be tested against what is actually possible. Otherwise, the extension of thought simply veers into nonsense. That thought which is something novel must ultimately derive from some past condition which made it possible. In this way, new ideas can emerge in the world and in systems where they previously didn't exist. Nowhere in the universe was technology "hard-coded" so to speak - we did not enter the world with the form of skyscrapers or spaceships already evident. Those potentials always existed in some theory, but they were never realized until there could be an understanding and theory suggesting such things were possible, and realizing the thought is something different from actually building those things. It is possible, while discovering how such things are built, unintended knowledge is found, and our initial conceit of what those things would be is challenged when considering the final product.

The limitations of a materially-based thinker are extensible, but not infinitely so and not without a process of development. For example, it is not easy to imagine four-dimensional space, but it is possible to conceive the consequences of four-dimensional space and suggest what a tesseract would seem like in a model. We can simulate three-dimensional space on a two dimensional surface, but this has limitations in what it can express to a viewer.

The question of existence implies that a material thinker and some cause-and-effect chain is, to our reckoning, a necessary condition to speak of anything existing, even if no such thinker actually exists. The past and future can be approached as if the world that thinker senses exists without it. Of course, "past" and "future" are relational understandings for us. To the hypothetical observer, time and causality are not a thing that is seen as motion, but all that happened and will happen is known to it. How it knows this or sees it is something we would not be able to fully understand with our present faculties; however, if we are to speak of a moment, we are implying that there were past conditions to make this moment, and future conditions that follow this moment. It is impossible to speak of a moment without reference to this, as if moments were isolated from time. This is true regardless of our perception of time or question of what time "really" is; or rather, our perception of cause and effect, which is in the end a construction we made to understand the world as events. The conclusion is that our thought itself is such an event, and that is why we observe things in the world as a collection of events that happen, or happened, or will happened. There is no "being" that is divorced from "doing" in entirety, as if the two realms were co-equal from creation yet separate except through an unknowable intermediary. This does not say something about the true nature of the universe or what things "really are", but it says something about us and what we are, and what we would have to be for thought to occur in the first place. The truth is that no thinker is inherently committed to the truth, but their thought serves another purpose altogether, and the truth is something that is useful to know for that purpose. This is a fatal weakness that can be exploited.

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There is still an unsatisfactory answer to this question of "systems" - we can look at things being done and say that this is what comprises the parts or simples as we can understand them, but our everyday experience is that systems are complex and we cannot easily separate the parts of a thing without losing our concept of the "thing". If all is reducible only to relations, then we are left with something unsatisfying in that we only really build structures that resemble ourselves and are self-referential. There is no bottom to the well where we can say with certainty what the systems are.

This question was posed in the 19th and 20th centuries in biology, around the question of what "life" was, and whether it could be reduced to mechanisms or if life possessed some vital essence that made it recognizably life. The debate itself largely consisted of non-sequiturs and posturing between two sides who were more interested in a political contest over what the ruling ideas would be than any genuine inquiry into biology. It did raise a very important question not just for biology but for science generally - what are we exactly looking at when we isolate something in a lab? The approach to science in the 19th century was chaotic but produced insights at a pace hitherto unknown in human history. These insights would sometimes be profound and sometimes be complete pseudoscience, and there was an expectation that if something worked, scientists, engineers, and everyone else would go with it. The outcome of the mechanism-vitalism debate in the long term would be a general systems theory, or a thought pertaining to it, that became a fixture of the university during and after the second world war. I direct the reader to Ludwig von Bertalanaffy's "General System Theory" (1968) and Norbert Wiener's "Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine" (1948) for further reading on the subject. This is a subject with considerable interest, but very often what a "system" is has been miscontrued and conjures images inseparable from the mystification of technocrats, and so things are described as "systems" or "systemic" without any knowledge of what the concept refers to. Also a product of the debate would be the field of cybernetics, which sought to answer the question in favor of the mechanistic view. What is really considered is not mechanism or vitalism as approaches to the systems, but a question of which mechanism is preferred, and how to mystify what is actually very simple. The "mechanists" resort to a genetic explanation of life, in which the "gene" simply is and nothing can be said of it except that is exists. The "vitalists" resort to imagining life as a special class of matter not because it is scientifically sound, but because it is politically pleasing to a certain interpretation of eugenics and a theory of the origin of societies. It would also be a battle between two imperial factions within global capitalism, the "mechanists" centering in Britain and around the doctrine of Francis Galton's eugenics, and the "vitalists" centering in Germany and eventually creating their variant of eugenics and the policies of the Nazi Party. It is the latter of which Bertalanaffy was a member, while mechanism and cybernetics would be the specialty of the British Empire, as would the computer. The Americans adopt primarily the British tradition, but the continental and Germanic influence on education creates in America a toxic stew and a false conflict over what is really an ideological question and power struggle. Nothing direct came out to resolve the question, because the conflict didn't pertain to a real question or an honest pursuit of science or philosophy. The general system thought is an attempt to make sense of the question posed, but it remains an incomplete project. Certainly I can't offer any suggestion.

The systems thought that did arise largely centered around living systems, rather than systems of heat, and this has made its adoption difficult outside of sciences that concern themselves with biological entities. Biology is the obvious candidate, but sociology concerns living agents, and systems-theory approaches to sociology or psychology tend to reduce their disciplines to the biological question. This is deliberate not because it offers true explanations, but because biology became the ruling idea, and society became total. The emphasis on living systems makes sense for a society that is seen as inescapable, in which life fills every niche as soon as possible, and no niche is safe from the expansion of life. The great problem with this view of systems is that most of the universe is dead, and even our bodies and our everyday experience are largely "dead". The flesh of life is not vibrant with potential, but largely fixed in form, proceeding through its lifecycle. Life is a parasite feeding on energy from the world, rather than the foundation of the world. Life persists not so much as a "thing", let alone as the foundational thing, but an alien imposition on a world that is almost entirely lifeless. The centrality life took in the ruling ideas only persists because the doctrine of life's victory over the world is really a doctrine of the ruling institutions' victory over the "dead" masses and the masses being reduced to livestock, harvested at will by those who manage society.

The insights of a systems theory around life do tell us some useful things, though. Since we are living things, our thought would have developed not around any rational purpose, but around the purposes of life before humans could independently ask the question with symbolic language. A view of systems as living is less about systems actually being alive or self-organizing, but a sort of modern day animism where non-living things are granted the attributes of life, and the functions of life are dominant in that which does live. We ourselves, though, are not purely reducible to "life". What is "life" except information or a pattern which insists on its perpetuation? The actual body we inhabit, and the interactions with the world we engage with every day, is more than the basic impulses of life or the inexorable tendencies of the system. Tendencies in the natural world and those of organisms inform our thinking, especially in the most basic constitution of what we are, and thus what we can and can't do as thinking entities. We arose out of material origins, and so our most basic thought is concrete rather than abstract. We like to think that when we speak, we are dealing with the world as it truly is, or we are issuing imperatives to others with the expectation that we want to speak straight. However adept humans are at lying, we can only lie so much because we have to contend with a real world at the end of the day. The functions of life are not fed by lies or unicorns or myths, but by substantive inputs and our ability to navigate that world. Those who make their living by lying to others will do well to not truly believe their own lies, or be able to qualify their lying with admissions of an occult truth to themselves and those in the know. Ideology and the myths of the trained liar are for the slaves, and so too is the treatment of a cult of life or promises of "eternal life" which are no such thing.

Life forms not the genesis of all systems, or the entirety of systems, but provides a starting point for us to construct systems for our own use, because we are living things - events - ourselves. To truly appreciate this, we would have to consider the world without any thinking entity, which we can do rather easily. The starting point for assembling systems then is not a particular standpoint, but the world itself, of which we and any other thinking entity would be a part. We think not because we are fundamentally "thought" in pure form, but because we interface with a world, and because that world created us and the vantage point to allow for thought. That is a requirement before anything else about us can be ascertained, including the existence of "us", either as a mind or as a body. Consideration of any system, down to the most basic, necessitates that we hypothesize that the whole of existence is knowable, and that it exists outside of us. This is not to say there is actually some "absolute observer" that must exist for the world to exist. Quite the contrary - this should disprove that "God", in any sense we would consider it to be like us, could exist at all. The human mind is something very different from the "mind" of a would-be God, if the mind were to be reduced to principles of operation which must be local events. No human mind has a direct connection with all things in the world equally, and such a connection would be impossible. What is truly done with such declarations is a reversion to the primordial light, in which all is one and anything can be anything - which is to say, the image of God as oneness is a false god, and suggests that the primordial light is all that can be and all that will be. In effect, if such a god were real, then it would not allow for the world as we know it to exist, and we could not exist in its image. It is a regression to the most base existence possible. This would not disprove that there is such a thing as a "god", but if it exists, it would be very much unlike us, and such a god would have little to say about human consciousness fundamentally. What it would suggest is what we have outlined - that for us to contemplate ourselves and a world outside of ourselves, we imagine a hypothetical observer, even if we can learn at an early age that such an observer would not be like us. We do not have to aspire to become this observer to consider its existence, but we have to acknowledge that there is a knowable world outside of our subjective experience for that subjective experience to exist at all.

The conclusion here is that knowledge is entirely a local event, rather than something existing outside of us. There is a world, and there is something construed as data to read from it, but there is no "knowledge" ready-made for consumption. If there is a hypothetical observer or "god", it does not actually "know" or possess a will that is comparable to ours. If we are to speak of a god in this way, we are invoking a metaphor at best, a way of personifying the world in some animistic sense or a large aspect of it. This makes sense to us because we observe the world largely as interpersonal relationships or relationships with animate things, because that suits the demands of life, rather than any fundamental truth of such a view. We view things, even still things, as animate objects, which we can break down sufficiently into propositions of truth and falsity - of matter and void, or substance and non-existence. The most basic logic arises because we sense the world as moving, and so propositions can be made about that motion. A number of definitions become so simple to us that we would have to agree that "space" is referring to the same concept for us to hold a conversation, that apples are apples regardles of who assembles the knowledge of apples, and so on. These definitions can be consistent across observers not because there was some absolute knowledge to tell us what is what, but because the world can only be a singular proposition, and all of our knowledge is dependent on its existence; indeed, ourselves as "us" depends on mechanisms existing in the world, from which any vital tendency of us may arise. That sense of consciousness exists not because it is fundamental to the world, but because we exist as a very particular configuration of mechanisms which allows for the whole to integrate those mechanisms into something new, and this conscious experience must be continuous in order to be maintained. There is not a moment, however small, that consciousness ceases, so long as we live and remain constituted as a conscious entity. If that consciousness truly ceases, we are dead, and we may revive and restore the functions of ourselves if the underlying hardware is not damaged; but to be truly dead is to disintegrate rapidly, and we have enough knowledge of brain death to know that true cessation of conscious experience or an interruption of the events which comprise consciousness is likely to cause damage. If consciousness is continuous, it is not something reducible to rationality. Rationality instead is something we hacked in because it is useful in our experience to view the world this way, and we can do this. We can distinguish a preferred object from noise surrounding it such that attention focuses on an object, and notes its qualities in a way we can appreciate, so far as our senses can probe a thing. We built logic on principles that we can distinguish noise and connections of a thing with other things that are not relevant to our understanding, and we must do this in order to adequately distinguish one thing from another. And so, we built three cardinal rules of logic from the existence of a universe where things are presumed to move, rather than a universe of still forms arrested and animated by hobgoblins. A is A, A is not B, and there is nothing between A and B. This ability to distinguish logical propositions becomes the basis for all of our knowledge - that we must be able to define things by what they are not, and that intermediary states can be arrested such that we are looking at the same thing regardless of its context. Regardless of where an apple exists, we comprehend the concept of apples. Each instance of an "apple" is unique and exists in a different context, and our understanding of apples need not conform to an exact definition that is invalid if one atom is off. The most basic propositions are substantive existence - matter - and the lack of substance, or void. This would be inclusive of any motive energy that could be ascribed to things, as energy is just another kind of substance in a philosophical sense. The movement of things by energy is not something that must be explained by logical tricks, but is explained better as things moving because energetic existence is what we sense every day. A world without any motive energy would be a world without any willful consciousness, and would remain frozen in place. We could say things about that world hypothetically, but the very existence of life would be motive energy - heat - disrupting the stillness of that world. Life to be life is motive, but that says nothing about the nature of all that exists, as if our life were inseperable from the world. We may imagine the energetic force of a thing as a small part of its total mass, but it is always something substantive which moves on its own accord, propelling an object that would otherwise be still or apparently so.

We can break down considerably the world into these logical propositions, but we must not make more of this reduction or believe that we're actually changing reality by thinking of it differently. A theory of fundamental particles should keep in mind that this reduction exists based on things we have observed about the world, rather than a grand theory to change the world by thought. We did not start from physics to build any concept of biology; rather, we begin modern science with a large body of observations already made about the world, ranging from that which is very minute in substances to the scale of human beings, to the planetary scale and the scale of civilizations, to the scale of star systems and galaxies. The construction of larger things is necessarily more complex when observing the nuances. We may reduce the motion of planets around a star to simple physics, but we are aware those planets include all of the energy, social activity, life, and chemical reactions beneath them, and we only summarize the total motion in the system as the orbital motion because the effect of the whole of humanity is not much relative to stellar forces and the inertia of the planets. If we lived in a world where humans could affect the orbit of planets significantly, we would take that into account. So too would we take into account human effect on the weather, if human technology is sufficiently advanced. There is a definite energy requirement necessary to affect motion at the larger scale, and only so much energy we can summon - scalability is not a given with any system, and we would have to question if our devices should be better or more efficient rather than merely bigger or involving greater quantities of energy. We would thus have a quality of efficiency in any power generating device which we seek, rather than simply taking power generation for granted and believing a bigger turbine will solve our problems. Efficiency is a quality that cannot be scaled arbitrarily, because of how we understand it and define it.

Therefore, the vital tendency in life - and this is a trivial answer - is that the mechanisms constituting a particular animal do things that other mechanisms do not. We may judge the variety of actions as similar enough and in the range for a particular animal. One objective of the mechanism-vitalism debate was to harden a classification scheme and enshrine the genetic myth of what life was, so that an older view of life as assemblages of organs would be destroyed. The vitalists reduce the animal to an essence. The mechanists reduce the animal to a prime mover. In both cases, the "gene", or genesis, takes center stage, rather than the actual existence of the animal, which is much more than its genesis or an essence. If we applied this thinking to the genetic material, we would have to ask what the "gene" does to create the distinction, and this was a question the believers of the genetic myth could not abide. It is not because the genetic theory cannot allow this - it would be very simple to accept that DNA, or whatever the genetic material may be since this was not known at the time, is acted on by something in life, such that the genetic material produces the outcome of the organism. This understanding, though, collides with some basic errors in what life DOES at a basic level - that life interacts with its environment, and whatever its vital tendency, life is affected by its environment in obvious ways. The genetic material may present something the organism inexorably returns to, or something that guides its early development, but it does not assert the destiny of an organism in the way that the genetic myth required it to. Even this look at early development runs into mechanistic difficulties. It is well known that malnourished offspring will not develop as those well-fed do, and early development is not conducted in some space isolated from the world. It becomes clear the genetic myth is not about ascertaining how the genes become the finished product, but protecting political conceits and a certain infantilism that was required for eugenics to maintain itself in the public imagination. This infantilism is yet another appeal to the primordial light, and the "gene" takes on the role not of an individual object, but of God itself. The interpretation of the gene in this debate is not a thing that is actually mechnical or vital, but it is presented as something transcendent, animating the world and everything in it like a hobgoblin. This is either charitably an interpretation of Christian dogma, but more often it is simple Luciferianism.

It could very well be that the genetic material does little except chemical things, and complex traits develop off of each other. That is how an organism would have to construct itself in reality from its prior conditions. An architect can understand that to actually realize a building, he does not simply assert that the building should stand. There is always a plan to construct the building, and certain construction methods will prevail over others, while others will falter and lead to a failed project. So it would be with any complex trait, such as hereditary intelligence or the shape of limbs. The genetic material does not provide blueprints with the form of intelligence or some highly specific and complex trait constructed in the code. It instead builds chemical reactions atop the old, and it can only construct the life-form in certain ways. This development, once in motion, is affected by developmental conditions, including those in the womb. The genetic material itself is assembled before it is fully formed, and this is how defects involving extra chromosomes are possible. This view, though, defeats the political conceit that "genes are destiny", such that the status of an intellectual elite is hardwired into nature itself. The conceit is stupid if anyone thinks about what intelligence is for five minutes, but it must assert itself violently. It can only make this violent assertion by making bold proclamations and lies one after another, and staging fake "debates" like this one to obfuscate what is really at stake. The mechanism-vitalism debate degenerates into a debate about nothing, as is intended. The only mechanism or vitality being debated is the almighty gene, and its introduction into the center of not just scientific discourse, but political discourse. If we wanted to construct something out of this genetic material, we would have to approach its operation mechanistically; and while this isn't incompatible with a theory of genetic material, such an approach would run counter to the claims eugenics had to make, and so it was rejected on arrival, even though such an approach would be mechanistically obvious to a child. If we approached its operation vitalistically, we would have to regard that organisms are alive and, once vital, they do things on their own accord, rather than in accord with some idea we held about them. A tendency of life to remain much as it is, only proceeding through its lifecycle, would just be a tautology. We understand life as life because it does remain consistent and repairs damage to its functions - and the repair is to the functions of life, rather than the preferred form it would take. The function of a given organism, which starts as something outside of its control, is the true form that is repaired by the life functions. The body repairs not in accord with a genetic blueprint, but to restore the functions so that organs in the body can continue their movement much as they have before; and the regulation of the body is not in accord with an idea held by a thought leader, but by the body's own integration of itself. If the body did not regulate itself, it would in the long term disintegrate as a recognizable body, or it would be mutable in a way that makes it incompatible with life as we know it. Such things happen, but they are displeasing to those whose conceit of life suggests a purity of race or idea. In all cases, a genetic myth is invoked above all, as this was what was actually contested - who would lead worldwide eugenics in the 20th century, the British or the German intellectuals.

We see here one of the difficulties of system thought - that if we do think of systems, there is a tendency of reductionism necessary for the concept to hold true. In this case, we imagine life. Others imagine heat, or a concept of elements, or energy generally. The true foundation for all of these systems is metaphysical thinking - that we ask a question of what things are, or what they do, which amounts to the same thing. There is no escaping metaphysics for good, because without such a concept, we don't have any sound basis to describe the world except "things are the way they are, as we see them". It is true that we as observers work backwards from our vantage point, but it does not take long for us to learn that there is a world greater than us, and we have to start from the presumption that the world is vast and knowable in its entirety to assemble any other knowledge about it. Otherwise, we only have crude models for ourselves, which cannot be communicated with anyone or checked against anything real. We can build sand castles in our head about what we believe the world to be, but only when they reckon with the whole world do they stand up to any scrutiny, and serve the goal we have in developing systems thought. Anything less is a distinctly inferior understanding which can only exist to be supplanted by another form of knowledge, which will make claims about the world where the false wisdom will not.

In constructing systems in a model, we are moving away from science and towards philosophy and some sort of authority which is not immediately verified by evidence. None of this systems thought should supercede science as a method, or the concept of studying nature as something apart from us. We would instead ask questions about ourselves, since we are the people constructing these systems, and we would ask questions about thought, which science can provide, given some basic assumptions about the world. We must assert for example that there is a world to be studied, and that we all live in the same world. Without that, no scientific approach and no reality is possible. I have taken the position that the world is the only thing we can prove, and that "the world" is inclusive of any metaphysics, but metaphysics is not written in the world, ready for us to claim it. We reconstruct it based on our ability to process the assumptions of such claims, even when we claim we have renounced metaphysics. By eliminating the human subject or observer, many of our errors in thinking are resolved, but this comes at a terrible price - political and abstract thought, which is something we use regularly to navigate society, is as malleable as anything else in the world. In short, what I describe suggests not just that social engineering is possible, but that reality control is possible and that sense experience can only be relied upon if it is not fettered by corrupting influences like other people. This is a difficult bridge to cross without being able to reconstruct, for ourselves, the political thought at work in society, and the origin of myths and spirituality as if they were scientific subjects. The only way to do this is to start from the most basic axioms and build, layer after layer, a better understanding of these things, which make formal science and formal knowledge possible. In doing so, it is my hope to elucidate certain things about the world which have been mystified. No such theory could build from a few axioms a whole understanding of the world. It would be possible to build out of a few axioms how we can meaningfully ask questions about the world, rather than hold to an assumption or crass reductionism, or being lost in a morass of unfathomable complexity.

The world's recurrent events can often be explained by simple rules, and out of those we can build the complexity of systems we encounter, as large as societies and political settlements. The society is not explicable purely by reduction of something we know to be complex, but the society is motivated by basic germs that are common to its agents and to things those agents interact with. If a grand theory suggests things that are discordant with either our sense of what people are or with what we have observed, we do not retreat to the theory and the institutions and shut out any critique of the imagined perfect system. We would instead have to ask if institutions are wrong, or our very approach to knowledge has been grossly wrong in ways we have always known, but have never been able to declare too plainly.

It is for that reason that I considered this view not because it is elegant or will create a perfect system, but because it will narrow our critique to that which is appropriate - the questioning of institutions concerning knowledge, which are in miserable shape from our perspective at the time of this writing. Knowledge, to be properly understood, could only be assembled as a system much like any other, and this assembly only happens for conscious thinkers and with the tools at their disposal. This means that knowledge is a local event and produced much like anything else is, rather than knowledge emerging from a black box or being a thing unknowable to all but those with the received wisdom.

If we view the world without regard to any observer but the hypothetical omniscient one, it is not possible for conscious experience or knowledge to exist as something ideal or apart from the world, as is the habit in philosophy. We may acknowledge certain formations of matter, certain systems, as "knowledge systems" that gather information about the world, but these systems would be local events and we would not attribute to them genuine sense. Sense would be impossible, in other words; the apparent thought and feeling of subjectivity would be an aberration that is of no consequence to an objective observer. This runs contra to our expectation that humans do act on their subjective experience, and must do so. The only conclusion is that this subjective experience must too be part of the world, rather than apart from it. If it exists, then where is it, and how is it isolated? Looking for a physical substance is missing the point; it is rather than the subjective experience must be itself real by virtue of the processes playing out, and this experience must play out in highly specific ways rather than being a general rule of matter itself, or some special class of matter which is universal. It is only possible for this to exist if something new can exist - that is, if the origins of conscious experience are not self-referential, and if consciousness is comprised of some baser process at work. If consciousness is the true starting point or origin of knowledge and of systems, then nothing new is possible and consciousness can only loop in reference to itself. It is yet another regression to the primordial light, in which anything can be anything and yet it is nothing. If we are to consider some way in which the world works, it would not be something reducible to any conscious or rational model; but rather, consciousness and rationality would be built in response to a world that existed before it. It would have emerged from prior conditions as so many other things did. It would be an inferior part of the way the world works, or a subsystem which must be integrated through some real, material process, rather than something foundational. Conscious experience is looking at a world that existed long before it, and in ways outside of its immediate comprehension. Rational understanding and knowledge is only possible if the world existed before knowledge did, and that it was possible to speak of a world before knowledge - that is, of a world that is defined by something other than a philosopher's conceit about it. Our objective is to read from experience some law governing thought and knowledge, but this is not as trivial as finding some material essence or thing in the world that is a seed, pure and untainted. No such thing exists. The only thing that is pure is matter itself, which is a singular proposition that what is real is that which is substantive, rather than that which is a figment of the imagination. We can further conclude that this imagination is itself rooted in a thing that is substantive - that conscious experience and what we experience as "mind" is something substantive at its root, but that it is not as simple as an idea floating in a virtual space to animate the world. Mind instead exists as something new, and it is a particular type of thing that forms. Conscious experience requires highly specific conditions to persist as we know it. We should not privilege human consciousness or human faculties over any other type of consciousness thus defined, as if the human mind were too comprised of some special substance unique to the race. Humans' differentiation from other animals is not a substance of consciousness but a symbolic language and tools to express it, which in turn affect the human body, its behavior, its development, and eventually its long-term trajectory in the conditions of society. To adequately answer the question requires not being hobbled by conceits humans hold about themselves, which are the product of a long history and interactions among each other and with the world. It would require a conception of conscious experience as something other than rational, but the result of persistent energetic events, which reproduces itself in everything we or any other thinking entity would do. The conscious experience is further defined not by rational information process, but by feeling and reaction to a world. Rationality is secondary to conscious experience at best, and usually tertiary. Humans, like any other animal, exist because they relate to the world, not because they are a form isolated from it in perfect lab conditions. The rational faculties are a useful sense for verifying our knowledge of the world or ourselves, but the origin of those faculties is not in some purified seed, but in some machinery that can conduct the energy in such a way that persistent conscious faculties are created.

We may imagine the operation of the brain or some processing interrupted to produce particular outcomes, but this is an imperfect model of what conscious experience does, or what it is. It is not reduced simply to the brain and neurological activity, or a set of behaviors which is written by an authority for you to abide. It is the case that central nervous systems allow conscious experience to begin in any way we would recognize. Plants and computers are not conscious in the sense that animals would be and need to be, because it doesn't occur to either of those things to feel or animate their body in a way that animals do on a regular basis. The animal does this first out of primitive instinct, but will react to feedback from the world and this feedback will influence the animal's future decisions. The animal will, given sufficient knowledge of the world and an ability to inquire into its meaning, operate with awareness that it is affected by the world. Even an animal or a child who does not understand what is affecting it will react as if the world were very real, and all such minds react to the world out of necessity. They cannot do otherwise. They can, if they are secure and can contemplate, modify themselves in some way that is not immediately tied to a stimulus. This requires both the time and an indicator of a goal some thinking entity would create for itself, or something to orient its behavior that is not merely a reaction to external stimuli. We can draw from the world consciously for this indicator or inspiration, rather than simply react passively to an input.

When we consider the developed mind that possesses symbolic language, we are dealing with something much more than an assembly of nerves and impulses. Even if we were to reduce this construct to its simplest components, it would not be contained arbitrarily within the body. The central nervous system and assemblage of events around the brain is very useful, because those parts of the mind are in closer communication with each other than the tools we use, the interactions we have with things external to the flesh. It is most important to note the distinction of distance in communication when distinguishing the body, and thus the proper domain of biology, from the mind and the true earthly representation of a man. A man is not simply his body as-is, but his past, his property, the tools he uses, and so on. The mind proper is nothing less than an interface with the whole world, and the subjective experience notes that which is very close at hand - the thoughts in a brain, the body's integration through the nervous system and the substantive connection of biological organs to each other, the immediate surroundings of the body that are the most obvious thing our behaviors revolve around, and the more distant interactions. We note that we cannot possess a connection with another body and brain in any way like the connections within our own body. If we were constituted in a way where the organs of another human body were so intimately linked with another, we would be very different creatures, and our thought on "mind" and how we communicate would be very different. No closeness among humans would be as intimate as the simplest connection within the body, yet humans do relate to each other and are aware that there is another mind not unlike theirs behind the fleshy exterior or the social tokens and signifiers we regard as someone's social and legal person. All of our concepts of political society are premised on humans possessing this agency that is not different from the agency we might imagine for ourselves, and even if we are depoliticized and cast out of society, we are aware that such an expectation exists within society. We are acutely aware of rejection from this sense of each other, so much that to be shunned in this way entails consequences more dire than death. If we are alien to humans, and we know the extent of evil we ourselves our capable of, we would default to considering every other human around us to be capable of the same malevolence or more at any time, until we have ruled out the possibility by knowing the alien. We would, if we regarded human minds as inherently alien and disconnected, have to play armchair psychologist around other people, and this leads to an endless inquisition and a society ruled by paranoia, in which fear would dominate all of our interactions. We see the results of that thinking in the outcome of the liberal project.

If we were to reduce all that enters into our experience to a biopolitical logic, where only that which is our body and the domain of biology is "us", and everything outside of that is utterly alien, we are left with a world where we cannot be anything but evolutionary flotsam. This is very intentionally constructed not because it is a true representation of us, but because it is politically convenient for those who would manage society. The eugenic idea was most helpful because it reduced further the body to a genetic destiny. If the genetic material were at least a substantive thing, this would not have been fatal, but because a substantive treatment of the gene would not say what eugenics needed it to say, a whole religion and pseudoscience was constructed around the biopolitical idea. It is divorced from what the body actually does or even the passing of hereditary traits through any genetic material, but eugenics spawned from a conceit that was long extant. In the past, it took the form of various lurid cults and the fetish for power. It is unsurprising that those elements clamored to join the eugenic vanguard and today their ideology and practice is highly visible and celebrated. It was not the flesh that imprisoned the mind and soul. The flesh and the world were what allowed humans to be anything substantive, and allowed humans to contemplate themselves at all. It is ideology and a trap in thinking that told humans that they were reducible not so much to basic material components, but to a conceit of what the world was.

There are of course many practical reasons humans distinguish their body, whose parts are closely integrated and must be so, from that which is outside of it, like their tools. Humans by necessity form a symbiotic relationship with the implements they use every day, but must make clear that they are not susceptible to their tools, lest there be a material thing that comes to dominate us and strip away the purpose we originally envisioned for the machine. If we engage in this autistic thinking about the gene and what humans are - if humans are reduced to a biopolitical conceit imposed by a pedagogue - we do not actually secure ourselves from this problem of being affected by the machine. We instead become ignorant of the machine, and the machines we use every day are mystified. The intent of the eugenic form of biopolitcal thought is to sever the connection men would make with the machine for themselves, and replace it with a preferred relation to the machine envisioned by the thought leader or the pedagogue. Men would be ruled by machines, and those machines would be the sole property of an interest that is alien and hostile to the ruled. Technocratic ideas always imply a hostility of those who hold the relevant machines towards those who are to be ruled by the machine, but there are versions of this technocratic idea that are not utterly alien. The eugenic thinking, in which the alienation of man from environment is an absolute, first makes men pliable to the machines of a ruler, and to every manipulation and every trap laid for them. In the long term, it makes even basic connections to the world impossible, and the final invasion is to invade the body itself and sever the most basic functions of life from a connection to the world or the integration we would possess normally. The condition of eugenic society, then, is total and controlled insanity. It is that which drives the spiritual, moral, and economic thinking of eugenics, and it is that which prompted me to write this and subsequent works to describe this effect.

If we suggest that mind is real and ultimately a material thing, it is not a unique substance or something special, but something emergent from processes. It is impossible to precisely locate "mind" anywhere in the world, because where it exists is in a virtual space for us and us alone. We need to do this not because mind is co-equal with the world, but because there isn't a physical location to place this. It is instead something any conscious entity would sense. We sense a connection with the body and the world in order to be conscious in the first place, so that what we recognize as thoughts may manifest. There is never a moment where we are totally unaware of this connection, because the most basic criteria for "thinking" is that there is a process playing out in reality. Once the process of thought begins - once the wires are connected and the impulse of consciousness is active and energetic - it takes on its own existence, which is a thing apart from its origins as an assemblage of hardware and electrical signals. This process continues for as long as we do - we do not truly stop thinking or changing with the world, and this is what the central nervous system was adapted to do in the first place. There would be no evolutionary advantage nor a drive in life to form this central nervous system if it did not arise organically and from simpler components, and there would not be a truly sudden invocation of this consciousness. There would be a transition where nervous activity begins as an inchoate presence barely acknowledged, to the conscious thought of lower animals, where a sense of self-preservation and integration of the body is more pronounced. Developed animals would possess a greater sense of themselves than cruder animals, and this produces very different behaviors which eventually feed back into further development of the life-form. In animals, this process remains a very slow one, as animals do not communicate nor develop particularly sophisticated thought. Humans refine this process not simply by possessing enormous brains but by their symbolic language allowing for the first time deliberate honing of the body as we live. Animals do not exercise or practice in the way that humans do at all, and among humans, the habit of playing games and recreation is one learned early and one that has changed throughout the ages, as humans develop both new games and new technology.

What we may consider "conscious" does not have bearing on the underlying process, but is instead a distinction we may draw between distinct activities an entity capable of any thinking process would do. The "thought" in its crudest and most inchoate form might vaguely sense the world and react to it, but it would not feel emotion or develop even a primitive moral sense that could be found in developed animals. The same lines divide animals from humans. The bitter pill for this is that it applies within humanity, and in ways that we are acutely aware of. Simply put, humans have chosen to view other conscious humans as unfeeling and unthinking, and in a sense this can be justified and comports with our understanding of humans. There are humans who do not understand certain things, and who may never understand much of what exists in society let alone the world. The core advance of eugenics, and what truly motivated the Galtonite "Jehad", was to declare baldly that the conscious experience and suffering of most of the world was not actually suffering at all, and yet at the same time the subjugated were to be tortured, with the torture reimagined as some sort of operational intervention. This was not a mere reduction of men to machines, as the stupider pontificators would muse in their sops. It was a deliberate hypocrisy at the heart of everything eugenics intended, and this hypocrisy would be on display in the aforementioned mechanism-vitalism debate and every other false debate eugenics introduced.

The simple truth is that whatever our ethical claims about consciousness may be, we cannot help but wince in pain when we know conscious suffering. It is something that we have only known to be particular to life, but if we were to construct a machine with the same faculties that animals with central nervous systems have - if we were to truly consider what we were and make a machine in our likeness - we would have created an artificial body and mind rather than a simulation of behaviors rationally understood, and we would interact with such a thing as if it were no different from us in the real manifestations of conscious experience. Not every conscious body is an identical thing, as if there were a singular type of "consciousness", and so one thinker's pleasure may be irrelevant to another, and two thinking entities can hold very different concepts of themselves and the world. Rationally, we have only a vague language to understand this suffering, and in rational views we distance ourselves from the passions and the action that full consciousness entails. We build computers specifically not to manifest what we would consider consciousness, as for the rational task we build computers to execute, the things that consciousness actually does would be regarded as noise. It is much the same when we comport ourselves to perform rational operations or we willfully utilize the body and senses like we would a machine - we would desire to filter out noise that is part of the normal conscious experience, so that we are for the moment oriented towards that task, and we may have to train ourselves to neutralize that which interferes with an objective we hold in our sense of the world. We would like to remember that there is a reality, rather than succumb to our own efforts to fool ourselves temporarily.

For those aware of human language and the propensity of humans to lie about everything, the conscious experience is one of limited information, and this is where our philosophy goes awry and must separate starkly the abstract from the real, and political reality from the material reality we actually live in. This dual system was identified in modern philosophy and, rather than a true reconciliation of our sense of self with the conditions we now know to be true - which would entail a reckoning for centuries of lies and more lies - philosophy doubled down on the human art of lying to oneself and to others, and mystified knowledge with full intent and with scientific knowledge of the brain, the body, the machine, and human societies and psychology. The program of lying, which had always been practiced by those who ruled, had to become absolute, thus severing the possibility that there could be a true integration of our native sense with the world, and ultimately with society. It is this lying that is prevalent in everything eugenics did, and this strategy of bold lying for the sake of lying was inherent to the very idea of eugenics. It was not important if eugenics described the real conditions of heredity, or even if eugenics proved its methods were natural or effective. It was important from the outset to make eugenics sacrosanct and surround it with so much fear and contradiction that it would be immune to any rational attack, and could lie infinitely. It is for that reason that, for the commoners who are to be exterminated or ruled, no theory of knowledge is allowed to develop beyond the crudest, and poison is regularly injected into all public discourse to keep the masses as retarded as possible.

It is for that reason that consciousness had to become a special class of matter in the ruling ideas, moreso than it had in past philosophy. Past philosophy had always preferred this program of lying, being well ahead of everyone else in advancing any ruling idea, but it could not fathom the level of deception and viciousness eugenics would use to pursue its program. A whole pseudoscience regarding knowledge had to be enshrined, in parallel with the genuine pursuit of knowledge that had always been useful for what knowledge actually accomplishes for us. It was no longer sufficient to rely on the ignorance and passivity of people and occasionally culling them in events like the Black Death. The key advance of modernity was technology's entry into the life of the peasant and the worker, where before the working class was largely involved in technology and politics only in an indirect way or in ways that were local to the workers - the command from ruler to serf was "thou shall not" and only occasional intervention, usually to humiliate the serf as is the desired state of affairs for any aristocracy. And so, the great search for the "secret location of the mind" is a fools' errand, because of a crass form of physcalism which entirely rests on political conceits rather than accepting that the virtual "mind" is as real as the hardware animating it. The ideas or conceits are held in a subjective, virtual world, but that virtual world only exists because it is informed by the material and physical reality underneath it. It became something distinct because we needed it to be so, and because the human or animal mind exists in the first place to integrate all the parts and functions into a working whole. The centralization of the nervous system and its known connections to the body and its implements is a connection with definite distance and mechanisms, rather than a set of vague connections that are always mysterious. The mystification is an effect of bad philosophy and known limitations of human faculties, rather than the mystification being the true nature of the mind - or in other words, the mind being defined by pure contradiction and nonsense. We could, if we wished, deconstruct our thought process and sense ourselves as distinct compartments, and we do this in practice very often, shifting from one mode of thought to another based on social context or when sleeping. This is highly counterproductive for the function of that mind and its nervous hardware; and because that hardware developed around the needs of the life form, this strange alien imposition on the world that insists on remaining as it is and perpetuating itself, there would be a natural tendency of organisms with central nervous systems to view themselves as a wholly integrated entity rather than a mass of impulses to be cajoled, even if they seek leadership and guidance or had a habit of following authority out of some deep-seated perversion or desperation in a crisis. A worthwhile authority would have no use for animals that cannot make the most basic connections between their parts, and so even if we imagined an authority dictating what the mind is supposed to think, the thought occurs in an integrated mind, or is presumed to be. We don't speak to the distinct aspects of someone when asking the body or person in question to do something for us.

The imperious mindset that seeks to cajole and berate someone is incompatible with authority in the traditional sense, and recognition of authority likely shaped the earliest sense of self and its pronounced definition in human persons. You would only resort to such cajoling to destroy someone by creating a spiritual environment utterly incompatible with life or anything independent of the cajoler, and that is precisely the function of such cajoling in modernity - to destroy, retard, and degrade the body and the person, in line with some impulse that can only be construed in modern parlance as "the system" in some vague sense. It is this mutilation of understanding a "system" that is at the heart of the entire eugenic idea - "the system" is presented as vague, while the individual is not a system nor a part of any system, reduced to its basest expression in the eyes of a manager or ideologue. It is for that reason I felt the need to explain this reasoning about the system.

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It is this tendency of thinking animals to integrate themselves that is really at the heart of the vitalist idea, or the idea of viewing systems wholistically. We think this way because we are constituted in such a way, and have to be in order for the body to function. A human that imagines itself as disparate, disconnected parts ultimately cannot orient its movement and basic mental faculties will fail. It is well known that in order for sanity to be retained, the mind cannot experience contradictions without a mechanism to resolve them. It is precisely that which German idealist philosophy attacked, by placing contradiction at the center of its program specifically because it would interrupt and stunt the thought process. The German philosophy also showed that this was scientifically possible and nothing could actually stop it from taking root, if it were insinuated enough. The 20th century proved this theory that was only haphazardly implemented in the past. Wholes could only be imagined if they were moved by "internal contradictions", and this was done for political purposes rather than this actually being what a thing would be. It was very effective for creating a stripped down education suitable for the slaves, workmen, and soldiers who were expected to obey without thinking. Such a thing quickly became the envy of all technologically advanced regimes, as this would end the conflict of classes and the democratic idea for good. This is what did indeed happen in the 20th century, as the faint vestiges of democracy allowed up to that point were snuffed out for good following the first world war. The new world order would be technocratic, ruled by experts with forbidden knowledge.

There is a lengthy discussion about the nature of the new science at another time, but the first takeaway and the reason this works is because knowledge was dependent on the integration of disparate facts into a coherent world-system, or a total view of the universe. Our initial claim that allows us to know anything is that everything is knowable, and we keep that in mind if we wish to know even a small part of the world with any rigorous approach. Even before we develop a formal understanding of this concept of "the all", we operate with cruder versions of it necessarily to begin assimilating knowledge. We are aware, however dimly, that the world is more than that which is front of us. A pernicious pedagogy seeks to tell us that we dare not look at anything other than what the charlatan or stage hypnotist wants us to look at, and if we dare disobey, we're crazy or, worse, "retarded". We've always had to regard a world outside of us or outside of the thing to regard the thing or our own standpoint, and it is only our judgement that allows us to define a useful separating line between "thing" and "not thing".

If we are using the mind's integration as our basis for systems as a whole, the "mind" is not a fixed thing, but a system which necessarily influences the world, because the world includes this mind. The mind references itself, and while this is a problem for our analysis, it is not a problem for the world itself or our actual ability to function. We have to make this reduction of infinite series every day to process the world, and we do not need a grand theory to understand a repeating sequence of decimal numbers, for example the decimal represent of one-third being 0.33333 repeating. Children can be taught the concept of a repeating decimal or some infinite sequence without failing to comprehend the concept - these concepts are actually very simple to explain if they are presented with any adequate language. The difficulty arises in knowing when to use them to solve a problem, or to prove rationally mathematical concepts to show that this is actually kosher. A desultory education teaches children to process numbers by rote and allows only enough flexibility to read the words on paper, and children of the lower class are intentionally taught in a way that denies them a solid grounding and discourages investigation or deeper connection of the knowledge base. Those of the better off class are pulled aside and taught the less stupid way to integrate knowledge, which is held as the province of an elite in the gifted program, while the lower classes are told they are incapable of logical thought. Logic puzzles which should be basic to learning are reserved only for the gifted, while the other kids are told in various ways they are retarded, and told to punish the special edcuation kids, treating their lump of horseflesh like some prized knowledge. The mind is portrayed as either an atom isolated from the world that must protect its purity, or an inchoate mass which can be manipulated by superior wills. The will to power is only available for a limited group which is ascribed all of the virtue, while everyone else implicitly possesses none. Of course, children out of necessity reject this desultory education, and usually the task of learning is done on your own time. The pedagogy specializes in laying traps to say "retarded, retarded, retarded" and ensure children are sorted into their correct position, which is the primary function of education and child-rearing. Some can say these traps are a necessary filter to see if children know to dodge them, but the traps are set up in a way to ensure that those selected to fail will fail, while those selected to succeed will always be given excuses so long as their esteem remains intact and they believe the right moral philosophy - that is, the gifted kids will all, invariably, believe in eugenics. The only exceptions are quickly rooted out and destroyed, and some children are selected for gifted track purely so they will be humiliated and the thrill of eugenics will be delivered to its most faithful partisans. There is no belief other than eugenics in that group, and the teachers and administrators of that program are aware of what they do and why they are there. This environment has confused drastically the thinking of systems or even what a thing may be. We are taught a watered down version of formal logic which concerns itself purely with facts, and any thought that even suggests an understanding of that formal logic's origin is stymied if a child asks the question of why we should believe this. Logic is instead taught didactically, and then the child is taught to obey the charlatan's trick and told that they cannot rely on their own sense for counting. The thought tricks to manipulate perception begin with early intervention, all intended by the course of education that has been normalized. A child with a clear mind and approach viewing mathematics without the fetters of pedagogy would not see any inherent difference between ten and ten trillion - both are numbers and premised on naive set theory as a child would comprehend it, and this is sufficient for practical purposes. It is the job of the pedagogue to convince the child that large numbers are beyond them, so that their scale is reduced to that which is appropriate to them. This is where the story of native tribes having no numbers beyond ten or twenty, or no numbers at all, is taught to children. This is taken, preposterously, to claim that native tribes deep in the Amazon are incapable of counting and must be taught this by the white man, but it is a much simpler proposition - that counting remained for them an internal system or worked out by counting by hand rather than with spoken words, and no words to group large numbers were invented for every day use. Personally, I think they were just getting a kick out of confounding the white guy anthropologists. In any event, numeracy does not change because of the scale of numbers, nor does the perception trick of crude psychology actually convince people that counting doesn't work. It is rather necessary to repeat these insulting stories to children ad nauseum to convince them to fear expert opinion. From sheer exhaustion and conditioning through severe punishment and maximizing the thrill of seeing the sacrifices suffer, the conditioning is enforced, and then internalized by repitition. The enforcement of this regime of lying is a complicated matter and beyond the scope of our writing, but we see here many of the difficulties of grasping systems, if systems start as something we behold. The same conditioning that teaches children to fear large numbers teaches them to fear complexity or any explanation that is longer than a staccato utterance, creating faithfully what Orwell called "duckspeak"^[1] Failure to grasp analogies is not just taught but enforced and expected, and signs of independent curiosity in those who are not "supposed" to think are ruthlessly attacked by the pedagogue.

For the world, all of our systems appear interconnected. The world has no use for our conception of space and the world itself doesn't think anything - it is not a conscious entity as we are and couldn't be - but we recognize readily that associations around the locus of a thing are closer or further away, and so we have a sense of objects being contiguous over space, whether they are solid or gaseous. We don't see an assemblage of particles or simples, but the thing. The hypothetical observer from before simply has no problem with this view of the world, and can translate it to systems we would comprehend because it would know our thinking in that regard and how to best illustrate it. We are not so lucky, being fettered by lag time and every other human limitation to cognition, and no technology conceivable overcomes that limitation. We would not truly know all there is to know short of being the universe, and there is no universal mind that is like ours. We do have the advantage of knowing our limitations, over many years of investigation of what we are. We would not know those limitations if we weren't part of the world and informed by it, and it is because we can be aware of those limitations that we can conceive of something greater. This, as you can guess, is the origin of how standards of comparison are destroyed; people are given a vision of the human as a technocratic point of life or agent in a simulation, and told "this is you", complete with a set of expectations crafted for you by a thought leader which are intentionally unrealistic. Day after day, you are told you do not exist unless you are in a favored class, and that you must be subsumed into one of the technocratic classes or abase yourself before the lord. The idea that humans are made of flesh is only acknowledged to regard their existence as a desultory grind, "dead" animals to be commanded by the "living" experts and influencers; common reference is made to humans' concrete behavior as animal behavior to be commanded by the superior will. At the root is the eugenic idea that "genes are destiny" and that the inborn traits of the selected elite cannot be questioned. The institutions can never be wrong, no matter how absurd their statements and deeds. The purpose is not merely to assert something the eugenist wishes to be true. They are conscious on some level of severing the social agent from its history and conditions, so that their world-view can be replaced with something supplied to them by thought leaders. The choice of the taboo and endless insinuations over overt eugenic policies was a deliberate one, because the aims of eugenics are not what they appear to be. The treatment of race-theory and its unmooring from the history of races or nations in eugenics is another. Race, nation, or any other identity in eugenic thinking merely denotes who is in the most holy in-group in the grand struggle for life at that time, and who you are supposed to hate today in the circle of friends. The Nazi example is much more obviously odious, but all forms of eugenics stem from the same root and purpose - a need to arrest history by making both mechanics and this vital essence of life an idea in the hands of another.

The judgement of systems has been in the end our judgement and ability to discern meaning from connections. This self-reference may seem nonsensical until the common root in the world is identified. All must be one in the conscious mind, but this "oneness" is a conceit for us rather than anything truly meaningful about the world. All we are doing is modulating by reason sensory input from organs that were built in the world like any other machine, to construct what is necessary for us to both ask questions about the world and to function at all. This doesn't mean that a system is what we individually choose it to be, but that all of us are looking at the same world, and thus we arrive at largely similar conclusions about it when all things are equal. All things are never equal, but in core faculties humans are similar enough that understanding between them is possible, and humans compare both against each other and evidence of the many events in the world that happen independent of our will. We are aware of each others' thinking and constantly make judgements of other peoples' thoughts, their moral character, and try to consider their perspective, and we would have to be in order to navigate society and the communication within it. This understanding can be interpreted to just move subjectivity to "society" in a vague sense, and socially propagated ideas become our individual ideas and create reality. This, too, fails because it cannot be maintained. Controlled insanity only persists with vast effort to maintain it and the degradation of the actual human agents in society, because human beings cannot truly hold two contradictory beliefs without facing a crisis if they must make a decision. Another prevalent fate in eugenic society then is indecision and neuroticism, an intended consequence of the habitual lying that the ruling ideas deploy to maintain their own version of reality. There is in the end only the world itself and events in it to guide the basis for this understanding. We recognize ourselves as products of that world without reducing ourselves to something commanded or something regressing to the ineffable, primordial light. The mind as we know it is something novel, and this is not mind in a general sense but each individual thinker. Every thinking man must reproduce for himself a world-system, or an understanding he holds about the world. We share some understanding with each other because we use symbolic language and learn from it, and learn that humans are habitual liars in all things, but all these world-systems function best when they reckon with the actual world we live in, which is a thing independent of mind.

In a way, we reproduce "God" or "Heaven" or some regulatory force simply to be able to integrate our body properly - that is, we imagine the world momentarily as if we were like the hypothetical observer, sometimes with a will and sometimes without a will and watching the march of the world against us. We may use another appropriate metaphor or reduce it to a vague sense that there is some way in which events around us happen without formulating the theory of connectedness of all things, and it is perfectly acceptable to reject out of hand the existence of any god or overmind and accept the events of the world as largely disconnected. An identified substantive mass or event is something we can locate, whether in physical space or in some spiritual sense or ordering we might imagine, for that which is a figment of our abstract thought. Nowhere can "gods" be located, and so the world collectively is something very different from a god in any concept we would possess; and so we are very different from any such god as well, rather than the mind being created in God's image. God exists not for a true metaphysical purpose, but a crass sociopolitical one - He is the avatar of rule itself, and a whole theory of social ordering and rule, which is something we adopt not for a materialist or naturalist explanation of the world, but to grant spiritual authority to particular practices and things in the world that are the result of people. The material world is incidental to most religions, and philosophy seeks not to understand the material - which it can never actually do - but command it and cajole it for some working, like a simpering idiot believing himself to be wise.

This applies not to life generally, but to a specific type of activity that living things did - that being conscious thought, and in particular human thought which adopted symbolic language. Humans to be humans suggested that they could be more than the body they started with, starting in crude ways with the use of tools to abstract thought about the world and very large and dynamic social arrangements which do not exist until humans constructed them. Nowhere else in nature do you see anything like the human city or empire, or at best you could only make analogies to human city and empire building in the kingdom of nature. The animals with central nervous systems but none of our technology and civilization operate on some similar principles - their behavior is deliberate towards particular ends, they feel and they interface with the world as we would expect to do if we were animals and had no society or language to rely on, and only the crudest of tools that are immediately apparent if we have tools at all. Animal tool use is crude but exists, since the faculty to pick up an implement towards some purpose is something that can be done with remarkably little thought or language, and the knowledge of using these things can be assembled through some system particular to the animal. Plants and life without any central nervous system behaves very differently - they do not "suffer" in any way and there isn't the energetic experience of consciousness that would exist in animals, and this is something we sense at a level that doesn't require a grand rational theory to tell us what thinks and what doesn't. We can tell the suffering of animals with the simplest sense of empathy, but we don't sense the suffering of plants because they don't suffer or think at all. Attempts to claim they do run into a sense we have of suffering, as humans are acutely aware of suffering not just for themselves but in any life. Even those who find other life alien and who become callous still maintain an awareness of suffering, whether they care about others' suffering or not. It is nearly impossible for a human being to remain unaware of suffering in some way, for suffering is foundational to the very sense of what it is to think and live in this world. Yet, the life of something like a plant or an amoeba is still recognizably "living" in that it shows intent. We return then to the definition of what "life" is, but this time we are aware that we are basing the concept of life on our conceits about ourselves and our ability to understand things outside of us.

A full discourse on the definition of "life" is beyond the scope of this book, but it is important here to note how the question is posed in the first place. There is no substance called "life" which is a distinct type of matter. We understand systems much as we understand the composition of ourselves and how we have to think; we didn't choose the manner of our thought entirely out of nothing, and can only change how we think from the conditions we are in presently, which were conditions of the past going back to our formation as an organic entity in the first place. We ask then what we do rather than what we are, since we start out with no useful language for describing Being. The mind, the underlying hardware that we possess, and everything we do adapted to do things rather than simply be something, inert on the surrounding world and interfacing only as a preferred form we imagine for us. We can simplify what we do to a few concepts, and generalize what other things like us - living things - do, and define life by what it does and what it does not do, and all the things that are excluded from the activities of life. All of these understandings revolve around our sense of life, because we are really recognizing something that is within us - what makes us "us" as a whole and allows us to integrate all the disparate events that comprise us - rather than something fundamental to the universe itself. The universe itself is not reducible to "life" in the sense that we live, without eliminating the very concept of what it is to live, to feel, and to sense the world as we do, and so the universe must start out as non-living in that sense, and life must be something that was novel. Life has to be able to arise from non-living components, and this can be a process that need not be a singular event but may be something occurring every day in the world. There was no overarching force compelling men and women to mate to conceive a child, and you see here the thing eugenics sought to arrest and control. If a man and a woman really wanted to, they would mate without regard of society or any objective other than that which one or both of them had in mind, but this is unacceptable to a eugenicist who desires to control that reproductive behavior. The same is true of anything we do - absent a compelling reason, living things are autonomous and operate as freely as their faculties allow. That is the nature of what it is to think, rather than thought being animated by an external agent commanding what we do or what we are. We possess both agency and a will to act in the conditions we are in; and so eugenics and most arrangements of society sought to control those conditions, if they could not reach inside the brain and manipulate the thought process directly. The former is a precondition to impose the latter. Life itself is not definely purely by "thinking" - thought is a particular activity of living things, and by no means is thinking as a process limited to life. We could reproduce a machine that is in its faculties like us, but that does not live in the sense that life has; it would instead be an autonomous machine and entity in the world, and thus its attitude towards the world and itself would be quite different from the attitude of a living agent like ourselves that possesses the wants and needs of life and the drives of a living entity. Naturally, though, thought originated in living things on this planet, unless someone is a believer in extraterrestrial intervention, which only moves the question to some far away place. That is a condition of the past which we always have to abide - nature did not produce thinking entities that are not living things, in the sense that we understand the concept of thought. Much of what life does is not a "thinking" act at all; rather, this is a question of how we are to rationally understand life and fit it into our world-system, or our sense of social values. We don't have to privilege living things over the non-living, or regard life as uniformly worthwhile, and such valuation is irrelevant to our understanding of what life does at the most basic level.

We read into life intents which lead to a few conclusions about what living things do. I have here an understanding of life which ties it to its economic behavior: For the purposes of this work, we must consider life to be the confluence of processes creating an object with the following properties:
- It is an open system, which is to say, a system (or object) in which both mass and energy can enter.
- It maintains steady conditions for its continued existence, that is homeostasis.
- It is responsive to its environment, or ecology, in an effort to maintain its continued existence as recognizably the system it was, or only metamorphosizes in accord with tendencies built into the original system.
- It must consume energy and/or matter, usually both, to accomplish these goals. It thus has wants, and also excludes "virtual life" as meaningfully living.
- It is capable of existence on its own power, provided the input of energy and matter from the environment; and thus the system is growing and changing, and it is mortal. Contained within is a contradiction of life which is nonetheless true. That is that living things seek homeostasis stubbornly to retain their form and repair damage, but they also grow and change over time and contain within the potential for growth into entirely new forms.
- It is capable, in some way, of reproducing another living thing, usually something much like itself. This may be self-directed, or involve pairing with another living thing, or some process by which new living things would appear from other living things.
- The combination of the last two tell us that living things evolve, and can be described as something historical; that is, that living things will have some ancestor or some condition of their creation, and their issue can be ascertained.
- Living things are capable of storage, in some form. Their bodies contain some reserve from which energy can be generated, when they are not consuming. If possible, living things can appropriate things from the outside world, in a way that associates the things with the living object. This means that life is not merely concerned with the barest sustenance or perpetuation of itself as life.
- Life enters relations with objects outside of itself, including other living things, that exert effect on the original organism, and life exerts influence on the other thing. It is impossible to speak of life as something that does not affect its environs, and that is not affected by its environs. This is in contradiction to the tendency of life to stubbornly persist in its form, but nonetheless true.

This is still an incomplete understanding, as it was intended to argue for life's economic task rather than give a full accounting of life's full existence. The intent of life does not begin as conscious at all, but we read intent because we ourselves our conscious. Life has particular intents like reproduction, self-defense, homeostasis, and all of these must hold true to speak of life. It may be argued that stars are systems which feed on their surroundings, attain stability, and by some process "reproduce", but life to be life is a particular proposition about action. Bereft of an intent and action, living organisms are just lumps of chemicals arranged in peculiar ways. Life organizes itself by principles particular to the life-form, rather than the form being organized by a principle like gravity or the laws of physics alone. There was no "intent" of the universe to form stars, as if it were destined; but life asserts its own destiny, in spite of laws of the world being generally hostile to life. Life persists in the pursuit of its missions even though life in an objective view is a futile effort. Living things are born, grow, and pass from this world. Their existence is a contradiction, where they seek permanence of their processes, yet to do so must be dynamic, and eventually their existence proves to be ephermeal as the living thing we imagined. Societies and states present themselves as eternal going concerns out of necessity, but they are not truly living forms unto themselves, because societies do not know the intent that a singular, integrated organism does. Attempts to impose a corporate view of whole societies, where certain people and things are the head, the limbs, and so on, conflict with what we know societies to be - that societies, if they are to be considered singular organisms, are very inhuman ones, and an integrated thought process cannot be ascribed so easily to organizations, tribes, races, cities, and so on. All social organizations are premised on socialized individuals to persist, and out of necessity, societies avert the typical processes of a living organism existing in its own right. We don't consider the collective to possess a true mind or will, because it does not and can not. If we attempted to conceive of a society thinking as we do, we sense that communication between its agents and its machines is laggard, and societies are rife with contradictions that would kill a singular integrated life-form to hold; and societies are often constructed with the knowledge that they are comprised of individuals with their own wants, because social organizations are not oriented towards a singular, managed task as an individual life-form would be. Social organizations often exist to mediate between many individuals, because collectively they respond to a shared condition of the agents in that society, rather than a concern that is independent of any one person. All of the decisions in society are made by individual people at the end, and in order for social values to perpetuate, individuals must be educated and reproduce the society's values on an individual and then a local basis. No society can be taken as a given or operate over a vaguely defined distance - all the things that comprise "society" are the result of its agents, and the behavior of all agents is something we can understand and arrest without vagaries, if we wished to do so. If there are things that are vague and unknown to us individually, we can seek to analyze and understand this beast, "society", and this is the understanding of society that most people held until modernity and the bureaucratic state. The vagaries concerning society intensified during the reign of science precisely because those vagaries would be imposed artificially, to mystify the growing bureaucracies and the conspiracies that individuals activated against the public. This is seemingly strange, because science would have been able to answer questions of society very easily without sacrificing our native understanding, and this was the expectation many held up until the bitter end of modernity and the final result playing out in this century.

There is an attempt to conflate all action and thus all things with "life", but life as we know it is a very particular event and action, rather than a rule for all systems. Not all life does everything the way human life does, where our thought processes originated around the demands of life before humans realized that life itself was a trap, and could incorporate the non-living, dead, and spiritual into their understanding and daily practice. We integrated the disparate parts of us, including our tools and machinery, because we need to do this in a very particular way. The way we think is not merely the product of natural processes or a primitive urge, but a long history where humans communicated with each other and knowledge in primitive form was accumulated, lost, and re-accumulated in new people. The reproduction of this knowledge happens every day, as it is repeated for every individual who is taught and absorbs the knowledge for personal use. Many variants of systems thought place "being" in a separate sphere of reality from "doing" altogether, and in doing so, any system can be replaced with a number of word tokens or ideas of what the system "ought" to be. Yet, it is very difficult, bordering on impossible, to say something substantial about systems without describing their motive and function. Without substantive action, all that is said about them are some tautologies or metaphors which miss the mark tragically, when a simple explanation of function would allow for a fuller understanding. Simple functions in concert become something entirely different, whether they can be broken down into the constituent parts or not. The unification of functions around a particular form is a thing ultimately discerned by us and by the real relations between a thing. We may identify recurrent centers - for example, we can conclude that substantive matter is arranged in what appears to us as particles we can quantify, and we observe particles and the resulting molecules in everyday substances. Out of 92 naturally occurring elements, some of which are very rare, arise alloys and hydrocarbons, which create all the interactions of organic chemistry, which are the basis for living chemical reactions of the type that is the standard purview of biology. Those elements did not exist just because they did, but because they are all in the end comprised of energy and substance and arranged in particular ways, and the study of these particles has been long established and does not need to be recounted here. The systems thought in the hands of an ideologue obstructs understandings that are very simple, where new things emerge from prior conditions, and replaces the system with an idea, which must be fully digested and now is only animated by "internal contradictions" or some other mystification a philosopher may develop. Ultimately these mystifications rest on a conceit held about life that makes it somehow special, and the liberal imperial philosopher has built a whole castle of ridiculous lies to tell the rubes if they dare ask questions that suggests eugenics may be wrong.

In logical analysis of systems, all of these things about the system are broken down into propositions of truth and falsity, down to the smallest identifiable part or aspect. We may be able to discern aspects of a system that we didn't consider before, but we would need to be careful to not invent things that are not substantive or meaningful in the way they need to be to speak of this as something real in the system. The final proof of a system is not in our conceits about systems, but in the material reality underneath them. Because we can never truly "know" matter, we are prone to making errors, and we may yet discover things about the world that were overlooked; but we know a lot about material systems. If we wish to build atop our understanding, the new understanding must eventually not contradict our existing understanding, or new understandings must inform our prior understanding and we update our sense of the world. Since we are stubborn about our sense of what is real, for reasons that make a lot of sense for life, changing radically our world-view is not likely with a simple assertion by thought alone. We do recognize in our understanding of the world that there are things we do not know, and a viable world-system is built from our initial observation of the world and our deconstruction of it, rather than an idea about the world held in the mind or handed down by a pedagogue. For this thinking on systems to hold requires us to consider that every thinking animal holds, in some way, a world-system or a collection of knowledge particular to their mind, and this world system must be free of contradictions or errors in order to remain intact. In the actual, real world, there are no contradictions - everything is as it was meant to be, whether it "should" be that way or not. This is not to say the real world is immutable or predestined in the way we might imagine, because a feature of that world is that any agent can affect that world independently of others, so long as it is constituted as a meaningful force in the world. We privilege thinking agents, but a star's supernova is not an act of thought, nor is a hurricane or an earthquake. If humans manipulate those events, then the thought is not in the weather event itself, but in a human manipulator. There are then very large events which impact the world without any human agency, but human agency can command those natural events simply by knowledge of their recurrence and predictions of how to best utilize them when they happen. Humans are highly opportunistic and capable of adjusting their plans as needed. The thinking of eugenics is that the master plan is an immaculate conspiracy which never goes wrong. If any grand narrative prediction is disproven, it is the task of the eugenic philosopher to rewrite history and ignore the past, as eugenics cannot fail - it can only be failed. For the conditions of eugenics to hold true implies the total control of the environment, or at least the ability to project that such a thing is possible. It is for that reason alone that ubiquitous propaganda appeared as it did. It is not that blanketing every surface with advertisements was effective at informing people or even projecting the state's force for any purpose, as eventually the familiar logo becomes background noise. The use of such mass propaganda is only effective if the ruling ideas suggest at the core that history is bunk and truth is personal, and this idea cannot simply be asserted in secret. The ruling idea of eugenics succeeds because it treats its destruction of material reality and history as a biological fact, which is inherent to what it means to be alive. To go against eugenics is not just tantamount to death; in the theory of eugenics and the taboos it enforces, to simply oppose eugenics with all your heart IS death and the very definition of sickness. Only through eugenics can someone be healthy, sane, and successful, following the example of a Christ-variant. Eugenics replaced Christ and relied on this understanding of systems and our ability to know things to suggest that it can and should do this.^[2][3]

We operate on things that are relevant to us as if they are wholes, rather than operating on the parts without sense of their connection. This pattern recognition is almost instinctive, and can be found across the world regardless of education, lanaguage, culture, and so on. It is of course possible to deal with assemblages of parts without any knowledge of how they are integrated, and some are more adept at working out a system for these objects than others. There is a challenge of being able to understand familiar systems of similar type, like those in a specialty of knowledge or practice, and another in being able to relate systems that can be very different and consider what happens when a foreign concept can apply to something very different. Darwin's great contribution to biology was the introduction of political economy to a question of natural history - he cites his ancestor Malthus as providing an answer to a question of history, by applying a population principle originally intended for humans to the animal kingdom and modifying it necessarily so that the principle was applied towards useful ends in Darwin's view. It should be noted that Darwin in doing this is not suggesting the crude, purely political takes on evolution that took his name, and he actually did not like this because it undermined the claims he made and how they could be proven; nor did Darwin possess a genetic theory in Origin of Species, because the genetic question was not relevant to Darwin's immediate problem and Darwin approached life as most people did, as a living creature that is responding to its situation. The import of Malthus' population principle is not sensical unless it is assumed there is some impulse in life that seeks reproduction, and in Darwin's example, the life-forms that reproduce less generally are less successful in being expressed in the species seen today; but Darwin tempers this by suggesting varying strategies life may use to proliferate, rather than simply believing the struggle for life to be an inexorable and linear trend towards some power and victory condition. The point here is that when importing something very alien and human to the animal kingdom, it should not be taken lightly and the conditions should be understood, rather than chanted as an article of faith as so many fools have done with biopolitical conceits. Of course, Charles Darwin would have no complaint about eugenics as a crusade, but eugenics was first and foremost a political movement rather than a genuine science, and the conceits of eugenics were brazenly nonsensical. It was not even pseudoscience, but some other species of perversion that succeeded not because it was right, but because it could do so and violently suppresed any suggestion that it could be wrong. And so, when we speak of living things, we think of whole organisms rather than the constitutent parts. Historically, living things still had a sense of their organs being individually relevant for their task, but in this question of reproductive success and speciation, it was necessary first to view the organism wholistically, and this is something that came into vogue around the time Darwin writes. If the whole can be judged, the genetic material is taken as the whole of its origin because it seems natural enough - life originates somewhere and generally, offspring resemble parents and continue struggling to live. The environmental effects on development do not outweigh much of what is hereditary - humans give birth to humans who are very similar to the parents rather than being a general "human" form held as universal. What was not substantiated were the grandiose claims of the eugenists that they were the smartest people in the room, or that their quote-unquote "science" suggested anything other than creative statistical manipulation and Galton incredulously saying "see?", while deploying every charlatan's trick and cajoling to unite a particular sort in the middle class that grasped for position. Virutally none of the claims about heredity had to do with things which were practical or measurable, and concerned instead claims about general intelligence that were premised on ridiculous criteria. Galton insists on these criteria because opening the eugenic interest to public scrutiny would cast doubt on who Galton believed should survived, and it would cast doubt on the interest gathering around eugenics who were all a particular sort of imperious person or their supplicants.

A common difficulty, deliberately engineered in state education and promoted by ideologues against those out of the know, is that the ruling philosophies do not deal with scale or distance, and are designed to confuse this concept. The statement "nature abhors a vacuum" is not sensical, but it is something you would say if you intentionally wished to compress space to that which is ideal and conforms to your wishes. The general rule is that nothingness predominates, and substance is rare and precious. Without void, there can be no distance and indeterminate substance in all things, all mashed together as mentioned in Chapter 2. And so, if we want to best isolate systems, we would consider proximity of the parts, and have a language for connections and how we make them. In short, we would ask ourselves a question every so often - how do we think, and what may bias our thinking about the world? A new paradigm arises typically not because it was ordained from above, but because it was a useful paradigm for a question asked. The medieval thinkers approached the world as a religious question because religion became the most useful governing institution and a repository of knowledge and seat of spiritual authority, and warlords looked to the Church for assistance and mediation between them. The early moderns gravitated towards heat because steam power, industry, and electricity were seen as the necessary next step, and harnessing them led to looking for those processes and their parallels everywhere they could be found. Life took center stage because the objective during the 20th century shifted from producing quantities and masses of energy, to producing particular qualities and commanding the functions of life in a minute way. If there is a paradigm in the future, it will respond to the situation we face either today or in the future. It is my belief that the paradigm centering life and the cajoling of us will not last, and cannot last, and so there must be a willingness to move on, at least in secret. Because eugenics is not just the ruling idea but an apparatus arranging wars and creating a living Hell, this will be very difficult. Those selected to die are fed a diet of pure eugenics and the word "retarded" stamped on their face forever, the thrill of the eugenist overwhelming anything we might consider decent. Those selected to live have long understood on some level that eugenics isn't really a science and doesn't produce better men at all, and have conducted their plans as they see fit. Eugenics for those who really know its function is a useful tool for liquidating people they never wanted to keep in the first place, and it motivates the incredulous zealots who prove they are more animal than human and revel in the rot of it all. But in all cases, space or what we sense as such is a very real constraint. We do not move as we wish, as if we were moved by a hobgoblin once every cycle. There are expectations in physical existence which exist for a reason, and no motion can be truly instantaneous to speak of movement at all. And so, part of the new understanding would be to return to a concept of doing and reducing "Being" to its appropriate domain - which is to say, those who actually work and think about the world as it is must ignore the philosophers and cajolers long enough and retain their own wits, which is a very difficult thing in this society. But simply reducing the world to "doing" implies some harsh consequences, and this weakness is a thing known and exploited by those who didn't lose their wits and figured out how the human mind works. This knowledge of the mind's working has always been accessible and any psychological inquisitor relied on it, but the art would remain forbidden because the inquisitors were to be presented as priests above "vulgar science" of the producers.

By regarding void as something meaningful, space can be understood not as a theoretical container but something about which we can say a few things. Space itself is not a "thing" that is substantive, but as I suggested, space likely exists in the simplest way it can exist, rather than a way that was arbitrarily defined. If we imagined a two-dimensional space, the complexity of matter likely couldn't exist as it does, and we can conclude that likely there was a density of substance long long ago or in some primitive state that suggested dimensionality quickly took on more than one or two aspects, and that each added dimension increases considerably the potential complexity - so much that a fourth dimension would not have much substance that we could detect. At a large enough scale, the universe appears to be a mostly "flat" topology, with the greatest protrusions being around the stars or centers of gravity. This doesn't necessarily operate at the lower scale - we may imagine the elements as solar systems in miniature, but it is entirely possible that the organization of space at that scale is of a much different nature, such that the electrons in orbit would not have any particular orientation, compared to the generally flat plane of solar orbits for the main planets. I do not wish to enter a long digression about particle physics better covered by other people, but this is indicative of the importance of space itself, and of its history. There could not be awareness of the world without space and thus without void, and the space is not an arbitrary distance. We would not need to presume that the system of a star forms as the system of a planet would, or that these are simply a matter of scale or some quality from the quantity of substance involved. They form under very different circumstances, and so it is with the smallest systems of particles which were largely formed in conditions which long established the matter of the world as something dominated by the recurrence of common particles, rather than loose substance floating around everywhere and slowly accumulating. There is no such abundance of stars or planets as there is of molecules, which would have absorbed loose energy into their orbits, such that a "natural formation" of the particle would not be seen as we see the formation of planetary orbits and accretion disks. If something were to arise seemingly ex nihilo, it would be a process starting at some basic level, like dust accreting to form a star as the current theory of star formation goes. Human consciousness did not suddenly pop into the world, where before we say "animal" and at some arbitrary phase "human" - it developed organically because it did not exist ready-made in the world, or with the human mind created in the image of a god. More primitive processes built on top of each other and our ability to think as we do has been a gradual project, and one that never ended. It was this truth that the eugenists and many charlatans latched onto in order to end the human project and take it in a direction towards their vices, rather than allow the human to become what it would need to be to cooperate and thrive in technological society. It became necessary to reduce humans to a biopolitical definition, and then degrade understanding of what biology even was, so that anything can be anything, and the brief awakenings in humanity can be silenced forever and aristocracy can rule with the untrammeled authority it always craved. All of this required abolishing space and void, returning to an imagined primordial light and oneness in which all are alien to each other, yet lack any language suggesting that they could be anything other than what they were assigned to be. It is because we can contemplate nothingness that the complexity of things can exist at all, and it has been a constant of philosophy to tell us that nothingness cannot hold meaning, even though it is clearly not true to our most basic sense. We can only know things by what they are not and what is excluded between that which we capture as ideas, which we analyze further and further with the faculties available to us. Logic cannot exist in any consistent form if it were handed down from on high; it instead emerged from prior conditions in the simplest way it could have, which is why formal logic remains so consistent and all reasoning we develop must pertain to an actual world, rather than the world we would want to exist in our delusions of grandeur. Much is made of human insignficance, which is true, but it is not possible in the present ideas to imagine humans as anything other than absolutes, because technocratic society abolished meaningful comparisons of scale and did so deliberately. It did so by effectively telling us that the void cannot mean anything, and that all is contained within the impulse of "life" - which is actually nothing more than a symbol of imperial legitimacy, rather than the thing we would have considered life to be, and did consider life to be until the eugenic conspiracy imposed its version of reality. The concept that there is something outside of society had to muted, and the only way to do this permanently was to deny that there could be such a thing as void in a spiritual sense. If there is a void, the will to power - a conceit of humans for their petty purposes - will immediately fill the vacuum and create reality, blocking it off to our native faculties of reason and sense and especially blocking it off to our own will to affect anything.

We are left then with the "system" so defined as a sort of animistic spirit, and we have come full circle to the origin of spiritual authority itself. The university came to its roots as a religious institution, and presented an understanding of systems that aligned with its plan to command them, without really knowing them or suggesting anything transcendent except their will. Most systems do not have the same intent that we do, but we read that intent into them regardless because we need to do so in order to properly define them. The intent we read is based on something real, because our own thought could only have arisen from a real process, but our ability to assemble these systems is limited. We do not have the hypothetical observer's insight into all things given to us, but must reconstruct this by analysis and the crude beginning of our sense. Life is peculiar in that it is defined more by its intent and behaviors than any fixed quality we could isolate in a lab, where we could cleanly define that which lives from that which does not. Life, in this view of it as functions and processes, is something animating the flesh which is just dead chemicals without the vital force holding it in place. This force exists in the first instance because a system could perpetuate itself in a relatively stable form, adapting to a wide range of situations where most things in the world can only withstand a fixed pressure or mutate into anything else the world does to it. Life is uniquely stubborn in persisting as it has been in order to be life, while no such intent could be read into a sheet of metal. The metal has an understood tolerance for heat and force that would break it, but life is not defined by those hard limits. Only dead things are truly consigned to that, and in arresting this vitality, a separation is made in living things - those that truly live, and those selected by the living to die. The attitudes of eugenics then are entirely towards a populace whose death was assigned in the mind of the eugenist long before true death. Those culled by eugenics are not killed in the eugenists' mind, but the order of the day is to set right that which ought to be dead by their thinking. In the mind of the eugenist, they see those to be culled as living abortions and can do no other, and this is a pathological trait of eugenics that cannot be reasoned with. It is for that reason that the absurd and perverse morality of eugenics is promoted. The eugenist on some level knows they are playing a mental trick, and does not actually hold two contradictory ideas in their head simultaneously, but it is absolutely necessary to claim that you can and do in order to demonstrate the lordship of the eugenist over all other things. Hypocrisy elevates to something altogether different, and becomes the way of life to be defended. The whole point is to be flagrantly wrong and lie as brazenly as possible, and this is done not because it is a strong strategy to compel submission, but because it is necessary for the eugenist's sense of themselves and the world. They would lie for the sake of lying, and lie to each other as a rule simply because it pleases them. The thrill of this so-called victory and the torture become life's prime want. It is this which allows them to truly say A is not A - that is, anything can be anything and nothing. Annihilating any spiritual authority and sense we would look to outside of ourselves was the final piece to make total submission to an alien intellect possible, and it started by suggesting that all that exist is both known and unknowable, forbidding that there is any knowable quality in the system except that which a thought leader decrees from their revelation, which the thought leader will relay to you without any barrier. The modern machine of mind control was ready for deployment.

None of these systems are singular or fixed in nature, but for us to speak of anything, we name specific patterns and their qualities, and possess a language that allows for analysis of those qualities and comparison to other qualities, and comparison to those things which we would consider transcendent. Some things are not truly transcendent, but are so foundational that they are very close to that. Space and time, for example, are difficult to part from without stepping outside of our typical functioning and reasoning about the world. Time has certainly been scrutinized over the years, and many stupid sayings about "time being relative" miss the point that is made by the principle of relativity. The status of time as a "thing" has always been shakier than the status of space. Whatever our name of things and understanding of them, the things do exist independent of us, and we just see what is. And so, the identity of things remains intact, with the caveat that those identities are a name for us, and should not be confused with the reality itself. What we see is very close to the real situation, because it is very difficult for our eyes to deceive us. Mind deceives all the time, but the sensory organs detect what they do, and the brain cannot trick itself in its most basic functions in relaying that sense to the body. The claim of the eugenist is that they can command reality at all of its levels and possess the sole super-knowledge, and a Satanic mentality regarding God is at the core of the entire eugenics movement. It can do nothing else. Yet, the truth of things has a way of coming out no matter how much we deceive ourselves. If it has to come at the very end, as we approach death and were prepared with promises of eternal bliss in the primordial light, only to learn the joke at the end that it was all a lie, that would create the maximal thrill for the eugenist. It is that which informs its approach to euthanasia, abortion, the lockouts of those cast out, and the way in which discipline is enforced among the eugenists themselves. These are terrible people who revel in the thrill and rot of what they created. They are nothing else, and do not see the purpose of anything but the thrill. Their moral and ethical philosophy tells them to do this and recapitulate it in increasingly bizarre contortions, where the moral philosophy can justify any cruelty and sadism but cannot suggest a world where anyone at all can live, unless they submit wholly to the thrill of maximal sadism. None of the sadism of the eugenists is particularly effective, but they do it instinctively because they can, and because of an impulse in eugenism to regress to this state that takes on a life of its own. They later rationalize this, and orient their behavior around a whole value system where misery is the point, and all understanding inimical to the urge to torture must be abolished. The only way it can be sustained is by finding some misery to inflict, and so it perpetuates itself. So long as fuel is fed to the beast, it will continue; and so it revels most of all in denying attention to anything that would counteract its creed, and revels in absolute ignorance. All these things feed off each other to accelerate the rot within our systems of knowledge, and that is reflected in the state of science and the understanding of systems we are allowed.

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True analysis of systems is not a mere recitation of facts, regurgitated as if they were questions on a quiz show. A proper materialist view of the world entails the ruthless criticism of all that exists, and this is not limited to a single approach to the world that alone allows such a criticism. Humans' native sense has always questioned everything around them out of necessity, and it was the role of the philosopher and thought leader to tell people what questions were permissible and what questions could not be permitted. The most general materialist approach to the world is skeptical of all ideas we would hold, and can on its own accept nothing at all. Materialism without any metaphysics is a grand discussion about nothing; but because ideas are not true fundamental things, every idealist view of the world can be attacked by the sense of human beings, whose basic constitution was formed long before conceits about ourselves or what things were "supposed" to be. The starting position for this inquiry is something that came before us, that was not willed by anyone. None of us had a choice in being born, and it would be madness to blame someone for their early childhood, yet the latter is something explicitly demanded by the sick moral depravity of political society. The starting point - the faculties available to someone at any particular moment and situation - is a given. What is extrapolated from it is not. The starting point of our investigation is not some pristine moment of purity, but a situation that itself is in flux. We started thinking about the world not as an idle exercise, but because this investigation is something we had to do in order to truly live. Even if we were very incurious and willing to accept staccato answers from a pedagogue, we learn very quickly of the human propensity for lying and to distrust words from people who cannot be trusted. Those who forget this are painfully reminded of this human cruelty and its centrality to everything humans do. There are those who embrace the lie and revel in it instinctively, and these people are rewarded and selected for advancement in eugenic society. Reality will, at some point, present something that must be assimilated into someone's knowledge base, or that will have consequences whether we think about it or not. For ideas and metaphysics to even be held, it is necessary to world we encounter as a fluctuating beast, which we make sense of in whatever way we can. The initial assumptions we held might have been things that just so happened in our lives, but we can see very easily that nothing happens "just so", and that all events in our lives arose for some reason. We are the way we are because of processes we can understand, from which we derive general rules and learn that these processes are not particular to us or our standpoint.

All of the complexity of the world is not reducible to a number of forms or ideas - and there are, in reality, no ideas at all except the one idea of existence itself. Idealism always returns to the primordial light, however it constitutes its world-system, while materialism develops into potentially limitless complexity. The problem of materialism is our own ability to describe this complexity, or understand it in ways we appreciate for our use. In the purely mechanistic world, human beings and their conceits do not immediately matter or hold any relevance. We only possess a conscious mind and experience because materially occurring events have led to an entity which, out of necessity, integrates itself as a whole. In doing so, the entity of the self is necessarily in communication with a whole world. This communication is not equal and cannot ignore distance, but to say anything at all about material things requires an assumption that there is a universe to describe. If the world were comprised of seemingly random events, it would be impossible to say anything meaningful about any particular event. A propensity in humans finds some common pattern. It is the function of the worst pedagogy to tell us we cannot do this at all, and that all such investigation is managed by thought leaders and designated change agents.

There is not truly a "knower" that is not itself a system in flux, no different from any other. It is through that system that knows anything that any world-system can be construted, and so the starting point of our knowledge is ourselves. Individual minds encounter the world, which at first is unknown, and included in the world is their own existence; the formation of the mind from its more basic components is not a history we know intuitively, but one we reconstruct. There was never a primordial genesis of "pure reason" or "pure mind" which must remain a type of thing apart from any other. Humans, like anything else, rose from muck in the world, and when we are cast down as most of us are, we may creep back out of the muck in an attempt to live in some way that would be dignified. This should not be interpreted to underestimate just how unusual human experience is in the world. Only an insufferable ideologue truly believes that their existence is the center of the universe. It does not take a great mind to sense that the world was here before us, and is much larger than any one person or any institution humanity has built. The conceit that Man's will commands reality by thought alone is a pernicious insanity which has been cultivated over centuries. It is a conceit that is inherent to slavery as an institution, and it is for that reason that the insanity is cultivated. Any slave master will, upon analysis of his stock, sense that he doesn't command the slaves by shouting petulantly that the slaves are supposed to obey. Slavery entails certain expenses, the nature of which are beyond the scope of the present writing. It is important to dismiss now one of the common conceits, because it has been the task of the pedagogue and philosopher to defend some form of slavery, by whatever name and modus operandi it uses. What does become clear over time is that human sanity and the faculties of the body are precious, and the free development of a human being is far from a given. The natural condition of Man as a system in flux must regularly do particular things in order to remain constituted as Man, or any sort of creature capable of thought and experience in a way we judge as real and useful. We can work out through investigation of history, the world, and what we recall in memory, how the events and parts which comprise us came to be integrated, and the ways in which we have been disrupted throughout our lives. Response to pain and a keen awareness of the world - including the chief threat to a human, which is other humans - is one of the most reliable pedagogues Man can ever find, for suffering is very real and it requires no mysterious knowledge to know it. It is so trusted that to this day, even though we know this process is ruinous, the teacher resorts to humiliation and insults to correct a child, who has no reliable basis for sorting the accumulated knowledge of civilization other than the teacher and whatever books the child may find, all of which are of dubious reliability. As the complexity of knowledge increased, and human beings were dragged into technological society, the native process by which this knowledge can be integrated faces a challenge. We could overcome this, but a decision is make to do the exact opposite and ensure human subjects are broken down and reduced to miserable wretches.

If the knowledge base itself is in flux and must be self-referential, it is only describable at all because there is a concept of void or non-existence, allowing for one local event to be different from another. It should be clear that any knowledge base is local to us, rather than knowledge existing "as-is" anywhere in the world. Thinking entities assemble a representation of the actual world which we call knowledge, and it is this knowledge that human faculties must deal with rather than the world itself. It may seem strange to think of a fist punching your face as "merely an idea", but if we are to act with the meaning of the fist taken into account, we are not contemplating the fist's composition when punches are thrown. In a fight, we would have to contend with the struggle in terms we would find useful. A philosophical treatment of the fight is an exercise for another time, and if we are to pontificate during a fight, the investigation must be brief enough that the fighter is not lost in thought before the next punch comes. A fighter would, perhaps, learn from their opponent on the fly, rather than being locked into a few strategies which are followed more or less by instinct. The point here is that we began assembling this knowledge base for a purpose, rather than pure truth for its own sake. Eventually, our investigation requires us to ask if the world is something very different from what are sense of utility would push us to believe. Rather than responding to each concept we encounter in a fight as what it is - developing a different routine for punches, kicks, and various tactics - all that fighting entails would be tied together in a general theory and practice of how to fight. The various tasks fighting involves must be integrated towards some common goal we had in mind, and this requires us to ask the question "why am I fighting?", among others that describe the situation. This necessarily ties into the whole world, of which fighting is a small part, and to know anything about fighting requires possessing a basis in general knowledge of the world. At its root then are a few laws of the world where appear to be transcendent, which allow us to describe any system at all. Logic is one tool for describing these systems. A theory of the brain and what we are is another, as it is through sense experience that we have raw data to describe what is happening materially. We seek a common quality of things in the world and one such quality is that physical objects are comprised of some substance which is common and explicable, and from that we can break down the various physical objects into components. The starting point is ourselves, but the mind is not a self-contained system and could not be. It did not "just-so" come into existence, and so humans largely see the same thing when analyzing the physical world. We can conclude that other humans are like ourselves in their faculties, and that much of the world is comprised of material things we study. That study can come from science or by whatever method we would possess to assimilate knowledge of the world, but all of these studies observe the same world, and the method one person possesses is in theory intelligible by another's method, even if they came from wildly different perspectives and assimilated knowledge in a different way. Knowledge-building in life is not merely any arrangement of matter that "performs" the role, but is a particular process of us that we can understand. We can think about how we think, and most of us do this throughout life. Only after doing this for long enough and assimilating a sense of the world through our selves do we become truly "sentient", and this sentience is something we know to be fragile. Chief among the functions of the body is to maintain its integrity, or else it won't remain a body for long, and so one of the most basic emotions and actions we perform is fear. Another is a curiosity about the alien, which eventually we meet whether we want to or not. Fear and a want to explore are typically balanced in a functioning human, so that one does not override the other. The function of modern pedagogy and philosophy is to ensure one or the other does override what would have made sense to us in a different world. Fear is to be commanded by the master and by the slave, and the master's curiosity and knowledge-building becomes the only valid type. The slave is conditioned to live by fear and turn it into a religion, and the slave's curiosity is cajoled and directed towards a pernicious pedagogy intended to teach eternal failure and defeat. This goal is explicit in the birth of modern idealism, in which the masters and slaves are segregated in the philosopher's mind as part of some sick conceit they hold about the state and their society. A crass appeal to the material, or some philosophy of grasping to seize the state, is little better for the purpose we had from the outset. It is important once again to note how even our basic faculties have been invaded by pernicious ideas, and how this was weaponized during the 20th century to ensure that most of humanity is caught in a perpetual no-win scenario. Sisyphus pushing a rock became the model for human labor, glorifying the pointlessness of all of our endeavors while enshrining the sadism of the ruling ideas.

All of our knowledge is a work in progress, and it is particular to human beings in the world. The world itself does not care about this knowledge; nor is there such a thing as "society" that truly lives and thinks as we do, with an independent knowledge-building process. The knowledge in society is only ever known by human agents, who are constituted in a particular way that allows them to "know" anything at all. The machines people build do not "know" or truly think in the sense that humans do. This is so because conscious experience is not an abstraction, nor is it just matter or energy generally. The origins of consciousness are in particular activities that must be continuous in order for all of this energy to manifest "knowing" in a sense that we would appreciate. Conscious experience precedes any knowledge that we do in fact "think" or any symbolic language to express it. An animal is still conscious of the world around it. Human beings, due to the faculty of language and their communication in society, possess knowledge in a form that animals cannot, or at least animals do not communicate to us. The animal can in some sense know the world around them - if it didn't, it could not react to the world around it, and its behavior would be chaotic and inexplicable, and unable to orient towards the goals even a basic animal would seek. The computer or the machine, unlike animals or humans, is built to replicate a rote task that we use computers for, and the output of the machine is intended to interface with a human user, or some thinking agent that eventually reaches a human. If a machine were to operate its processes without any humans attending it, then it would be no different than any other matter in motion in the world. The machine itself had no want or need or goal it was oriented towards, other than that which was supplied to it by its builder. Once its directive is complete, or if the program simply loops forever, the machine carries on as something inert. To be truly conscious implies a continuous relationship with the world, that the entity can appreciate as something other than abstraction. To be conscious has nothing to do with rational information, which is a faculty we can adopt and replicate very easily. It doesn't have anything to do with sanity, or a particular level of development that we regard as "valid thought". To be a thinking agent implies not a state of being, but particular actions that would constitute that thought. For humans, or any free-standing thinking agent, this process only ends when we end. The human's existence is not reducible to this knowledge base or conscious pressing into the world alone. Such an existence would be anathema to all concepts we hold about what it means to be "us". Knowledge systems detached from their real origins are meaningless and ephermeal. There is no genuine knowledge in the world that is not tied to some substantive existence, and could not be. Once that knowledge base is established, though, thinking creatures can develop abstractions that are not apparent by simply looking at the world. All the ideas we hold about the world are things which are potentially accessible to another mind, if we could communicate without the filters we normally use in interacting with people. This communication would be as close to direct as we possibly could be; but it is not defined by any particular medium or approach to talking. Humans can choose whether they will be honest or deceptive towards another human, and think about concealing their appearance and knowledge in the world. Even if they do not know another person will be looking at them, there is a conscious sense that someone, somewhere could pick up what we leave behind. Among the impulses that orient the body to integrate its functions in the first place is fear, or a more base impulse in life that living things developed around to stabilize as they did. Fear is not the sole emotion or the basis for all others, for human beings interact with a world which requires much more than that simple impulse. Fear and the more base impulses do explain why we orient our thought the way we do, and why we had to think of ourselves as persons in a society, or as individuals in a state of savagery. Without those impulses and tendencies in life, the thinking entity and task would be very different, and thought in organic life was secondary to the most basic functions of life. Thinking life only develops with the centralization of a nervous system, and develops in humans due to tool use, language, interaction with other humans, and the construction of machines which are novel. Even the simplest tools humans use are not ready-made in nature for us. Humans are ingenious at finding some implement like a rock and dissecting its utilities for the various tasks we might have for it. Nowhere in nature were axes, swords, bows, plows, and all the machinery of civilization created for us, encoded and permanent. All of the more advanced tools could only have developed over some time, and in response to some necessity or a desire in humans to optimize performance of tasks. Knowledge systems themselves originate not as pure knowledge, but as a type of technology or tool that can be applied for our purposes. If we desired knowledge for its own sake, we can only pursue that aim for so long until the pressing needs of sustenance and survival against predators are evident. The pursuit of greater knowledge is always wary of threats either from an external agent who is also accumulating knowledge, or from the world itself which was not designed to serve our ends.

It is most necessary not to confuse the media - the symbols, sounds, and so on we process in language - from the underlying meaning, which is the true purpose of knowledge as opposed to information or data. It is true that all that we can know is mediated in some way - I repeat again that there is no knowledge ready-made for us in the world. This is a characteristic of knowledge, and the sole mediator at the end is the world itself. No entity within the world can mediate for us in the direct way the world itself does. Our first analysis has to acknowledge the world as a whole, rather than any part of it or any pedagogy we might be subjected to. For us to know more about the world, we have to reach out on our own initiative. That initiative might be prompted by another entity or some force in the world, but in the end, we cannot be forcefed knowledge in some pure form. If we were to receive instruction and information directly, bypassing the filters of reason that we normally maintain, it would still be necessary to assimilate that information into a coherent world-system for its effects to be meaningful. Otherwise, the brain and body are filled with disjointed information, and eventually the human is unable to make decisions and experiences a reckoning. Attempts to impose an ideology by diktat are doomed to failure no matter how much they are insinuated. The ideology can press incessantly against us, so far as something substantive transmits this ideology, but unless the information can be assembled by a functioning mind, it is of little use. Even the simplest idea has to be congruent with other ideas we hold in order for it to lead to genuine knowledge or an application of knowledge to action. It may be the case that the human in actuality is not as integrated as we would like to believe - we often do things that are called subconscious that are not part of any deliberate intent, and these responses can be ingrained through drilling and torture common to our society. We may only partially know what we are doing, and this is completely natural. We don't hold the sum total of our experience in our mind with everything we do, because we would be under severe strain if we were hyper-aware of all events around us. Filtering our thought about the world and compartmentalizing our presentation to society and the world is itself something we do to navigate the world. We are aware there is information available to us that we don't normally regard, and so we might keep a library for personal use or some reference to assist our rational faculties.

I also want to make clear the distinction between causality and mechanism. Causality is, in our experience, an expression in language of events that happen, in a way that comports with our understanding of things. A cause need not act on an object to produce an effect immediately, and there are effects which are caused by no mechanism at all, but are an inherent property of a system's structure. The frame of a house, for instance, does not mechanistically "cause" the house to stay in place, as if the frame must initiate some force to keep the house standing. The forces acting on the house - the wear and tear of weather, gravity, a bulldozer smashing it, whatever - affect the house and its frame. We can understand that the frame, by virtue of existence, exerts physical force that does mechanistic things, but the effect of "house remains standing" can be appreciated without a full mechanistic analysis; nor is it an axiomatic rule that a house must have a "frame". Mud huts and teepees do not have wooden frames and may not have any recognizable frame at all, and their architecture must rely on principles we would not use with steel girders. To have a useful theory of architecture, we would understand physics and the materials that constitute the house, and how those materials would operate in an ideal space, and then we would theorize hypothetical natural elements in that ideal space to test in imagination whether that house would withstand environmental events. The cause of the house's construction leading to an effect that the house stays in place is something we lump together, because if we included every potential mechanistic cause in the universe that is acting at any given time, we could not resolve the cause-effect chain in our models of language and thought for ourselves. We would, if we wish to be thorough, strive to include every possible mechanism in the world that could destroy our well-constructed house, but houses can stand for a long time without every possibility being explored. It is only necessary to demonstrate sufficiently to our knowledge that a house will withstand events we regard as relevant to the question of causality posed, or what conditions may exist that will destroy or damage the house. If we were to imagine the system of a house as a clockwork, and wanted the fullest mechanistic accounting of architecture possible, we cannot omit the slightest detail that might affect the house, even if it is something insignificant. The world itself does not care about our knowledge of houses or whether we think the house is supposed to stand or crumble. So too does mechanism not care about our conceits about the world or ourselves. We can see the problem with this, and this is a problem mechanism faced since Antiquity - if we are to reduce the world to mechanistic causes, we are left with an infinite series, reproducing Zeno's old paradox in an algorithm. There are solutions to this paradox which can survive a mechanistic view of the world, but to solve the paradox requires us to consider a world where mechanism alone is not the sole explanation of events. We would need some creative device to summarize infinite regress or an infinite series, and we can indeed do this in mathematics but not without a clear understanding of what we are doing in making the claim of an infinitesimal. What we cannot do in a mechanistic view is suggest that our limited understanding is an excuse to claim that a particular mechanism doesn't exist, even if it is the tiniest pertubation in our model. Every single pertubation or potential pertubation must be accounted for if we wish to view this piece of architecture and its environment mechanistically. We may make mistakes, since our knowledge of the true state of the world is always limited, but we know simply by accepting the world's existence that there are aspects of it we do not know immediately, and that there is a finite limit to human knowledge. This is not because the limit is absolute unknowability, but because the "knowing" system is in the end limited to the faculties available to it. If we wish to view this mechanistic question properly, the only way to do so is to start with both skepticism and a curiosity to see the truth, regardless of our fetters and biases. We may not wish to acknowledge all things in the world, and can only consider so much with our faculties. We account instinctively for events which are too minor to impact our sense of the system's scale, and so dismiss the movement of random particles and concern ourselves with mechanistic events of magnitude appropriate for the question. We also account for the obvious that if a quasar rips through Planet Earth, our house is not likely to survive - and if it does survive, we're not likely to remain alive to see it for long. There are many events of such large scale that would be like the destruction of an antill, and it is impractical to list all of those events. We would at the least sort them by likelihood, but very often we limit our investigation to a number of forces common enough to be expected, which operate at the scale of the individual house rather than something much larger or too small to be substantively significant.

For now, the question of what "we" are is not too important. We can tell from a young age that we are not reducible to a story about what we are, or what some pedagogue insisted our place in society was to be. In the past, it was impossible to invade private life in most cases, and a thorough sorting of the population like livestock was not technically possible. Too many people would resist, and too many players in society had an incentive to resist. It was understood that if the practice of degrading people to their lowest and most base traits became absolute, it would destroy the very thing a manager wished to appropriate by doing this. It does not take long for a willful knower to assert him- or herself against the world and any other person they encounter, and this is done out of necessity. Even a slave will remain stubborn in their faculties, and a wise master is not going to do the slave's job for them. The point of holding the slave was that the slave would do that for the master, and the master's incentive is merely to create the threat that compels a slave to do what the slave does not want to do, or compel the slave through manipulation of incentives to do something the master would want. It has been a long-run goal of all slaveries to define absolutely what their slave can be, but this run counter to a tendency of masters to be lazy and an incentive in politics to gain the most reward for the least effort. The tyranny any slavery implies works against what the master wanted out of slavery, but the master can never surrender the tyranny for a moment. Today's effort to catalogue extensively the population and sort them into grades of civic worth is the most elaborate slave system yet known, and unlike past slaveries which were always provisional, eugenic slavery seeks to become permanent. It seeks to arrest the world entirely, and the masters are taught to discipline themselves in accord with the eugenic creed alone. The full implications of this are beyond the scope of this writing, but an instinct in us has likely led the reader of this book to this conclusion without my prompting. The finer details of how and why may not be clear to the reader, and the implications of the slave system are to my knowledge not documented anywhere. There are those in the machine that possess vast information and know the intent of the present institutions without the fetter of ideology, but the perspective that has been missing until recently is the perspective of the lowest class, who have for all of human history been mute in political affairs and intellectual culture.

All of the biases of ideology, socialization, politics, language, and so on do not change the underlying mechanisms of the world. To the world's motion, infinite regress is not a barrier. It is a difficulty for us in assembling knowledge, but this difficulty is not intractable. We resolve the problem for ourselves simply by constituting ourselves, recreating ourselves, and interfacing with the world in a way where we grow whether we want to or not. Where there is infinite regress, we can detect recurring events with such regularity that we would see them as natural laws, and those events are the most basic "things" we can isolate, which form the everyday objects and concepts we work with in practical matters. Normally, we do not stop to ask ourselves the nature of the things we interact with. We simplify something like a car to the functions we need of it, and only ask deeper questions about it if it is broken or we are interested in engineering a similar machine but better or with different functions that are similar to those the machine already does.

Some clarification of terminology is helpful when considering what "knowledge" entails. In typical discussion, only ideas which can be rationally processed are considered genuine knowledge, and all that cannot be expressed in symbolic language may as well not exist. We are aware that there is an world where events happen and do not regard our ideas about it, and we are aware that to some extent our ideas affect the world because we act on what we think. However much we recognize the trap of knowledge, we only can communicate our ideas through symbolic language, or some expression with meanings that can be symbolized and rationalized. This can confuse the meaning of words pertaining to knowledge systems. The terms I propose are particular to this work and how I am using the words, and I invite the reader to compare this to other conceits about knowledge and its meaning.

Data - The most basic unit for the construction of knowledge in the ideal model of a system. Data represents some basic representation of a thing, rather than a "thing" in a material sense. This is not yet a "fact", as facts imply symbolic representation which is not yet available, but we do not doubt that there is some raw material that constitutes a data stream. Philosophically, all abstract models of the world, which require symbolic representation, concern not actual things but facts that are arrested in the mind as propositions. Without these propositions, we cannot speak of knowledge except with metaphors and generalities. Data is not identical with a "fact" - rather, it is some representation in the real world that we take as a fact once we have established symbolic language. Before facts are verified and proven, we take data as it is, and we do not deny that there is such a thing a data. Even if the data is of a cruder sort that operates without our use of symbolic rationality, we can accept that something is fed to an entity which processes knowledge, whatever the source of it. If the data comes from the processes of knowledge activating something stored in the brain or reconstructed by us to feed into another function, it is still taken as data for the next function. We cannot deny that letters on a page exist if that page is presented to our sight and maintain that this is a factual representation of the world. We can play mind games in politics, or dismiss the letters on a page as irrelevant, but the ink remains, and in order to deny the patterns requires forced ignorance, especially when we know better and are perfectly aware that we are mentally cheating.

All that exists can, in principle, be reduced to data concerning propositions of existence and non-existence, and the apparent events. We have to accept as a fact that we can distinguish between existence and non-existence, if not in knowledge than in some process in the world we regard as real that would form knowledge. The propositions themselves are always understood in some context that we subjectively know, but to the world, those propositions do not matter - all that matters is that propositions can be made, about data which is at first glance unintelligible. The propositions can reduced to two values - 0 and 1, false or true - however complex they can be in their composition. It is this stream of data that is interpreted by sense and reason to produce information, knowledge, meaning, facts, and so on. How it is arranged in the world, and how it is retrieved by sense, is a question that is ultimately self-referential. Reason is formed by processes which were in the world, but which have no discernable origin that is materially evident at first glance; this reasoning and sense information is the only basis we possess for answering questions about knowledge or meaning, regardless of what we might assume about a transcendent meaning that is immaterial. Even the proposition that we can interpret the world this way is something that is not immediately evident by looking at the universe. We are not natural logicians who always agree on the truth or falsity of propositions, nor are all propositions self-evident. We can interpret the world this way, and all of our knowledge is based on our ability to make these propositions. No metaphysics would be possible if we couldn't, because there wouldn't be and truth or falsity to prove and all appears as a morass. Whatever the particulars of any information or facts we may derive from data, for any discussion on the question to be meaningful, we have to agree that there is such a thing as data to be read, and that it can be broken down into infinitely many propositions if we were willing to do so.

Those who would tell you up is down with a straight face are engaging in such a hostile act to make it clear that whomever they are talking to is outside of the know, and thus invalid. This baldfaced lying, if done for political or passionate purposes, is not constructive for anything except making humans miserable. It does not filter for intelligence or any serious ambition. It does not reward the merit of bypassing the obvious trap. The utterance of such flagrant lies is a thing that takes on its own life, and this is intended to be done in every way possible. Those who are selected in a society dominated by this lying are invariably the worst of the worst, for nothing decent or worthwhile can exist. Low cunning and sheer volume of lies will always prevail over any facts or truth that could be gleaned from data. All that would be necessary is the substantive fuel to perpetuate the lie, which humans can provide very easily by their own will, and which mass media and all the tricks humans developed amplify such that a small number of well-trained liars can copy and paste more lies than any honest human could ever refute. The moment the honest human vanquishes one lie, dozens more are recapitulated. The intent is to produce the intellectual environment of a siege, with full knowledge that the individual subject is on the defensive, while all human vitality is sucked into institutions and co-opted for the institution's use. Only recently has such a thing been possible. In the past, the volume of lying required to impose this conception of the world was too vast to reproduce without considerable support from humans on the ground, nor was there any reliable mechanism for enforcing discipline to those who violate the unwritten law of controlled realities. Both would be necessary and would need to proliferate for a few generations before living memory of past conditions could be destroyed, and a bastardization of the past could be promoted by the institutions who hated the people more than anyone else ever did. It was further the case that such a program of lying would produce vast death and disarray, such that the society would not be able to withstand any external threat, or a sufficiently organized group of malcontents. Only in the late 20th century did the conditions to impose this finally exist. Those conditions were consciously pursued by those who managed society for generations, but this remained the ambition of a dedicated minority. That minority has its roots in the most ancient cult practices of humanity, but could only find so many true believers who were drawn to a vision of enslaving the world for some transcendent purpose; and those true believers were usually filtered through religious and intellectual practices which, on the surface, promoted a vision of prosperity and peace, and which were obligated to allow those ends to infect their projects so that the spiritual authority would not be attacked on sight by those who could smell bullshit. It is a particular type of person who was drawn from the very start to this type of flagrant lying for its own sake, and who could do it not for short-term gain or crass ambitions but out of a sense that the struggle for political power was the entire purpose of life. There are many who pursue the glory of struggle without any ideology or thorough vision for changing the world, or whose vision for such a plan is imperfect or obviously self-serving. For the Big Lie to truly be successful, those who perpetuate it and benefit the most from it must be able to commit to the lie and possess a mechanism for splitting the world into an abstract, political story, and the concrete material story that science and data would answer, and selectively choose which story to use when speaking to the non-initiates. Enforcement of the lie had to be internal, and each agent of the ruling institution was a rival of every other agent, while paradoxically their entire enterprise was premised on a cooperation which bordered on creating a hive mind. The reasons why this approach to society has failed and will continue to fail is beyond the scope of this book, but as it is failing, those who hold the institutions are under no external threat that would remove them, and they have elected to drive the conditions of everyone else as low as possible. That is the only way in which such liars can continue as they have for generations, and to ensure compliance with the lie, members of the ruling institution and all who want to be in their graces are compelled to compromise their integrity, embracing ever-increasing depravity for no reason other than the thrill of the lie.

This machine of control would not be possible if the universe could not be broken down to data, which is compiled in models that can produce information, knowledge, meaning, and the more advanced products that arise from data. The data need not be the "true form" of the universe, as if the data were placed there by a god or some hobgoblins who like seeing the humans suffer. We can do this, even if the data is reconfigured to produce an entirely false reality or our interpretation of the data suffers from severe human error or deliberate incompetence. It is impossible to truly express a meaningful statement that does not reduce, in some way, to data supporting the statement. Truths we hold to be transcendant or self-evident are always derived from the proposition that there is a world where those truths can hold and be confirmed by reason, even if the reasoning is spurious. To demand the acceptance of any higher form derived from data, without any data whatsoever or any string of reasoning to suggest why we can or should accept a piece of knowledge, is not a "leap of faith" that convinces someone with genuine conviction. It is the insulting trick of charlatans who despise the very idea of honest dialogue between humans. Those who did place faith in God as any sort of genuine explanation of the world, or anything that was at all valuable, did not consider the god something that was arbitrary or interchangeable with any other god, where the propositions that God suggested didn't matter at all and God simply was an inexplicable demon. If that were the case, then none of the religions or priesthoods could produce content except more lies to support the central lie. It was necessary for religions to suggest some truth that was tied to a real world, or to conditions humans found themselves in that were intelligible without initiation into any great occult mystery. Religions typically answered some question of the human condition or provided spiritual authority in a way that was easily communicated between people without extensive education, and that was typically the function of religion. The faith of the people in gods, or the deeper theological meaning of religion, only mattered to a small number of people. What was relevant was whether the teachings of the religion were a path to anything good, or if the religion's institutions led to some spiritual, temporal, or material order if practiced faithfully. A religion which openly revelled in depravity and cruelty did not have great staying power, and we have historical examples of societies ruled by such death cults. This did not require the religion or its teachings to be genuinely good - very often religions themselves play a dual game to test the intelligence of the adherent, with many in the religion perfectly aware of human duplicity and the propensity to lie. One of the tasks of many religions is to explain this propensity for lying in a way that allows those who heed the religion to cope with the situation. Without the explanation, humans are likely to lapse into the simplest lies as they proceed through life, only learning from individual experience of human deception after it is too late to save themselves from it. The greater lie still is to make it illegal to say that this is indeed what humans do, with religion or education or any other method of imposing on the world through knowledge. The habit of lying in religion started early and often, but there would usually be some sobering influence to prevent the lie from cannibalizing the material base that fed it. Even a vigorous defender of the cult of power and the cult of war had to face limits to this habit of lying, if for no other reason than retaining the sanity of their officers. The concept that it was possible for an empire to create a false reality out of pseudoscience and selective data required innovations that were not immediately apparent to human sense, and even if someone conceived of that, it was not possible to make others believe it without the plot being rejected or violently attacked. The exhortation to believe in God on "faith alone" is a bastardization of any genuine conviction. There is always something, even if it is only an intuition or some sense that there is a greater truth, that leads someone to practice a religion, or follow any coherent course of action beyond that which is instinctive. Those who demand loyalty by "faith alone" only seek to cajole the world like some puppet, imagining themselves as one of the hobgoblins their pseudo-philosophy suggests must make the world go.

Information - Information theory is the new fad in pseudo-philosophy, and so great mystification surrounds the concept in recent history. There is a valid question answered about what information is, which finds its root in electronic communication and mathematical models that were introduced as an engineering solution. The information theory is helpful in eliminating philosophical baggage that was shoehorned to create pseudoscience, but the human and spiritual question in knowledge is consciously destroyed. This is done not because it allows for accuracy, for humans are necessarily spiritual creatures no matter what the ruling ideas claim, but because it corresponds to the dominant spiritual authority of a technocratic and particularly eugenic society. Control of information was seen as absolutely necessary for the conditions of eugenics to be imposed, and this has been taken as a proxy for reality control if one understands the dominant philosophy of the present era. In the prevalent theory today, information is understood as the "resolution of uncertainty" - thus enshrining a subjective conceit and mystification by making it a question of psychology, which is construed simultaneously as a black box and as a specialist subject only a trained class of inquisitors can divine. This description is what distinguishes information from ordinary data - that is, information is something humans or similar thinking agents construct for their purposes, rather than anything real in-of-itself. By enshrining certainty or uncertainty, particular conceits in the dual-system of thought that prevails today are maintained, but at a basic level, information - and thus all other developments of the raw data - are things which are particular to thinking entities, rather than something that is co-equal with any other data in the universe.

One thing that must be made clear to prevent mystification right away is that there is no actual "uncertainty" in the universe, nor is there true uncertainty as a constant in human thought. The world itself does not lie and does not play games of chance, and has no need of either concept. For humans to make meaningful logical decisions, we operate with a certainty that what we regard as information is valid, however incomplete it is and regardless of whether the information lines up with truth or is a known fiction. At no point are we ever truly certain in an absolute sense of what we see, nor are we absolutely uncertain, but we are confident enough in our sense and reason that this is not a question we would ask most of the time. In this phrasing of "certainty" - a game played with theories of physics to muddy the waters - a game of psychological manipulation is played on those who are not deemed specialists in a given area, so that knowledge may be bifurcated into any number of sectors, where the peons are locked in a cage and disallowed useful communication except through managerial intermediaries. This treatment of information theory was designed for managers more than actual scientists or workers. A specialized thinking agent still must integrate specialized knowledge into some wider framework for themselves. If the general approach of fear in education and the Academy is understood, as many of us in the 21st century have learned, then the emphasis on "certainty" as a pedagogical shibboleth makes sense. The ways in which we are trained to fear interpretation of data are numerous, some of them mentioned already in this writing. At the same time, there is a translation of raw data to something meaningful that can be worked with, and this is one of the steps that must be disrupted for reality control to be effective at the base level.

What is really at work is assembling raw data, which lacks any predefined forms, into meanings that allow us to make propositions, whether in symbolic language or in an understanding of objects that we might develop for internal use. "Meaning" of course is not yet available to us, as the assembly of data into information is a necessary intermediary between the world and knowledge proper, where meaning can be a concept we draw from the knowledge process. The data that passes through our faculties can be construed as information, even if there is no "sense" of the information that we appreciate. We can, in principle, interpret every event and every object in the world not just as data, but potential "information" we can glean. The information is presented in philosophical thinking as an occulted thing, whereas data is both the exoteric face and the true essence of the thing. The educated subject congratulates him or herself on some lump of horseflesh they call information, often regurgitated as simple facts with a limited ability to construct out of this information any greater understanding. The highest understanding is occulted and dictated by a few people who decide what is and is not a true teaching, no matter how absurd this high knowledge is to our native sense.

Humans start assembling this data into information by an instinct which is deeper than any simple mechanism. It can be shown that life itself is effectively a type of information, or a pattern that asserts itself against the world on its own power. This treatment of life is an incomplete one, for beneath the information is a substantive level where events happen regardless of any intent. Nowhere in the assembly of information is the form of that information "pre-ordained" to occur in a pattern which is fixed in nature. The underlying material is what it is, and we can in hindsight look at ourselves and ask what the brain, body, tools, and so on do. So do is the most basic existence of consciousness not premised on any "information" or "intelligence" acting on its own accord. The first stirrings of conscious thought appear just as the body did; but unlike the physical world, where objects only move in accord with natural laws, living thinkers operate on an impulse which can be directed willfully. This will is itself something inherent to a living creature, absent any compulsion that would tell the life-form what it is allowed to think. We may argue that the will is itself just matter in motion, but life developed specifically to resist the motion of events around it, so that it may persist as life and respond to all environmental agents which affect it, while adapting necessarily to its conditions. This is different from non-animate objects which only change in ways which are predictable by simple laws that we can arrest. This quality is not unique to life, nor is it unique to a particular form of life we might privilege, but living systems with complex nervous systems are arranged in a particular way that grant to this conscious experience qualities we are familiar with. If we were to imagine a robot that actually "thought", operating on the same principles that allow living thinkers to integrate systems, the nature of a machine that is not biological would have no need of conceits that developed in us because we are living creatures with wants. We might engineer those traits into the robot, and in theory create a replica of a human who in all respects is like us, save for its artificial origin. This artificial origin in of itself suggests certain things about its conscious thought and how it would see itself, just as the circumstances of a human's parentage and upbringing have an effect on the organism that involves more than the simple transfer of hereditary traits. The particular circumstances of each thinking entity impart on it uniqueness in the world. There is no "default human" or template on which all other humans are derived. There are commonalities among the human race, such that we can understand each other very well, but there is not by any natural law a "human right" that stems from a biological truth of the human race.^[1]

We do not start out with a model of thought ready-made, and we do not get to define our thought entirely as we choose. We cannot rearrange the mind or soul by simple assertion. What living, thinking entities can do is react to their environment with deliberation that is not normally expected. The most basic reasoning tasks refine reflexes of movement, allowing humans to hone their prowess in ways that are not possible for animals. When a human is old enough to start assembling for him or herself a model of what a human is, the first guess is to look at yourself, then look at the world to confirm something that makes sense to you. You cannot deny your own sense if you are awake, and should you wish to deny it, reality will make you acknowledge that which is in front of you. We presume that this is not a barrier for most readers, who are going to ask this question about themselves, other people, and the world out of necessity. This formation of the basic germs we work with in thought takes place "by some process behind the backs of the intellectuals". We only determine after the fact what we were and thus are today, and then use that knowledge to build further knowledge, ad infinitum or until life ceases and our individual thought ends. It is not possible to speak of a present without a past and a future implied. The aspirations of life are not to arrest history, but to navigate the present with some future in mind and some goal attained, which is informed by the past. To that which does not live nor think, "time" is of little consequence. Time is very relevant to us, and we have to read it in all the knowledge we accumulate, even if we were to accept time as purely a relational concept or reframe it as a more general causality. All of our knowledge, down to the most basic, is dependent on a proposition that this knowledge and the things it pertains to can change and causes and effects can exist. The change itself is not infinite or an unknowable potential. It instead proceeds only in the ways it can. Intellectually, we understand that to reach point B from point A, there is a way to that, and we are inclined to view the progression as a linear one. The allure of a model where things, particularly living things, proceed through a fixed process in nature, is a simplification we make of a process where many potentials exist, but the potential is not infinite.

It is the arrest of this continuous process that resolves uncertainty and creates information out of data. The first arresting of information happens in the formation of stable life itself, as life is defined as a peculiar pattern which replicates itself, in addition to the other traits of living things. Life to be life is the pattern settling into what appears to us as a stable state, where all that comprises the body is integrated into an organism. Life to be life cannot be an isolated creature, and complex life contains many organs working in concert which act and grow independently. The failure of one organ does not destroy in total the whole, and there is no rule that organs cannot be replaced or grafted onto extant life; it is indeed expected that life assimilates matter external from it. More than that, the living thing enters into relations with other things around it, and those things have an undeniable effect on the life-form itself. The effect is not immediate or absolute, where the life-form is utterly helpless against an external world, for the life form itself affects its surroundings and cannot do otherwise. Life to remain stable tends to resist whatever the world throws at it, and seeks to assimilate that which serves the goals of life only. Those goals are not fixed in nature in a way that we are "supposed" to act, and life in service to itself is an empty existence. The stabilization of the body and brain leads to stabilization of the thought process as time passes, and the life form encounters things in nature which compel it to learn or react by instinct. The willful life form learns that it can impress on the world, feebly at first. A toddler petulantly expects to change the world by will, but this is a stage that children overcome in one way or another, whether they want to or not. The more clever schemers learn early how to manipulate, and that they can lie to other people if they are so inclined. Lying is so natural to humans that preventing the most brazen lying requires discipline of the child, either by authority or by some sobering influence to convince the child that lying doesn't work. Society does not have a uniform effect of imposing honesty, as if society were the benchmark for fairness. Far from it, most societies encourage dishonesty and venality, particularly in defense of the ruling institutions and interests. The reasons why will be abundantly clear in this and future writings, if they are not clear already. The goodness of authority in teaching values will vary, almost never conducted in any way that would be considered effective if we actually thought about the present situation and why we came to this.

All of our efforts in assembling and processing information are really a question of arresting some parts of the world in place, so that the material reality matches our idea of the thing. It is only in this way that stable patterns in the world can be isolated, and so we encapsulate all those intermediate meanings in the "thing" that is information. In this abstraction, time does not act on the whole object - it simply exists until some thought, some will, or some information acts on it. In the abstract world, it is as if the world really were moved by some hobgoblins beneath the universe. The problems with this have already been described; in arresting this motion, it is not really possible to describe a world at all, if we take this information as the literal truth of the world. We are typically smart enough not to confuse information with knowledge, meaning, or the underlying world from which we assemble information. The assembly of information is not a passive thing, or something which is purely air, no matter how much someone manipulates language to make it appear ideas are willful reproductions of primordial light. Information and ideas can only exist if they are reproduced day after day, and are actively recalled and placed in working memory. Information may have an ephermeal existence, and life itself may seem ephermeal, but it is a real existence and the basis for further development. It is useful to understand information not as some resolution of uncertainty floating around in the universe, as if they were Forms waiting to be animated by some spirit or will or rational substance, and thus, the treatment of ideas and information as reified things is highly inappropriate. So too is the treatment of information as a morass of flux, about which only metaphors and stories can be explained. It is also inappropriate to confuse the models of science with reality itself, or the models we create in subjective experience with reality. The reality is the thing information is pointing to. By this I do not mean that the data, the raw propositions of existence, is the true reality, but that the reality is the world itself. Human subjectivity has nothing to do with it, except as a small part of the world. The data is, to use an extractive analogy, material in situ while information is what is pulled from the mine, but neither of these things constitutes genuine knowledge nor the genuine thing we are interacting with.

Information by itself is an ephermeal thing. It is not even a fully formed "fact" in the logical sense, which we can rely on. Information is constructed by thinking entities, and thinking entities can compile "bad information" from data, or be full of garbage information which is of no relevance to knowledge or a truth that we would care about. Information can be compiled in a way that data in some media did not intend. It is in information that the first "systems" appear, and the propagation of this information abides natural laws that can be understood mathematically. The models that led to modern "information theory" originate in communications technology, where engineers were seeking a way to reduce noise in electrical communication and to perfect the mechanisms that are ubiquitous today. Those who grew up in recent times take for granted just how much technical knowhow is required to make electrical communication possible, and then consider the implications of electronic communication overriding the tradtional manners of communication. Not just the media used to communicate information changed, but increasingly communication was a technical matter and conducted by machine. The earlier communication required a human element, and early manipulation of communiation - whether electronic, via internet or by radio or television, or modern recastings of the older type of communciation - relied on exploiting the built-in weaknesses of humans in information, which the machine did not suffer. The habit of lying and cajoling went into overdrive after the establishment of the national security state, and it is during the 1950s that maniacs in white lab coats were at their height, threatening the world with nuclear weapons.^[2] The vanguard for the degradation of communication, and the mystification of new media and institutions, were the eugenists and the inheritors of Nazism. Opposing them were those who attempted to retain some human element, not realizing that the human project had been fatally undermined by the proliferation of eugenics. Without a clear and uncompromising opposition to the eugenic creed, the imposition of ideology in the Marxian sense was possible for the first time, and it would be in America that the first true ideological brainwashing machine would be constructed. To this day, the Anglo-American efforts at brainwashing and reality control are the most extensive, assisted greatly by the rise of English as the "global language" and the willing cooperation of elites around the world in the dominant world-system. Just like the educated slaves in Rome, the intelligentsia like their Romans and their Americans as dumb as possible. Every belief they hold dear depends on the belief that those outside of their institution are absolutely depraved, and eugenics simply took that dictum to heart.

Philosophers are tempted to believe they can insinuate through wordplay the condition of things in the world, and in some way, this is exactly what humans do with their language. The use of language to speak matter-of-factly or for simple curiosity is anathema to philosophy, and all philosophy must be read with the expectation that the writer holds ulterior motives. Information is not reducible to "language" or the meanings derived from spoken words, nor is it reducible purely to our interpretations. Information, to be useful, implies a fidelity to material reality or the presumption thereof. Information is always mediated by something substantive, whereas "ideas" or "meanings" are interpretations constructed at a higher level of knowledge-gathering. Information does not fully resolve the uncertainty of what things are, and often raises more questions about the nature of anything that exists. What information does is arrest in thought a material system, so that communication of knowledge and meaning pertaining to it is possible for us. The simplest pieces of information are things we learn to take for granted, even when we know this is inaccurate. At some point in the thinking process, we have to accept that what we are working with in thought is what we regard it as, and recursion that is inherent in defining anything comes to a halt. Our thinking about something does not change the underlying data, and we easily make the correction when thinking materially to ignore conceits we hold about things or doubts about the nature of things. We can see, without too much debate, that an apple is an apple and no amount of pontificating changes the substantive meaning of it. We can arrest any particular thing or part as information, and there are "parts" that are either too small for us to notice or inconsequential to knowledge and meaning for our purposes; for example, we can only pontificate about the skin of an apple for so long, compared to the other things in the universe.

Information alone is little better than data. It only pertains to a particular thing that has been isolated, and so information can never be stated as generalities, for example, "roses are red" is a statement of fact requiring knowledge and symbolic language. We may make a proposition of some information that is particular - e.g., "this rose is red" - and this is something more than data, but by itself it is devoid of meaning. We compile information of roses as a form, and redness as a concept, and link the two in the sentence, but alone this is just a statement. We may judge if it is factual or not, but this does not become genuine knowledge or meaning by asserting it. We can make a statement that the rose - and we speak here of a particular rose or entity we are analyzing rather than a general statement about roses - are blue, and it would still be information, however inaccurate. Such statements are necessary for the compilation of knowledge and meaning, and for the application thereof. We start with observations of data, from which information can be gleaned to make a general statement about that data. The data is not the form "rose" or "redness" as essences, but that which comprises the rose and its qualities. We do not, in any absolute sense, know that we are analyzing a rose in all cases we encounter one. The existence of roses in our working memory is not information but knowledge, which requires a fuller model than mere information.

The assemblage of information into more developed forms, and to knowledge and meaning, is not conducted by information. Information, which is an abstraction for our use, cannot be broken into infinitely many divisions the way real things can be. Each piece of information is arrested and appears as a moment in the imagination. The past, present, future, and potential of that information is encapsulated in the information, for it to be recognizably information we can use. The process of thinking cannot be itself an abstraction devoid of substance, as bad philosophers claim. Thinking can only exist in a meaningful way because there is a world in which events happen, and the events comprising thought have an origin that we can rationalize after the fact, but that occurred on their own power. Throughout this entire circuit, there is a way the world allows information to pass, which is not informed by any other information or something outside of the world. All that exists could only be real if its existence were a thing independent from other things, which is something to be elaborated on in the next chapter. This does not mean that everything that exists is inhernetly isolated and cannot be affected by other information, but that the interaction between things must occur in the final analysis in some way that no information can tell us. To bridge this gap to create proper knowledge, something new must emerge from the simple fact of information. This happens not because an arbitrary complexity of information is reached, but because certain functions can be done in the life-form, and eventually the human. The human's symbolic language is not a passive force or a sudden spark of light, but a thing which immediately affects the human individually and in his relations with other entities and the world. We continue to be affected by language at the individual level throughout life. The words that come out of humans will have an effect on the world, if they are deployed in a way that can by sheer repetition compel the behavior of the recipient. The words do not do this because the words themselves have some power that is an inexplicable will, but because thought must proceed in ways we can understand and arrest. Words can only influence people in ways that are acceptable to natural and material laws, and this is more than a mere thought game or rhetorical trick.

The strategy of flagrant lying in all things does not have a force simply by assertion, but because there would exist both technology to propagate the word en masse and because information is more than simple meanings or tokens. Information can, through machinery, command bureaucracies and control what knowledge humans can act on. It is not enough to simply repeat a lie very often, but to omit the possibility that lies can be challenged by any Earthly force. To do this, honesty and a forthright effort to do good in the world must become unseemly and "retarded" or an insane proposition. The step to condition the core beliefs of those who participate in the Big Lie happens before the lies themselves are uttered, and so the Big Lie must command from the start a base that has both an incentive to command reality through ideology, and the coordination to arrange that base in a phalanx that confronts the rest of humanity. It must further be possible to scatter the dissenters through both fear and continual interventions into private life, and the interventions were only possible when a number of technological conditions are met. For example, transportation technology must be able to deliver soldiers to the doorstep of any dissenter, and those conducting the purge must possess superiority of arms and a network communicating strategy. The purgers must hold territory zealously and move away from a view of humanity as individuals with freedom to move, but bodies in spaces which are parceled out, and all the domains of the state are managed as ecologies. The dissenters must be manipulated by control of incentives that would unite them, and so a game of creating false controversies becomes the norm, and the chief method to command labor and behavior would be control of monetary incentives. The centralization of wealth in banking cartels effectively accomplishes the abolition of private property in the older sense, but private property remains as a legal concept because it is highly effective at conditioning moral behavior. The present order is only possible if there is a ruling interest which is effectively immune to any consequences of money, and this was proven in the early 21st century. Those who ruled simply voted themselves more money and declared victory, no matter how ruinous their rule has been in an economic sense. How this happened requires a proper discernment of information from knowledge, and undoing conceits which have been spread as a pseudo-science among the masses.

For data to become information, it must be possible to describe the elements of a system and their relations, without regard to external factors. The informational "system" is described as a Form with such-and-such qualities, both members of the object and the methods of the object. The system then is understood in the first instance as information, which can be stated as bland propositions. The information itself need not be true or false - it merely needs to be an intelligble statement about some thing, which can be related to other things. Any basis for a systems theory must concern itself with this information, and some common element is described for a theory of particular systems, or systems in general. Information theory is one such basis, in which data is computed by rational agents to construct a model describing the actual world. This theory implies a rational essence guiding the world, but after sufficient reasoning it can be concluded that this "essence of reason" doesn't exist at a fundamental level, and so the crass forms of information theory fail from the start. This was foreseen by those who envisioned "information theory", because the true intent of the liberal fetish for information was to obscure knowledge, and through it obscure the very information a systems analyst would learn of and process. In short, the paradigm of information presented to those selected to die is intended to produce disinformation and ignorance, and make connections of information in any knowledge base impossible. This was not an accident, but an intended thing by those who possessed institutional authority and found a way to impress, by fear, that ordinary people were no longer permitted to make basic connections to reality.

To assemble knowledge requires moving past simple analysis or a purely materialist view of the world, so that we are able to view analysis and mechanism in its proper context.

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Knowledge - The accumulation of knowledge, which was claimed by those who proclaimed their "love" for it to steal the concept from the rest of us, is the true basis for our vision of the world. It is the first form the world takes to us and it concerns that which we are capable of not merely rationalizing or communicating with, but that allows us to interface properly with the world and all that exists in it. Knowledge did not form the genesis of the world, but it is the first conception of the world we ask which allows us to ask any question about genesis, meaning, what things are and what they do, and what they can be in the future. Knowledge never existed in some pure form which can be distilled from its origin. Knowledge can be understood rationally as a process, but knowledge in the proper sense is not reducible to information, data, some force in the world which defies rational description, or simply "the world" in some vague and omnipresent sense. Knowledge, like anything else, is something new that arose from origins we can speculate about. Knowledge cannot on its own form the entirety of the world, as if all things in the world were really psychic projections of knowledge or a "knower", human or divine. There is not a claim that there is some "unknowable" thing that is functionally identical with knowledge or could be treated as such. Claims to speak of an "unknowable God" producing emanations that reveal the world to us are not a true revealation from on high, but the fevered delusions of humans who can only think of returning to a primordial condition, and dragging anyone fool enough to believe them into the same abyss. There is more to the world than mere "knowledge", where knowledge is construed as the substance of the world. Knowledge is our subjective entry point for investigating the world, and so our mission to understand the nature of knowledge can only begin from what we already know.

Information properly understood is fixed in place. For information to be valid, laws of logic must be accepted and applied to it, and this is a fixed rule. Information exists entirely in the abstract, and it is information which is processed by rationality instead of any substance or other concept. Rationality concerns itself purely with the management of information, and the rational task can be envisioned as an algorithm in a computer. All that can be done in rationality is in principle a thing which is computable and can be automated, and it is the rational and managerial task that is the easiest of all to automate. Rationality requires only a machine capable of regulating some physical process which allows for algorithmic processing of data fed into it, in some way where the process can be construed as information. Turing's machine is the description of such a device. A CPU contains so many "rules of thumb" which are the instructions it can carry out, and these are the base-level instructions that constitute machine language and assembly language. The CPU is designed, once engaged with electricity, to read a tape of data. This data for simplicity's sake can be expressed as a stream of bytes, or 8-digit binary values. The CPU reads one byte which directs the CPU to carry out an instruction in its "rules of thumb". If the instruction is intended to read from the tape a value relevant to carrying out the instruction, the next byte or two bytes read are utilized, and the value read is either used directly for the operation, or points to some location in the computer's memory. The CPU contains many registers, such as an accumulator, a stack pointer, and so on, which are used for the CPU's operations. The CPU's architecture, registers, and so on can fit any specification which is logically and rationally possible. The CPU in a computer today is an electronic circuit, which can be designed to carry out these rational instructions as quickly as possible and with as few errors as is physically possible. It is through these instructions that computers can replicate the rational task. Humans did not have any such "built-in" hardware to do this, but instead fashioned out of their faculties and language a simulation to perform rational, logical operations. Humans are lousy at accomplishing this task quickly, but absent language and a knowledge base to know what an effective use of rationality would be, humans remained for a long time the only way in which algorithmic rationality could be accomplished. Any tool the human used to assist this task was itself a thing devised by human rationality, or something that was appropriated in nature that accomplished a need the human had for it. The human faculties to accomplish this had a basis in earlier processes which are ubiquitous, but humans developed intent and purpose for this rational task and could direct it in the interests of the individual life-form and its situation. Animals possessed similar faculties but no language or communication network that could develop the task into a general rule that described the world. Humans' ability to use this rational faculty is not limitless or the best the world can possibly allow, but humans with language, society, and technology accomplish something that cruder information processing or the knowledge of animals could not. The human did not by virtue of this task possess an essence that was entirely novel, but did something in a way that was previously not considered. It was only possible to do this because humans did develop in a space which allowed the practice of this faculty without disruption, and there was no hobgoblin in nature telling a human that this was not allowed. However it is done, information is understood as a thing processed rationally and algorithmically. At a basic level, this is how we can understand in a model anything that happens in the world. All of the possible outcomes of a rational view of existence break down to this algorithmic processing of information, which we understand to be something pertaining to a real world where the data can be drawn. There is no "hyper-computing" which is still rational but beyond computation in the sense we understand it - that is to say, there is no "unknowable" thing that is still computable or a thing that can be treated as if it has any bearing on a rational world. When we arrest information from the underlying matter, we are aware on some level that we are doing this, so that the abstract world is cleaved from the material truth.

To truly know anything, knowledge cannot be constrained to a study of information and the hardware that processes it, or anything the information or hardware is drawn from. Nothing at the level of information or below it can account for a single iota of genuine knowledge. There is considerable processing of information in the world, for all that exists in reality can be conceived as information. To illustrate the difference between knowing and computation, the mechanics of the electronic computer must be briefly described. The "brain", the CPU, is a remarkably simple device. It is nothing more than wires arranged in circuits which are designed to carry out the logical operations mechanically. These can be diagrammed, so that an "OR" and "AND" logical gate is created, which distinguishes between a 0 and 1, or charge and no charge passing through the gate. Physically, these gates are designed with a cybernetic principle of regulating electrical systems in mind, and the development of transistors and integrated circuits follows from the much earlier computers. Early comptuers were very large and inefficient devices, so feeble that they would barely qualify as useful if not for their future potential. Every rule of thumb is hardwired in the CPU - and "hardwired" here is not a metaphor, but literally a description of the CPU circuit design. As mentioned, these logic gates were built with Turing's mathematical theory of computation in mind, and Boole's logical algebra allowed the development of computational theory. The principle that allows systems in general to be regulated is what allows information processing to exist - that is, that systems in flux eventually stabilize in such a way that recurrent patterns can be recognized, placed in abstract memory, and worked with logically. The material things now become primordial ideas, which form new ideas, and so on to the most complex assemblages of information. This only allows for dealing with information, and the world cannot be more than that based on this principle alone. The electronic computer simply engineers these qualities into a machine for the purpose of processing information, whereas human brains were not natural computers in this sense and constructed rationality through a more obtuse process. The computer is a tool that reproduces something that we would have done manually. At no point does the electronic computer "think" in the way we do. It processes one instruction after another, in an algorithm that is either written in advance with intended results or an algorithm that was constructed from another algorithm, writing the machine code algorithmically. At no point does the algorithm ever transcend being an algorithm, and if that happened, the computer would not be functioning for the task it was designed to do. To do that implies the computer's existence would be something entirely different, and this is contrary to the design of its hardware. The hardware was designed specifically to regulate mechanistic action towards this task of reading from a tape and following instructions, and to prevent errors in this process. Humans could do this, but it would throw away all of the functionality of the human brain and body and reduce it to this task of following a singular algorithm. The entire purpose of a computer is that it does not "know" or "think" about what it is doing, because human knowledge and thought and the impulses of humanity would be a burden on the task of algorithmic computing. Executing the algorithm is one of many tasks humans do in order to navigate the world, but to derive any meaning from the algorithm implies there is something above the mere task of computation. The computer specifically reduces the task of information processing to that which serves the function of producing an output for some input, and could not function as anything else. The computer then is reducing things which are necessarily complex to simple abstractions, with the expectation that a human user - or some user who is dealing with knowledge - can read from the output of computation something useful. Absent the user of a computer who actually knows, all of the information processing of a computer is no different from any other exchange of information, and it may as well be dead. All of this knowledge can be rationalized as a process - we would have no other way to construct a theory of knowledge if we lacked information - but the real existence of knowledge is something different from mere computation or information processing in the material world.

For an entity to "know" implies something altogether different, that has nothing to do with an arbitrary complexity of information exchange. Knowledge concerns feeling and experience, and the assimilation of information into that experience and intent of the knower. The knower does not merely assimilate the information as a distant thing, an isolated point of resolving uncertainty that is not at all related to anything else, or that is taken at face value with no criticism. The necessary, substantive thing which constitutes knowledge is that which assembles information into practice and deed. There is an entity that knows which is acting on information, and which must be able to process information but does substantive things in the world as a result of that information. This knowledge is not merely a behavior or an expression, as many establishment psychologists would insinuate, but it is something reproduced constantly, just as information processing is reproduced. It is trivial for a machine to mimic the appearance of knowledge, or the behavior of some entity which we presume to know anything. Computers can formulate intelligible language by algorithm, and the output can be useful or arrive at expressions of information that either wouldn't have occured to a human thinker, or that are beneath the notice of our interest normally. The computer can compile paragraphs pertaining to information, and it can replicate a rationalization of our knowledge-building task. We can easily demonstrate the expression of knowledge or intelligence in a scientific model, in which knowledge is an ephermeal thing that is nothing more than an interpretation of behavior, or an expression of some gene or some thing that is expressed as information or data.

"Knowing" in any sense that knowledge means anything is not a question of expression or some abstract notion of what we think "looks like knowledge", in a way that we would detect by some simple rational test. To actually know implies that there is a substantive entity that "knows" for its own sake, and does not require a judgement from another entity to prove that it is a knowing creature. To know implies the entity is autonomous and can "know that it knows", and it can repeat that process recursively as much as it wishes. There is a substantive limit to how much a rational mind can or the underlying material processes can execute this recursion, before it must resolve as something we would apprehend as knowledge in the abstract. Knowledge implies an intent of the knower with whatever information it is processing. The intent does not need to be a rational thing or understood to the knower, and the intent does not need to possess any moral quality let alone a transcendent moral quality we are obliged to appreciate. There is always, in any knowing entity, an intent to its process, or a reason why it would know, and why it would process information. For living thinkers that arose by natural processes, there is an impulse in life to attain homeostasis, and the brain and conscious faculties arose first for navigating the world and processing sense input. It did not need to occur to a conscious entity, whether human or animal, that there was a "grand purpose" to life that conforms to our spiritual purpose or any authority, but living things typically integrate their functions and sense of the world in a way that allows the living entity to persist. If it did not do this, the living entity can degenerate into a morass of impulses, directionless and despondent. As a human who, like many, has been in that state of mind, there is something in us that would compel a human to get their act together, at least enough to drag themselves out of bed and obtain their sustenance, or present themselves as vaguely capable of participating in society. Many a drunk or drug addict can conjure, out of either dire necessity or a impulse that abhors reveling in too much filth, enough intent to tolerate living for one more day.^[1] This action, where the drunkard staggers out of bed to manage something in life, is dependent on certain knowledge just to attain this small amount. It cannot proceed purely on instinct or impulse, though for the drunkard it certain feels as if the body is laggard, and some energy must be summoned to drag the body through the world like a dog. The claim that this act is totally unknowing is only possible if someone has accepted a conceit and ideology about knowledge and reduced it to information and expression, and to behaviors which are abstracted and conceived in a grand model to define what human minds are in the context of a society that has become universal and inescapable. There are actions humans perform that are not dependent on knowledge, or that are the result of instinct, drilling, and habit. Human experience is never an experience of pure knowledge or rationality, but reckons with a baser existence, and there are those things that are done without rational intent, knowing intent, or any purpose; they may be involuntary tics or addictions, or acts humans perform out of some compulsion or programming, as if a beast - often a beast with distinctly human qualities which was projected by another human's imposition - made them do it.^[2]

Knowledge implies that deliberation is possible in some sense for the knower, and this deliberation is not a thing that is reducible to a decision-making algorithm but is something that is inherent to intents in the knower that are not informational. If a decision-making process is algorithmic, then there is no actual decision being made, as the decision will be determined by its sole logical outcome given the same inputs. The decision-making process in a living, knowing human is not purely a matter of pushing some buttons and feeding the machine an input for a desired output. Humans can be trained and conditioned to do this, and discipline their thoughts and actions themselves when conducting operations, and this is not confused with knowledge or the deliberation process. The conditions which a knowing entity would act on are not merely information to be fed into the algorithm, but are conditions that allow the knower to maintain autonomous integrity. We may consider the life functions of the knower to be irrelevant, and it is not an absolute given that a knowing, living entity would defend their life functions to the bitter end, as if they were compelled by a hobgoblin to live at all costs. Life is pursued not purely for a primal urge, but because life is known to be worth living, or because life is preferable to a number of other outcomes. The desire to avoid death is not limited to a primal fear of suffering or some hardwired instruction set in life, and such desires are overcome. Humans can commit suicide, sacrifice themselves, charge into battle without regard for themselves, embrace a nihilistic and fatalistic philosophy, and ask themselves what kind of life they would live. In any event, humans are mortal and expect suffering and death, and any human worthy of the name has considered the circumstances of death and suffering and the ways in which they would prefer to die, given the likelihood of such an outcome. A drive for immortality is not reducible to the simple continuation of life functions. It is possible to continue living in the basest sense, but to not truly "live" in a way that a knowing human would want. There are far worse things in any human's experience than death, which need not be recounted here. It would not be possible to contemplate these questions simply by a rational or logical approach, or to suggest a basic materialist reason why life should continue. On that level, all that exists is just information exchanged in the world, or matter in motion which is of no moral and no intellectual consequence whatsoever. The embrace of viewing one's own life as merely this is itself knowledge of the situation. The pure computer lacks this in any real sense. It may exhibit behaviors of self-preservation, but a careful examination of such a program would likely detect severe errors that a knowing human recognizes very easily. Building a more sophisticated simulacrum does not change fundamentally that the electronic computer is ultimately just a machine, and not even a complicated one. All the information put out by the CPU and translated into output that a user reads or senses is irrelevant without a user that converts the information to knowledge and meaning. This is not to say that there is a universal "knower" or that all "knowers" will know or think in the same way, or recognize each other instinctively in an undeniable way. It is rather to say that, to the knower, their subjective experience is not merely information to be discarded. The very existence of human memory and its integration with the body and anything in the world is not premised on a transfer of information, which could be manipulated by a thought leader. Humans to function in the world act and react at a level far more foundational to material reality and their own integrity as a living thing, and our processing of information is a tool to assist in that more basic task. The result of that task is something altogether new, which becomes the thing that humans actually concern themselves with. Humans, or any knowing entity, concern themselves with knowledge that makes any information they process and any material thing they interact with meaningful for them, and this knowledge can only exist if it is placed in a context where it holds some relevance, whether the relevance is understood by the knower or not. We can "know" things we did not intend to know or want to know, but we cannot "un-know" things we would rather forget simply by wishing it so. The condition of existence being a thing we didn't ask for requires us to know that there is an alternative way to exist, or many alternatives. It behooves anyone who values knowledge to consider that knowledge which is unpleasant, and to reckon with reality in some way if they want to retain knowledge in general. Knowledge also implies that we could conceive of a different world, or changes in the world that are not yet realized, or potentials in the world that are not immediately apparent to sense.

In short, knowledge implies that entities that "know" possess free will, regardless of the material inputs and forces acting upon them. Even if we were to presume that almost everything about the human experience, the body and all the faculties of the human, were reducible to information and could be transformed into a machine, the distinction between a knowing entity and an unknowing entity is some sense that it could be different. Perhaps the knowing entity, feeling the compulsion of external forces, is sensing horror and dread as his body moves from place to place, shambling through this existence without any true direction or developed intent; but that silent shrieking inside or dull urge suggesting that something could be different would be a product of knowledge, and could not be construed as a bug in the information processing system from the perspective of the knower. Perhaps the knower would not want this discomfort and something in him would compel him to repair the "defect" so that he can return to unthinking bliss, brought to him by Neuralink's brain shock torture chip, but if he's trusting Elon Musk to help him, he's up shit creek and may never know just what sort of Hell he's in for. Usually, though, knowing entities retain enough autonomy to act in the conditions they can hold for themselves, and overbearing external compulsion of the sort described is itself a dreaded condition. There are few humans who can be happy in such captivity, and if such a slavery were to be made pleasant, it would imply a benevolent master granting to the slave a degree of autonomy to grow and live while being confined and legally a non-entity. Slavery throughout history has involved both sticks and carrots, and a few privileges can be a more effective and cheaper motivator than torture.^[3] Regardless of one's attitude towards captivity, an entity with knowledge is aware of capitivity and freedom to act, and the limitations of their faculties are a thing that constitutes a knowing system in its entirety. No "knower" has unlimited freedom to act, since the knower is in its origins a material entity that abides certain natural laws. To "know" implies agency and an ability to act on one's own power. If that were not the case, then there would be no need of threats to jam a torture chip into your brain and keep it there as a continuous threat. Nothing about this initiative to act is the mere execution of a program or a simple assertion of natural laws buffeting a thing around. Knowing entities exist because they react to everything around them and within them, and reinforce their very existence in a way that is not trivial. An algorithm fails if a single instruction of machine code fails, leading to a program cash. Non-living things are truly at the whim of nature, with no initiative whatsoever - they are blind to events around them. The living entity which knows is aware that it knows, and this knowing is recursive ad infinitum, and it reacts to anything in the world and its own existence as if it were a real thing, rather than merely information whose truth or falsity is of no importance. The knowledge of humans, or living "knowing" things did not require any great leap of rationality, but would be inherent even in a more primitive form. It did require a central nervous system, a brain and senses that could allow for action and reaction, limbs to interface with the world, and rational information processing would assist in the integration of those things into a fully autonomous creature.

The intent leading to knowledge did not "just so" make knowledge appear, as if it were a fait accompli. The underlying processes, like the hardware, are not themselves knowledge or thought, nor is the energy flow the thought in pure form. The material basis, the information that is processed, and the vital integration of the body creates the basis for knowledge, and the most primitive knowledge is that which is accumulated early in existence. The early knowledge is that which constitutes the primitive mind, before it can develop personhood or symbolic language which expands its faculties. Like many things in the world, knowledge did not arise fully formed and pristine, but began its primordial forms as something we might not appreciate as "knowledge". The infant does not have the deliberate intent of a human with symbolic language and knowledge of society, but it possesses the intent of life and the primitive stirrings which inspire the infant to develop faculties and store something that is relevant to it. Even without symbolic language, the infant is not merely a vessel for outside material that produces output, as if the infant were a machine processing everything in rational order. The infant's acquisition of knowledge is largely a thing it conducts on its own power, and so far as the infant recognizes something as interesting, it can work towards it. The infant is not an impressionable blank mind to be fed knowledge, and even if we envisioned its genetic origin making all infants equal, the infant is not in perfect lab conditions. The very act of knowing anything, in this primitive way, suggests something deliberate enough that the infant will gather a very crude moral sense. It knows over time what it wants regardless of efforts to insist that it wants something else, and part of mothering is to habituate the infant to accept deprivation and control its development through methods passed down since time immemorial. Those who nurture the infant do not feed knowledge by some pedagogy that grants the infant meaningful life; an infant would, without any pedagogy, acquire knowledge in any environment where it can, and the infant is seeking this primitive knowledge to meet its demands for life. What the parent wants is not what the parent gets, and so the parent is wary about any influences that would be negative, and seeks to create positive influences that would allow the infant's full development, unless the intent is to damage the infant as many are selected to be. An infant too dependent on its mother would be sickly, and no mother can attach herself to a newborn at all times and control it, as if she were stuffing it into Plato's cave to make the child into a homunculus. Attempts to do this have less-than-perfect success and eventually the infant attains independence and defiance, even if the parent did everything right. The demands of life contain a built-in aggression and territoriality that is difficult to condition away, but that instinct is not sublated. It is instead the basis for greater understanding. Violation of that basic instinct is a violation of a sense of self, if it is carried out in a manner intended to strip the would-be child of any hint of aggression or opposition to pedagogy. Effective pedagogues do not seek that, even in the most destructive forms of education, because too much in the infant and child would reject such an overt humiliation. The humiliations reach their maximum only for those who are to be denied any knowledge of their own, and whose knowledge is negated entirely in the abstract models of knowledge we are allowed. That, though, is purely a social concept of knowledge, which belongs to a different realm of understanding. Here I speak of knowledge in the concrete, as something which emerges in systems regardless of political or social values we hold. It arose out of material origins which are common enough, and at first knowledge is something held purely in subjective experience. We did not start with a symbolic language or any preferred media for formalizing knowledge, but instead worked out systems internal to us that relied on an individual's ability to assemble it alone. Before there can be a social conception of knowledge, there must be individual knowers for whom knowledge is something pertaining to a real world.^[4] Knowledge cannot exist in the ether or as a vague spirit found in any organization of information, but exists instead because there are entities which gather knowledge in particular rather than mere information, and because these entities operate on their own power and with intent rather than being buffeted around by natural forces like anything else.

It is in knowledge that the "form" of a system is attached to something substantive, and it is possible to speak of a system as something which can be known and beheld, rather than simply describing the system as an assemblage of information pointing to some matter. Knowledge is always a local event, and it is the vital integration of the living thinker that is the first seat of knowledge, or the germ of knowledge that we acknowledge in society. The vital tendency itself is not the knowledge, nor is the analysis of information or information processing. Those things must meet in a particular way that allows for information processing to be stored as knowledge and acted on in a real world. If knowledge does not pertain to reality, then this facsimile or impostor of knowing is not relevant. This does not mean that knowledge is necessarily "true" in all cases, or that only factual knowledge is valid. It is entirely possible to produce "bad knowledge", or practices which are discordant with the world we live in. It is possible for political truths that are abstractions for us to constitute knowledge that is very relevant to our lives, even if materially the political "truth" is an intentional lie, or a morass of errors that took on a life of its own. It is still relevant to know of this false, abstract reality, because human beings act on such knowledge regardless of whether it conforms to the universe. Conversely, material observations we make that constitute knowledge are knowledge in the same sense as political truths and established reality, even if it is the knowledge of a madman who is wildly discordant with the surrounding society. Knowledge in of itself does not provide truth. It simply refers to a process which emerged from information processing. The basis for genuine knowledge can only occur in a real world - that is, if anyone is to "know" anything, it must be accepted that there is a real world that preceded us, and we can verify this knowledge very simply by asking where we as biological humans came from. We further ask questions about the soul, spiritual authority, the genesis of the universe itself, and so on that are not easily answered with a crude materialist philosophy or science. "Science" itself is a process that emerged from knowledge, rather than science being something that exists outside of knowledge; nowhere in the universe does "science" animate the universe like a hobgoblin. Such views are really the typical pablum that has been a ruling class obsession for centuries, and have nothing to do with science in the genuine sense.^[5] Knowledge is only the beginning of a genuine investigation into truth, reality, and concepts that are not reducible to the simple assertion of information or material existence, and it is the sole entry point we possess that allows us to grasp information or the material world to any extent we do. We do not possess a direct connection to information, raw data, or the material world, that allows us to see these things as they truly are. They are always filtered through a faculty of knowledge in order for meaning to be established and for the knowledge system itself to grow.

Knowledge does not stand as some disconnected fact or essence, but can only exist in entities that are continuously active in "knowing" throughout their existence, in some form or another. The gathering of knowledge or more basic information is limited by the ability of that entity, but all of this knowledge pertains to a world shared by all who know of the real world. There is no way to un-know the shared reality, which does not regard any of our conceits about what it is or what we are. For this to happen, the knowing entity assembles its knowledge and arranges it towards its purposes, rather than some design imposed from an outside power. Even if a scheme by which people are required to assemble knowledge in particular ways can be rationalized, and the knowledge-gathering of the real entities can be controlled in one way or another, it remains a task that is autonomous for those who seek knowledge, and it could not proceed in any other way. All information and matter that enters our knowledge can only be transformed into knowledge and meaning by processes which are internal to the knower. This does not prevent the knower's internal affairs from being disrupted, if such a thing is materially possible, but for this task to be ordained from an external force, it implies some substantive interaction in the processes that assemble knowledge. Those interactions are limited by a number of factors, chief among them being a tendency in life to defend itself and its integrity. If something hostile and alien seeks to corrupt our native knowledge base, we as living knowers resist it or must be persuaded by some trick or argument or by coercion to accept the alien influence. It is not a given that information alien to us is hostile, but that is a decision that the individual in the end must make. Even if the decision is not really a decision - if the information is presented by an adult pedagogue representing social institutions which are cast and the child is isolated and threatened to comply or face humiliation or death - the alien influence must be assembled for each individual knower, and those who assemble knowledge, whether they want it or not, can only do so on the terms that their prior conditions allow. It is not possible to insert information for uncritical acceptance, such that the child will hold two or more contradictory ideas and not think of how to integrate them into a knowledge base. Just as the functions of the body cannot be rife with too many contradictions, the knowing entity cannot be plagued by contradictions in its thinking without eventual terminal failure. Children, even those who gain the aptitude for lying and are rewarded for it as this society does, cannot contend with the extent of deliberate lying and control of lying that political society demands. Such habits much be trained, with full knowledge of when to shift between lying and fidelity to reality. Absent knowledge, paricularly social knowledge of who can and cannot be lied to and who holds authority, it would be impossible to reconcile the lying that is inherent to human social existence. Knowledge itself constitutes the first true concept of authority, relations with people beyond obvious statements of physical fact, and this knowledge is among the core knowledge that informs the development of any larger knowledge base. There no knowledge gathering that does not account for the situation we live in, since the task of gathering knowledge served a need of ourselves to live and must reconcile with a world that is outside of our immediate knowledge.

Knowledge demands the accumulation of more knowledge through the life of those who know - at no point is the drive to acquire knowledge satisfied. This does not take the form of ever-increasing wisdom or goodness, but instead it is a constant wariness of those who know of what may threaten that seat of knowledge or the body. Never in human experience is it desirable to not know what is coming for you. Not all knowledge is desired, and only so much knowledge can be developed and acted on at any given time. Ignorance is not bliss and ignorance is not strength; to not know, when surrounded by other entities who know things forbidden from you, is the most harrowing experience a human can face, and this is a constant that is greater than any other fear that is imagined. To truly fear is itself dependent on knowledge that there is something to fear, and it does not require advanced knowledge to know that there is something to fear. Fear is something that arises early in humans, and is one of the chief senses guiding human behavior, politics, and the values we hold. The knowledge that there is something to fear is apparent to every human, no matter how out of the know they are. Someone held captive in an institution, who cannot speak but knows there are men ready to wrangle him, must scream at the sorry state of his existence. It has always been the case that capitivity and the humiliations of social existence produce acute fear and a response, without any rationalization required to ask why this is so. Humans cannot be happy in capitivity if their situation remains uncertain, and the captors' assurances that all of this is normal is of no comfort. Humans who notice a severe gap in their knowledge base relative to entities like themselves will be at a permanent disadvantage, and the severity of this disadvantage is more pronounced as knowledge and its products, such as technology and higher wisdom, are more prevalent in a society. Once an entity begins the process of knowing, it cannot un-know or fail to respond in some way to the threats knowledge would reveal to it. It may be able to accept the inevitable, and it may cower in fear and refuse to acknowledge what their knowledge would tell them. The former is common and necessary in a life where we know, from an early age, that we were always doomed. The latter is encouraged less by the knower itself, who is aware of the trap of excessive fear, but is a thing imposed deliberately on knowing entities by another knowing entity. That is the basis for struggle in humanity and in life - a struggle between two agents who are presumed to be knowers, rather than a struggle between two essences unmoored from any knowledge. If the two agents were just material or informational flotsam, whatever "struggle" they engage in would be irrelevant. Struggle is not foundational to knowledge nor is knowledge a thing consumed entirely by struggle, but struggle is a potential any knowing entity faces, whether it struggles with another knowing entity or a sense of the whole world. A human does not struggle in any serious sense with an unknowing force or entity. Humans do not genuinely struggle with the weather, or with plants they domesticated and pluck with minimal effort. Humans do struggle against the world in the absence of any struggle with each other, for it is a human tendency to ascribe to the world as a whole the qualities of knowledge and information processing.

If we recall how we started this investigation into knowledge and its origin, the presumption of the world at first glance is that it is a largely unknown thing, and it is not immediately evident that the world as a whole is unaware. We can easily presume that there is a hobgoblin animating everything in the world, or that we could personify the whole world in the form of a godhead, because our first impression of the world was dependent on presuming our faculties of knowing had relevance to answering a question of the world. We are able to discern with little work that the world is not a "knowing" entity in any sense like we are, but struggle as a concept can override this basic deductive work we would have discovered as a child. For reasons that will become apparent, spiritual authority in society and political authority often claimed the name of "the world", either with the spiritual authority claiming they are one with the world and we are alien to the world, or claiming that the world is the enemy of the Kingdom of Man and that Man will defeat the whole world and its intents. That struggle is a very real one, continuing to this day, and so it is very easy to speak of fighting "the world", rather than merely a society or an assembly of agents who are known to be limited creatures. The extent of society and its machinations are not always apparent to us, and we may still labor under the impression that there is a sector within society we can call friend and a sector we call enemy, and we may in some way identify with the states and the men that rule us, or pick which lord of the terrible options we will follow or are obligated to follow. Such is the way of the world and of human society. That investigation must wait for a later writing.

We will presume for the rest of this section of our book that we are concerned with knowledge for the individual who is the "knower", and the question of society appears to us first as a black box or a number of black boxes, about which we can only speculate. In casual behavior, normal people do not attempt to psychoanalyze other knowing entities too deeply, and see little success in doing so. It doesn't stop loudmouths from shouting their assertions about another human, almost always serving the loudmouth's sense of himself or his petty bigotries or uttered as a defense against an alien as a prelude to attack. For a sufficiently well-integrated knower, whatever internal contradictions exist in the knowledge base are a thing that should be resolved, rather than a thing to be celebrated or allowed to fester. We may present a lying face to other people and we may push ourselves to lie to ourselves to an extent that allows us to push through an unpleasant situation, but in regular functioning, we do not internally struggle because that is stupid.

The most basic knowledge arises ultimately on the power of the knower to interpret the world and act in it, rather than knowledge being supplied to the knower. If information is fed pedagogically, it must pass through the student's filter to be accepted as valid knowledge. The peculiarities of this are a subject for another time. This basic knowledge is accumulated at first by an impulse in life, and adapts to common recurrencing events it will encounter. The human brain in particular is lousy at rationality, but it is great at pattern recognition - so great that its ability to sort patterns and discern meaning from them was able to substitute for algorithmic rationality for most of our purposes, and it was this pattern recognition which allowed the development of symbolic language and anything that could express algorithmic rationality as something meaningful to us. The peculiariaties of early childhood development, and the varying qualities of humans that are revealed by the age where children are exposed to wider society, are not too relevant. We are aware of the faculties of humans, that most humans will acquire the rudiments of language and this language usually offers tools for inquiry into meaning, based on informational inputs that the knowing entity can gather on their own power, with intent to search for information that is relevant to meaning. Those faculties become regular enough that we depend on them to navigate the world, and usually assume they will not change significantly. As mentioned, we cannot "un-know" things by simple assertion, and the capacities of a human being only change as they can. Even if a knowledge base is destroyed - if the brain were damaged or knowledge were disused for so long that its recollection is foggy - the effect of that knowledge base once upon a time is still felt. Human beings, being aware of the faculties necessary to survive in a hostile world and having some awareness of other humans' faculties, will often seek to acquire that baseline and find ample examples of information leading to it. Even if there is an attempt in society to conceal knowledge, enough of the truth has a way of reaching those who are not "supposed" to know certain things, particularly when they concern knowledge that commonly circulated. Even if the emulation of faculties in an individual is atypical and a botched job in an attempt to fit in to a society which demands those faculties, it is difficult to truly forbid that faculty unless someone is confined and deliberately kept out of knowledge by a vast conspiracy. A drive in humans to exercise this faculty and the necessity to do begins an engine where knowledge is accumulated and propagates socially. Because large parts of human knowledge are acquired because social circulation of information allowed it to be reproduced, it is difficult to speak of knowing humans as autistic, isolated entities, even when their behavior is described as "autistic". The most desperate humans, out of dire necessity, seek to know enough to avoid or defeat the vicious humans who revel in torturing those who are out of the know. At the end, though, knowledge is a local event, and not mediated by anything else. It is knowledge itself which forms the basis of all understanding, and we only possess models to break that knowledge down into its constituent parts, and an understanding that this knowledge should point to an actual reality that is outside of knowledge and information altogether. The information and knowledge are more developed forms of the basic data that we pulled from the world, and all of this information and knowledge is a work in progress.

Both information and knowledge face the problem of reduction. The actual substantive events we encounter are reduced to information which is a rendering of the event that is useful for us, and knowledge fits that information into some storehouse and allows for meaning. Knowledge is even more limited than information, for information can be described with any amount of complexity we can imagine. The true condition of things and events in the world is a morass of data and information that is very complex, and with information we have very complicated models we describe in books and in science, but that don't enter everyday knowledge. A trained scientist will still refer to textbooks to supplement his knowledge, and ponders over very complex knowledge with careful deliberation.

We may be tempted to think of the knower as a preferred form - for example, a human, or a creature with a brain with such and such features. The basic faculties of a body inform greatly what the knowledge process does, and what we might value as "worthwhile knowledge", i.e. processes that we regard as sufficiently intelligent to allow for reason. This does not hold as a universal even among humans, and that has been one of the great games humans have played with each other - to define who is and is not "in the know", who is valid and who is not. We cannot axiomatically define knowing entities by a fixed trait like a particular brain structure or feelings in the sense we appreciate them, but we can define knowing entities by a few traits we consider "knowledge" as opposed to mere information processing or ordinary motion. To know is to be able to regulate some data stream in such a way that information can be resolved, which implies in the first place particular types of machines that accomplish it. The negative feedback loop necessary in cybernetics to allow for regulation of energy to become some information processing operates in ways that we can understand only after a considerable knowledge base, but are nonetheless active in anything we presume to "know" or "think". To know then is to in some sense govern at the very least some process in the actual world, rather than simply process knowledge and spit out the result. Knowledge formed in life to govern the body, but became something more. Knowledge implies consciousness, which itself implies a constant experience which is sustained somehow and energetically active, and some way to connect with a world which consciousness observes or interfaces with. It implies further that this process can accumulate, store, retrieve, and build upon knowledge, which requires yet more specific hardware to allow this faculty to begin in earnest. The greater spiritual questions of knowledge - concepts of the soul, purpose, of something more than a material understanding - are products of a sufficient advanced knowledge to be conceived of as relevant. We may identify ourselves more with a spiritual conception of ourselves which is not wholly symbolic but a thing we regard as very real, than a materialistic origin which is only the beginning of a much more sophisticated existence. Unlike a computer, knowledge is never "turned off", and even if we envisioned a switch to deactivate knowledge processing, we may imagine such an artificial knowing entity restarting and retrieving information from storage, reconstituting its knowing state very quickly and resuming the process. It could be aware that there is such a thing as being "turned off", where it is completely inert rather than sleeping as we do. Sleeping life is still conscious in some sense and can be roused, and must possess this processing to continue living. An entity that is not burdened by this requirement may be turned off with no consequence. However, if this entity were able to sense its hardware as its basis for "knowing", and was sufficiently aware of its existence, it would be able to tell readily that its body has particular qualities that allow this process to happen. "It" would not be a thing that could be transferred easily to another host and remain the same thing. Sentience or self-identity in the sense we appreciate it would not be necessarily how this entity viewed its knowledge process or conscious experience; but then, humans can dissociate or act as if their past did not exist. If we are thinking through the nature of our conscious existence, whatever it may be, though, we are aware that there is a past, and that the current existence came from somewhere and is going somewhere. We may not perceive "time" in the same sense, and can model in the abstract a world in which time is not a constant pressing, viewing the whole procession of one motion as a singular event. We are aware though that there were conditions of creation, destruction, and existence, even if we truly forget them for ourselves. Something else in the world would be able to assert the past whether we wish it or not, and the future cannot be put off simply by thinking there is no future or that time is meaningless. The form of the entity does have considerable impact on how this entity can view itself and its relations to anything, whether it will be able to process symbolic language as we do which produces qualities otherwise impossible. That investigation can continue to much higher levels of understanding and purpose if we so choose, but the important core of knowledge is the process playing out.

By no means is a knowing entity confined to a body or form that corresponds to life. Knowledge to be knowledge is open-ended and approaches a world. We cannot help but form a symbiotic relationship with tools, and this has long been known and approached in modern science and thinking on the human condition. Where we draw the distinction between the knowing entity and what is not a part of its knowledge process is something we would be able to ascertain only with proper analysis and a concept of meaning. We could see the tool as part of ourselves, or a thing which we attach and hold as property very intimately. We can see relations with other entities or to the world as a whole as essential to our own construction and sense of what we are, and this is the default in society where we are very strongly influenced by other humans, or even the possibility or threat of other humans, or the history of human society which made language and civilization and sophisticated technology possible. Absent any deeper meaning or symbolic representation, we might extend the "knowledge gathering system" to the whole world, with caveats that we know that which is distant to other things in our "whole self" - a conceit that our subjective experience of the world in entirety is "us", whether we wish it to be or not. We may distinguish distinct influences like other knowing entities we do not control, and a large world about which we know little except that it could exist, but we never find a way to divide "us" from the rest of the sensory cluster in any certain way. This is because, taken to its logical conclusion, if we operate with a preconceived informational content of what we are, we wouldn't be able to integrate the simplest function of our own organic bodies without an overmind pushing it as it will. Even if we regard ourselves as masses of chemical and electrical reactions interfacing with a world reducible to the same, this definition is derived from knowledge in the first place to be anything meaningful. We would need to know what those events are to speak of "us" in this way, and from that we would construct a greater system to describe ourselves as emergent from those basic physical processes. If we reduce ourselves to that, though, we see that what comes out is much more than just those, and entails a sense of self that at the least conceives of assimilating different reactions and events, that would have a history we could retrace. This would be necessary because to even think of chemistry or formal science requires many leaps in knowledge and the development of the entity. Without that, there wouldn't be any knowing of chemical reactions or anything - not just in subjective experience, but in what would be observed if someone saw the body of the creature which did not know at all. It would mean the body would be unable to direct the processes which sustain its life, and the body becomes a dead thing, a lump of flesh groaning in some way that would not qualify as highly developed life, or an organism we would appreciate in the sense even the least well-integrated organism has some identifiable consistent behaviors and underlying constitution. We might imagine a flesh doll preserved, and we might imagine some regulatory process administered by another, but living things to remain living on entirely their own power would only regulate themselves with the primitive forebears of this ability to know. A similar reasoning could be applied to non-organic or non-living "knowers", with the caveat that these are constitutionally very different constructs.

Our cyborg friend that can be turned off may be designed in such a way that turning it off just leaves a plastic, inert doll, but if that body is destroyed and can no longer boot, then it would not turn back on as a "knower". We might retrieve its recorded memory hard drive or whatever parts and insert them into a new cyborg, and it would appear to be back to our symbolic representation. Realistically, every time we turn back on the cyborg, it's a new instance of the "knower", and it may be aware of this while still being a knowing creature. The particulars of life, with its demonstrated wants and desires and persistence, should not be considered entirely necessary or foundational for knowledge. Our sense of ourselves, and humans' symbolic language and civilzation, was premised on living systems, which were and remain our first instinct to know what we are and what we are interfacing with. We think about knowledge and consciousness as we do because we are acutely aware of life and death, and what it means to be terminated and in a society where this is a constant threat. Knowledge need not be confined to the basest expression of life, where we envision life as a thing locked in a struggle for existence, a struggle for political relevance and command of the state, or an expression of some infantile "me wantee" germ in the core of us that needs no other justification or purpose. Even to live with any of the dignity that we would expect requires living knowledge to develop beyond the mere process of knowledge, or the conceit that knowledge for its own sake is the goal of life or the crown of existence. We can choose to value knowledge for various purposes or specialize as people who are knowledgeable or expert, or we can ask a question about why we are here, why we do anything. We could find symbolic representation, wordplay, games, music, art, and so on to just be intrinsically interesting when these things provide some meaning, information, or development of the faculties, or we indulge in things simply to pass the time or find a salve from an otherwise dreary base existence. Seeking those answers is not an obligation. The base existence of life is by no means an obligation until we have a society telling us it is; we can choose to an extent the basic conditions of life, and if we are sufficiently motivated and overcome an instinct against doing so, we can end our life or prepare ourselves for death if it is inevitable. I do not seek to answer all of those questions here or ever, because all this author can do is whatever he's going to do, and his life is not a good example to follow for other humans.

This chapter has only described some of the characteristics of knowledge at a basic level. A full, exhaustive description would take too long, and in the subsequent chapters of this book I will elaborate on these knowledge systems as it pertains to further writings. I would recommend a full and proper treatment of knowledge in another writing, and of course, I exhort the reader to arrive at their own conclusions rather than believe what I write religiously.

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Knowledge by itself as a process is not and cannot be the sole seat of truth, or the apex of all that exists. The task of accumulating knowledge can proceed as if by some impulse, without fully knowing a rational model of why it is accumulated at all. Humans were able to do this for many centuries without any formal "theory of mind" or "theory of knowledge", let alone one that conformed to a politicized education or the subjects who had to exist in such a world. Again, the peculiarities of knowledge in society, and knowledge in state society in particular, is beyond the scope of this writing and must wait for a later book. It is evident to everyone who lives in society today that we do live in such a society, even if we do not understand political theory or why those who rule do as they do. The impression of institutions and those who contest power in the state on our individual knowledge base is something we live with every day, even if we were caged in an institution and unable to speak. Those who are wrangled and prodded, then locked in dreary conditions that are intended to degrade the inmate to make them pliable, are aware that there are men who will beat them, and a whole society of aliens who despise them at a visceral level that normal humans only occasiaonlly experience. It is much easier for the normal people to kick down that which they find unsightly than to truly understand the position of the damned. It is of course a lie to claim that the middle or upper classes cannot understand the lowest class due to some essential nature of the classes. Those who are valid are well aware of how the invalid in captivity operate, why the valid must attack the invalid, and a general modus operandi for the valid to suppress the invalid that is acted on throughout all human societies. The valid know very well what they do the invalid, and could if they really wanted to envision life as a retard or a slave; the methods of humiliation and degradation that are ubiquitous in humanity would not be so consistent if this knowledge were not available, and the exceptions to the rule were known to the valid. The invalid may be able to know the mentality of the valid classes, even to the point of becoming a learned scholar with a more deliberate intellectual knowledge than the valid, but the key knowledge that separates the valid from the invalid is forever restricted, because that key knowledge is not some grand truth or mystery that is transcendent. Entry into valid society is a knowledge particular to humans and political society, and the bar for entry into that society can be set at whatever arbitrary level the gatekeepers of the institutions desire. No amount of learning or education will change that the invalid are to be rejected from valid society. While it is in principle possible for the invalid to be redeemed or allowed entry into valid society after great struggle, moral philosophy and the spiritual and political principles that came to dominate were explicit in rejecting forever the invalid. Once invalid, always invalid, and this becomes a rule of society that is absolute in the final analysis. This distinction being a social one must be acknowledged as a potential fetter for our understanding, but at a basic level, the germ of knowledge is present in any living thing constituted in a way that allows it to gather knowledge. The particular knowledge that is attained by the individual may vary, but to know at a basic level is not a proposition of some information or some judgement of something, but to exist in a way that allows this knowledge to be stored at all, and acted upon.

This recapitulates much of what was written in the last chapter about the germ of knowledge. Knowledge by itself is an empty experience. We may know everything there is to know, and keep acquiring knowledge, but any meaning to knowledge is only possible if knowledge can diversify, and if knowledge is to pertain to something other than this germ or genesis of knowledge that we have acknowledged. The "pure pursuit of knowledge" has been shown time and time again to be a very pernicious death cult, and if someone is fool enough to believe in it, the fetish for knowledge degrades first into a search for information or crass material wants, and then to degraded forms of institutions which exist to perpetuate themselves by an impulse that is unknowing and uncaring. Taken to its extreme, the fetish for knowledge and the cult of knowledge is just another regression to the primordial light, and it is this regression that is very common and inherent to the strategy of elites to enslave most of mankind. In the past, technology, science, and institutions could not invade private life to such an extent that this was possible or desirable in those conditions, but latent in state society this tendency was already present and had wrought considerable damage before the modern period. The rule of ideology required glorifying knowledge above all, and excising anything that could arise from it or that constituted its true origins. This meant that human society and the ruling ideas would be arrested, or only could change in service to a cult of power which claimed the spiritual authority of science and all other spiritual authority. That is what we have been locked in for the past century and will be locked in for the forseeable future, for ideology became not merely a story but a self-perptuating beast that cannibalized any real basis for knowledge and any product it created. Ideology is an adaptive beast but only within confines sufficient to regress back to a cult of knowledge and pseudoscience, which invariably turns against itself once it has cannibalized all external threats. Knowledge without context and deeper purpose is nothing relevant at best and a trap at worst. We are given the false dichotomy of knowledge, which is held in private for those selected to live, and ignorance, which is the presumed state of those selected to die. We who are selected to die are not ignorant, and never were. We saw the so-called wise for what they were and saw their game as a futile exercise, and those selected to live who enshrined their self-serving wisdom can only persist by systematically destroying any understanding they did not approve of - that is, that nothing that challenges their rule and the beast which extracts wealth for their pleasure will ever be allowed to exist. This meant, ultimately, those selected to die wouldn't merely be killed, but would become living abortions by decree, their remaining life spent under constant attack and a pressing of the nerve of power. This is the only way the doctrine of knowledge as the sole spiritual authority could have ended. It is often blamed on "science" or technology, as if it were the machines or an understanding of the material world alone that was the culprit of modern rot. It was the idealists and those who defend their pseudoscientific religion that took the fore, bastardizing science and taking it away from the workers entirely. Science to be meaningful suggests knowledge is the basis for a meaning which is greater than the sum of all that came before knowledge. It is only in completing this that knowledge can not only be meaningful in a way beyond statements of fact, but that we can possess a genuine sense of ourselves and all that exists; or at least, this would be the starting point to be something more than a point of knowledge mindlessly accumulating this prime concept.

This process begins as early as the first formation of knowledge, before language. Not all knowledge is some common substance that is indistinguishable from another, but the distinction is not merely in informational content. All knowledge must be acquired in a way the knower regards as distinct from other knowledge. Just as it is impossible to hold contradictions in actual knowledge for long, it is impossible to say with any seriousness that all knowledge is the same thing. Anyone attempting to say this is muddying the waters with full knowledge of the trick, and this is something done only in language to speak down to those held in contempt. To hold this knowledge, it would correspond to information and some material reality that is placed somewhere in memory distinct from other knowledge. This by itself would not distinguish it, but knowledge to be knowledge relies on the knower possessing some faculty that suggests what information is necessary for its task of living. It makes sense for the knower to consider different knowledge as things pertaining to different spheres of existence, and to be able to discern what in one sphere of activity can relate to another sphere of activity, and how they relate. This relies on some commonality between all types of knowledge which allows this comparison, and a knowledge that is acquired not through mere experience but by pondering something transcendent. The transcendent knowledge is the metaphysics referred to earlier - that we develop, at first instinctively, a concept of what things are. This concept itself is not fixed in the brain or mind, but it is always active to allow for knowledge to exist as knowledge. Without a concept of what it means for things to "be", and all other questions metaphysics sheds light on, all knowledge can be nothing more than informational flotsam. The earliest "metaphysics" is something instinctive to the life-form, but it is quickly apparent that this instinct and the earliest developmental experiences cannot remain an internal process. We reckon with a world that is much larger than us, with entities who are like us but much more developed and organized, who have accumulated knowledge long before us and without us. The world is full of things we see and we catalogue all that we can sense, and attempt to integrate this information into some framework. The information cannot remain staccato utterances of a concept with only the meanings demanded by pedagogy. For someone assimilating knowledge to further develop knowledge, it is necessary to speak of a general nature of things that is not dependent on any particular sense experience. We only have sense experience to tell us of all the things we can possibly encounter, but once enough knowledge of things has accumulated, we are capable of speculating about things which we never sensed. Those things might be imagined, or they might be abstract things we would only have known through language or through considerable contemplation of concepts. They may be things we could conceive of realizing through some action, like the plan of an architect to build a house.^[1]

For knowledge to be knowledge implies that it is never fixed but that it allows for speculation within the boundaries that are within the capacities of the knower. The capabilities of a person in actuality are far more than anything that is expressed in the final outcome of thought and action, and for humans with tool use and language those capabilities in the long term have very high potentials. Humans through tools can command large machines or, in principle, whole societies just from the seat of knowledge and a few seeds that were allowed to develop and grow. This potential is not limitless and immediate, but with a general knowledge base and the material means available for someone to act, humans grow from a very feeble native potential to potentials that are difficult to measure. For an animal or a dull human, this potential is less, but in their own knowledge the potential for growth and adaptation is always possible so long as they live. The potential for the reverse, decay of knowledge, is less common and never the inexorable march to defeat that the philosophers like to claim. Knowledge, once present and circulating, tends to be retained in some way. It makes sense for humans to write down symbols pertaining to knowledge, or to construct some method for retrieving knowledge from media or from a more scant memory - for example, a mnemonic or rhyme to recall knowledge. There is a great incentive in humans to never lose permanently knowledge, even that which is a burden or painful to know. That incentive cannot be taken for granted, but the decay of bodily faculties or damage to the body is not in of itself the wholesale destruction of knowledge. Weakening faculties may lose memory that was once reliable. Knowledge that was judged as superfluous may be forgotten in human memory. We never know when an errant expression or some mistake long ago will come back to haunt us, if another knows of that error or sin and seeks to press advantage against us. The state of an individual's knowledge at any time is always in flux, and in principle none of our knowledge is sacred. Humans can be corrupted, destroyed, and can do the same to other thinking and knowing entities. Humans can also cooperate, learn from the world, and question their convictions to assemble new ones. Children often learn through trial and error that which works, and that which they need to know to conform to a hostile and alien society. At no point is any of this knowledge reducible to a thing called "general knowledge" or "general intelligence", in some sense that knowledge is like precious manna of the universe or a substance priced at a premium. Natively, the only "economy of knowledge" is whatever limitations we encounter for the task at hand. Economic thought is the subject of the next book in this series, and so for now I leave it until then. We build core beliefs about what things are and basic concepts like locality, inquiry, names of things, definitions, which are premised on some basic truth we encounter in the world so frequently that we can take them for granted. We can refine these core beliefs only as we need to, usually settling in late childhood with our understanding of crude metaphysics, which is sufficient for a more formal investigation into knowledge. We must distinguish between even the core concepts to develop a worthwhile metaphysics. Otherwise, we would be left with "shit happens" or a series of just-so stories repeated regardless of any context or comparison. Even the most core knowledge that would be the genesis of more knowledge is something distinct and more, containing within it the basic material truth that there is something in the world - us - that is "knowing" anything. Knowledge as a disconnected, general concept is a gaping void, and may as well not exist. Treatments of information as if the information itself were "knowledge" are pointing to this vacuous treatment of knowledge that is promoted by those in the institutions against those who are to be excluded from the institutional knowledge, and eventually from the society dominated by those institutions. That knowledge is recursive if we attempt to define it is not a barrier for knowledge existing in the real world. That is only a barrier for our rational understanding of knowledge, which is far more limited than the full extent of our knowledge. The full extent of our knowledge contains things we have yet to verbalize or write down, and all we say and write is informed by our existence as creatures which do things in a real world. We are not disconnected information hubs, or processes spitting out a single output for some input. Knowledge, on its own terms, produces a variety of outputs, and does not automatically spit output for any input like a machine. Knowledge can assess inputs without suggesting a consequential output of note to the knower. The nature of a knowing entity suggests it will possess some barrier between its functions and the world, however thin it may be. Any knowledgeable entity which retains sanity knows that this barrier is not absolute, and none of its knowledge is sacred or under divine protection that is absolute, but the barrier is strong enough that knowledge typically is not overwritten, and even a toddler is known to be defiant against certain alien knowledge - any parent can tell you about defiant toddlers and the difficulty of habituating them to even the society of home, let alone a highly predatory outside world. If this permeability was zero or produced a total barrier between the outer and inner world, then we would not need to ask ourselves any question of political competition or the general fear, or ask why humans lie to each other. Either there is no barrier and humanity can be lied to by any superior will without resistance, or the barrier is such that any lie would be rejected and this wouldn't be a problem. Both of these positions are suggested simultaneously in the ruling ideas, and the actual situation is politically and scientifically inadmissible unless those with expert clearance can adjudicate it, or the disparity between aggressor and defender is one of unequal social class which is regarded as a natural and permanent distinction.^[2]

It is important to understand the primacy of a metaphysical conception over conceits of the self, and the bifurcation of the self into "ego" and "superego" in the popular imagination. By promoting self-indulgence, psychology presented the most clear path to atomizing the liberal subject, and setting up the interrogations that would become the norm, and then a state-sanctioned inquisition unbound by any law. This atomization is presented to the liberal and socialist subject as a "just-so" story, as if the inquisition were natural and you were crazy for questioning the institution in any way. Since they decided for you what was sane and insane, retarded or intelligent, it followed that truth and fiction and political settlements would be decided by these men, rather than whatever government or ideology was purported to be at work. The conservative had always been a glutton for ideology, and so they were allowed to indulged in a reduced and bastardized version of the preceding society, with occasional indulgence in futurism and a fool's obsession with technology. The conservative is elevated just enough to prey on the selected victim classes, but consciously kept away from any meaningful institutional force. Conservatism as a trend in society was always a sad joke, a mish-mash of contradictory ideas and sentiments. With the effective defeat of the left during the middle of the 20th century, the Right, and especially its fascist vanguard, were able to insinuate the sole pseudo-collectivist position, while liberalism and socialism reverted into self-indulgence and self-abasement. The Right, for all their bloviating, encouraged an insane hyper-atomization and indulgence in the most crass pleasures, making a point to disdain any sign of intelligence beyond the minimum to be a thoughtless killer and enforcer for their masters.^[3] In all cases, this segregation of society into distinct grades relies on either a lack of metaphysical knowledge as an independent basis for judging humanity, or the production of specific metaphysical knowledge as ideology which must be accepted uncritically.^[4]

The knowlege of metaphysics can, in ideology, be used to construct an entirely artificial reality by thought alone. This never can sustain itself, because all metaphysics relies on observing a world in which actual things happen, without our thought or reason or any other thought animating any of it. Thought, mind, and thus metaphysics are themselves a product of the world. We only start with metaphysics because we have to, but we do this only to better reconstruct the actual world in our subjective experience. For us to actually make use of this metaphysics requires us to assemble knowledge of each thing, categorize it, and link it in some way that allows comparison. Once categorized, each body of knowledge we assemble will become its own thing. We thus develop concepts, theories, and so on regarding electricity, physics, materials or chemistry, biology, or their antecedents. The categorization of knowledge need not conform to a scientific view of the world, or a materialist conception, but knowledge is always sorted in some way that allows us to know what things are classified in a category. If we did not do this, then all knowledge would remain isolated points, which appear as if they were absurdities of the universe. We cannot rule out that the universe exists because "shit happens" - after all, absent an explanation which makes sense to us and follows a chain of events that we can understand, there is no reason to believe that there is any purpose or meaning inherent in a singular fact, as if the mere assertion of a form allowed us to "know" anything. Knowledge in the most basic sense has to be stored with regard to something greater, which has yet to fully develop. The various categories and classes of knowledge, however thoroughly developed, all must tie to some general theory of how the world works, from the perspective of the knower. The general theory of how the world works gives rise to something greater than a view of systems as some interlocking clockwork or a huge organism, which can be defined as a more elaborate construction of basic knowledge.

The World-System - Any entity which knows anything must construct, in their experience, a general understanding of how the world works. This understanding is never complete, and may be full of uncertainties which must be regarded as gaps in knowledge, but there is even in children a sense of cosmology and an inquiry to answer everything with some knowledge. The world-system is not simply an ideology or catechism, but the whole understanding someone has constructed of the world. For this concept to hold, it must be accepted that there is a world, and our subjective experience only exists to attempt an assembly of this world-system as much as possible. Our inner experience, that which we do not regard in society too readily, is as much a part of the world-system as anything else in the world. At the most basic level, there is no separation whatsoever between observer and the world, other than the same separation between any other thing in the world - that is, that we know our subjective experience cannot be reduced to a "point of light", and certainly not the primordial light that is harkened to. All the knowledge that any thinking entity gathers is limited and definite, and can only be acquired by definite means; that is, there is no "infinite knowledge", or an actual black box where knowledge and intelligence are inscrutable except by some arcane pseudoscience. This full understanding, all faculties and knowledge that can be drawn upon, is the world-system of a particular entity.

This world-system is necessary for any thinking entity to meaningfully compile knowledge, however limited it may be. It is impossible to gather genuine knowledge unless the "knower" has some concept that there is a world to be known, and that all things in this world are relatable in some way. It is only with the entire world-system that particular aspects of knowledge can be ascertained. No part of the world-system can be truly bifurcated from the rest of the world-system. We may trick ourselves, or be unaware in rational, waking thought of all aspects of the world-system - much of the world-system is what a mesmerist would call "sub-conscious", or things which do not enter rational awareness. The human brain and the active memory of a human, for all of its potential, only processes so much information at any given time. The limitations of humans are documented extensively in other literature which is too vast to recount here, and varies with each entity, but there are a few baselines which are common among humans in society.^[5]

It should not be construed that this world-system is limited to the body or domain of a human's property, as we are trained to believe. All that interfaces with the knowing agent is, in some way, an effect on the world-system. Because the ruling ideas disallow void or distance, it believed that if we accept that which is outside of us affects us, it all invariably affects us equally. This false egalitarianism is at the heart of the ruling philosophy, which annihilates all distance and meaning and nuance deliberately. The ways in which systems can be distinguished allow us to conclude that many external effects have virtually no effect on the world-system, but we are always cognizant that there is a world outside of immediate sense where events happen, and modify the world-system to account for this possibility. Uncertainty is a principle in knowledge systems, but it is a problem only for knowledge. The underlying material reality does not experience uncertainty. Any information we extract from the world is taken as what it is - we rely on information precisely because it resolves uncertainty in our models of the world. If there is uncertainty of some small iota, our models of reality recognize the uncertainty as an error in our thinking, rather than a characteristic of the world itself. Knowledge must account for a world where our information is incomplete, for no knowing entity has unlimited information processing input, and can only sense the world with a resolution it is capable of sensing. Knowledge itself entails conflating many pieces of information, including that which is unknown and uncertain about things. The world-system we construct guides us to be able to resolve this uncertainty - we are able to resolve uncertainty because we reference other knowledge we store, and we rely on first principles and a basic knowledge to build more knowledge. The world-system is not identical with "us" - we are able to discern what in the world-system is our property and under the influence of our will. The world-system does not need to regard "us" as a whole and inviolable entity at all, but the act of knowing itself implies that there is some knowledge gathering in a locus. The "knower" can subdivide itself however it imagines, and does so every day simply to comport itself as an entity in the real world. The knower is never whole and unitary in a full spiritual sense, and could not be. The integrity of connections to its body, and to the various spheres of knowledge it possesses, is what we understand as a sense that we are "whole" - that the knower is in touch with the real conditions of the world, rather than trapped in some knowledge base and asserting it autistically. Part of knowing the world is knowing yourself and your limitations, and your position in the world. I refer to one's position in the actual world - that is, with an accounting of the whole universe, rather than merely the political arena of society or human interaction. One of the great victories of eugenism was to sever the human from a habitat, from history, from any spiritual authority outside of eugenism, and from each other independent of the mediation of the eugenist.

The world-system to be properly constituted does not revert knowledge to some lowest common denominator, or reduce knowledge to a few koans and myths we tell ourselves. Such sayings are a way for humans, with their limited faculties, to link together a large network of information and knowledge, so that comparisons are made easier. No reasonable person confuses a metaphor or analogy for reality. Children are educated today in an environment where they must fail to grasp metaphors, except in ways that are prescribed by pedagogy, and that the ruling ideas can be injected to violate the individual's native process of figuring out anything. This is not an easy task, but it is one that is accomplished through a vast preponderance of force and information, that is intended to confuse and cajole humans. It would only be possible to impose such a belief about knowledge through a great fear and the means to make that fear materially present.

The world-system is a necessary construct for knowledge to develop beyond the basic functions which allow any entity to "know" a thing. The world-system is never the immaculate whole or "totality" which dictates what reality is. The world-system of a knower, like the underlying physical entity, is assimilating new information and knowledge, and must do so in order to develop genuine and useful knowledge. If knowledge were just metaphysics, metaphysics can be imposed from on high and without any standard of comparison to verify if this matches anything we observe. Even the most basic knowledge is a product of a world that came before us, and so too is the totality of knowledge of any subject. The world, as a whole, does not "know" in any way like we do, and does not have any sense of itself. If we are to describe "God" as a fount of knowledge, it is a false God. The proposition of any "god" does not conform to this crass, pseudoscientific explanation of the entity, but refers to something much different which is beyond the scope of the present writing. Here I am only concerned with the world-system of an individual, as it actually exists and as we can verify through our own faculties. The assertion of any "god" belongs to the domain of society and politics. If we are to posit that there is such an entity as a "god", it does not conform to any hitherto existing myth about it, and most of all does not conform to the bastardization of divinity that has been propagated en masse to fool the common stock. The "gods", if they exist, would be very different creatures, which could only be understood through metaphors. Ascribing human traits to the gods has been understood even to a crude mind as the conceit of priests who seek to hoard spiritual authority, and not every human culture needed "gods", let alone the particular forms the "gods" took in imperial civilization. I would wager that most of humanity never actually believed in "gods" in the sense we are exhorted to believe in them, and profession of belief in such entities was almost entirely an act of fealty to the ruling interest. The actual attitudes towards gods in the common people were either to understand them as metaphors, or to relate an experience of the world that did not conform to the ruling ideas and the bastardizations of the priests and pedagogues. The madmen who claim to hear "God" are usually desperately seeking something that would attack the beast that lords over them imperiously and tells them what they are and all they can be. In societies where this influence is less pernicious, and among humans who are blessed enough not to face the worst humans can bring to other humans, the bizarre ideology surrounding "gods" is less prevalent, and it remains possible to speak of these concepts as more than a pressing of the nerve of power, or a lie to lure the enslaved to an imagined primordial light and to the butcher's knife.

We may imagine the processes which assemble information as the genesis of knowledge, and the world-system as the "final result" - a result which never is truly final, but which is for us our full knowledge and assessment of the world in subjective experience. What is in between is the actual interface with the world, in which information constructed from things external to the world-system modifies this knowledge base. Humans form the basis of their personality and their most core concepts of themselves early in life, with parts of this personality more or less "hardcoded" as a result of their biological constitution and that which is passed by typical heredity. The personality is never "encoded" as if the biological constitution were a computer program read algorithmically, but rather, biological constitution determines which limitations on knowledge are materially determined, and suggests a few impulses which would, in most cases, produce remarkably similar outcomes among humans, which do not occur in other forms of life. What parts of knowledge can be said to be "hardcoded" or "genetically determined" are the most basic reactions of the body, or tendencies of living systems to organize in ways that meet the demands of life and of the particular intent of a given life-form. It is possible then to speak of a thing such as "human nature", but if we are to speak of it we are speaking of things which are minor, and which are not immutable essences.^[6] Part of this nature is that humans, like any knowledgeable creature, will grow and develop knowledge, specialize it towards tasks that are relevant to that knowledge, and knowledgable creatures can detect threats to their core understanding as a threat to their existence.^[7] The world-system develops around this core understanding, but human beings who are honest with themselves can tell very easily that this core understanding is insufficient. We seek answers to a world which is not fixed in place and does not conform to our conceits about what it is or what things do, and these answers are not things we can determine entirely on our own power. We often assemble knowledge not by direct experience of all things, but by reading or learning from others who did things and condensing that knowledge to something comprehensible. It is only possible to do this by possession of some basic language or literacy that would allow for a small kernel of knowledge, even if it is not core knowledge, to allow us to assimilate very large information and knowledge storehouses in the world. The world itself is one such storehouse - all the things we regard as worth knowing will exist in the world in some way. Libraries, pedagogues, monuments, homes, are another such place where we can keep things which we use to reassemble knowledge. We might not hold in the brain all of this knowledge, and almost certainly we will not be able to store all the information that is worth knowing in the brain's memory. What we would hold in the brain and body for immediate recall is that which is most useful for daily life, and to better assimilate events in the world. In that way, the things we truly value in a spiritual sense can be protected.

At no point are the physical contents of the brain, the electrical signals as they physically exist, or any media with data we interpret as information the "knowledge" itself. Knowledge instead is assembled from information, and it can only become meaningful knowledge - knowledge as we appreciate it - if it is compared against a world-system, and that world-system can regard that something exists outside of it. To "know" anything entails that the "knower" senses itself as something distinct from the rest of the world as it knows it; that it, it possesses a sense of that which is relevant to its integrity and that which is not. This does not need to be "self-awareness" or a sense of identity as we often possess in society. That sense is a particular conceit we hold about our person, the abstracted form of ourselves in social situations and in politics. It is instead a sense that our "knowing" is a thing apart from the rest of the world, that arose from the world, and that can distinguish itself. To distinguish itself, it must be able to construct an inventory of its possessions, or at least a partial inventory - it must be able to distinguish one body of knowledge from another and explain how they are different. In developing the different areas of knowledge about the world, it is necessary to describe that which is transcendent, that which is occulted to normal sense but permeates the world, and a proper description of things so that the system is observed as a thing resembling the "true thing" we wanted to know anything about. Knowledge cannot remain mere knowledge, nor can knowledge subsume the lesser categories that comprise information and the material world. It is further impossible to imagine a transcendent hobgoblin "above the world" that animates things to give them true and full existence, that operates outside of knowledge yet is totally inaccessible to us. For human beings, or any true object, to really exist, implies that they possess this fourth stage to some degree or another. Spiritual language does not give us very helpful language for describing it, with analogues like "soul", "purpose", "true spirit", "true form", or simply "form" presented to us with varying interpretations. To elaborate about ourselves beyond the perception of immediate awareness - to know of our parts, the tools we use, the proximate distance between us and other things, and have a sense of that which is closer or further - implies something more. To elaborate further and associate ourselves with abstract ideas or things distant to us in space or energy but closely tied to our sense of what we are meaningfully implies yet more. We are in some sense tied to everything else, but all of those ties are things we can comprehend and we can describe the relationship or have a sense without a direct symbol of the relevance of each aspect of the world-system we can pick out. We are only able to do this because the world-system, which we premise implicitly on the existence of a world that did not regard our knowledge at all, allows us to make these comparisons, if not through logic or reason than through a sense that we consider real.

In this way, any problems of temporality - judging where the past and future affect the present - can be resolved by considering the procession of events, or all the things we may consider causality, in whole rather than as something continuous. This is the important step that allows knowledge to form any world-system or a part of it - that for something to be meaningful, it is something which must have a past, present, and future, or something we would regard as the result of causal chains, rather than being a process "in the moment" like knowledge, or "information" which is a representation of some past due to a delay in translating data to knowledge and then acting on it. Information is always at least slightly out of time from the moment where knowledge is actually happening. This is not the case with meaning, which we deal with in the immediate present with knowledge of both past and future - that is, for things to be meaningful and integrated into our knowledge, we imply that past and future states are a consideration of the present, and the present ultimately is a transition between cause and effect. We do this while regarding that the present is meaningful - in knowledge processing and real events, knowledge only processes "now", only delayed by any real mechanism that communicates knowledge. For example, we possess only certain organs and information processing faculties, certain sensory organs, and certain accumualted knowledge to draw upon. Without a sense of past and a sense of history and potential future that is either known to have existed, or is a future that could easily exist, all knowledge-gathering in the present would not be associated with anything allowing comparison or meaning. It would just be as if a button were pressed to activate a machine, manipulating knowledge without the "knower" having any sense of what it knows. If we did not regard a procession of events as relevant, the truth one day may be altered the next. This is not actually possible. Someone might pretend they can rewrite history in their mind and make the past irrelevant, or wish that they could just ignore the past and not let it taint the future. There is no good reason why the man who wishes to walk away from his past shouldn't be able to, however terrible the truth is. What he cannot do is act as if the past is irrelevant for other people who would judge it, or that past events can be wiped away and never be revealed by any force in the world. Once it is known, it cannot truly be un-known. The future is implied by the existence of a past; if this happened before, it can happen again. We would have to sense some effect from the past to guide even the most basic knowledge processing. What encapsulating all of these things does is not to conflate the distinction of temporality, but to make it possible to view an event with relation to other events, rather than taking the event as an isolated case. The isolated lab sample is never quite isolated in the actual world; that isolation is carried out in abstraction, and we would in a lab account for potential interference that would taint with this lab sample when writing an abstract scientific model of what this sample means.

A human being to be human is not merely the doing of the knowledge-building process at one instant in time, or a sum of knowledge gathering as if the human were a machine; nor is the human confined to play out a program dictated by biology or forces of nature. If humans were truly automata, there would be no purpose for experience and no possibility of any volition in humans, and so the entire question of will and what we are is pointless. It would be easy to give in, despite knowing that giving in means a living death, and it would appear in nature that giving in to the basest impulses of life is the only possibility. We cannot continue by doing that, even for the simplest act of genuinely living in this world. If we did, we would either disintegrate, or we would persist through life moving in circles without any cause or ability to stop it. It is possible to perceive that our lives are this despite all of our efforts to resist the urge, but if there were truly no alternative, then it would not be conceivable that there even was an alternative. The world and all we know would appear as a series of just-so stories ad infinitum. For us to know anything about the world suggests we possess a concept of history and the potential of us, and that we could if we really wanted to do things in a much different way. This is to say that there is no "historical progress" as a global trend or even a local trend for the whole of a person. There is a future about which we can say general things pertaining to a particular thing's history, but nowhere - not in the real material world, not in abstract models, not in spiritual thought, and not in some vague sense of things - does historical progress follow a linear trend that reduces all to a crude story. All histories can be broken down, analyzed, and seen as a great assemblage of parts to make the narrative whole and sensical, and we may find upon closer inspection aspects of history or potential we did not include in a story of what happened. It is only because we did do such a thing that humans could change at all to create the situation we are in. This concept altogether cannot be reduced simply to an assembly of knowledge to understand and arrest all that exists. Even if we sought to arrest the world into concepts that we can work with and manipulate, and we regarded that all that exists is comprised of knowledge, information, and underlying material substance, simply to exert the will to continue existing implies that there is a history to know or care about. All the necessary components to construct this are inhernet in the act of knowing. They may manifest differently dependent on the faculties of the knowing entity, and it may not occur to a creature with knowledge that it should contend with reality on this level, in this way, or that this reality has any more meaning than the cruder knowledge or information we deal with.

It might be possible to construe this history as something constructed out of knowledge or information or physical energy, but it could not be history in a sense that allows history to be genuine or meaningful. It would have the effect of claiming that "he who controls the present controls the past, he who controls the past controls the future", and this habit of knowledge is incompatible with anything existing at all as we have written before. The very recognition of a "present" implies a past and future, and it is the entire arc of a "thing"'s existence that we consider to truly interface with it. We casually arrest this existence as knowledge, information, or substance, because we lack a language to deal adequately with the full and elaborate history of things, and we could not regularly work with objects in this way and think of ourselves doing this. If we tried, we would approach life as if we were speaking in metaphors, and it would become interminably complex to manage the knowledge and information we must manage to navigate the world. We are, however, aware that when we are working with knowledge and information, it is pointing to a greater existence and meaning of any one thing. It is only because we do recognize that that it is possible to begin this investigation, this analysis, and this assembly of knowledge in earnest, rather than simply forming more primitive meanings without a general plan. We may possess a basic physical impulse to be as we are, which entailed that we would become knowing entities without any reason why we would "know" anything, but the full development of knowledge implies asking questions about the world and anything in it that are not reducible to the simple declaration of existence, whether we speak of our own existence or the existence of any particular thing, any particular form. The existence of things as distinguishable things, that can be ascribed meaning, implies we can know more about anything - including ourselves - than a form or linguistic token referent to the thing.

We obviously don't speak of "souls" being the true form of everything, yet this metaphor is often employed since it is one that is readily accessible to our language. We would not confine the "soul" of a thing to a fixed form in nature, and this includes our very own existence. For a lot of reasons though, human beings consider the "soul" to be sacred and particular to them, and often consider it to be a thing particular to certain types of humans. The drive for self-preservation in living knowledge-gathering systems would place a value on their own integrity and inviolability. This is necessary for a living creature such as ourselves to truly live in an often hostile world, without succumbing to the tendencies of matter in motion or forces which we know to exist. We value as soulful that which is closest at hand, and that which is most prominent in our lives. This means we prioritize ourselves and the internal processes of the human, with which we are intimately familiar and can't escape easily even if we wanted to, and we prioritize other human beings. We ascribe to non-living things human qualities or animistic qualities, because this is a convenient shorthand for us to understand many things through metaphor or stories. It is unsurprising that the first stirrings of spiritual thought and authority involved viewing things in the world in this animistic way, and we only developed formal knowledge and expounded on written language long after this step was taken. We always understood that this was a metaphor, and had some system for dealing with knowledge and information without metaphor. We often look at material things as a substance of importance to us, rather than engage in wordplay or thought experiments about the various material things we encounter. If we are to develop formal knowledge systems, as opposed to our cruder knowledge for navigating the world, we ask these questions of the nature of things. Such thinking is incompatible with daily functioning, and not necessary. It is enough to know that what we see and sense is very close to the actual world we encounter, or at least it would be enough to know this. The development of formal knowledge systems gave rise to the art of habitual lying that is endemic to the human race, and of those whose specialized knowledge of lying allowed them to accrue command over human beings in one way or another. That is a very particular type of knowledge, which is beyond the scope of the present writing. It is not a fait accompli that this knowledge of deception and the stories to mystify knowledge that is actually accessible to a large number of people was necessary or destined to happen. Throughout human existence, human beings resist this mystification and seek for themselves the answers, rather than relying on a thought leader to provide all knowledge and all understanding of the true meanings of things. We have to develop independently a knowledge base. No pedagogy can force someone to learn, or impose on someone a deep drive to learn in a particular way. It cannot be taken for granted that knowing entities truly want to learn anything. We seek to learn because it is something we do to live, not because learning consumes all available human effort and the material resources available to us.

It is only in this description that we reckon with knowledge in a way that assimilates its potential meanings and allows us to actually accumulate and define knowledge, beyond knowledge being some general thing or process. It is only possible to speak of definitive knowledge if it is possible to speak of it as more than an isolated instance of information or a tautological description of form and substance. This is not about any dialogue or a koan that "the universe is changing". The knowledge in full form may be arrested or imagined as a still thing, even if we know the knowledge exists for us, who are creatures that move and act and change, around other things which we know to change. It is rather that, for us to speak to one another of anything real in a way that is not merely matter-of-fact but allows for meaning, we presume that any word or idea we present in language or conjure as the form in any model we construct does not encompass all potential meanings of the thing. We may have very elaborate and deep understanding of a thing, so much that we are an expert on it compared to others in society, but even to work with it as an expert, we omit characteristics of a thing that are superfluous to what we want to do with it, or what we wish to communicate about it. When knowledge is translated to meaning and practical action, we must concern ourselves with the task at hand rather than pontificate too deeply about what we are doing. We only possess so much informational and knowledge- processing capacity to act on knowledge, or gather new knowledge. Even when we reduce knowledge to meanings that are for our use, we are still dealing with an understanding of the thing that is greater than merely stating knowledge matter-of-factly or a recitation of its informational content. If we wish to demonstrate understanding to another person, we would not parrot a definition from a textbook, but be able to relate meanings to another person, or render meanings that allow us to work with the simplified thing, without reducing the meaning to a staccato utterance of the word.

All learning and knowledge-accumulation is in the end a task of the individual, regardless of pedagogy. When someone presents to a tutor or at a school, they individually must habituate themselves to the institution and take from it what they can. Most learning, though, happens on our own time, and in spite of any institution. The instituions, as it will become clear, are primarily tasked with filtering individuals for the state's purpose, and education either is a key plank of every state that has ever existed, or constituted a de facto "deep state", or both. This concept can only be understood when the state is properly understood, and so is beyond the scope of this writing. Whatever institutions may exist, and whatever social environment may exist, learning and the seat of knowledge is always constituted in individuals, or entities which possess some awareness of themselves as a thing. It is often thought that only humans possess this sentience, but there is no doubt that an animal possesses some sense of themselves and territoriality. The animal is not an automaton, and reacts in ways that would make sense if we imagined ourselves as creatures like them, without language or complex sociality or tools or all the hallmarks of humanity. We should not be too hasty to place ourselves in an animal's skin and suppose the animal's thought is analagous to ours in whole, or that humans are just really advanced animals. Humans to be human entail a spiritual sense that would be faint in animals, in addition to all that arises when humans become animals communicating ideas in society, and then when humans form state societies. It is a mistake to regard a singular "human" as the starting point, as if the human appeared formed at some point we regard as whole and unchanging. What it means to be human has changed with every society and institution we encounter, and man's inhumanity to man is a matter of vast public record. It does not need to be relitigated that human universalism has never been the true state of the world, but human universalism exists both for aspirational reasons and as a spiritual claim of many religions and ways of life. We don't consider all humans human by appealing to a false egalitarianism, but by recognizing the things humans do that non-human entities do not, and recognizing that the defective offspring of humans who have been deemed "life unworthy of life" very often think and have many of the same impulses their relatives would possess. There is a very sad tale of why we are the most cruel to defective offspring of humans, in a way we are never cruel to animals, but that must wait for another time. If knowledge is built by individual knowers and does not exist in the world "freely", as if it originated from pure void, the only way it can be fully realized is to recognize that the metaphors we use in language and story and any understand which is necessarily a reduced meaning must derive from a genuine article of the thing, which knowledge can only point to rather than describe in full. This soul of a thing is not simply knowledge animating some matter to make the real object, but entails that the things we interface with take on spiritual and moral significance. They would have to be as real as ourselves, and so too would any individual "knower" be real, regardless of our judgements suggesting that their knowledge is of a distinctly inferior type. Knowledge by itself is a process which is universal to any entity which can "know". It is the greater existence of a thing beyond knowledge and substance that can differentiate people and anything from each other, in the experience of any entity which can know.

It is therefore the truth of the world that things we know of are much as we see them, regardless of human understanding of them or any story we might tell to complicate the matter. Any story we could tell about a true thing in the world has to reckon with a real world and a knowledge base that is only meaningful in a real world. If we wanted to bullshit and mystify about things that are real and true, we can only bullshit in ways we are capable of, to the extent that our faculties allow. No bullshit can survive any genuine scrutiny, and it is not the purpose of bullshit to convince someone that the bullshit is genuine. The purpose of bullshit in society, politics, and propaganda, is to wear down the observer by its sheer volume and audacity, to convince any knowing entity that genuine knowledge cannot be spoken, and will overcome any attempt at assembling genuine knowledge. It was only possible to bullshit in this way when a large enough volume of information can bombard the human subject, and information flooded the sensory cluster of any man, woman, or child in city life. This is why propaganda made sure to place posters everywhere, and created the impression that propaganda was in all places. It was not indicative of any truth to the information presented, or even suggested that the propaganda was intended to make you believe a falsehood. It was not even intended to necessarily force the public to accept a single lie version of reality. It is entirely possible, and even suggested, to create a vast panoply of bullshit in propaganda, so that every niche and interest group and subculture can receive personalized bullshit. The true meaning of mass propaganda, which was very consciously promoted as the act of a nebulous and singular entity, is to impress forcefully that words, ideas, and knowledge alone can shape reality. This method is no less effective if the true purpose of the propaganda is stated bluntly. It has long been open knowledge that propaganda works by repetition and the impression it creates, and that propaganda is produced by people who are hostile towards the broad masses. The hostility of the propagandist towards democracy and the public is explicitly stated at multiple points in the seminal work of American propaganda, Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann (1922).^[8] It is commonly believed that propaganda is "just there", even though it is acknowledged that propaganda is insidious and hostile. Americans are taught to claim that they do not live under propaganda, even though the message that they do not live under vast propaganda is itself propaganda. Americans are aware they are exposed to a greater volume of propaganda, trashy entertainment, cultural products and struggles over culture, invasion of privacy, overreach of institutions, and so on than any other population on the Earth. Even the claims that the Soviet Union or Communist China are "totalitarian" are delivered with such a childish stupidity, which is a deliberate affront to any adult familiar with American institutions. It was indeed the case that before 1970, anticommunism could not credibly present the communist states as "totalitarian" to any adult who retained their sanity. The ability to impress this on children of the post-war generation was dubious at best, as the cohort born after 1945 would be in actuality the last that retained faith in republican institutions or a democratic idea. More genuine dissent would be found in the so-called "Boomers" than in the subsequent generation. The next generation - and this concept of describing American cohorts as named "generations" is itself an invention of propaganda, marking the phases of social engineering dictated by those who shape the narratives of a generation - was given over to nihilism and saw their futures snatched away from them piece by piece. The generation after that, which your author is a member of, would be wholly given over to dictatorship and rot. It is the sad fate of the generation born after the late 1990s that they are thrown away more or less openly as the residue of humanity, most especially in the American system.^[9] The currently active cohorts as of this writing believed that narratives create reality, and this propaganda has a magical effect to produce behavior, in one way or another. There are specialists who know, in their own sphere, their role in producing this machine, and many people are aware of the truth but can do nothing about it. It is not that people believe that reality can be controlled by knowledge alone, but that knowledge produced a machine which could degrade by every avenue the potential for genuine knowledge or communication without state or oligarchic mediation. Knowing the nature of the beast does not change that it is impossible to get a word in edgewise, and that being seen in possession of genuine knowledge makes an individual suspect. The general fear that defines state society would be backed by a preponderance of violent force and potential. It is common knowledge that all acts of the American state called for the provision of vast ammunition stores, in preparation for a war against the American people. I have described this conflict as the war between those selected to live and those selected to die, which was only possible because institutions could exist which ruled over all the ways we could assemble knowledge. The last vestiges of independence would be closed by computerization, and by generations that were inured to the existence of these vast and unaccountable institutions.

Our first instinct is to trust our senses and native faculties over all others. The key to effective propaganda is to insinuate, through every possible avenue, that the subject must doubt their senses and suspend them. The moment you do experience that doubt, you are placed on the ropes. This is not merely a question of spreading information. Propaganda is hilariously ineffective at molding specific public opinion. It can intensify the general fear and create an impression, but the vast expense in propaganda is merely a necessary projection atop a much larger assembly of institutions. This description is beyond the scope of the current writing. What is necessary, and this is produced in nearly every technocratic institution, is self-doubt and doubt of all native sense, in favor of expert opinion and the information presented by alien institutions. It is not so much that the institutions are alien to democracy as an idea, or that the institutions truly possess such superior knowledge that we must bow to them, or adhere to them. What is true is that institutions and people who have been here far longer than we have, who access far more information and hold privileged information in secret, would be in a position to know more than we do individually. Natively, we assume that at some point, we will have to trust but verify the information provided by others. Human society and learning is built off communication with each other to acquire knowledge beyond that which can be worked out independently, and so we may have an inclination to trust a book or some pedagogue if their information lines up with something that is sensical to our native sense. We would have to trust other people in order to function in a society with knowledge like ours, since part of that knowledge is political knowledge that allows us to know what group we are in, what social situations are safe, what to say and not say, and our knowledge of other peoples' knowledge pertaining to us. We would have to know how we appear to other people, and what knowledge we managed to retain as our own secrets against the institutions. With all the potentially malevolent forces in humanity accounted for, it is still the case that the world presents things to us which will challenge our native sense and the assumptions we accumulated in our lives. Even if people were honest to a fault and we lived in a society that rewarded honesty, we are prone to errors simply because our faculties are insufficient for the task of assimilating this much knowledge. The storehouse of knowledgde in society is much too large for any one person to know more than a few areas of expertise, and there are competing theories of general knowledge, ideologies, religions, and so on, which often represent material interests that cannot be reasoned with or thought through in any way. In place of a genuine understanding of history and spiritual authority, technocratic subjects are offered identity and signifiers which replace such concepts.

In short, there can be no independent existence - and thus no society as such - without recognition of this concept of a thing beyond mere knowledge. The germ of knowledge which we hold to be a singular person must become many things, storing many areas of knowledge simply to produce a functioning, knowing entity. It is politically inconvenient to view ourselves as split from ourselves, but in actual existence, humans compartmentalize their knowledge every day, wearing different faces around different people and holding whatever secrets they can. We never hold the sum total knowledge of ourselves in memory, and we are not our political identity or the reputation we hold in society. Reputations can be destroyed through no fault of our own, and honesty is not a value the present society desires at all. Simply to live when one is on the ropes requires twisting oneself to conform to an alien which attacks every sense we held about ourselves, and this alien does not want to hear about a cooperative enterprise or a world where everyone can coexist. It is not even a question of humanity existing in harmony, where the world is rid of violence and anything rotten. The very idea of cooperation is limited only to the task of purging humanity of its unwanted elements, and all that is deemed unsightly. This is an incredibly stupid fate for the human project, but it is the one that was chosen and the one that rules the world presently. There is nothing behind eugenics which can claim that it will produce anything more than another iteration of the predatory mindset, perhaps one that would be even worse than eugenism. If the spiritual values held by eugenics are followed and able to operate with untrammeled force, then the future beyond eugenism can only be an ever-escalating Hell. If there is someone who believes eugenics can be tamed or managed to get the lower orders to kill each other while they remain in safety, there will be precious little that isn't cannibalized. Those in that hidden world would know the siege they laid to us and why they live, and that those they killed and hated the most did not one thing wrong to them. Eugenics abhors innocence most of all and so do those who enable it in any way. The plan towards the eugenic faithful and the soldiers of eugenics is to allow them to continue and live out their lives after carrying out this grisly task, with a number of them kept as eager, blooded slaves who shamelessly revel in their status, as the cuckolds who carry along eugenics know of nothing else.

Meaning - It may be spiritually fulfilling to speak of souls in all that exists, and to hold such a high-minded belief about existence and its potential, given the shit humanity has been up to this point. Not one thing in the whole of human history suggests that any awakening of the soul is imminent or even possible. The crass attempts to emulate this thinking were only ever pursued with an intent to subdue the soul under some hidden, occult knowledge, or are the vague ramblings of madmen that disconnect any meaning from a wider knowledge base or sense of the world. Usually talk of the "fourth outcome" is some flowery pablum or metaphor, which is just another mystification and lie. Since we lack a useful language to describe the true form of anything, including ourselves, we reduce the things we reference in language or thought to meanings, which allow us to convey developed knowledge and work with it, without being bogged down in spiritual navel-gazing.

It may be helpful to recount our steps point by point. I will do so now:

- Knowledge is, for our experience, the entry point for any systemic understanding of the world or anything in it. Knowledge in the real world is a process playing out, about which we at first know nothing. Preceding this is only the knowledge that there is a world to know - that is a pre-requisite to speak of any subjective knowledge. We know at first nothing about the world or ourselves, and we only establish through processes preceding formal knowledge and our ability to ask the question that there is a "self" that can ask this question. The particulars of these claims to arrive at the constitution of a human self have been elaborated upon in the preceding chapters, and are not presently important.

- Crude knowledge-gathering allows us to refine our knowledge, and this refinement feeds into the world-system new knowledge. The interface with the rest of the world and other agents in it is for the moment not necessary to conclude that knowledge, on its own power, can refine itself into a new form of knowledge, can subdivide areas of knowledge, can integrate them into a world-system, and so on. We would carry out this process even in the absence of any external stimuli, but as a matter of course, knowing systems can only exist in a world where there is something to know other than ourselves. Once independent, a knowing system can self-modify within the capabilities available to it even absent external stimuli. External forces, whether they are sensory stimuli or material interventions from the environment, can affect this knowledge base, but it is not a rule that any external force will without resistance inject itself into our knowledge, in a predefined way. We can choose how to react to external forces to an extent, and have to be able to in order to meaningfully "know" anything. This will does not "violate nature" or stand opposed to physical or material determination. It is instead the case that the will of a knowing entity is itself a part of the natural world, and if we are to analyze knowledge objectively, there is no fundamental estrangement between oneself and the natural world. We can argue that all forces, internal and external, are deterministic, but knowing entities would not "know" or be able to respond to their environment unless they were presumed to have willful intent orienting their actions. That is, knowing entities operate on their own power.

- This "knowing" is the essential "vital" element of systems, and what makes life "vitalistic" rather than a clump of some matter behaving in particular ways. Even if a living thing did not possess a central nervous system or processes of "knowing" as animals do or as humans do, we understand life as a thing driven by this vital tendency. If we did not, then biology as a discipline would be impossible, and so too would the "mechanistic" view of life as disembodied agents. We recapitulate here that for the example of Darwin's evolutionary theory, in which Darwin imports the political economic thought of Malthus to natural history, the very concept of competition for limited resources could not be carried unless life possessed this impulse, and Darwin in no way suggests that life is animated by a hobgoblin in a particular philosophical conceit that gained currency in our time. Arguments that life is dictated by a statistical analysis outside of it miss the point that allows Darwin's theory to be sensical in the first place, and so they are wholly inappropriate. This is something that would be discussed in detail another time, as it is a very important question with greater implications than the problem of vitalism or biology, and the answer can never be some just-so story which is used for a blatant philosophical or political cause, in violation of basic facts.

- Recapitulation: "Life" is understood as something we can know as a system, in addition to the familiar behaviors of life. The behaviors of life are not in of themselves the definition of life, and could not be. All such behaviors are caused by something which is not evident from behavior or expression of traits. This would apply to any "genetic material" as well, and so reducing life to its genetic content is a purely philosophical conceit and an inappropriate conception of life. The reasons for that particular formulation are a large topic occupying much of my writing.

- Non-living things, and all things, are only understood by us as things which can be known. We know that the things we observe are not defined by knowledge, and that the information and underlying data are premised on a material world. We can attempt through knowledge to assimilate information and act on it, but knowledge is not limited to this task of reacting to stimuli. Knowing entities are not defined as computers alone. Very often we attribute to non-living things, even abstract things, the qualities of living things, due to errors in our thinking and an inability to truly embrace the dead and lifeless; but we also understand that this habit of ours is a failing and can correct for it very easily. The ideological problems with this are not important for the time being, since we can correct for the most obvious errors very easily if we wish to.

- Knowledge is only ever assembled by knowing entities, for their purposes. To speak of knowledge as information or some substance is inappropriate. Knowledge only pertains to the knower's best available interpretation, which the knower uses for its purpose. Truth or the actual state of the world is something different from knowledge in of itself. We may know the truth, and we may treat our knowledge as truth since that is the only thing we have to go on with our own faculties in the final analysis, but knowledge and truth are very different propositions, and truth is not contingent on any particular knowledge at all. The truth of knowledge itself is not defined by some "super-knowledge" that is placed above all others. The truth is simply what is, and knowledge can accept that truth or disregard it. Knowledge is under no obligation to truth, and it is very possible to know and believe faithfully in falsehoods or construct an entire world-system premised on falsehoods from first principles. The truth has always been in the world, and nowhere else. Knowledge has no claim whatsoever to truth. Knowing entities can either acknowledge a world where events happen outside of knowledge and attempt to assimilate the actual information and substance, or attempt to shape the world in accord with their conceits and will. This applies even to political truths about knowledge itself, whether it is our own or judgements of another's knowledge; there is obviously an entity knowing things that can be analyzed, if we wish to ascertain what another entity knows.

- Knowledge presents to us as systems we can analyze. We can focus on a particular part of knowledge and isolate one system of knowledge from another, and elaborate on that piece of knowledge as much as we like, by drawing on other knowledge either in our possession or from external knowledge or information. There is no such thing as an "irreducible system" in nature, so far as we are concerned with knowledge. We may posit in knowledge certain fundamentals if we wish that we hold to be irreducible, but there is no way of asserting those fundamentals through knowledge alone in a way that cannot be questioned. We could in theory deny the most basic conditions that would allow knowledge to exist, in which case we construct an entirely unreal cosmology to explain knowledge and the world. This encounters many difficulties and cannot be maintained for long with any seriousness. The author takes it for granted that there is a world to know anything about that is outside of him, and that he is a part of. There are many who disagree that the author is a person or possesses any genuine thought, but that argument is inconsequential.^[10]

- We have written on the analysis of systems, and theories of their underlying substance and relations, at considerable enough length. This is the proper purview of science - that is, we assemble knowledge about the natural and material world and formalize it in a way that any knowing entity is capable of testing. There is in theory no limit to what can be analyzed scientifically, since the world concerns all things, but the use of science to describe political abstractions or knowledge itself must be conducted with awareness of what the scientist is doing. Modernity, particularly in the past 150 years, is rife with hilarious and deliberate errors that are intended to destroy our native conception of science. That argument will be revisited later in another writing, but is not important here. Science as a method is not the sole way in which we assimilate information, and science is always limited to the methods available to it. A "religion of science" is a bastardization of terminology.

- The system that is a knower - what we consider "us" - is itself analyzable, and can only analyze systems in the ways it is able to do. This does not take the form of fixed rules governing reason as we might think, but there are limitations to what we can process, which are contingent on technology, the body's limitations where they apply, and a number of other factors which each can be analyzed.

- The self-reference of knowledge, and knowledge built as a conclusion from other knowledge - that is, the modification of the knowledge process itself - does not change the underlying process at work, or that we can observe a system as information. We can "know" in a variety of ways and human beings grow simply by proceeding through life. This knowledge process' shift as a real process responding to the actual world is never arrested no matter what claims may be made about an "end to growth" or a settled state of some entity. At some point, we may not know - either we can no longer think, or certain processes are lost and not recoverable. Certain memories may slip from us. Certain records in media storage, like paper records, may be stolen from us and we cannot recall with sufficient detail what was on them.

- The "system" is a thing to behold, a fragment of knowledge that we often interpret as information. We may describe the system, or a collection of systems, using metaphors which are not directly informational, yet allow for the system to describe with some meaning. In practice, even our informational understanding of systems relies on these metaphors, these meanings, for us to effectively analyze a system in knowledge. We hold to some rules which we call reason to guide analysis, and these rules, while they can be themselves criticized and are the product of the same emergent processes allowing knowledge-gathering, are in the end understandings we have arrived at which have no "fundamental truth". We hold to reason not out of blind faith or a belief that reason commands the world, but because reason has been demonstrated to comport with that world and is a better guide than blind guesswork or leaps of thinking which do not stand up to scrutiny. In practice, every act of reasoning relies on some leap of thinking. It is entirely possible to paralyze the rational process by endless criticism of reason, a reductio ad absurdum gone haywire in which, by knowledge, we conclude that anything can be anything. All it would require is someone willing to deploy reason towards dishonest ends, or reason built on faulty premises which is nonetheless internally coherent and can perpetuate itself. We believe that a crude sense humans possess natively would dispel the most obvious failures of reason, but the modern period has demonstrated that reason can, through pernicious pedagogy, insinuate an entirely false reality that is internally coherent and conforms to "science" of a sort, and there is nothing in science or nature or any spirit of the world or mankind that could stop someone from this profuse lying. It is not a case of moral failing that this happens; to those who willfully perpetuate a lie to others, they may consider the big lie morally good, or inherently moral above the material world. This will be written of in another writing.

- Systems appear to us to be things in flux not because fluctuation is the true state of nature, but because knowledge is in flux due to what we are. We may account for this flux in our models of reality and rationalize it, and we may be able to freeze in our minds a system as information which does not fluctuate. We understand when we arrest a system and consider it fixed, we are either inventing a short-hand of something we observe to make material analysis simpler and meaningful, or we are dealing with an abstract system which we could only understood as a thing arrested and definiable with clear delinations between what is and isn't. For example, a diagram of a machine is not "in flux" when we read it for meaning, nor are the words on a page in flux; such a fluctuation in media would not be conducive to its use as a medium for conveying information and meaning. It is not impossible to conceive of flux in some media that is intended or an unintended but acceptable consequence of media. It is also possible to simulate flux in the abstract models we create, even if we do not meticulously model it mathematically to create pseudo-randomness.

- The self-reference and recursion inherent in systems allows all events to occur "simultaneously" - that is, it would be impossible to speak of moving systems without this infinite regress. This is not a problem for the world or our processes in life. It is a problem for algorithms we would use in reason or in a computer, but we can through reasoning consider algorithms which resolve this problem for our purposes. The algorithm itself does not "know" it is constructed to do this; rather, it is constructed by a reasonable programmer so that the problem of infinite regress is accounted for or ignored in the model of the problem the algorithm solves. Simple calculus can resolve many of these problems trivially, but a naive algoirthm badly programmed may fail and cause an infinite loop. The infinite loop itself is a problem of computers which in reality do not process instructions infinitely fast, but are machines with definite qualities we designed for a purpose. Since computers deal with information and the underlying machinery rather than knowledge proper, they are not our concern here. We develop algorithms to resolve physical problems rationally with this infinite recursion in mind as a possibility. All of our approaches to solving a physical problem assume that substance can be divided into infinitesimal fragments in first principle; that is, there is no naturally ordained minimal size we can rationalize. We can construct a model of physics for practical purposes which does not allow for divisibility beyond a point, or considers the particle or atom as the basic unit of interest for that sort of physics, but these claims are made not as philosophical claims but claims based on evidence of particles which we have considerable observational evidence to support. The same is true even of abstract motion or "motion" of a non-physical sort. It is not demonstrated by claims of an individual event, but claims that a potentially unlimited number of events may occur at some locus. We simplify this whenever we wish to describe something meaningful or operate with a concept rationally, with a sense that we are simplifying something to terms that are appropriate for saying something. We would not need to elaborate on an entire sequence of motion to say something is moving, or moved so far in a period of time. We can summarize a union of however many events as a singular concept, for example describing "topography" of a region as a singular concept, which involves many variations of terrain simplified to something we can observe at a glance, or describe with a word that would allow us to know something about that topography.

Aside from the actual matter or substance at work, all of these concepts - information, knowledge, meaning - are products of knowledge for us. The world as a whole or our hypothetical omniscient observer from before does not need to acknowledge a "system" or see the world in this way. For knowledge, however, all things are systemic, even if they are vaguely defined. If we were to make airy claims about transcendent nature, we are describing a "system" with vague metaphors, and we can ask questions of that nature or its meaning. This is no different than an observation made with science. Science as we would understand it does not work well with such metaphors or claims of that nature, and for many reasons, science as an approach is ill-suited for asking questions that are religious or political. It could be conceived that the theological realm can be studied with science just as anything else is, if it is accepted that all that theology points to is "the world" - we recall that there is not truly a segregation between "nature" and "the world", or ourselves, which is relevant to any truth. Philosophically, this segregation is very important - it beehoves us to distinguish what is deemed natural from parts of the world that are not, and to consider subjective experience a world apart from nature. Nothing about that segregation is naturally or spiritually ordained in a way that is undeniable. A religion may claim its spiritual authority is something beyond the world, but this is usually qualified by describing "the world" as "the world as we know it" or "the mortal realm", or suggesting that a world outside of normal experience, while alien to the everyday, has bearing on the world we see and touch.

"Meaning" is not merely a reduction of knowledge to information or a compact form of some developed knowledge. Meaning implies something very different - that a fragment of knowledge is placed somewhere and can be held and operated on by a knowing entity. To do this implies that meanings can be compared with other meanings, and drawn from knowledge beyond that which is directly in front of us. If the world is simply as it is described in language, all that is possible is tautologies and a number of rules and transformations ordained by a pedagogue. The reduction of complexity and regresses in meaning is not merely a stripping away of the true form of a thing, but an effort to translate the true form - or a deceptive falsehood knowingly perpetrated - into something relatable to other meanings and to a world-system, whether to communicate the idea to another knowing entity or to discern for ourselves what exists and happens. We could not extend meaning to the whole world-system or note every potential connection to another meaning, but in merely isolating a system, we are suggesting it can be related to other systems, if that system is to mean anything beyond a tautological description. Without a recognition of distance and void - if we regard the existence of systems as facts bereft of any placement in a world where those things are relevant to the very existence of a system - we would not be able to truly build meaning. All we could do is process information with a knowledge system in pre-defined ways, which do not allow anything new to exist. Meaning can only exist because there is a distinction between things in a world where that distinction is not merely informational or a description in knowledge. The knowledge always points to a world in which non-existence is a possibility. We know what things are and what they are not, and how far apart they would be. We can quantify and qualify the distinction among things in the world, classify them in categories that are never just-so. There is a rationale behind every categorization we describe that distinguishes a class from other classes. This distinction is not an essence that just-so happens to exist, but it is a distinction that can be described because we have a general knowledge pertaining to systems. The most basic axioms we use to build this categorization of knowledge are themselves things derived from experience and confirmed by the meanings we develop. If we were to comprehend meaning in a way that violated our core axioms, and we knew that meaning regarded a truth in the world that we cannot abide, we would have to ask if our axioms, our core metaphysical claims, are faulty, or if the meanings we comprehend in the finished product were flawed. There cannot be an inconsistency that allows axioms to persist yet be violated regularly in the things we observe. Somewhere, the contradiction will be resolved, if not by our own will than by forces outside of us. The world has no use for this psychological game of contradiction we play in developing knowledge and meaning, and will resolve such inconsistencies regardless of our efforts to cajole the world. If we wished to exert will meaningfully, we would not permit such rank contradictions and vileness to be perpetuated, let alone glorify the lying. Conversely, those who wish to suppress the will of someone who is to be eliminated would embrace a strategy of total deception in all things, even basic things.

Whole world-systems, or vague generalities of the world, are not what knowledge operates with to gather new knowledge and affect the world. It is impossible for knowledge to operate on the "pure form" of knowledge, as if it were a symbol bereft of context. Only with meanings can a knowing entity make use of any knowledge, including the most basic knowledge that asserts knowing is possible. That is, for knowledge to be expressed as anything substantive, it becomes meaningful and can compared with other meanings. There is no way to approach knowledge in its raw form without our ability to extract meaning. We developed meanings just to describe the components leading to our ability to ask the question and expound upon it in writing. Only with considerable labor on our part are those meanings assembled in writing to reconstruct, as best as possible, the world-system within us, so we may communicate what is happening in our thought process, or in the world, or surmise what is happening in another's mind. We need not know all details of the world to know the meanings of anything we observe. A more elaborate knowledge base does allow us to refine meanings, and consider the possibility of communicating meaning in ways we did not consider in the past. More elaborate knowledge may allow us to discern meanings that were obscure to us, or occulted by the efforts of another mind that has been overcome. We may have very cloudy meanings that speak of generalities or metaphors, but all of these metaphors point to meanings that we can discern and disassemble, and we would have had to assemble in some way a metaphor that conveys meaning. We knew the basic conditions and then sought words, stories, images, or some expression that best resembled them; and when the meanings were not easily reducible to a word token or some image readily understood and drilled into the imagination of many in society, we developed dialogue or stories that encouraged the readed to draw what they needed, with the understanding between two knowing entities that both of us are capable of doing this.

The meanings of things are only known through the faculties of knowledge. Nowhere is meaning something floating freely in the world, just as knowledge does not float freely. Words, symbols, or any other information are things which are intended to refer to meaning, but do not in of themselves mean anything. It is entirely possible for a symbol to be deployed deceptively, and there is no symbol which can be truly universal in its meaning, so far as our faculty of knowledge is concerned. We may regard that there is a world and speak of it as a fact, and we may be able to independently derive that the one world is the only world that can exist. We did not need to arrive at that fact through a uniform path of progression to agree on mutually intelligble meanings so that dialogue is possible. Meaning is something we translate to words, symbols, actions, intents as they are carried out by the body or by the tools we construct. The behaviors or exoteric appearance of any expression is never the meaning, and often exoteric expressions are intended to deceive. Humans, as you probably know by now, are born liars, and cannot stop lying even when it would be in their interest to cease doing so. It is only through meaning that we can discern knowledge that is true from that which is false, and make sense of the information and data we gather. Meaning itself is never actually disrupted in the way knowledge, information, or the other steps in the process can be. No amount of wordplay and no material intervention can change a meaning. To control another knower's sense of reality requires not to change the meaning of words, but to change the theories and practice of knowledge so that any meaning inimical to the controller's wishes is no longer admissible as a valid meaning. To do this, information and material force must be imposed to compel by force someone's native knowledge-gathering faculties to be something alien. This requires imposing by force a desired metaphysical model, and controlling all information that would suggest that anything outside of that model is possible. Control of the physical space is demanded, and that condition could not be met at the level of society and the world until very recently.

I want one thing to be clear, and this is not immediately related to the rest of this book: A meaning is never a lie, in that someone "doesn't mean what they mean". Intent is a type of meaning that we understand, which has characteristics that we know of in social existence. There is no doubting of someone's intent, in that there is an intent behind every action of knowledge, no matter what we may think of it or how we judge it. Not all meanings are intents, for we can speak of meaning that is a description. For ourselves, we strive for meanings to align with an actual world or with other people, rather than for us to "create our own meanings" that are discordant with the world. We may choose to ignore reality or overturn it, and perhaps we will succeed in changing the world in some way, at least in the ways we can. Nothing afer all prevents us from acting our intents in our own space, until there is another agent that would tell us otherwise. Whether meanings are intents, descriptions, imperatives, or any other meaning we would extract from knowledge, they are never for us lies. If we are to speak of deception, we never deceive ourselves in genuine meaning or intent. We know what we intended on some level and what we meant, if we were able to hold in our mind the meaning in the first place. To prevent this meaning from forming is to terminate the process of that meaning, invoking a mental block or cheating around certain concepts. It is not possible to prevent this formation of meaning simply by declaring it so. Training the mind in selective and deliberate stupidity is something that requires a much more sophisticated intelligence than mere blissful ignorance or dumb luck. It may be possible for a cruder mind to use whatever advantages it does possess to occult or obfuscate meanings to others, but this always implies that there is a filter of symbolic language and interpretation, in which both participants are knowing creatures that act on meanings rather than symbols. One of the shameful rhetorical games played is for an extreme posture to be projected, and then for the recipient to be told they are not allowed to acknowledge the meaning of what was said, or suggest any meaning inimical to it. This is not accidental, and not something that succeeds simply by will of assertion. If someone spoke that way out of the blue, without a vast infrastructure enabling them, a lone recipient lied to in such a brazen way would see no reason to speak to the liar, and would probably attack them for insolence if it kept up. The only way such humiliating behavior is even tolerated is because the presumption of capitivity is intended by the aggressor. If the recipient is not captive, or if the transgressor is weak, the calculus of these humiliations is different. A weaker party may transgress out of a sense of dire necessity against a society that rejected it, or weaker parties may transgress decencies in order to erode them. This can be done out of individual whim, when the weaker party does not expect that society can punish this transgression short of expensive actions of disinterest to the stronger party, or weaker parties band together to join in transgression, usually at the behest of a "great leader" or "daddy" or "mommy" that condones weakness and poses as a Christ-like figure that will lead the weak to victory and redemption, or some parody of that. In today's society, the dominant idea relies on transgressing a concept of mercy in mass religions, where the religious authority long portrayed its purpose as a defense of the flock's spiritual state and social order. By exploiting the mercy and decency that had existed and forcing the decent to suffer under repeat transgression, a party that is strong and occulted by large sums of money or institutional influence allowing them to operate in the shadows without consequence is able to summon weak men and women to a sense that they can transgress the normative decencies. This concept will need to be explored in a much later writing, but it is familiar to any American today. On the internet, this is called "edgelording". This humble writer has been called an edgelord and admits his use of the tactic for purposes of explanation, but in this case, I seek to elucidate genuine meaning rather than transgress something the reader knows to be right. I have said and will repeat that I always want readers to be able to formulate their own knowledge and meaning, while remaining honest to a world where meaning and truth are relevant. Making reference to the edgelord tactic and some basic knowledge should make it clear to the reader when this hyperbole is used for rhetorical effect or to make some meaning clear to those who know this pattern of behavior. I cannot guarantee that readers will receive the "correct" meaning I intended when I wrote. This, as many have noted in history, is a characteristic of the written word - that which is written is now dead and cannot be unwritten or unread.

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I have often lapsed into references to human society and the peculiarities of human politics and the human sense of themselves. I have done this out of necessity to dislodge certain conceits that are often raised to attack our nascent, independent conception of knowledge and meaning, and where it originated. I wish to avoid that in this chapter beyond the first paragraph, and speak of knowing entities as "black boxes". The nature of knowledge itself has been elaborated upon enough, and we can for the moment accept that there are entities like you and I who possess this knowledge. The peculiarities of human institutions and particular types of education are not necessary for the rest of this writing. I write instead on communication of meaning itself. In the next book, I begin with a treatment of the world as "information" - that is, the quasi-scientific model that would be necessary for economic thought to be examined in earnest, and thus the origin of society, states, and developed knowledge of politics and spirituality can be explored only after that is accomplished. I wrote this first, introductory book on my method because I originally presented the information world as the starting point, and certain philosophical and metaphysical peculiarities had to be addressed so that confusion in my later writing could be avoided. In this chapter, I do not concern myself with the technical or material details of communication, as this description is better made at another time. Having described knowledge itself as the origin of systems, and then meaning as the practical "pieces" of knowledge we operate with and discern from a developed knowledge base, it would be necessary to speak of the further degradations of meaning that are inherent when meanings must be compressed into symbols that are accessible to a wide audience. It should not be hard to discern that human beings, whatever the variation in their faculties, do not possess unlimited mental processing power to agonize over meaning or philosophy. Most humans will not consider philosophy beyond that which is needed for them to function in the world and find some answers of value for them. The full history of human philosophy, the various competing schools and arguments between them, would drive an individual mad if he alone attempted to reconcile all that has been said and written, and all that has been enacted in the name of philosophy, knowledge, science, and the conceits of those who rule. I have in the preceding chapters laid out a crude and necessarily incomplete thinking on knowledge. To summarize, the very concept of systems which became prominent in science and everyday verbiage in the 20th century is only possible because humans developed conceits around knowledge, and were for the first time able to modulate human learning, education, and experience to conform to those conceits. This development of a general systems theory was a necessary development for the society of that time, and up to today. As it has developed, revelations concerning the past have arisen, been suppressed, and thinking of the past became either too alien to acknowledge or was deliberately destroyed. I cannot present my own theory of history and how I have reconstructed useful narratives here. What I can do is describe communication of signs, which in formal philosophy is called semiotics. I do not consider symbols in of themselves to mean anything at all. Those with knowledge ascribe meanings to symbols not because symbols are imbued with meaning outside of us, but because symbolic language requires us to compress meaning into something that can be communicated. The genuine meaning and knowledge is something for us. We may be able to rationalize that knowledge with symbolic language, to develop a theory of psychology or discern the modus operandi of the human animal, but the symbols are in the end things we utilize. When a bullet or a ball impacts something, it is not "symbolic" of anything. Physical objects, and ourselves and our knowledge facutlies, do as they do regardless of symbolic representation or comprehension. I have mentioned before that a computer program and the output on the monitor is useless without a knowledgeable user who can translate the output to meaning. Without knowledge and some agent assessing it, the processes of the computer and whatever is put out on the screen is not meaningful, and thus whatever the computer does is not a "symbol" of anything. To the world and to the computer, all that happens is a process of nature, the consequence of which is nothing more than a flow of energy through the computer and the emission of light in particular patterns. Only when a human user observes the computer does every aspect of it become a symbol. Because some intelligence developed the computer after considerable inquiry into symbolic and mathematical thought, the symbol and meaning of the computer and its output is intelligible even to a crude mind. In rationality and computing, logic will hold. The full meaning and purpose of the computer program need not be apparent to the user, but the computer by its nature is producing rational information. The entire purpose of its construction was to carry out this task, and only that. The computer does not by its nature tell us more than the theory that went into its construction allowed; there is no "essence" of computerization that has an effect on reality and meaning. We could in theory reproduce the meanings of a computer program entirely by rote and manual actions, and this again is the entire point of the computer. We did not build the computer to "think for us", but to execute a task we figured out in the most efficient way, so human effort could be extended and amplified. Which humans' effort was to be amplified, and towards what purpose, is the reason why the computer took on the political importance it did, with all of the mystifications atrocious science-fantasy and science fiction promoted.^[1]

I would like to address something that will be raised as an objection. If someone is going to use the argument of infinite regress against me in this description of knowledge - this is exact the point I am making. Vicious infinite regress is a rational fallacy, yet the actual world suggests that a malevolent human can impose on another that vicious infinite regress, and through this exercise one avenue to condition people to accept falsehood or insanity. Rationally, any infinity has to be understood as a thing which does not "actually exist", in that there isn't an infinitely dense point of light or an infinitely large world with infinite mass that can be rationally described. We can suggest that space has no boundaries and potentially limitless matter, but it would be impossible to catalogue all that exists in it, even if the infinite were summarized to a singular meaning. All that could be said about an infinitely large world would have little to do with describing the position of everything in it just from that claim alone. Rationally, we can only regard what is observed as the "material world", or hypothesize about things we do not observe but that are defined and finite. It wouldn't stop us from suggesting that the world is infinitely large, but that claim if factual would be meaningless to make rational claims about the nature of the world beyond that; we would in rational arguments concern ourselves only with things we can define, however vast they might be. We may approximate a topology broken down to infinitesimally small points of data, even if there are infinite points of data, but in doing so we are substituting in data from the topology drawn in some way that is suitable for our conception of the whole, and surmising that we could predict the data using mathematics or statistical analysis. It is unsurprising that vicious infinite regress is a common tactic to derail any reasoned counter-claim to the ruling ideas, which can be made into a "truth" by the superior preponderance of informational output of the ruling institutions, or threats the rulers impose violently; if nothing else, the rulers can simply beat subjects until they agree to anything. Those operating from an inferior position can only carry out the strategy so far before they are exhausted and collapse before a superior force. I have separated claims about the world and its nature from claims about rationality, and reject the idea that rationality or knowledge is in any way fundamentally tied to the world at all. Knowledge, as I have said, is merely the tool we possess to know anything about the world, and many errors are made by glorifying particular conceits of knowledge. It does not take a great philosopher to figure out that knowledge does not possess this quality to control reality by will alone, and couldn't. A child can see through these arguments, which is why education typically involves regular humiliations and beatings and somehow this is supposed to "teach" knowledge. The only people who seem convinced of the primacy of knowledge or wisdom are philosophers with an obvious stake in keeping their scam going.

A problem with seeing infinite regress everywhere is that it makes symbolic language impossible without reference to metaphors which can never be symbolized. We could draw a symbol that represents "infinity" conceptually, but we cannot draw an infinite number of symbols on any media that is conceivable. Infinity is understood by us as a concept very easily, and we can envision a sequence repeating infinitely, or being broken into infinitesimal parts - for example, there is no known repeating sequence in the digits of pi, which we understand to be the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. We defined the concept of a circle mathematically and have a symbolic representation of the circle, and we know from math textbooks to differentiate the mathematical symbolic definition from the drawing on the page just to clarify what is referred to in the abstraction.

Only symbols can express language. The process of knowledge and meaning in its genuine sense is not symbolic at all, nor is it a "language" which is always a thing implying communication. Symbolic language is the means by which media can be communicated, and this is the only thing we can operate with in the abstract, where communication is conceived and is possible. Even the material processes themselves are understood not as the actual things that happen, but by symbolic representations of matter and living processes that were abstracted. The abstraction is rooted in something that actually happens, or that we hold to be a possibility that could be real in some version of the world. We have no language to communicate what these things "really" are, but symbolic language and our native faculty of knowledge and meaning allows us to construct very close approximations, which are communicated with a single word or icon. That icon or token has meanings which are understood by whomever reads or listens, and there is in society generally understood meanings that are referenced in dictionaries, and are reinforced in how those symbols and icons are used by other people and by institutions. All of our theories in science or any understanding we would construct is only something that can be conveted with symbols, language, and abstract models. Even our own sensical reconstruction of the world, what we regard as "subjective reality", is an abstraction, albeit one we do not control or manipulate in the way we could manipulate imagination or write a book. The ability to conceive of "the world" at all is necessarily an abstract concept in language. We can suggest by reason that there is a world and only one world, and certain things about it, but none of our reasoning is itself the content of the world. The world simply is, and the underlying matter and knowledge that comprises us also exists in a way that is independent from our abstract models. The problem of language and abstraction only exists for our thinking process and for knowledge, rather than saying anything about the true nature of the world. We know this and have known this, but for reasons that will become apparent, we are never permitted to acknowledge this too frankly. If we do this, we can be caught in a vicious infinite regress when engaging with other people or the world, and so there comes a point where we terminate this use of symbolic language. We eventually contend with the world and events in them as they actually happen, rather than what we think in language they are.

We would distinguish the meaning of things, which we know on a level that is not symbolic, from the symbolic representation of things we express in language, and how all things we interface with would be abstracted. It is this final step which makes the abstract, political world possible as a thing derived from knowledge and meaning, and it constitutes a fifth sphere that is a product of knowledge. These are, to summarize:

- The first, primordial sphere, which is identified with the past, origin, genesis, and causative spirit of the world and of things. This sphere taken on its own is a thing that is "unknowable", in the sense that it is nonsensical and a thing we surmised to exist to speak of anything moving at all. To describe the past meaningfully requires a present condition to draw upon, or otherwise it is an unknown and singular proposition. Everything that exists came from some prior condition, or some condition held to have allowed a thing to exist. There isn't a rule against "spontaneous generation", or fluctuations which we could never arrest by any abstract knowledge, or concepts of a causal origin that is outside the typical procession of time as we comprehend the relation. If we were to speak of why those fluctuations led to a particular outcome, they are always rationalizable by tracing back to the point of departure, which invokes the other spheres and leaves the first primordial sphere to be nothing more than a demiurge-like creative force, or a concept of a primordial light which isn't useful for knowledge. There is no knowledge inside the primordial light whatsoever, and it is a common trap to drag thinking entities to the question of origin or genesis without suggesting a plausible origin, or granting to genesis spiritual, temporal, or material authority it does not possess. Once a thing is created, it will persist on its own power, and it can transform, disintegrate, and so on just like any other matter. The genesis of something is only relevant if we work under the presumption that conditions of its creation were events, much like events that would happen in another time or space. And so, nothing in the world "just-so" exists, even if we applied this to the world itself. There is no "genetic material" of anything that is not created by prior conditions which we can understand, and if so, the outcome of genesis is not locked in place by those conditions alone. This is to say, once something is instantiated in an abstract model, it would be its own thing with its own history, which its genesis only informed rather than defined. Speaking of genesis as an ineffable and inexorable force throughout history misunderstands what creation of anything would mean at a very basic level, for nothing is created in a vacuum, even errant thoughts in an abstraction. There was a process by which an abstract idea came to our knowledge in a daydream, even if we do not analyze it and even if the process did not follow any prescribed intent to bring about that particular idea.^[2]

- The second is what is commonly referred to as the "material" sphere, or rather, a conception of information and data that points directly to what is deemed matter or the natural world. This is what science studies, and attempts to model; that is, science studies a world which is represented as information or data in a model, from which knowledge and meaning that subjective experience acknowledge is drawn. Where knowledge and meaning refer to processes which are particular to an entity which can know, the information of the world existed regardless of any knowledge. Science does not solely concern itself with this sphere, as if it cannot ask questions of knowledge or genesis, but it draws its evidence from the natural world, and axioms from knowledge or assertions about "fundamental nature" have to conform to that evidence. It is not scientific to engage in thought experiments in a purely abstract realm and then superimpose the conceits of the thought experiment onto reality, in an attempt to interpret reality as something conforming to the model. This error is called "scientism", although that it is an imperfect description of what is happening and why this is done. Scientism can refer to a conceit that "material forces" in some vague sense dictate what can be known - which is to say that knowledge is nothing more than information processing and subjective experience and mind are wholly illusory - or scientism can refer to conceits that rational mind tricks can define reality, and then the models are used to shift perception of the actual information to conform to the model. Both of these can operate simultaneously, and do not explain the full errors of "scientism", because "science" is in the end something practiced by people and institutions, and so it involves not just knowledge but the higher levels and eventually symbolic communication. The two examples are common, naive mistakes that seeped into the way we are trained to think about science and revere it as a spiritual authority. Science must hold that, whatever conceits people hold about the world, there is a world that is shared in common where this information and data is drawn from, and that there are certain things about that world that we can agree on in order to hold a scientific conversation. Because the information in the material world is meaningless without knowledge and all knowledge entails, looking for "The Science" in a level outside of knowledge, as if there was some entity "science" governing the universe, is tragically missing the point. Science as a spiritual authority made sense because it allowed for independent verification, rather than "science" or the material world possessing a force that compelled and governed knowledge towards pre-determined outcomes. We can in everyday language speak of material, physical things as the world, and accept that what we see and touch everyday is as we describe it and interact with it. We don't need to know in full detail these things or have a general scientific model to interface with uncertain things. For our purposes with knowledge, though, we construe this sphere as information which can be used to assemble a system that can be expounded upon. We possess as well a thinking about "systems" that isn't scientific or part of some formal knowledge, but is something we expect when we normally talk about things in the world that are not specifically abstract or imagined. We normally leave out the step of knowledge and our conceits about it in everyday interactions, since it would be burdensome to break down every such interaction. We think of opening a door as an event that is familiar, and the reasoning at work as to why we would open a door or what happens when doors open does not require detailed knowledge for us to process the event. Much of that knowledge of operations, and the language we understand it with, is something we can do from a young age and so it is not interesting to expound upon it unless we really want to.

- The third is the sphere of "knowing", or the process of knowledge itself. Effectively, this suggests the "knower" as an entity processing at any given time, and so it only concerns the part of the entity that is "knowing" anything, rather than the entity as a whole, its material content or any meaning the knowledge possesses. Because of how humans constitute themselves, the "knower" typically conceives of itself as a human being with the body parts appropriate to it, which is not divisible or seen as "split parts" that are divorced from one another. It may conceive of its tools, its social relations, and other things external to the body as part of its essential nature, especially as it is integrated into a political society where cooperation is mandated and impossible to escape, or "cooperation" is imposed by some condition of slavery. It is impossible for a knowing entity to be truly negated, as if it didn't actually "know" - so long as the processes of knowing play out, the entity cannot turn them off in entirety. It may convince itself that it can do this, or may be pressed upon so much that its knowledge of itself becomes dim, and others may operate on the conceit that the knowing entity knows nothing and is a zombie for the purpose of knowledge, but these conditions do not change that knowledge processing happens, and this processing is something distinct from a simple informational exchange. It is something that, in humans, produces senses and emotions that are undeniable, and a sense of self that is not reducible to any informational or rational content suggested that it should exist. To "know" is to "be" - or in Descartes' famous words, "cogito, ergo sum".

Descartes famous line, commonly translated as "I am thinking, therefore I am" has a very different basis to give rise to it, and has been questioned by philosophers that don't share his view of what mind would entail. Rather than doubting existence, I started with the proposition that there is only existence, of which "mind" or knowledge is a product, and that this is our most basic existence, or at least the conscious spark from which further knowledge and concepts of the self would be derived. We started with a statement that the world is knowable, not necessarily by us or any entity but for the question to be one that could be asked. The arguments against an unknowable world were partially covered and should be trivial. It is not knowledge alone that makes us "real" in a sense that we would appreciate, but if thinking is happening, it makes sense thinking is constituted by something to be meaningful beyond a vaguely defined mind. However the process of thinking and knowledge is construed, there are definite things which can be said about it, which implies that "we" are something more than thought. It is by thinking and knowledge that "we" would be constituted, rather than some more elaborate process as the foundation, or because a clump of matter or some prime energy defined us as "us". It may be possible to construct the "soul", "will", and other such concepts in a different framework, but every such concept is premised on knowledge, whether it is formally reasoned or an intuition which is immediately assigned to a different sphere or sense of what it means to "think". Even if the foundation of knowledge were held to be something different, to describe anything real implies a concept of knowledge that could be construed in any number of ways must be the proper foundation to speak of reality, truth, and so on as more than a vagary or a sense. This does not grant to knowledge any supreme authority, but it means all communication regarding the world is conducted by and for knowledgeable entities, or is something which is received by knowing entities to be meaningfully communication or information. There is vast activity in nature outside of any knowledge, but to speak of any of it implies that it is communicable, however we are able to communicate it. Whether humans can communicate the knowledge as we are is not relevant, only that communication is an act requiring knowledge instead of merely a mechanism of the natural world. We can conceive of information as the world that created knowledge in the first place, or information being relayed in a system without any observer and only supposing that we would be able to know about such a system if it existed, but without knowledge, this information would just be a meaningless wisp in the world. We ignore a great volume of such information simply because it has yet to be assimilated into knowledge, often judged as irrelevant for our uses or greater interests, but we could surmise its existence and dismiss its relevance.

By thought alone, little can be said except that there is a process called "thinking", which is not constituted in any particular locale of interest. What is important here is that all knowledge, and all that comes from it, is something in action, rather than a thing frozen in some preferred state "as its nature". Even the symbols in language are not truly still things held apart from the world. We operate on them as if they are arrested, as we operate on things we interact with as if they were what we considered them to be in everyday life rather than as a simulation of something very complex. If we were to imagine a world that was truly arrested like a clockwork and claim "this is knowledge", we would be describing a simulation we made which is necessarily incomplete, and could never be complete even if we had a computer to track every atom, every symbol, every single arrested thing, inclusive of its own existence. This is because what is meant by knowledge, meaning, and the world-system is something more than a thing observed. This does not mean that our knowledge can be expounded on infinitely or in any direction we choose, but that to even speak of such knowledge as genuine requires the presumption that knowledge is never isolated and can be compared with other knowledge. This is a task that only knowing entities are capable of performing "for real", in a way that is meaningful. We can simulate this task of comparison easily with information in ways that allow information systems to compare knowledge without actually "knowing" what is happening, but it is our capacity to know and care about meaning that allows that informational task to be useful in any knowledge. The computer by itself has no reason to care simply because so much information has been processed, and neither would any other entity if it were purely informational, or some imagined purified essence of knowledge which could be anything.

- The fourth sphere is that of the world-system and meaning, where knowledge and its constitutent parts are integrated, compared, and dissembled. Here, the world-system and meanings are, for us, as true as we wish them to be. We do not deceive ourselves in the genuine meaning of knowledge, however much we may play a game where we pretend to, or however ignorant we may be of knowledge outside of our world-system. We know what we know and make comparisons not out of some ulterior motive, but because that is what we as knowing entities have to do if we wish to make use of this knowledge faculty. This does not mean we are fully honest with ourselves in the abstract, or that we are wholly of one mind and purpose in a way that is politically or abstractly expressible in all cases. It means that, in the final analysis, any entity capable of knowledge knows exactly what they know, and does what they do for some reason, and the actual meanings we derive are things which we hold as real, or things that were at least treated as real for the purposes of a thought exercise. For example, we can discern the difference between a fantasy woman and an actual woman very easily, and we are not fooled by the appearance of a lifelike robot given knowledge that such a thing could mimic human behavior. We would be able to know that a lifelike robot is constructed, even if the robot were a replica of humans and intended to deceive us about its nature. We cannot guarantee that we will actually "know" the truth of a particular entity, but if we were to trace the origin of a construct, we would be able to determine it to be a replica, and the very nature of such a possibility changes how we would consider what makes someone human, or how we consider reproduction, or what this constructed entity could be in human society if we hold that constructs are not human. We would be able to guess about the nature of a constructed human, and the nature of humans conceived the old fashioned way, or the nature of humans conceived in eugenic breeding chambers operated by a hostile state, and conceive that those events are relevant to the social and political question in human society. Whether those events hold the meaning an ideology would uphold about human sacredness is not a given. I take it the reader is sufficiently introduced to the question of what it means to be human and can investigate independently of my writings what that question refers to, since it would be necessary to speak of society with any seriousness.

- What then, is the fifth sphere? It is found first in the translation of meanings, or events we hold as true and worth communicating, to symbols which are intended to convey that meaning, without being the actual thing. This step is not merely a convention of linguistics where we hold that symbols are the best knowledge we can use. We are aware that symbols are just that, and the knowledge and meaning they refer to is independent of them. Symbolic language is never something which just happens to compact meaning to language that is suitable for our processing potential. Symbolic expression, which is much more than language, can be used to play mind games. The symbolic expression then is where we can speak of true abstraction from the material, and with it, our ability to consider deception and truth for the first time. The fifth sphere concerns then not just the formation of symbols and language and media, but the practices of occulting, education, and political abstractions which are highly relevant to our existence. Even for a creature in savage conditions, there is no getting around the problem of deception, trust, verification, and systems which allow the best sense of symbols for something useful.

The symbol is a particular type of meaning. All symbols are what they are. We cannot deny in symbolic language that a letter is something other than it is, because the entire purpose of a symbol is that they are things consistently interpreted, and the symbol must be agreed upon in some respect for any meaningful dialogue to be carried out with it. Even for our own use, symbols remain consistent. Not all meanings we would communicate are represented by a particular symbol, and a symbol does not refer axiomatically to a singular meaning or interpretation.

If we were to haggle over whether the letter 'a' is indeed a letter, though, we would engage in an endless absurd argument which has no resolution. Anyone who would waste time with such an argument is dishonest, but there is nothing preventing someone from communicating such falsehoods flagrantly. The meaning of such dishonesty is clear - a seething contempt and hatred for the other party. It does not matter if the other party sees past this - a new dishonesty is raised, until the other party is exhausted or resorts to struggle. No such falsehood is ever constructive for learning or knowledge. It exists entirely as a filter and exercise of force and deception, a barrier to prevent meaningful communication. These deceptions can be carried out in more elaborate forms, but they always entail a brazenness and hatred of the other party. A defense of secrets does not always entail such a hateful and contemptuous lying. Very often, the defender of secrets simply does not talk, or creates mildly plausible lies or lies to assuage the enemy party, or resorts to a simple threat backed by force known to exist. Deliberate and flagrant lying as an organized enterprise in this way is an enterprise requiring a passionate commitment to the lie. It is not that a particular falsehood must be defended, but that the entire religion of falsity and lying for its own sake becomes the dominant force. There is no version of this which could be limited. Once it infects communication, the only course of action is to mitigate its spread, eliminate such behaviors wherever possible, or allow it to spread and turn all symbolic communication into lies, lies, lies. There is not a version of such lying which can be held as something necessary for filtering communication. The defenders of such a regime of lying will always claim that other agents are inherently and essentially hostile, or that power creates its own reality, or that the lie is for some greater good which is never specified or meaningful, but never can they claim that such a love of lying is actually good or a thing which could be constructive. Its entire function is destructive, malicious, and contemptuous of the very idea that genuine bilateral communication is possible. There is no middle ground where there is an acceptable level of this contempt that is necessary for a functional society. The costs of this regime of lying are clear to anyone who considers it in its entirety for five minutes. It is this sort of deception, which is a very particular kind, which is necessary for the present society's institutions to carry out their grisly work. It is not done because it actually succeeds at deceiving people - most humans know what this is - but that such a commitment to flagrant lying is a demonstration of fealty to a whole ethical and moral view and supplication to the ruling interest, the nature of which will be expounded on in future writings. The lie is not justified as something serving an ulterior motive, but as something which in-of-itself defines the entire project of those who engage in it. It may be more or less pernicious in a particular moral or ethical view of the world, but the intent in all cases is the same.

Such a disagreement of course only exists in abstractions that require symbolic language. It requires the use of this symbolism to suggest a lie about what a symbol even is, and it is impossible to claim that there is really is no such thing as a symbol, or else this writing would be impossible. Symbols are as possible as any other meaning in the world, though it is not inevitable that a particular set of symbols must exist or that any particular symbol is necessary at a fundamental level. All symbols came out of some prior conditions - there is a reason why we possess an alphabet, or a number of glyphs that are understood to convey meaning. There is definitional content to every image, sound, or thing that is at first a symbolic representation. Not all meanings we observe in the world are singular "symbols" or forms to be taken as a whole, but those meanings are always represented as least in principle as a symbol, by pointing to the meaningful object and calling it "that thing". Perhaps a symbolic representation in language becomes standard to refer to that thing and expound upon it, or the image of "that thing" is reproduced often enough that it is a familiar symbol interpreted in ways that were not inherent to the original meaning. Perhaps the symbol remains a placeholder and is discarded as soon as the placeholder is not necessary.

The symbol is constructed specifically to be compact enough so that knowledge faculties, or any application that was built with those faculties, can utilize it and distinguish it from other symbols. If it is a symbol of symbolic language, there are necessarily a limited number of them, catalogued and studied. The symbols can be taught pedagogically, or reconstructed as part of pattern recognition, and these methods work alongside each other; it is much easier to learn symbols if they are taught in some deliberate and planned dispensation of information, and built on earlier symbols that the learner understands. The recognition of symbols as what they are and the complexity of symbolic expression is dependent on whatever faculties the knowing agent possesses to process such things. It is possible to envision many symbolic systems that are not in everyday use but are comprehensible to someone who can learn those systems and the meaning associated with them. Typically, symbolic languages make clear definitions of the symbols and are consistent across speakers, so that confusion is minimized and teaching the language is possible without great difficulty. There may be an esoteric sector to be counted as literate or in know of the arts of a language, but the basic symbolic expressions are simple enough that a child can pick up a language and expound upon that knowledge once a basic vocabulary is established. While there is a world full of meanings and potential symbols, forming very large contraptions which appear like Rube Goldberg devices, we simplify the symbols enough so that at least the symbols can be interpreted. If we cannot comprehend the symbols as they were written by another, we attempt to grasp them using our knowledge of symbolic expression and the meaning of things we have accumulated. It is then possible with a small number of symbols to describe many complex things, such that a language with a small and countable number of sounds or letters can allow for complex expression. While meanings can be left vague enough to allow for versatility, a symbol must be consistent and simple enough that its recognition is not burdensome. If written or spoken, the symbolic language is never so uniform. There can and will be slight variations in the printing of letters if intended to be written in the same font, and different handwriting is recognizable as originating from a particular person unless someone is trained to modulate such subtle variations to throw off that recognition. There are as many accents as there are speakers and a voice is recognizable as particular to some actual human, again barring training to throw off this expectation or modify subtle traits of the spoken word. This does not change that the symbols are understood to mean the same thing across variations, and we can also comprehend the intended symbols when someone mis-speaks or mis-writes, correcting common errors without stopping over pedantic definition-mongering. When we do so, the symbolic representation is corrected in our imagination to fit expectations. That correction is always a local event like other knowledge, as is the process which formulated symbolic expression in the first place.

These symbols - whether they are letters or pictographs, images, videos, sounds, recorded audio, streams of digital data on a hard drive or in some memory that is translated for computational use, or whatever they may be - are the basis for all abstract thought. For an abstraction or "form" to be acknowledged requires that there be some meaning, some substance, that is referenced, to reconstruct it out of a world that is in the first place a morass of events and things which are not inherently distingtuishable by any rule of nature. In our meaning and understanding of things, we do not have any ready-made forms for consumption. All forms we would work with in abstract thought are things which were constructed. They may be constructed without any awareness, and may derive from events we hold to be a fact of nature, science, and history. For us to know that in an abstract model - in any symbolic language that allows us to express the concept and work with it with other abstract reasoning - we must construct symbols of some sort which point to the meanings that are manipulated by thought. If we lack this faculty, we would not be able to easily construct new meanings in the way that we do with abstract thought. Language, even a crude language worked out in a savage state that is for internal use, is something different from the natural knowledge-gathering process in any animal. It is this which marks humans are markedly distinct from other animals, for human technology and language is not only far more prolific than the language of any other creature, but humans have been shaped by the use of this faculty and do things that no other animal is observed to do. We know from simple investigation of ourselves that we would not be as we are without this faculty, for it informs so much of our behavior, in ways that are so basic that we would find it difficult to be reduced to a lower level of language or civilization, where this faculty of abstraction would not be as effective. We are habituated to living in a human society where communication and abstract thought is a daily part of life, and we are habituated to the particular niche in society we inhabit. To leave that niche and enter another entails culture shock and usually a fear of some alien culture, and this phenomenon is not the same for humans as it would be for animals. Humans, through abstract thought and language, are acutely aware of the danger that an alien presents if it can think as well or better than they themselves think, and cooperate in society and associations which only humans are known to make. We are aware of the danger of being in our own society, the relevance of social ranks which are only conceivable because of abstract language, to the point where these abstractions take over the native sense we had of the world and our connection to the meaning of anything we do. Animals do not know a concept of "political insanity" - they might in some sense experience insanity and fear and a disconnect from their situation, but humans have a thoroughly developed concept of political insanity and political stupidity that is inherent to every society humans made, even at the level of a hunter-gatherer band. To be stupid or insane in that sense is social death and an omnipresent terror, which has intensified throughout human history. It is a seemingly inexorable trend, though in actuality there have been rises and falls and a rewriting of history to pretend that this situation is eternal and unchanging.

Every system that is abstracted, and communicated in some rational understanding, contains a collection of symbols, and any part of that system it itself as symbol, as is the entire system's extraction. The relations between things can be symbolized in some way, to know for example the distance between two objects or the length of it, if the symbolic representation is a physical object. Symbols can be fashioned out of other symbols. It is not axiomatically necessary that all symbols can be broken down into constituent parts - unlike other things, a symbol can be interpreted as a philosophical "simple" or a basic germ. Symbols are not inherently "whole", in that composites of symbols can be conceived, but the composition of symbols would only be broken down into smaller symbols, which would be very different things meaningfully - for example, reducing a letter on a computer monitor to pixels, none of which have any symbolic meaning beyond being pixels. The letter "a" displayed on a monitor is not actually composed of anything necessarily to be recognized as "a" - we take the letter "a" as a symbol in an alphabet, and we are capable of identifying near-matches of the "a" symbol as the same thing in written symbolic language. We can distinguish for example different fonts or handwriting. The actual existence of the media allowing the letter "a" to be rendered does not change the purpose of the alphabetic symbol, and the same sentence written by hand, in print, or on a computer monitor, will be read the same, with the same purpose of the symbols. Only in the inherent meaning of the medium does the meaning of the sentence change, and this is not due to the symbols being different, but because we have many associations with some medium and media physically possess certain characteristics that are not symbolic at all.

Meanings, knowledge, and the material reality of things can never be arrested in this way, in a way that would be satisfactory for our need of knowledge. It is further the case that knowledge relies on this capacity to abstract to exist in the first place. A lack of language or sophistication that we would appreciate would not mean that there is no abstraction at all - only that this faculty of abstraction did not advance in a way that allowed for consistent language that allows an entity to expound on abstract systems. The abstractions are not in of themselves knowledge or intelligence, as if the abstraction were the substance of mind and the definition of what it means to think or experience the world. We did not need any abstract reasoning in language to assert our existence; that truth is something that was evident before we could express the concept of existence in abstract knowledge. None of us chose at will to exist, or have the ability to turn off that existence without consequence. Even if we could terminate that conscious existence at will, as if we were puppeting knowledge itself like a machine, the consequences of doing so would be a real thing. Whether they are recognized as "real" in our sense of society or what is relevant would not change that thinking and knowledge are premised on a world existing and events that preceded our ability to abstract the concept formally. The formal understanding is necessarily built on a prior understanding that did not possess clear symbols or anything expressed in language. This stretches back to the conception of a living thing like us which can think, the material constitution of the body and its development, and the ability of abstract thought to modify that constitution in particular ways if it can guide the use of tools, which includes faculties of the human body. The abstract thought is only a representation of a process which is substantive, which allows a human to know anything. We would like this abstract thought to reflect a real condition if we are honest with ourselves, but we are not under any obligation to reality to be honest. We do not even need to be honest with ourselves, whether we know of the consequences of self-deception or if we are truly blind to the consequences of dishonesty. It is of course possible to consider meanings as philosophical simples without a symbol as such - we have concepts so simple and self-evident that a word to define them is more elaborate than needed and not part of common circulation, and we operate with such meanings and knowledge without thinking about them, integrating them into larger concepts implicitly.

For example, we can conceive of a physical world constructed of particles, without having a detailed theory of the particle or what it is, but we don't reference the particles of most physical objects. The symbol is relevant not because it is a purified form of some meaning, but because it is a token used to communciate our concepts of what things are, and it is only intended to be that. We are aware that the symbols we utilize are not the actual things, even if we operate with symbols that are intended to match closely the underlying reality we would study in science or an application of reason and sense. It doesn't occur to us that what we see and hear every day is "abstract" in that sense. We are inclined to trust that our eyes and ears are reliable, and if something is off with our sight or sound, we would look for something interrupting the typical process of seeing or hearing, rather than assume there is a psychological error in sense. If there is a psychological error, we would understand that not as a defect of the eye or even the brain and nervous system, but an error in abstract thinking. Those errors are things which can be corrected and do not need to be essentialized at all, and we could model our thought process or the base of knowledge drawn upon for abstraction as if it were some clockwork, much like a physical machine. This is not actually "how we think" - that is, what it means to think and know is not a question of conforming to an abstract notion of thought or humanity. It is however how we can communicate our thought process, or diagram it so that we may look at this process rationally and ask how we might change it, or what would influence our thinking in ways we did not want. We do not possess a means to communicate meanings directly in language or reason. We can "communicate" a fist to the face or a bullet to the head without regarding the symbolism of such an act, but people do not do these things on any whim that is unpredictable. There is some reasoning process involved, even if the reasoning process is crude and not understood by whomever performs the act. We do not need to think through perfectly the full consequences of such communication in every instance, and in practice we are trained not to think so extensively about anything we do in society or politics.

Even in a primitive sense before language, the world-system of any knowing entity is a thing expressed as symbols. The primitive events which allow knowledge to form are all things that can be symbolized, and a characteristic of thinking life is that is it constructed out of parts which are also things we symbolize. We speak of eyes, arms, legs, hearts, brains, and so on as symbolic wholes, even though we can dissect all functions of life to determine what "thought" is, and what symbolic representations we could detect that would be understood as "thinking" behavior. That is, we do not define intelligence or thought by the behavior of life alone, as if the behaviors were in of themselves intelligence. We do not look for a superficial marker to prove that someone thinks and conclude that this is the extent of our ability to know anything about thought. We may look at something a person wrote or tasks this person accomplished to gauge their thinking, but this is scant evidence and only so much of it is available to make an assessment on that basis. Nor is intelligence reduced to some informational processing power, as if a shorter gap or leaps of reason that allow for information processing and the obedient digestion of ideas by pedagogy is the marker of intellectual capacity. Some mystifiers deny that intelligence can be measured at all, or that intelligence is a vague and philosophical concept that is never truly defined, yet tests of intelligence and politicization of intelligence is omnipresent in the present society. These mystifiers are shameless charlatans, but genuine inquiries into intelligence and the nature of thought arrive at complex answers to discern intelligence. There are genuine metrics of intelligence or functioning that are used by various entities that are meticulously detailed, but none of them conform to the politicized notion of intelligence that is promoted to the masses as "intelligence quotient", or any newer mystification of the same politicized concept. The arbitrariness of institutional psychology and the university is notorious, as the entire eugenic scam has been nothing more than a defense of traditional class and hereditary privileges, and a vicious assault on anyone who transgresses the eugenic religion of Galton. If there were quantifiable and useful metrics of intelligence that answered what is actually happening in the human brain, it would undermine Galton's claim that intelligence is solely determined by his shady statistical trickery, and it would undermine the true intent of Galton's imperial clique to make people as vicious as them. It would expose the character of the eugenic coup as something so foul that no one should ever allow such entities to exist; or, if intelligence metrics corresponded to virtues that were productive, the vicious imperial logic and its love of sadism would be rooted out and the Galtonite coup would have been averted. Sadly, humanity could not avoid that.^[3]

The development of primitive thought into symbolic language and then human sociality and all of the abstractions humans take for granted is a long story, and it is outside the scope of this writing. I can only provide a brief sketch of what might have happened, and this would only be a best-guess that I make based on what I have seen and what would have made sense if I were a savage man. That would not be sufficient if my goal were to trace the origin of human thought as we know it, but that is not the point of any of my writing. It can be safely assumed that human symbolic language and the very concept of humanity did not arise in one moment, as if an essence imbued some random apes with a soul and defined the race forevermore. Humanity's origin is almost certainly something more gradual, and it is unlikely that a single ancestor can be credited as the "first human" by some definition we devise. That entire thinking is necessary not for science or reason but for a biopolitical myth, which is of no interest to me. So too would the origin of social customs and language be more gradual. Language developed organically to fit the demands of creatures who lived under very different pressures than us. In recorded history, there is a progression of human thought and consciousness, where we can see that men who lived in different societies and times thought very differently than we do today, and this development of knowledge proceeded not at the level of a race or species but at a local level. Knowledge can only be a local event, and communication is not with some vague ether of humanity or the world but with agents we can define and symbolize in the abstract. Nothing like the technocratic concepts of psychiatry or inquisitorial psychology existed before 1800, and the closest parallels would have been the practices of religion or mystical cults rather than anything scientific. One of the great projects of eugenics has been to willfully shape and mold humanity to fit to its sadistic images of mankind, to run down all subordinated classes and glorify the worst aristocracy mankind ever suffered. It is possible even in this author's lifetime to notice a drift in human psychology that is not reducible to informational influences released at a whim, that could be reversed if the influence were removed. There is no "normal" baseline to return to, and the entire purpose of such influecing was to change human beings. It was never a question of some right ideas animating humans who would be philosophical zombies without the thought leaders telling them what to believe. The purpose of ideology was to impose a physical transformation of human beings, social behavior, the spaces we inhabit, the states we construct, and the tools we make. In short, ideology was created to guide technological progress in a direction that pedagogues and educators preferred, and to retard any technological development that would destabilize the ruling institutions. It is in that way that humanity has, since 1980, essentially frozen in technological development outside of a few key areas. The disparity in technology between the lower class selected to die and the safe and favored classes selected to promote grows more stark in the 21st century, and this is deliberate. In general knowledge, science and technology stand still. In philosophy of science, all practice of science, even among the favored classes for their purposes, has regressed and enshrined deliberately maladaptive paradigms, because it became more important to suppress the native faculties of humanity than to encourage free thought or sharing of knowledge for cooperative benefit. The generation born after 1980 has been highly educated, but is hobbled by the most maladaptive institutions of education and learning possible, and an insane and childish bastardization of science and reason that those institutions promote to filter out the majority of humanity, and corral any scientist who is not on board with full eugenism. The result has been two generations of incredibly intelligent and thoughtful fools, preaching a foolishness that could only be taught by intense pedagogy and an environment of fear, which is supported by technology designed to enslave, degrade, and eliminate large swathes of mankind. The whole world is afflicted with this illness, but it is most accelerated in the United States, which was subjected to the most vicious ravages of eugenic ideology in its institutions.

However it happens, it is through symbols that we comprehend abstract models of the world, and in this way, the human's sense of separation from the world is far greater than that of an animal. In other words, abstract self-reference and a large vocabulary mark the decisive difference between humans and animals. This is not so much about an essence of thought that appeared one day or an expression of such, but it is rather a demonstrated ability to act on abstractions and construct new ones with variety that is not seen in any animal. This ability can be confirmed by self-investigation which is easy for us, if we were allowed such introspection and comparison with external standards. Both conditions are ubiquitous, but are discouraged by certain conceits that are well known lies, even if self-serving lies. The abstraction of self leads to self-identity and a sense of identity in the world, and an abstraction of other people. We learn very quickly that other people are much like ourselves and are aware of themselves in the same way, whatever we may claim about their thought process, and this presents a danger that animals do not know. Humans through this abstract reasoning are capable of rational politics and deliberation towards another entity like themselves that is not seen in the animal kingdom. This allows for kindness, but far more often this leads to sadism and cruelty, and a general fear among humanity that is felt by any animal that learns of human treachery. The abstraction leads further to a much larger understanding of the world, and the general fear of awareness is not the first or primordial thought by any means. Absent fear of other humans, if we lived in a society where humanity were generally good-natured or at least averse to causing the harm that is prevalent throughout history, we likely would remark on the possibility of danger then move on to things we actually liked or found fascinating. The nature of this general fear is for many later writings.

What is important about the preceding paragraph for this discussion is a recognition of how much our thinking about "thought", "mind", "reason", "intelligence", and similar concepts, concerns primarily abstractions of thought in a model rather than our sense of what thinking actually is, or what a scientific study of thought would suggest thought is. The evidence of my own thinking is something I leave for the reader to discover for themselves, and I would be eager to argue that belief in detail if I felt the outcome would allow for growth of understanding or refinement of the view. I do not think my belief regarding conscious thought is particularly unusual, given recent work on cognition and investigation into the human brain, but there is a large political incentive to not acknowledge anything but an institutional model that is deliberately constructed to defend narrow conceits. If we investigate past theories of thought and reason, philosophers from ancient times on held surprisingly complex views about the mind and the nature of thought, and this thinking can appear almost modern in some cases. Steeping the question of consciousness in mysticism is not an ancient myth that everyone believed until science gave mankind the Promethean fire of true wisdom. Theories about the nature of matter, thought, and what made humans different are found in the philosophical traditions of all of the advanced old world civilizations, and there is a thinking about reason that is present in primitive societies. It was possible for the American natives or African tribesmen to understand well enough what the old world civilizations understood thought to me, because they were not devoid of mind and held out of necessity an understanding of thought that must comport to some reality they knew. The civilized peoples held theories of mind and thought that could not diverge too far from the actual conditions any human who independently investigates the question would discover without pedagogy. If the ruling philosophy and theory of mind were too alien from something sensical to an actual human, it would not be useful for any exercise except degrading the native faculties of everyone. There are certainly philosophers with such a pernicious aim, but there would remain enough interest in a genuine investigation that fidelity to knowledge required consistency and could not abide too much bullshit. In the past, the lower classes were kept fearful of politics and swayed by force, crass mesmerism, bribes, the promotion of internecine violence in their ranks, patronage customs, and their political thought was often aligned with religious thought or at least informed by the dominant religion and widespread superstitions. The lower class was almost never involved in any political matter by design, regardless of their knowledge or capability. Because that was normal, philosophy and writing among the aristocracy and wealthy openly disdained the masses and wrote freely about the nature of thought, because there was little expectation that the lower classes would read it or care about the writing. Philosophy typically advanced a program that was alien to the working classes, and the conceit that thought or reason or mind or philosophy was paramount was never an idea of the lower classes or the workers. The fetish for knowledge and symbols thereof had always been a ruling class conceit, and science for much of human history was the domain of slaves, commoners, specialists, and a few noble dilettantes. The ruling philosophies disdained science and always sought to curtail its influence on matters of spiritual authority or politics, precisely because science was seen as a low pursuit. Only out of a desire to co-opt knowledge would the teaching of natural science become a feature of medieval society, and this required an organized religion and priesthood with a theory of mind and knowledge and a theory of pedagogy.

It is not that the distinctions drawn between symbolism and reality were unknown - these categories were understood long ago. How matter, which at first appears as some substance, acquires any form to be regarded as an idea or symbol, has never been traced to arrive at any way where true reality control is possible. Control of symbols or some concerted praxis to change the world has only arrived at ways to badger and cajole human subjects, and answers little about changing systems that we analyze and understand well. The control of human perception has been demonstrated to be ineffective and highly damaging to maintain in the present society. It is only in this time of the 21st century, after a century of living in a world were technocratic reality control has been at the forefront of the ruling class imagination, that we have seen the results of this grand experiment, and the results are both gruesome and sadly predictable. It is with recent experience in mind that I write this, not to reveal some new truth, but to explain to the readers why this works and why it is repeated ad nauseum.

What I referred to as information then began as the supposed material things we want to know about, but are understood in scientific models or cruder models as symbols and abstractions. It is only through this symbolic understanding that data becomes information which, at least on the surface, resolves uncertainty. In this way, the faculty of symbolic language attempts to terraform the world in accord with human conceits. The information can only be gleaned in ways that the world itself will allow, and at heart this process is not driven by our conceits in language about the world, data, or information. We only can do this with the symbols we developed over time, and can only guide this with meaningful knowledge that has accumulated over time. Where a full meaning or observed system can be taken as what it is and expounded upon, information belongs to an earlier stage of forming meaning. Some schema for reducing information to a common substance is implied. For digital information, this is a stream of binary digits, which are taken as references to truth or falsity. The actual meaning of that information is not the digits in of themselves. An argument passed to some computer function reads the same data but produces different output when fed to different functions. The data for an audio recording is not the same as a text file. The user of a computer uses a program which makes use of data to produce output that is read or heard by a user, and this is where the data processing becomes information. Only by communicating to the user can data be informational, since information only truly exists for knowing entities as an intermediary step to knowledge. The mere playing of an audio file does not in of itself hold meaning. It could very well be dismissed by a user as noise or something irrelevant. The informational stage for us is more symbolic when we express information on some media, but seemingly material and "realer" than senses which we know to be flawed. We normally use this information to resolve sensory errors, without overriding things we know to be true from experience or prior reason. The abuse of information in modern rhetoric is a deliberate short-circuiting of this process, so that "information" and symbols are granted spiritual authority that no one ever believed them to possess in the past. The concept of mind in the past was an essence difficult to conceive today in full. The invocations of the ruling class today require belief in a large number of assumptions to temporarily suspend the commonly believed conceits of psychology and the methods used by today's institutions. Past society maintained a spiritual and religious view of Man and thus of mind and rationality that invoked much different assumptions of its nature.

One characteristic then of human "sentience", or what is glorified as a distinction of humans, is that humans really deal with abstractions in a way which makes reality "unreal", and there is at all times a tension between the conscious concrete experience and waking rationality. In a strange inversion, in mesmerist parlance, waking rationality - the abstract faculty which is known to be malleable and under attack - is described as consciousness, and the concrete and real experience which is truly defining of what it means to be conscious is described as subconscious, reactive, and a thing to be programmed. There are in actuality no "hallucinations" of the sort that are described in fiction, and this bizarre narrative has always been invoked to defend political conceits rather than describe an actual state of mind or sensory errors. A melting of our conscious faculties which would be durable if we retained sanity mixes abstractions with the concrete sensory input, in a way which violates what would normally be desirable if we were in control of those abstractions. If it were not for intriguers and the human proclivity for deception, and if there weren't a constant pressure from society on people which taxes their abstract thinking and threatens the conscious core of themselves, humans that are well fed and not under some non-human threatening condition would likely develop their faculties as they pleased, and this would be healthier. We might have imagined a human society of genuine comraderie enjoying such abundance that we would expect some baseline decency and engagement even if not friendship, but humanity in reality has been the opposite - a race of venal, petty, cruel, sadistic apes whose great ruling idea is to puff up the superficial qualities of leadership and deny that leaders face any more accountability than they are made to assume, where the supposed leaders are averse to providing even basic goods which would be abundant if the will to create them were allowed to flourish. Only because humans in solitude see the futility of this general state of the race, and because humans have seen enough suffering and could to some extent choose their associations, did any genuine virtues arise in them.

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I have largely concerned this writing with the germ of knowledge in individuals, without great regard for the emergence of language and abstractions that comprise human thought on society, the world, their environment, and concepts that are transcendent. Out of one transcendent truth - that there is a world - we conclude from our vantage point that there are other truths that can be held to be true regardless of our standpoint, or that appear true to our experience. For example, in physics, the laws of physics are held to be the same for all observers and from all vantage points. This would be necessary for a consistent model of physics to allow us meaningful explanation of the world generally; any "alternate laws" would be a thing understood in reference to some other laws of physics which would be reconciled to understand the whole. If, for example, we held that the world is the result of physical interactions and systems - a position called physicalism - then if we considered something like a virtual space or knowledge in subjective experience, we would not understand it as simply a more elaborate form of physics, but as something we can refer to that had an origin in physical events. In my example, human experience is the result of energetic activity that comprises our physical existence, and we construct for ourselves a subjective model of a world which is at first glance a world of physical objects. We would tie that world and all other emergent concepts to this root concept of physics to answer the question of why we are the way we are at a basic level. It would be wholly inappropriate to use a physics metaphor where it did not apply - for example, to reduce human agents to points of light or billiard balls in a physics simulation - and assume that this is all there is to reality. We can build a model reducing human beings to agents with simple behaviors, or abstract large populations to say something about the whole without needing to investigate each agent. If we do so, we would only be able to construct such a reduced model by considering the agents that are described, and confirming that are reduction fits what the agents actually are, or some aspect of the agents we would like to simulate. For example, we might consider in a simulation that humans are agents which consume food and produce so much iron, timber, swords, or some other resources, and this would be a type of behavior humans engage in. There is nothing wrong with positing such a simulation for answering a question of how to optimize human behavior, and it will answer sufficiently the question posed. There is no need to insert elaborate symbolic games to suggest that humans don't consume food or produce things, and if we were to suggest criticisms of this simple model, we would root critique in analysis, or confirm the hypothesis we boldly state from some supposition we made. We would not be able to make the want for food into something other than what it is, without disregarding many well known facts about humans and life as we understand it. It is similarly futile to chant a koan that "life is struggle" or "life is hunger", as if this assertion were a just-so fact or axiom. The axioms to demonstrate what humans are derive not from a law of physics or some abstraction, but from a reality that preceded humans. The only axiom that can be taken for granted is existence, and we demonstrate that axiom by trivially demonstrating the futility of solipsism. We may not be aware of why there is anything or a deeper nature of the world that humans do not access, but games with symbolic knowledge do not replace genuine knowledge as we understand it. Knowledge itself has no bearing on the truth of anything, and knowledge need not concern itself with learning the truth of the world. Knowledge serves a much more crass goal no matter how elaborate our knowledge systems and justifications for it become. Symbolic abstractions serve a much more crass goal than that, and humans have lied about basic things. They lie not because of some ulterior motive or reason, but because lying and the amusement of knowing others to be fools became a reward in of itself, and the behavior is so ubiquitous that it is a rare case to find a single honest companion in this cursed society. We make do with whatever islands of honesty we have among each other. I have often said and will keep saying that the truth is always in the world, and all human knowledge has nothing to do with that truth. We can choose to regard the truth of the world that is revealed to us time and time again, or disregard it in favor of whatever abstraction we want. There is no moral reason whatsoever for humans to abide the truth, and far from it, humans invent moral rationales for elaborate lies even when the habit of lying accomplishes nothing but a lot of needless misery and stupidity. If we desire accurate analysis of systems, we would do well not to carry conceits about knowledge when we know ourselves to be natural liars.

It is for that reason that a systems theory which devolves all things to a singular substance usually betrays the intent of those who construct the system theory, more than it arrives at something truly foundational. Systems may be described as heat, life, information, knowledge, wisdom, "truths", facts, logical propositions, matter, physics, ecology, or some political logic which asserts itself like a Demiurge. Systems may be described as contradiction to play elaborate word games, obfuscating proper analysis or the use of any rational faculty.

Here I have described systems analysis as a thing rooted in knowledge itself, which is referencing itself in a way that we are able to reconcile without symbolism. That is, humans are perfectly capable of handling infinite regress, both in their actual existence and in symbolic abstraction. The latter is provable through reason, but not without proper caveats about what is described. It is impossible to write an infinite series of symbols, but we would be able to extrapolate some infinite series based on simple propositions and a definition of infinities or infinitesimals that is sensical to us in meaning. For systems to be rooted in knowledge, which is the one thing humans can agree upon, requires that knowledge not be foundational, but a thing emergent from prior conditions which are only analyzed from the standpoint of our knowledge. We know from our standpoint that there is a past, and that there is no evidence that "we" mean anything to the existence that is observed. That proof is trivial, and only through elaborate mystifications can subjectivism be defended as a meaningful truth. The prior conditions do not "guide" knowledge, like a hobgoblin puppeting men through some vaguely defined material conditions which act like a god; nor does knowledge exert command to change what the world is at the primordial level, no matter how many assertions we make or how much force we apply. Knowledge does not direct change in the world in accord with some overarching plan, nor is it hopelessly reactive.

The philosophy of struggle, whether it is a struggle for life or a struggle of classes or struggle for some ill-defined purpose, is ultimately a philosophy of internal contradiction, intended to break the foundation of knowledge and isolate the agents. It is, then, a philosophy of slavery, however it is constructed. It is not slavery to acknowledge that this philosophy is operative, for struggle is very much a condition of life and it arises in various forms. In the actual world, our subjective struggles and sense of self is irrelevant to the proceedings. The struggle always resolves in real time, and the struggle of the past need not be the struggle of the future. The struggle of the present need not consume us. It is a pernicious train of moral philosophy which introduced then emphasized struggle in human society, and this has taken various guises throughout history. Struggles are overcome or survived not because of any justice or moral truth that is established by them. Struggle does not create anything at all except waste and stupidity. They nonetheless occur, because it is the nature of life to desire security and to continue much as it has, and an impulse to grow is inherent to even the dullest mind absent a compelling reason it should be restrained. It is not an axiomatic rule that two or more aliens are locked in some essential battle of wills to assert their existence. Life has long been capable of cooperation, and the imperatives of life resist senseless confrontation or ritual slaughter. The philosophy of struggle as a ruling idea has been hilariously terrible at governing anything, and this is intended to be so. So too is the philosophy of apathy and indifference, which pretends that struggle can be negated by symbolic tricks and performances. The only solution for knowledgeable entities like ourselves is to somehow reconcile with our condition so that we would, in some way, possess that which we wanted. Those who are dispossessed, scorned, rejected, and treated in the ways that the lowest of humanity have been will have no reason to ever reconcile with people who lord imperiously over them, and deny them the most basic conditions of life or sufficient security. It is not a question of some just order asserting who wins the struggle. The damned of the Earth have no reason to ever agree to the conceits of a few philosophers or their subordinates, or any scheme by which the world is claimed and doled out to cronies of a few assholes. Struggles are obviously not resolved for us, because the basic conditions of life are denied to so many, with no actual justification and new grand lies spun to suggest the inevitability of this reign. For any purpose of genuine knowledge, struggle is nothing more than a mechanistic force which can be explained, and usually the explanation does not require the habitual lying or assumptions about human nature which are not substantiated by any experience we have ever had.

The purpose of saying this here is that knowledge, properly understood, can stand on its own as the foundation of systems analysis. The symbolic representation of systems, which is what we would have to reason with using our faculties, is something human knowledge, or any suitable substitute, interprets and translates into meaning, which is derived from a knowledge process. That knowledge is rooted ultimately in a material source, but once knowledge is established, it operates in conditions that are not entirely material. If we think of what a human body actually needs for its sustenance, it is not that much at all. So too are the wants of a human not such great things. Those who want large and expensive things are aware that holding those things attracts the envy of other humans, and that a crass ambition for bigger and better shiny things is silly and futile. A child sees that without too much difficulty. It is not that those large things are intrinsically bad, or that no one should possess them, but that it is impossible for gross disparities of wealth to be maintained on the basis of a just-so story. That, though, was never really what was at stake. No material condition is a just-so story that leads to a moral conclusion. The question of morality suggests agency and an actual choice. For much of history, gross wealth disparities in of themselves could be accepted and life went on. The purpose of extracting so much wealth in the first place was to specifically deprive the subjugated of security, and force them to face an organization which intimidates the subjugated and drives them further into despair, and eventually to suck dry a class that was always hated and despised. It would be no different if the wealthy were to cherish a mud hut and claim it to be the height of civilization, so long as the poor were sufficiently fearful of this vaunted accomplishment. Very often, the ruling interest disdains open displays of wealth and status. It is much more suitable for their aims of deprivation to operate in secret, and encourage the vice of humanity so that a shared predatory enterprise is protected, and this interest cuts across classes and interests and constitutes an interest that rules apart from any material origin, technology, or any other interest which may exist in the world. It claims to be the primordial interest from which all others must spring, but most humans do not embrace or mindlessly follow it. If they did, the world would be a far worse place, and the terror would be so uniform that no concept of anything other than it would be admissible. This state of affairs is the goal of the predatory, whose numbers are small but sufficient and not limited to any particular cabal or race. Joining them are those who, out of some natural proclivity, follow the predatory with slavish devotion. It is these enablers, who are more numerous and fed like cattle, that this author considers particularly contemptible. The predatory at least possess some mindful approach to their goal, while the followers lurch from one depravity to another and suggest that their posturing and symbolism are some sort of valuable substance. The true predatory understand the value of knowledge, while their followers are just intelligent enough to make life miserable for the rest of us. Most of humanity, regardless of class or their position in ruling or serving, has some motive beyond pressing this predatory pleasure button, and has things to do with their existence that don't revolve around torture or thrill-seeking. For many of us, life has been enough, and if we didn't like that, we didn't have much say in the matter. It is only because there is something outside of this that any civilization was possible or could be sold as desirable, and so it has long been the aim of the predatory element to proclaim that all aspirations other than theirs were a lie and a joke.

I should make it clear, if it is not already, that "systems" do not describe vague constructs or transcendant truths about the world as a whole. The universe is not a "system", nor is a society governed by any particular "system" in a sense that is vague. If there is a ruling idea presented as a "system", it is a program with definite qualities, whether explicitly espoused or a conspiracy that is uncovered. The bastardization of language has loved to use the word "system" to describe its exact opposite, while actual systems - the things we observe and can analyze - are invisibilized or reduced by clever mental or verbal tricks. And so, while knowledge is the basis of systems, "systems" do not allow for a totalizing explanation of anything and never could, and knowledge very obviously is not foundational to the universe. It is a ruling institution conceit that knowledge possesses authority it does not possess. Men can rule very capably without knowing much, and wise people can be moral cretins who chase after the stupidest objectives because it does not occur to them that doing otherwise is worthwhile. The reasons why rulers obsess over knowledge is not because they possess genuine knowledge that grants them the virtue or authority to rule simply by receiving the knowledge, nor is it because the knowledge of passwords, secret initiation rites, names and locations of subjects, or the occulting of one's own identity, is in of itself effective for rule. We defined a political class by access to certain symbolic knowledge or meaningful knowledge, and we defined the subjugated and oppressed by the lack of knowledge, because humans chose to do that. The knowledge in of itself did not grant any legitimacy to rulers, as if any form of knowledge or truth commanded the world from on high. Knowledge can only perpetuate a class society if it can translate into action, by being fed material inputs from the world, assessing knowledge of science and technology and what it would take to command those things, assessing people and other knowledgeable creatures to see how they can be dominated or appeased, can present a spiritual authority that is above mere statements of fact or truth or a claim to the world through will or force, and can successfully occult and symbolize these methods in a way that allows knowledge to propagate. By obfuscating the concept of a system in so many ways, all of these aims are protected. The conceit of rulers that they were smarter and better than everyone else can be made into not mere fact but reality only by praxis, and once the means to do this were understood by enough people, the rule of society would be determined not merely by the acquisition of information or knowledge, but by full command of all products of knowledge.

This is to say that the theory of knowledge was developed by people who had long desired to command the world utterly, and by those who sought to resist such domination out of necessity. It has been a game between humanity since humans could communicate with each other, played out from the local level to the global level. Left out entirely are the many people who had no such conceit to rule, by knowledge or any other mechanism, and especially left out are those who questioned the legitimacy of institutions that monopolized knowledge and spiritual authority. It became the chief imperative above all to not allow any question to exist about the legitimacy of political knowledge, and the next imperative is that all knowledge would be co-opted by political interests, repurposed for political aims. It may be permitted to question a particular theory or ideology or institution, but never does this questioning allow the prospect of disregarding rule through knowledge altogther, or suggest any knowledge that would subvert or impede the procession of the will to power. You are allowed "anarchy" with the presumption that "nature abhors a vacuum", but you are not permitted to suggest there is a purpose to life that exists outside of the ruling interest. All such purposes are in the end claimed by the political project of rule, whether they are spiritual or material purposes or something else we would have wanted in this life. It is also never suggested that the core institutions of knowledge could be truly abolished and replaced with institutions that are suitable for those who wanted anything other than perpetual tyranny of political knowledge. It is suggested that the social proof of these institutions must become the power of life and death, and that the rule will become absolute. This is, of course, no way for a society to produce useful material things or genuine knowledge, including the knowledge to sustain rule. It confirms something that was foundational to the separation of mankind from the animal kingdom - that there would be those who are cast out, ritually sacrificed, and their lack of knowledge must be declared an absolute, regardless of what those sacrifices actually thought, did, or would have offered if they were allowed to join society. The same process plays out in every institution and every tier of a hierarchical society. There could be no class collaboration as such, where two or more classes share rule and conceive of some separation of powers.

Had we possessed a theory of knowledge that was not constructed for this political goal, we would live in a much different world, and there are attempts to do this. Concessions are, as little as possible, tolerated simply so that human beings can learn anything at all from their education. For the entirety of human history, knowledge and life have been hampered by education which is woefully inadequate, an institution intended first to beat animals into submission and command them by barking orders, then institutions to recreate a priesthood and their enforcers while keeping everyone else immiserated and barely capable of operating machines. So despicable and worthless was education that humanity could never build a consistent theory of machinery and operations until the 19th century, despite the intelligence of men clearly being capable of far better from early Antiquity. This relaxation of human stupidity was not the result of any improvement to education, but quite the opposite - that the wealth of humanity, and the weakness of states compared to the potential of human knowledge en masse, could not constrain knowledge once a number of key advances proliferated, and a number of institutional reforms brought human communities in regular contact. This growth of knowledge was always sporadic and often directed towards some imperial goal in the end, but it was no longer possible to rule humanity through religion and poverty, as had been the rule. Not only was it impossible to uphold a clearly unnecessary aristocracy and institutions completely unfit for purpose, but a rising technological interest saw its potential in that arrangement, and this interest saw that technological knowledge had risen sufficiently for the machines of industry and war to grant advantages to any empire that can command science and natural forces. Rather than foster genuine knowledge among the people, or even allowing people a place that would best suit an industrial society mobilizing its human resources in any sort of efficient scheme, the conceits of knowledge and ruling wisdom conspired to make education even more worthless. Out of some inertia, education in the 18th century was crude but widespread due to a wealth of printed material and a sufficient incentive for people to learn in that social niche. Pedagogues in the early 19th century remarked at the possibilities that reform could bring to society. All of these would be disrupted by a far more pernicious philosophical movement, which sought to use state education as a means to retard the sources of the democratizing tendency. The state education schemes looked around the world to find the worst of all pedagogical methods, and created an insidious beast that suited the needs of the Prussian state. This awful, deceptive, and vicious institution too allowed too much knowledge to accumulate, and so every generation, the administrators of state schooling have developed new and creative ways to use this institution to destroy more lives, more knowledge, and generally increase human suffering. This serves the goals of both the military, which is driven by an essentially demonic cult of war rather than any worthwhile purpose, and of rising industrial capitalists who were quickly rising to become finance capitalists and the de facto kings and princes of modernity. The nascent experiments to break free from this institution were systematically wiped out, until the last half of the 20th century, where it could finally invade every other institution. It would be education and pedagogy which most of all was the engine of state authority and control, promoting an insidious vision for humanity that was joined by the worst elements in society, all of which flocked to the school and its adjacent institution and saw a bonanza of torture and exploitation to reap when the time came. That time is the 21st century, and we live in it right now.

It seems very elaborate and torturous to describe this, but it must be clear how much deception in all things dominates every conceit we hold about knowledge and intelligence, rather than the thing it purported represented. The duplicitly of the human race originates from the recognition that abstraction and the underlying reality can be alienated from each other, first by training oneself and then by experimenting on others and invoking rituals of shame, humiliation, terror, and so on which were the first stirrings of a cult of power. So omnipresent is this beast that it has made it difficult to render clearly just what it is and the full extent of its mode of operation. Nearly all human endeavor, in one way or another, is absorbed to feed this beast. To its view, all human activity not in service to the cult of power - to what became the state and its holders - is a superfluous and unnecessary waste. If the holders of a state grant to their subjects freedom in a genuine sense or material benefit, it is presumed that they do so only to serve the state's interest, just as cattle are fed to prepare them for the slaughter. It is not that genuine altruism is impossible for the human race, as if humans are incapable of comprehending the concept. It has long been known that a cult of power serves no purpose other than itself, and its drive to monopolize human behavior is a foolish project. We would be far better if this horrific influence over our lives were eliminated completely, and those who have lived for the thrill of torture no long were allowed to do this to anyone. This is where the specter of struggle as a philosophy is invoked, when there is really no struggle to be insinuated. It might have been possible to conceive of eliminating sadism. This runs against tendencies that perpetuated in civilization and its forebears, as it would require institutions and an armed body that is unlike any that has ever existed. It is not a matter of the people possessing some moral goodness or innate sense that would naturally stop this. The natural tendency of life would have favored the emergence of cults of power, but nature also presented tendencies to mitigate them, and in the vast majority of mankind, some sense persists to tell us this cult of power is wrong. It is a characteristic of ruling class psychological "science" to invert entirely the assignment of this guilt. Those who accurately describe human history and its institutions as a barbarous outrage against decency, that rules primarily through fear and torture and degrades the vast majority of the race, are described as crazy or psychopathic for stating facts that have been more or less admitted in private, if they follow from those facts to take measures to defend even the smallest self-interest or any interest other than sadism. The sadists occupy the inquistion which ostensibly roots out such behavior, protect each other, and have never failed to ritualistically torture the innocent and blame the weak for crimes of Being.

It is for that reason that so much ignorance of knowledge persists. Humans, by nature, are not too bright. We are ruled by fear and educated by beatings and humiliations. Even the most capable of the race are ill-suited to rule anything, and invent elaborate scams to suggest that whatever system they purport to rule through will totally work this time, despite the institutions being rife with dishonesty and malice. It would be simple to avert this by not allowing institutions designed to be malicious to exist. None of the malice serves a genuine function necessary for defense. Whenever the holders of the state must neutralize a threat, the malice and sadism that the holders of the state protect must be set aside to actually accomplish the task against a rival who is not impressed by fear. Overwhelmingly, those who rule and provide the intellectual ideas guiding a state despise the common masses more than anything else. It is laughable that an intellectual elite, let alone an intellectual elite forged in the ruling class university, ever presented itself as a friend of the common man. The common man has never bought this story, but was born to be contested by a voracious and pigheaded middle class that was trained to revel in blood, and a ruling intellectual elite that revels in deception and low cunning. Nowhere in this apparatus is there any inherent kindness or a desire for good, or anything a single participant would find materially useful. Only out of dire necessity does anyone produce anything at all, even though the social enterprise ostensibly exists so that humans can produce more things than they would in a state of savagery or disorganization. The product of industry, which is vast, is denuded and then even this denuded supply of goods is denied to the common man, placed behind price tags and made shittier by deliberate engineering choices of rulers who wish for the common man's suffering. What luxury the commoners are allowed is always accompanied by threats to take it away if the commoner misbehaves or disrupts the regular procession of torture and sadistic thrill-seeking that defines civilized society. No one, not even those who rule, can actually justify this torture, and cannot help but allow enough product to enter the hands of those who would use it. In this way, civilization allowed for a rise of living standards, but always held the threat of taking away all of that product if the gravy train feeding middle class avarice and ruling class lust for torture were stopped. Since it became normal for commoners to justify themselves by selling product, and it was impossible to ration out minutely that product so that the rulers commanded how little the commoners receive, it would become more difficult to suggest that it is truly in the interest of society to suppress living standards and continue shittifying every institution, every thing that humans do. It does not serve any material use for those who rule to continue the shittification. If this rule by humiliation and torture ever stopped, though, a sadistic faction and their followers would howl in outrage and resort to unlimited terror, so that the grinding down and torture of the populace may continue. This torture inflicts the middle and upper classes, whose behavior is disciplined by a cult that was never entirely a thing they willed into existence. A certain sort of person wanted the world to be this, and for rule to be defined by the most sadistic and their pleasure.

It is with this origin that humans learned to speak not so much to communicate rational thought, but to intimidate, to occult, to insinuate, and to share secrets only when it suited them. Ordinary conversation is peppered with tests, threats, jibes, cues, and various indicators that are not a flat declaration of information. It is almost a given that nothing a human says can be trusted, and we only learn after it is too late that we couldn't trust anyone we thought we could. Our mothers, fathers, and elders lied long before us and knew well the ways to lie in order to prove their membership in adult society. Children learn to lie in various ways, and in most societies are taught to shamelessly lie. So natural is lying that children have to be beaten and disciplined to force honesty only to authority. Lying and occulting become natural habits because in a dangerous world, aliens are not people who can be trusted at all. Hostility marks human interactions even at the closest level, and no relationship can be taken for granted. Only at a very young age are children trusting, and this is because they have no choice in the matter. To go it alone as an infant is to face near-certain death, a common fate since the start of human history. Ritual sacrifice is something children learn of, as long as it doesn't happen to them. Ritual humiliations are the norm of human childhood. Very little can be trusted, and even the games and play of children is tainted with the hostility imbued in everything the race does, and the culture that arises when humans communciate with each other enough. This is a miserable beginning of symbolic language. It can become better out of necessity, or through systems some human worked out alone because it was not possible for human society to arrive to wreck whatever a solitary human managed to build. A habit of needing trust to survive may become a proclivity to engage in dialogue, but this dialogue is always of a limited sort, usually evading any substantive matter. The truth is that there is little to say between people, given the general hostility the race engenders. Those who naively seek friends when thirsty for information are shown the shun and marked for some humiliation, and figuring out who is out of the know is the key to survival. Because violence works more effectively with superior numbers and control of the space, those of a hostile mindset towards the weak find each other and establish a pecking order, and this works in any association humans make. Families typically assign the runt or the loser of the family to blame for their problems, and in some families this is more or less pronounced. By and large, the honest words either come from one's own investigation into the world and are kept to themselves as a way to track genuine meaning, or they come because such an environment promotes nihilistic disregard for the rotten situation that humans can just say what's on their mind, expecting little to come from it and perhaps finding a genuine dialogue more amusing than the usual games of ridicule and posturing. Typically, though, the habit of thumping the chest and barking like a savage never ended. Rather than seeing such displays as the moronic rot that they are, such behavior is glorified and considered some sign of virtue. That behavior is then enshrined and protected, while protests against this contagious stupidity, even passive ones of walking away, are forbidden. Those designated as prey are conditioned not to fight back, even though the expense of maintain ritual terror and humiliation is enormous and provides no gain. When the inevitable happens and the prey decide that violent and lethal retaliation is emotionally, rationally, and morally appropriate to such a situation repeated often enough, the barking animals shriek and howl about injustice, as if ritualized terror and animalistic orgies were somehow productive, while the smallest peace is some sort of outrage against nature. That is the moral value of such thinking in the extreme, but most humans can see the stupidity of it. It nonetheless continues in more elaborate forms, and civiliation primarily exists to provide security to the ritual humiliations and expand their practice, such that they become a general condition. It becomes normal to expect cities to be ruled by mafias and drug lords to impress clearly deleterious habits in all ways, and is lauded by the intellectuals who have long maintained an alliance with said mafias. The intellectuals pawn off the guilt to the nobles, who share in the same conspiracy as the intellectuals. The only losers are anyone fool enough to believe anything better was possible or desirable. This idea had names and expressions long before its alternatives did, but this ritual humiliation and fear was not the sole genesis of human thought, nor could it be as foundational as the advocates of its ideology claim.

There are other instincts at work in man, and none can be said to be a singular origin of psychological impulses. Psychology originates not from some inchoate feeling or gene of rationality, but by a process and interface with a world which was necessarily complex to allow consciousness to exist in the first place. By time small-brained animals multiplied and speciated into humans, sociality and baggage is inherited from the immediate forebears. To claim a bastardized version of evolutionary psychology rooting all behavior in a singular impulse or imperative is not science or reason, but the same idiotic return to the primordial light. Evolution in psychology to be meaningful implies agency which is contingent on an environment and other agents to react to, and knowledge and information processing with enough variety to not be reduced to a staccato symbol that is pleasing to ideology but useless for sustenance. Sadism will not feed an empty stomach. A naive sop is to claim that the opposition, some sickly and fickle bastardization of "love", is the true foundation, but this understanding of love is designed to humiliate anyone believing the concept. Love as an impulse is a simple thing, and the greatest game of information control and humiliation is to claim that the stupid and weak do not know love, and to transform love into an instrument of the state, education, and very particular conceits about knowledge. Love is claimed to belong to the strong who stole it, and a primitive stirring that is often involved in any human pursuit that isn't consumed by the predatory element is negated. Hatred is called love, and love is rebranded as the target of hatred, a sentiment to be rooted out along with every other sense and feeling comprising life. That love would be directed towards many things, and our sense and knowledge of it could grow, is to be snuffed out. That hatred never wants nor needs to grow is obvious, but its victory is self-evident to the ideologue. That much of what humans do concerns neither love nor hatred nor placid contentment nor some egotistical pride, but a sense of right, wrong, and morality which is not just an idea but meaningful and relevant to any sense of ourselves. So too would humanity require many substantive things not just as an article of consumption or a machine to be manipulated, nor are those substantive things human qualities that lock man into a preferred form of sociality by nature. To actually live and even be able to direct hatred towards some target implies substance and meaning that is implicitly understood by those who have lived enough, and that life cannot be denied by a symbolic assertion of what life is supposed to be. A terrorized child who is poisoned to stunt his growth will lash out because he senses correctly he is under attack, the target of a seething hatred that came to man not as his sole nature but as a conceit that served certain people and insisted that it should claim what love is and what miserable quantities of substance should be doled out, as if this fickle impostor were a thing anyone would want without the general fear and need of social proof creating demand for it. A sense in most humans can understand this without requiring a grand theory, and certainly has to wince at seeing the damaged child screaming for his life. The sadist knows exactly what he is doing, and wants to repeat it. The sadist knows what the decent think, and has institutions which glorify his knowledge of the sadistic arts and humiliate the decent into compliance. It is a triumphant declaration of the will to torture that says that the screaming child does not actually feel pain. We would consider someone who kicks puppies or boils them alive to be cruel, even though such actions are common enough and wouldn't be granted moral weight. The sadism towards the defective human is a sort which seeks not merely a goal to normalize torture of the damned. The sadism is a recapitulation of what it means to human in the predatory ethos, where humanity and the whole world is redefined in their image. The sadist tells you a truth that animal slaughter involves imprisonment and torture and agony on a scale that would be difficult to stomach, as if this statement justified unnecessary and arbitrary slaughter as a universal. The sadist and those in his orbit of course exempt themselves from this, for they alone are sacrosanct. Hatred of the defective human is the highest sacrament of all for the sadist, and it is this that was channeled to make the core moral philosophy in operation today. All other moral and ethical ideas are made to bow to this beast, and all knowledge and human effort is intended to serve that beast.

Symbols to evoke intense disgust, transgression, and visceral emotion are commonplace and are among the stock and trade of any mesmerist, cajoler, talking head, trained liar, and above all the Fürher-type leaders that sadists idolize and imaging waving a mighty hand to move history by thought alone. Even if they recognize the sitting dictator as a clown or useful tool, they substitute themselves and ask "What Would Hitler Do?". Symbols that are dry and technical are designed to obfuscate and occult, when a plainer explanation would make more rational sense to a reader of any ability. Symbols to betray sentiments of instinctive love are intended to be saccharine and cloying, to drive home the fakeness and associate that symbol with a dissonant meaning, then authoritatively declaring love is something scarce and defined by thought leaders. This habit of lying has been with humanity for a long time, and modern propagandists did not discover the Promethean fire. What had changed is that a strategy of shameless lying became politically and technologically viable, and there were institutions prepared to support such a push, since otherwise it would meet pushback from all parties with no interest in such an image, of which there were many.

We are exhorted to turn off our emotions in response to symbols, and this too is a manipulation. The symbols of disgust are not merely disgusting because of some psychological priming or a reference stored in the brain to be triggered by a thought leader. The symbolized disgust or transgression must not be impressed only once or during formative years. A whole culture must exist which claims that these impressions are permanent and inescapable, following all mankind everywhere they go. There can be no redemption from the past and nothing hidden, and no "fault" is ignored if it transgresses the praxis of those who rule and the vision they have for the world. In matters which do not conflict with the core spiritual authority and religion - which today is eugenics rather than anything else - redemption is possible and in many cases trivial. The deliberate arbitrariness of authority, justice, sentences, punishments, rewards, symbols, and behaviors is calculated and intended to be repeated, so that consistent standards of comparison are destroyed. The disgust and transgression must be linked to some genuine meaning which is held to be present and lurking somewhere, and that genuine meaning cannot be ignored. It is essentialized, and with enough programming and specific targeting, internalized. To whatever degree such an intervention is sufficient, this is one of the vehicles at work with agressive and deliberately transgressive wordplay. It is not the meaning of symbols or the power of a symbol due to some association or tradition. It is the daily practice of what that symbol refers to, which once internalized turns the unwitting into vectors. This is not the only way in which symbols are manipulated, nor is it even the most ubiquitous, but the use of this method grew in prominence as mass media advanced. A sharp escalation of the strategy is seen starting in 1980, and this is part of a much larger project to shape psychology individually and in systems where interdependence and sociality have long been understood. This will be revisited in future writings. The purpose here is to make clear that an emotional response to symbols is expected, and in some way guides are ability to fetch meanings from memory and reconstruct them. By heigthening fear and disgust and covering the whole society with media promoting it, and minimizing complexity or expressions of love that are not manipulative or fickle, and reducing intellectual pursuits to a conceit and apperance and preferred mannerisms, it is more difficult to countenance construction of one's own interpretation of symbols, or for the use of symbols to transform in ways that a thought leader did not want. This works very often in favor of particular emotions which benefit from the strategy, but with detailed attention to an individual, emotional triggers can be used to construct much more elaborate associations and then ideological frameworks if the subject is worthy of that much attention, and capable of accepting the programming without neural breakdown or failure to comply with the ruling ethos. This tendency is more pronounced in those whose proclivities were already aligned with it, who are selected and favored for this programming.

A crass rebuttal to this claim is that I think emotionally or instinctively, and this is a flaw of my thinking and experience and not the correct one. The claim could be made about any other way in which symbolic language is deliberately deployed to deceive, cajole, mislead, and push the recipients to predetermined outcomes. Those outcomes always entail the symbolic language is hostile and used for the purposes of war. Symbols are treated like weapons. Conversely, weapons are treated like symbols. A fetish for the gun replaces the earlier concept of a citizens militia or a conscript mass army, and displays of infantile toughness and chest-thumping replaced the original purpose of that armed militia and citizenry. Only because of the militarization of society and the institutions was it possible to impose with finality the plan I have described. Past efforts to do this could only affect certain spheres of society, but the world and its people were largely untamed, or only tamed with less effective methods. The drive of later modernity would be to invade in every way possible the native knowledge faculty of human subjects, and this is the program in force today.

It is for that reason that knowledge became the basis for general systems thought, rather than any other source or the genuine meaning of systems. Knowledge had long been the decisive element of political society, and the moderns saw that this rule was not merely a conceit but something which could be imposed on reality. Systems might be envisioned in another way, but symbolic knowledge would be chosen in particular because of advances in communication and rationalization of technology. The institutions would in time direct technological advance in directions that favored the state and disfavored initiatives which challenged the ruling idea. General systems thought as we know it could only have arisen because political insanity and political retardation became not merely the implied source of class divisions, but were overtly the paramount distinction between those who were human and those who were cast out of the human family. It is with the rise of eugenics that systems thinking could proceed, released in parts and occulted as needed to keep away those who had no place in the world to come. There are, as mentioned, many great goods on general systems thought and its prevalence in education and scientific institutions today. Systems thinking is prominent in sociology, psychology, and the inquisition. The computer was a special component of this. A device which automated a task that was laborious and politicized in the past would need to be co-opted not merely by a ruling class, but a ruling idea which taught those who would program to think in the most debauched manner possible. Effective systems analysis could not operate with the culture that was promulgated to create "nerds", stunted and brain-damaged programmers fed a diet of self-abasement and infantilization. The continued work on systems analysis could proceed only because enough of these men were able to work through the suck and retain some sanity.

Systems thinking arose not because it was natural for humans to perceive "systems" philosophically, using symbolic language only after it has been interpreted through a political lens with a number of assertions built in. Until early modernity, no one possessed a "system", neither of individual things or concepts or any grand system theory which purported the universe operated in line with these systems. The birth of systems thinking was particular to a course of development informed by religious arguments concerning orthodoxy and the political purpose of the Church. There was a similar thinking in the rest of the world, such that the scientific thought of early modern Europe was understandable to contemporaries around the world, but the peculiar attitude towards science that defined modernity did not arise elsewhere, despite the intellectual reasoning allowing such a concept to be understood. In many ways, the scientific approach was at work among medieval and ancient thinkers around the world, and the Greek example is not exceptional. The orthodoxy of Christianity, where the words of a singular institution were taken to be gospel truth - literally - is something different from attitudes towards religion in the far East, where religious and philosophical thought is developed as a composite of whatever works for the adherent. No orthodoxy was ever zealously enforced in the Chinese Empire or the peoples in its orbit, and many historical examples of changing beliefs are adopted, then abandoned and replaced at the whim of the Emperor or his court. In Islam, orthodoxy is less relevant than the practice of the religion, and the religion suggests a legal code that is answerable to the aims of the religion and its functions, rather than adherence to the letter of the book or debates held by church leaders. There would be no established central church in Islam at all, and this was inherent to the practice of the religion. An institution promulgating the orthodoxy that came to rule in Europe would be rejected, and scholars operated not in line with orthodox institutional reason but in the niche they inhabited, where they were accountable to each other and to the mentality the religion suggested on a mass scale. The emphasis on symbolic language promulgated by the church, in which saying the right words and engaging in logic exercises to uphold that peculiar orthodoxy, was a uniquely Christian thing. There were of course reasoned discussions about religion, philosophy, spirituality, science, nature, what humanity was, politics, and every other topic in all of the civilizations, and these concepts are not alien outside of the old world core. Machinery and technology, and symbolic reasoning are not inborn to a particular race or only possible for a highly specific philosophy, because that was something useful to any state or sovereign. Early investigations into systems thought in European or Christian universities produce little of value in meaningful technology, and in many cases the obsession with orthodoxy retards the thinking of Christian subjects in ways that do not plague subjects of other religious civilizations. The Christian thinking on systems promotes a particular conceit of how the systems thought should be utilized and commanded by institutional authority, and the institution of the university becomes a hotbed for ideas alien to the ostensible values of religion. The practices of war that were particular to Christian civilization and their Roman forebears are carried over to this symbolic systems thought, and the first great leap that was unique to European civilization was the development of weapons, or machines that amplified a state's ability to produce more war material. This was coupled with a drive and mercantile operation that allowed a scientific and technological interest to form with greater influence than such an interest had in the rest of the world. The full implications of this history can be revisited throughout this work. 20th century systems thought is a product of the projects of humanity in that time, both because it reinforced the new technocratic institutions that were the de facto temporal authority and because it answered the question posed earlier in this writing. Viewing life in particular through this systems thought, in which orthodoxy to central institutions could be defended, would have been a necessary development in that time and place, that was preceded by the rise of eugenic thinking and imperial science. From various directions, the questions general systems thought sought to resolve were given false answers the moment a systems thinking became necessary for most of the public. The mystifications - German idealism and its philosophy of struggle and contradiction, idiotic and deliberately retarded sops of British imperial science, the promotion of American vices to displace any native intellectual tradition of the inhabitants, and a project to build a scientific caste system under eugenics - were all attempts to manipulate the systems thinking of people through the mechanisms systems thought suggested. What was entailed, then, was an occulting of knowledge and a habit of lying that had already been trialed during the rise of Hitlerism and the rise of occult woo woo and neo-Satanic spiritual authority. Crowley and his ilk are part of a larger project of neoreactionary degeneracy, which would be animated with lavish imperial funds and a perverse pedagogy in secret that worked alongside the state schooling institutions.

The result would be a grinding down of the population's intellects. By the systems thinking that was rising, this was possible and the way to affect it would be through the control of all informational content. It is not so much that knowledge and meaning have to be controlled - the people can think whatever they want, and so long as people are locked out of any machinery which would disrupt the greater "system", the greater interests which actually govern humanity, their intellectual product and writing is of little consequence. Whenever a line of thinking in the general public threatens the status quo, this rare event is marked down and eliminated, with ritual humiliation and shaming of the lower classes who dare to challenge imperious science and technocratic authority.

Regardless of these pressures, we continue to recognize symbols regardless of intents to suggest they are something other than what we recognize. We cannot do otherwise - not because we are cursed by a hobgoblin, but because recognition of patterns that become symbols is something the knowledge process must do to be carried out substantively. Even if we lacked symbolic language or any apparent symbols, we would recognize patterns in the chaos that are significant. Not all of our pattern recognition is symbolic, and for symbols to be recognized at all, it must be accepted that there is a pattern to be found in substance and void. This is why the concept of void regarded earlier is very important for constructing any metaphysics and thus knowledge. It is not because the void or substance had to arrive before the other, being imposed on a condition of pure substance or pure void. Existence supposed that substance and void had to be co-equal and "created" in the same instance, to speak of an existence that is definiable as something other than "is". For substance to be considered requires lack of substance to be a regarded condition of the actual world, and the reasoning as to why has been made already. Symbols are a pattern we recognized rather than any rule suggested by the universe. We utilize symbols readily because this is much easier and more consistent than correcting for vagaries. It is also the case that living matter to construct brains must operate on something like cybernetic principles of regulation; that is, a receptor is turned on or off, and while this need not conform to a binary digit, it is helpful for us to resolve the things we work with as if they were symbols, clearly understood and not controversial. For logical deduction to be carried out, A has to be A, and the law of identity is not so much a primary thing in this view, but something defined by two other axioms of logic, that A is not B and the law of the excluded middle. This does not define the universe, but defines our best perception of it, allowing primitive logical responses to be carried out. Even without thought as such, detection of objects in the animal brain would require some ability to discern what is seen, and associate it with some value, some feeling or sentiment. Otherwise, all that would be possible is vague associations with a general condition of life, without regard to things like another animal that would pose a threat, are suitable food, or any other interaction that may occur with them. Even if the regulation does not create clear symbols that can be defined rationally, the regulation approximates this. This is what electronic computers did; the parts that allow for binary digits to be meaningful are carefully designed and calibrated to perform without error, and the need for precision in the computer is precise. Failure rates of a transitor must be uncommon enough for the electronic computer to work. Weiner in cybernetics investigates this problem of building an electronic computer, regulating electricity so that the machine is possible. This cybernetic principle is not a just-so story, but part of an investigation of how systems can be regulated, and certain laws pertaining to the regulation of systems generally. We understand in constructing this machine that we are not actually making a "digital reality", divorced from physical principles. It is the same with any psychological trick we may play on ourselves. We can play word games and conduct ourselves as we wish, but not without consequences, and not without the behavior of system regulation that would be carried out by life and by its thought process. Negative and positive feedback loops are things that can be observed in nature and in our reasoned models, and this mimics a function of the brain to make the first capacity of knowledge possible. There would be no other way for knowledge to exist in any way. Nowhere in the world does knowledge assert itself without being regulated by physical laws. This is not because our conceits of physical laws are programmed into the universe, but because our knowledge - the thing we would use to be able to say anything about the universe - abides the properties of physics, and no non-physical "thought" can be said to be a substantive or real thing.

Facts - To speak of reality in the abstract is to speak not of meanings or knowledge, but of symbols presented in some language and verified in some court, by some authority which can judge what is and is not a fact. Facts to be worthwhile are not merely statements of meaning or expression, but are verified to the satisfaction of whatever body is judging the meaning. This judgement can come from an authority dictating a ruling to a group, from consensus, from some faith in common sense or a shared reality that is assumed true enough to be a basis for facts, or from our own judgement when the facts are only relevant for our own use. Even in isolation, distinguishing facts from a concrete reality we find meaningful is important. This is because we learn very early that what we sense with the world, our instincts and earlier thinking we use to know what things are, can be faulty. We do not establish fact because we believe our senses are erroneous to the point where facts must override the native sense we possess. We establish fact because it is only through judgement that we can, through symbolic language, refine meaning, knowledge, and our storehouse in the world-system in ways that satisfy our need for truth. We may for example see something briefly and have a guess from imperfect knowledge of what drove by us. Facts, both of what happened and prior facts that have been accepted, can fill in for meaning that was not sensed, such that we possess a better understanding for our purposes of the event that happened. This meaning is only constructed abstractly rather than from direct observational evidence, but we observe enough facts throughout our life that we are able to reconstruct something sufficiently meaningful to believe the composite meaning is factual. Without symbolic language or a concept of "truth" in the abstract, this refinement is not possible, or can only proceed through cruder methods. We may for example guess - and this is only my guess - that there is some thought process at work with a dog's behavior, its responses to events. The dog knows who its family is, its pack, its association with humans, who it likes and does not like. It may not have the ability to remember names in the way we do, but the thinking is not purely a thing conditioned in response to fixed stimuli. A dog isn't going to bark or kneel for any human saying the magic word, and will recognize who it likes and its home. A dog can navigate to return home if lost. This process, though, is so crude that a "fact" never fully forms in a way that facts are authoritative for humans. It is not that facts are irrelevant to a dog, so much as the dog wouldn't have any ability to construe "facts" in a way that allow it to hone its own faculties and relations in the way humans do. The dog will recognize a fact that it is hurting and does not like a human, and remain stubborn in those sentiments unless conditioned away from them, without fully comprehending "facts" in an abstract language it lacks. In our society, dogs don't get a say in facts. The terms of the relationship are that dogs are not heeded as if their sense and thinking would grant them any authority to determine facts for us. The dog can only, in some crude sense, establish better meanings for its use through a process where symbols are recognized. The dog is not incapable of correcting its senses, as if it were utterly beholden to its sensory cluster in all things. Such a behavior is operative even at a primitive level in order for knowledge of anything to develop. What it builds is something between a mere meaning or sense and a fact in the sense we would appreciate the concept, but by logic, this would not be suitable for rational discernment on the dog's part in the way we contemplate our situation.

It seems simple enough to demonstrate by logic that facts are facts, but this only works for knowledge deemed "a priori", which tells us nothing about substantive things. That knowledge itself derives from symbols whose interpretation can be detached through wordplay, unless careful attention is paid to the symbolic language. In today's logic, wordplay is discouraged and the symbolic language used for the most rigorous logic is stripped of connotations and meanings we would associate with words and tokens, to ensure that ambiguities are removed. The facts that are interesting here, the first facts, are always a posterori, or derived from sense. These defintions are themselves things which have been cleverly manipulated, since "sense" is not a thing to be taken at face value when concerned with symbolic language. We are aware of genuine meanings and that the meanings we observe through sense are things, whether we want to see them or not. The point of suggesting a fact in symbolic language is not to declare a just-so story, but to demonstrate through reason that we can appreicate that what we see can be understood as something more than what it appears to be at first glance. For example, for us to visualize the potential of what is behind a door requires us to consider many facts, rather than operate on assumptions of some generalities which happen when doors are opened or seen through. We might be able to discern from history that an apple is likely to contain seeds, like many other fruits. We would have no knowledge of what is behind a door without facts, because what is behind the door is not constitutionally necessary for the door's existence. We may seek indicators of some fact that would tell us what is behind a door - whether we hear music or some sound, a scent, knowledge about the location of this particular door. Uncertainty is a game that can be turned into yet more wordplay in symbolic language, but in all meaning, uncertainty is not a principle in force at all. Uncertainty only makes sense in the realm of facts for us, rather than uncertainty being a meaningful part of the universe at some basic level or a basic reality of knowledge. In the concrete world, and in our genuine knowledge if we possessed a perfect recall of meaning and sense experience, uncertainty is not a true possibility. We model uncertainty because we are dealing with symbolic representations of things, even if the representation is something we know to be very close to the actual thing we see. Uncertainty as a principle only exists in this abstract and symbolic representation of things, where we account for uncertainty as an error correction routine. Factual treatments of this uncertainty would define precisely what is meant by it, and what we would do to compensate for these ranges of values that are relevant to a thing. If we defined uncertainty as a vagueness that could not be limited or narrowed down, it would have the effect of suggesting symbolic logic cannot accurately describe the thing at all, or it would make our symbolic representation of things a farcical exercise. If we insinuate due to uncertainty that anything can be anything, or things can be arbitrarily defined because of our limitations, we are engaging in sophistry and this is stupid. To resolve facts from observations - whether they are from the bodily senses or from symbolic language that we are interpreting as potentially factual - requires us to have an ability to mitigate uncertainty in all cases. Whether humans are actually capable of eliminating all uncertainty in their real knowledge of symbolic representations is not relevant; we need to assume that this is possible at all to move from statements to things adjudicated as facts.

A fact established is not something we should trivialize. Such facts are in reality our basis for really knowing much beyond that which is self-evident. We should not confuse facts with the true meaning or the world, but facts exist for a reason rather than by some arbitrary whim. Humans can choose to lie to themselves or play games that are politically useful, but in the end, the facts we hold to be social and political reality are beholden to a world that is outside of our immediate knowledge. What we choose to do with that is our choice, and we can debate facts because we subjectively hold that spiritual authority starts with us before we can make claims about facts in the world. The debate over facts is under no obligation to be conducted with any honesty, as if nature will decide through struggle which facts prevail, or that knowledge will set you free. Facts allows us to assemble a general systems thought that can do more than recapitulate a knowledge process that is local. It finally allows us to speak of the things we know as if they were solid, at least for the time we have to speak of anything. We wouldn't grant to facts power that they do not possess. A fact has no more legitimacy than any other statement, and facts are not in of themselves identical with truth. It is entirely possible to state bland facts which correspond to reality, but miss entirely the meaning that was intended and useful for our actual operations. Facts can help us refine meaning for our sake, and meaning can grant to facts something more. Every isolated component and relationship identified in systems thought derives from some fact and some meaning, and so too do our conclusions about systems generally or the whole of a system. We can derive many facts beyond the sum of parts in a system, if we so choose and step outside conceits we hold about the world. Any time we do attempt some new paradigm, we do not look to some institutional authority to tell us this is kosher, as if we need permission to know. New paradigms will always be tested by prior facts and conditions, and things in the future or in the imagination. This does not solely concern a scientific view of the world or naturalism, but our approach to society, political thought, and that which humans would find purposeful. It is not a matter of some will to individually make the world as we please, but a suggestion the world has always given to us to think of something more than that idiotic impulse in the mind. We can tell that so much of the philosophical thought promulgated and rehashed ad nauseum has brought little to most of humanity, or actively retarded most of our efforts to find things we morally value or want to do. It is self-evident to this author and many others that after all the writing, the sum total of human knowledge on Earth, the world deserves better and we deserve better. I wouldn't wish the perverse ignorance and fear that dominates today on my worst enemy, if I knew there were a way to not have to do this. It would not be difficult to conceive of something better. The great obstacle is not so much our failings in knowledge, which are what they are, but a willful and enthusiastic stupidity and malice that sees the rot in humanity and proclaims they would like more of that.

We would not find that something better from expounding on knowledge or facts, or by envisioning some praxis or theory or struggle by which justice will prevail. All of those things have their purpose, but the potential of anything we would want is not something won by facts or a mark of victory to display as yet another symbol. All of the wars and internecine struggles for position accomplish not one thing for humanity whatsoever, that would not be accomplished by better means if we truly wished it and could allow that concept to exist beyond imagination. The problem with this is that, by facts and all that knowledge derives, humanity has been cursed to abide realities that do not serve any grand purpose, and the most pernicious authorities exhort us to believe that facts confirm the curse to be some sort of good or virtue beyond question.

It is from facts that the next book best begins an investigation into the "information world" and the economic logic that suggested an information world was in the end the correct understanding of what made things valuable in an economic sense, rather than the substantive or material content of anything that was exchanged or considered in economy.

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I have suggested this ontology and metaphysics of knowledge not because it is the "one true religion", but because it is to my recollection the ontology that is operative in the dominant information theory today, and so long as it is internally consistent, it can assert itself. In short, symbolic representations - which are the only things humans can rationalize or consider the "sense data" at first place - point to an underlying material world which we never actually touch or have a direct connection with. At the same time, we cannot help but be connected to the world, because all of this symbolic expression arose for us in a world that existed before us. The problem with this is that if someone thinks this way about the world and cannot escape this thinking, they will surely go insane. If this is the only possible world, then there is truly no way out and no way to find true meaning or purpose, that can be accounted for by knowledge or any material origin.

The implication of such a metaphysics is that our comprehension of reality is malleable, but it is only changed through considerable control of information. That is to say, the crucial step of resolving uncertainty is interrupted in every way possible, and those with sufficient knowledge seek to do this in a way that perpetuates itself. By doing so, "history is arrested", and this can be accomplished by viewing knowledge as a mind virus or infection. The language of organic life is often invoked in modern efforts to do this. By the 20th century, the biopolitical idea, whether it is accomplished through eugenics, a vague "religion of science", a religion of secular humanism that became ideological, or a crass assertion of life's will to power, or any other vehicle by which biological metaphors are granted political or spiritual authority, was accepted by all. They differed superficially in their interpretation of biopolitics and where it would lead, and often technology as something independent of life was invoked. The myth of technocracy is that technology, being something alien to "true" life, would overcome the biopolitical idea. It is not difficult to see that the fetish for technology, far from overcoming biopolitics, is the highest and most developed form of biopolitics. It stems from the same conceit about knowledge and simply declares that technology is a higher stage of life, and that technological advance in general is arrested in the same way life processes and political action is arrested and controlled. If this is true, then it is not difficult to imagine that knowledge as a process, and all information, is in some way another technology to be harnessed and controlled. The inner thoughts of a human being, which make our existence as humans possible, are now another piece of machinery. The whole of human existence, stem and branch, is available to managerial intent, and there is nothing in the world or human spirit to suggest this cannot be done. The only way it is resolved is a permanent struggle, force against force, ad infinitum. By commanding struggle and herding it towards preplanned outcome, all that happens is regulation of the human machine and all social organizations, all institutions. This is not particular to eugenics or any other ideology, like Marxism or its variants. It is not a necessary condition of any economic logic, and most economic thought was premised on an assumption that this command of humanity was impossible. The language of free trade, socialism, communism, or any approach suggested that human agency and moral decisions were at the heart of what we do. If the question of economics were simply management of resource inflows and outflows, as if this were a mechanical problem to be solved with mathematics, the solution in any era is simple. This has been known for as long as there were humans overseeing some property and asking how it could be managed, however it was. Politics and economics were never premised on such a problem, though. Even the simplest economic task was contingent on a moral question of what someone wanted to do with possessions and the world, with their body, mind, soul, spirit of their being, and their social and legal person being one such possession; and any aspect of that core possession allowing others was never a given or absolute of nature. We may ask a question of where moral thought originated, but it is unsurprising that the vanguard of human stupidity embraces amorality, hedonism, and poops on the idea that humans are at all moral creatures, or that anything in the world can be assigned moral value. I may ask whether there is a solution to this problem another time, but I assume the reader is disinterested in such navel gazing. This author has certainly heard enough of the idiotic moral arguments, which are a favorite of pissant teenagers around the world and the enablers of the present rot in humanity. Since that rot has a number of predictable outcomes, I will not concern myself with such a moral philosophy, other than to point out its stupidity when it useful for some meaning I wish to communicate.

When the ability to lie in symbolic language develops sufficiently, it becomes necessary to section off the mind and consider it inviolable for the purposes of politics and the internecine struggles in humanity. In doing so, the human subject, or any other subject of note, is sectioned off into a world apart from the material world, where knowledge and meaning are products of a world outside of ourselves and outside of society. All that we truly know came from the world in one way or another, and all of the conceits we hold about our "mind" or any mind are symbolic representations. Because we become very adept at working with these symbols, it is very easy to section off all things in an abstract world, such that the material world does not taint our ideas of things. Even if we were not aware of the human propensity for lying and all the methods that have been used, it is necessary to defend oneself from natural events and any "noise" in the world that interferes with the rational task, and the things we use symbolic language and representation to do. This necessity is never an absolute, and for us to even make a meaning out of that symbolic world, the barrier between mind and matter must fray. We would seek then to view the mind or the abstract as mostly inviolate, but still permeable enough to allow in a singal we deem worthy. We have some control over what sensory data can be resolved to information, and further control our symbolic representation of things and the models we hold of what things are in the abstract. We cannot easily see something other than what we see in a literal sense, but we can pretend we see something else, and we may become so good at pretending that we visualize a wholly artificial construct as a thing more real than that in front of us. Those who can maintain this lie with a straight face possess a talent that is not uniform among the human race or even terribly common. Those who are expert at lying for long periods will, out of necessity, learn creative ways to justify or rationalize deception, or ways to humiliate others into accepting their lie. None of this entails the liar deceiving himself, as if the liar were actually unaware of the lie in any way.^[1] To be able to "doublethink" actually entails switching an ontological approach, so that a dual system or more than two systems are created to speak of reality in different ways depending on context. Compartmentalization is a standard dissembling tactic, known to intelligence agencies and heightened during the past century. It is in the 21st century obligatory to know when to do this, and how to strategically attack any mention of particular keywords or concepts that are absolutely verboten. Certain words, if allowed to retain some of their genuine meaning, must be reconstructed or only spoken of in certain domains, by certain people. The broad description of "communism" for example is largely an accurate one in the serious literature, and communist parties and organizations are allowed to exist and espouse the communist idea. Communism is contained not by eliminating the idea, but establishing boundaries that are "off-limits" to communists, where suddenly the communist idea no longer applies. Deep criticism of the communist theory on its own terms, or on any terms as if it were a serious discussion, is not permitted, except by those who consider themselves experts in ideology or who are enmeshed in communist history and phraseology. Communists among themselves can criticize each other and discuss at length what is written, but this discussion is always contained in their ecosystem, and disregarded as "real" discourse. Certain boundaries are policed inside the communist movement, that prevent it from hitting any truly core shibboleths of the ruling system. In the main, communism is depreciated because the basis for communist society is eroded in secret, and the communists find themselves consigned to an academic exercise, a collection of desperate lumpenproles hoping to find some salvation, a few old-timers who remember when communism was a force in history, and a freshly educated and appointed coterie of experts and grifters, some of whom are selected to sit in communist parties and rat out anything that would upset the status quo, and others who are selected as change agents or useful idiots to engage in pointless performative politics. So controlled is symbolic communication that, in the communist discourse, it is as if the world were essentially arrested at 1917, or history was rolled back and the cycle of time requires us to LARP as Russian revolutionaries and repeat the same story, as so many stories are repeated. Many keywords or ideas of political importance are structured in this way, so that political theories can be developed but all ideas elide the actual mechanisms at work in society, in economics, and most of all in the state and its policies.

The command of language is not a trivial thing, but all languages shift and there has been throughout history ways in which communication is influenced in minute ways. Religion almost always prescribes dictums for how believers are to speak, with different rules for different classes and social stations. The expectation that speech is controlled and regimented is not a new invention. Stutterers, slurring of speech, and any defect meant at best relentless mockery, and often meant death. The idea of not ritually sacrificing unsightly children in civilization is a practice only sporadically introduced, and the idea that there was an imagined "good time" where humans or their forebears did not do this ever is the illusion. A primitive sentiment suggests that humans would find killing defenseless children disgusting, and this would be developed further in any society that developed a moral code. The same moral thinking allowed for excuses to be made, and to refine who could be eliminated or subjugated in this way, and ways to lock someone cast out in a subordinate position.

The switching of stance has long been common in humanity, and this is a necessary adaptation. The development of whole formal systems of lying, which are calculated with the whole environment in mind, only reached widespread distribution in the past century. Up to the 20th century, primitive sentiments had been normal and retained even among the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. The bourgeois man was in mannerisms not too different from the farmer or mountain dweller, and neither recognized the other as a true alien with whom communication was impossible. However much the bourgeois and intellectual held conceits about their knowledge, the worker and the beggar were not convinced that their social betters were made of magic by any means. Today's mystification of intellect was possible not because the intellectual attained some vaunted enlightenment, but because the working class and residuum were scarred and beaten into such abject submission and taught of their stupidity from birth. In actual faculties, the intelligentsia of the 21st century is laughably stupid, given over to fads and perverse speaking that would be a shame to their superior ancestors. The educated man or woman of today is glorified and enshrined, yet in all metrics of functioning, only a tiny minority have improved their knowledge and command of the world. It would be quite impossible for a smart person today to be what their forebears were, simply because institutional science and knowledge requires an intellectual to do very different things to succeed. The most capable minds are by and large esconsced in a world apart from the plebians, and don't even waste their time speaking or writing to us losers. How this appears to us as some sort of genius is not merely the result of the masses being poisoned or degraded. In some ways, the intelligence of the typical human in 21st century society is enhanced over their forebears. Literacy and competency with machinery is ubiquitous, and there is an awareness of the principles at work which govern the society which was not present when technocratic rule began. There are fewer people who are unaware of how the world works. Even without formal education, enough stored knowledge and media propagates in society to allow those cast out of education exposure to machines. The greatest barrier to intelligence for the common man is not so much a lack of capacity or even training, but the intense force deployed to tell the common man throughout his life that he is stupid, a dog, a fool, and deserves to suffer. If not for this, the proliferation of communications technology, easy access to electronic libraries, a wealth of accessible guides that allow anyone to look up how to do things, and proliferation of crude scientific and mechanical knowledge, would allow for the present population to be far more productive than any in the past, and rehabilitation of the damage wrought by eugenic society and its poisoning could proceed. Were it not for the greater forces at work animating eugenics, the immediate removal of the eugenic creed from institutional authority would likely allow recovery from this mental poison in the space of a generation. Nothing about eugenics improved intelligence whatsoever. The traits selected during the eugenic purges were always to promote avarice, cruelty, and those who are amenable to a certain ethical view where torture and slavery are natural conditions. Those traits' promotion in society stimulated a race for social success that pressed people to attempt to improve themselves however they can, simply to adapt to a hostile world. In the final selection of mates and the promotion of favored races and families under eugenic rule, the eugenists always favored the cruel and vicious, and any intelligence concerned with honest pursuits would be used up and destroyed, seeing by the end that it was all a lie. The selection of favored families under eugenics has produced a scientific aristocracy that knows nothing about the science they wield, beyond that which allows them to promote their inborn avarice. The more prevalent result of eugenic selection has been to favor a subordinate caste that is trained to obey orders from the creed and the creed alone, based on selection of qualities well known to be aligned with a particular view of humanity. In short, the traits which favor submissiveness and domination are considered a favored type of intelligence, and creative intelligence is pawned off to another caste which are bred for docility, their intelligence denuded and directed towards silly hobbies and empty fads. For this caste, political education and knowledge is strongly discouraged, and over time, the selective pressures from breeding and the conditioning of their caste in education and the propaganda fed to them inculcate a sensitivity to fear and torture. This is deliberate, as the goal of the eugenist is to maximize torture, and the best way to maximize torture would be to increase the sensitivity of selected subjects. Those amenable to what I haved termed "the Satan"^[2] are promoted in the institutions by like-minded people, and it is this which drives the eugenic interest in our time.

The ways in which this is actually done do not conform to any "doublethink", and do not require any hypocrisy or self-deception. They do not even require deception of other people. Compartmentalization and shifting of someone's "operating mode" is something that can be done purely to move from one environment or sphere of activity to another. Here Orwell shows his own presumptions about the nature of the imperial project and the necessity of imperial universalism, despite his well known antipathy towards groups he considered alien. Orwell suggests that the faithful believer of a given religion is blind to all other religions, but those who delve into religion have never done so out of blind faith. Those who follow religion do so because some part of the religion makes sense to them, and because they likely have heard of other religions and their practices. The ancient Jews were not ignorant of Baal-worship, the worship of Egyptian sun gods, or the religion of the Romans. Judaism as a religion is formed as a rebellion against the practices of other religions, and the rules and more rules of the religion are intended not for their own sake but to specifically mark the Jews as distinct from their rivals, and because doing this served some purpose of the religion's adherents beyond simply asserting it so. I would not wish to be bogged down in a history of very ancient religions or the history of Christianity. From the Christian view, it was important to understand the dogma and be able to detect by reason the errors of other religions, as doctrinal disputes were the great defining feature of one church against another, and the entire religion of Christianity is premised on a specific opposition to the words and practices prevalent among the Romans. If this doctrinal dispute did not matter, it would not have figured so prominently in deciding what the religion's tenets would be. The religion's legalization came with yet more disputes over which arguments were heretical, and these arguments were philosophical debates among the elders of the religion. Emperor Constantine attends these debates and weighs in, and crucially Constantine is not dictating dogma based on his personal whims. The word and meaning of the religion is very relevant to him and to the empire, because this religion would have to rule over a very large, multinational domain, and it would seek to convert the many pagans and heathens. This process would proceed over centuries, and the introduction of Christianity was never a uniform declaration where the word suddenly was believed by everyone by saying Jesus's name ad nauseum. Everywhere Christianity spread, it would encounter alien beliefs among the peoples it sought to assimilate, and new doctrinal problems as knowledge, science, technology, and civilization progressed. Nor is this presumption of ignorance and blind faith found in Islam. Other major religions do not exhort blind faith in God at all, often actively encouraging synthesis with other beliefs and forming new beliefs and institutions as needed. The Protestant arguments for faith - and there were as many versions of this as there were pastors with an axe to grind - were not premised on "blind faith", but specific arguments about the nature of rationality and what can be said about God or the world by reason alone, and arguments about whether rationality alone can provide spiritual authority. Those arguments are very much valid today and raised a point that was on the mind of many a literate Christian who had to work with this stuff. The later history of Christianity always proclaimed dogmas, responded to the claims of science, and continues to do so to this day. Orwell's statement that blind faith was expected of religion was never true except in one case - the "religion of science" that Francis Galton exhorted his followers to adhere to. It is a specific insanity of Galtonism that promotes this "blind faith". Every other religious practice known to man has allowed for questioning the faith at least in principle. Whether you were allowed to openly question the religion, to make the question of religion a political matter, is a different question. Every religion, even the Satan-worship cults of the ancient world, permitted and in some cases encouraged adherents to think about the tenets and practice of the religion. It would be quite impossible for these rituals to persist or hold meaning if there was no individual inquiry. Galtonism must short-circuit that in all ways, so that all moral and ethical thought conforms to Galton's perversions.

Marxists, in all of their variants, had no difficulty in understanding the positions of their rivals - far from it, the Marxists typically engaged with their enemies and made it a core purpose of their approach to the world to critique everything. The Fascists and Nazis did not shout "not true not true not true!" ad nauseum in their response to Marxism or liberalism - they possessed their own thinking about the nature of the world and the purpose of ideology, were perfectly aware of the genuine positions of their enemies, and were under no serious illusion about what Nazism entailed. Anyone who did not figure out what the Nazis meant would learn where they stood in short order. Many a liberal were polishing Hitler's knob during the 1930s, showing where their true loyalties laid. It would be quite impossible to exercise proper switching without sufficient knowledge of the enemy's faith, practices, state of knowledge, and so on, so that the practicioner of this switching would know when to wear a mask. Orwell does not want his readers to figure out how the mask switching actually happens, as this is forbidden knowledge and gives away too readily what his real intention is. It is necessary for him to present his anti-hero as an idealistic wimp who actually believes history can be altered, even as he is aware that this is done. The simpler truth, first, is that such an editing of history is largely unnecessary as a true practice. Even a weakly educated subject is aware of when to go along with a lie, and in a society like Ingsoc where there is no freedom of expression and no avenue where agitators could speak about a past newspaper, it would not be easy to spread the word that the papers are edited and lie to you. If the edit were revealed, all that would be necessary for the believer in Ingsoc - even the proletarian - is to say "who the hell cares?" when the naive idiot believes words by themselves hold this power. The "edited history" trope in the novel is little more than a lazy slander of Soviet practices of editing history books and cooking production statistics so that Communist Party operators looked better to their bosses. The editing of history books always pertained to people who were charged with crimes and shunned. Students would see the faces of those purged cut out of their history books, and were aware that the person whose memory was damned did something to warrant political punishment. No one was so afraid that they forgot to know who Yezhov was, and when Stalin throws Yezhov to the wolves, it is not understood by competent minds that they must switch their understanding of reality. Yezhov's role in the purges was known to anyone who followed political trials. It would also be known that when the purge picked you, it was not a matter of holding the wrong ideas or saying the wrong performative statements. No amount of "goodthink" saved you or removed suspicion, and the causes for purges were never about ideological conformity in the first place. Disapproval of Stalin's line was only a charge added as evidence of some act, whether the act was actual sabotage or angering the wrong person who knew someone in the Party. The political enemies of Stalin were numerous, and so the purges were understood by anyone as something with a history, rather than something Stalin decided to do out of the blue because he enjoyed making people suffer, like some cartoon villain full of evil. Whether this is deserved or not is a whole other matter, but no one involved in this matter was convinced that the purge in of itself changed reality by declaration alone. The supposed editing of production figures is, frankly, a lie, at least for the purpose Orwell insists it was used for. The living conditions of Soviet people were not a thing lied about so flagrantly, and the conditions of the country during the Stalin period were conditions of siege and preparation for war. Somehow, the waves of death from Nazi invasion and actual internal saboteurs like the kulaks are not real in Orwell's edited history, and it was all again Stalin and the Communist Party deciding from on high to make people suffer for no particular reason. Such a deliberate immiseration first of all would have been grossly counterproductive in the situation the USSR faced during the entire Stalin era. It would also have not been believed, nor did every good Soviet comrade believe dogmatically everything in Pravda. People do not have so faint a memory that they cannot recall changes in their living standard. Further, something like an arbitrary reduction of the chocolate ration would be the kind of petty claim a Galtonite or neoliberal would value. It was impossible to hide the famine of the early 1930s in entirety. It would make sense not to advertise the situation in the domestic press, but such bald-faced lies about production statistics in that time would have been seen through by anyone with a functioning brain. Uttering that level of absurdity in the newspaper would only stoke outrage for no actual gain. Orwell, being a propagandist, should know the value of strategic lying. He likes to believe his enemies are too stupid to be as good as lying as Orwell is, though Orwell in hindsight is not a particularly good liar, writer, or man.

This digression is helpful because part of what brought me to write this book is to explain why "this works" - which is to say, how reality control is practiced in the everyday, and how it would have been practiced in a society like that described in the book. The same reality control methods were at work in all the major states, to one degree or another. The aims of reality control varied, and would be spun by people who had to rule actual states, and understood what lies could and could not be sold, and when to turn on the "lie brazenly about everything" machine and who would be the best targets for it. Those subjected to this reality control are not "aware and unaware" or actually believe reality control creates the world through just-so stories. Most often, reality control rests on the moral sentiments of human beings who want to believe a lie, or who can be induced to accept things through sufficient pressure. The reality control is never a fait accompli, but something that entails creating immense pressure in the whole society to conform or else. It is always actively enforced by a considerable apparatus, machinery, and many people who are fully aware of the nature of lying and see that lie as beneficial to their station in life. Reality control in the truest sense is not merely the utterance of symbols, but is premised on the ability of technology to invade a natural world, and that technology being at the command of an entity which is alien to any one person. This concept has existed for much longer than the past century. It is something inherent to every philosophy of rule since the classical period, and efforts to impose this invasion are found as far afield as the Inca Empire, to the gurus of India, to African slave kingdoms where most of the people were servants and brutal humiliations were de rigeur, and the mark of freedom in that world was demonstrated by the free master's humiliation of slaves. The American Confederacy was aware of these historical lessons and saw the institution of slavery scientifically, not a story or a myth. Very little of the post-war mythology concerning slavery was a thing believed in any part of antebellum America. The slave masters, drivers, and disciplined slaves were never unaware of how slavery was perpetuated day after day, and could not afford to be ignorant. The slave system could persist not because slaves did not know of freedom as a concept, but because the concept that it could be any different was repeatedly defeated in every expression the Confederacy encouraged. That did not necessarily entail any ignorance about the nature of the relationship, and usually a slave would be spoken to as if he were perfectly aware of the master's expectations. Those who could not follow orders were whipped or, if considered uneducable, exterminated.

All of this brings many questions to the reader, chief among them why any of this is tolerated even in form. The overt statements of Galtonism, barely hidden and promoted in neoliberal media, are such an abomination that it begs us to form an anti-eugenic press. If such a thing happens though, the taboo against speaking of eugenics is invoked, with ritual terror and humiliation for anyone who dares suggest there can be anything other than this democide and torture. How this has been insinuated did not happen overnight, nor did it happen evenly. The breakdown of society, the machinery used to insinuate it, and all that led us to this, is a very complicated question indeed, and to truly explain it requires examination of the clockwork that is technocratic society, and why it is indeed a clockwork unlike any that we have ever known. We in the 21st century are now aware of what many writers in the past only partially knew. There was an assembly of the full purpose of the plan, but even those who did much of the work to put this into motion only operated with partial knowledge. A grand philosopher or theorist might have understood the broad strokes of the great plan, and the general orientation of technocratic society and eugenism is understood and acted on by most participants, even though the taboo forbids acknowledging the full nature of it. The knowledge of what this is has been thorough enough that it is something men and women of sufficient intelligence act on without needing to be prompted, and know who and what must be obeyed. The finer details of how this works are not a trivial science, and never work in the way the managers' conceits expect them to function. Machinery, computers, biological weapons and drugs, institutions, communications, and all the things that make this world possible are areas worthy of many volumes on their own just to make sense of it all. A reasonable accounting of the major machines at the present time would be a considerable undertaking, likely beyond the ability of one person to compile in time without missing many relevant details. Deeper conspiracies at work, and the many subcultures activated in support of this project or working against it in some way, would themselves point to the nature of American society in this time. A story of eugenics would not in of itself describe the whole of this apparatus and how it would be undone, if it can be undone. A mistake I made earlier was to believe that eugenics would be rejected because it very clearly did not serve the interests of so many. I underestimated the interest of human beings in thinking that it was going to be any other way, and the will of many people to follow an instinct drilled into them for so long that they wouldn't know a world without it. I also expected a level of self-interest would compel enough people to act in ways that stalled eugenics, and while this worked during periods of peaceful and legal resistance to protect something, there was little that was working against this institutionally. Very simply, the concept that eugenics did not have a right of conquest could not be stated, and this was enough for eugenics to assert more or less in a vacuum that it could do what it wished, and we were forbidden to do anything to defend ourselves. Our desire for self-defense was instead turned into a pretext for the aggressors to claim that our existence in of itself was a violation of the law, and self-defense became a word for the aggressors to claim absolute justice, while the promotion of absolute predation for those in the know was glorified. It would be glorified by war, in cultural products, in mafia movies and glorifications of the imperial-backed drug culture, and by promoting filth among the despised masses and seeding streets with terrorists who would ensure a level of endemic violence and general agony throughout the society. No purpose for the agony existed except one - "because we can". Eugenics never needed anything else, and claimed this monopoly alone. A useful theory to explain why this truly works is the project I hope to accomplish here, if I can.

We may use a crude metaphor of the chosen ontology as an operating system of symbolic representations of knowledge; that is, we build a formal or informal ontology in symbolic language of some sort, or imply that one exists, which has an effect on the knowledge process. This process is not without consequences, for a human brain is not like a computer which can boot one operating system at will, or needs to reboot to shift to another. In some way, the human brain is capable of blurring its sense of what things are even when engaged in focused thought, and this can be induced by a number of methods which are not of interest here. It is indeed possible to hold two contradictory ideas in the brain "simultaneously", but this most often results in a haze or fugue^[3] for those who are stupefied, out of the know, and pushed through one of the many humiliations this society inflicts. The confusion may be temporary, and this is a necessary feature of knowledge and consciousness to orient its faculties in the first place. Typically the resolution of this is to be able to distinguish the material world from the abstract, and to have in general a political view of the world for public facing and a private view for internal consumption. The political view is split into whatever facings are appropriate for your social circle. The private, internal view is by default solitary, learning early in life not to trust anyone they supposedly love. It can switch in tune with a vibe or with abstract knowledge of the social situation. Failure to read the room is a taboo, punishable with silence, humiliation, imprisonment, slavery, and often for habitual transgressors, social death or outright physical death. It is a mistake to assume any baseline of decency exists in the human race or any race one might define.

A tripartite splitting of the mind's faculties matches the preferred political forms of most societies. In this, the mind or soul of someone is held sacrosanct and must be immune to external effects. This is a requirement of political society - that the mind or soul must be seen as whole in order for someone to exercise any meaningful virtue or presence in the society. This precludes detailed investigation of the mind, and only crude metaphors about a personality may be investigated or assumed. A willful ambiguity about the nature of mind and knowledge is preferred to maintain this. The second layer, the "crude ontology" is one used for everyday use, rather than the formal systems used for reasoned analysis or high-level thought that does not conform to strict formal rationality (for example, the faculty to compose art or music is not merely determined by some algorithmic process in all cases, but draws on inspiration and meaning which is only given symbolic form as the pattern is conjured by the composer). The "crude ontology", although treated as inferior, is where most decisions regarding reality and the world are made, and where our more immediate sense of things is established. While this crude thinking often sees things as "what they are", and does not indulge in tricks of wordplay willingly, the thinking to simply know what goes where and function daily is a necessarily complex thing. Formal philosophy, when distilled to its necessary components and only called upon as needed, always has to be constrained in a system that can be digested and understood. We possess through native faculties many instincts and senses of the world which we can better understand with formal logic and reason, but which we process on a level that does not require us to dissect it formally, and which can be appreciated as genuine knowledge or a thing from which our formal knowledge can be derived. The lowest level, the "primitive ontology", comprises the baser mechanisms of the body and mind and all forces impacting the knowing entity, and so it is vulnerable to tools and manipulations, but it is also capable of an instinctive resistance to such intrusion that typical functioning might have allowed. Animals, whose thinking is more instinctive though not entirely so, are remarkably constant and stubborn in their behavior, and are never seen crossing moral lines that humans cross every day. Sadism and torture never occur to animals, and in that regard, they are by far our superiors. A crass posture of domination is known in the animal world, but only through sophisticated symbolic language and established political sense can sadism and torture exist. This is not only because of a will to destroy someone's body and knowledge, but because another knowing entity has much more to lose and is painfully aware of the consequences of what he or she may be made to do with enough torture.

The philosophy of mind is entirely a product of something like this, and such concepts exist in various systems. Each such philosophy fixes in the person - and it is always the abstract person rather than a human who adopts this - a preferred set of directives by which knowledge can be formalized. Without a proper philosophy, if some formal reasoning is required, one is fashioned out of whatever rules of thumb allow for formal knowledge building. In practice, this is what most people have to do, as the teaching of philosophy or any education is atrociously bad, and the schools of mind offered to students leave much to be desired. This is expected because invariably, the philosophy of mind serves the ruling institutions, which most people are alien to. Even if someone outside of the club were to adopt this mindset, they would in practice not be allowed to adopt the ruling ideas as equals. Those who came from the lower classes never had a need for "philosophy of mind" as a paramount idea, and saw correctly such a thing as a construct of more primitive parts. When the lower class do consider mind formally, they do so with knowledge that such formalism is constructed for a purpose. This in essence is what every class, including the rulers, do for themselves. The imposition of a preferred and fixed "mind" is always a conceit to impose on another. The models presented may offer some explanatory knowledge about knowledge, but when they are adopted by the student, they are often adopted by those who seek a guru to tell them what to think, out of some sense of desperation, fear, awe, or a recognition of how to curry favor with the master. Those who seek to become gurus themselves are rarely the true believers but the skeptics, or those the guru pulls aside after seeing evidence of the pupil's ability to get what this is really for. At the heart of the philosophy of mind is the same quest for power and control that has long animated philosophy, that had been the true objective of those who institutionalized knowledge.

If the metaphysics is chosen, it becomes a fairly simple task for a trained thinker to reassemble accumulated information by other means into this new way of thinking. "Getting" the system and its peculiarities may take some getting used to, and an ability to compare two formalizations of knowledge is necessary for this task to be performed efficiently. A dialectical materialist knows when to turn off their diamat brain - useful for some decent-grade bullshit - and shift to a mechanistic understanding or some system appropriate for the conduct of science in the worthwhile sense. An ideological neoliberal constructs his or her ontology specifically to defend the eugenic creed above all, and is conscious that eugenics as a movement is the sole driver of all that follows. The creed took on a life of its own, overcoming its philosophical origins in anarchism and a bastardization of Enligthenment thought that became an imperial religion. The explanations offered by the neoliberal philosopher are almost screamingly bullshit and intended to be so, because what the neoliberal philosopher writes is never a genuine inquiry.

It is not that fascism was something the world-spirit ordained, or that fascism can even create the world that it purports is ideal. It is much simpler - the fetish for knowledge and crass models of science made a world where the institutions are designed to choke humanity. This was true of all the technocratic polities in one way or another, and in all of the organizing principles of modern states, a drive to invade the commons and place it under the rule of an intellectual elite was present, and became dominant in the middle of the 20th century. The vestiges of free commoners were eroded not by any mighty idea or some insidious conspiracy of false consciousness, but by the belief that science was commanded by the rulers against the ruled. The reality of technological advance up until the middle of the 20th century is that technological advance came from people who had incentive to build machines, because in the environment of that time, industrial technology and advances in the sciences served goals of profit in economic competititon and the interest of entities which vied for a place in a worldwide empire. The moment technology was consolidated in the hands of large national security states, and then became state secrets, any drive to advance technology was moderated by those whose interest was control over the people. Biology and medicine advanced primarily to serve eugenic aims, and only advanced generally to preserve the lives of those who were favored in the new ordering of society. As a rule, medical treatments were denied to those who were useless, and offered sparingly to those who were moderately useful. They were always contingent on utility to a militarized society, and those who did not have utility in war were seen in all ruling philosophies as a burden to keep up. As this arrangement progressed, institutions designed to serve a class of technocrats turned vicious against those who were no longer of service to that arrangement, pitting the disparate groups outside the ruling interest against each other. Neoliberal society is dominated by a race to reach a lifeboat, in which aspiring elites go on retreats and choose to rise above the plebeian commoners. It is in this environment where eugenics comes to the forefront, announcing bombastic plans to reduce the world's population from 5 to 8 billion depending on the year to 500 million or 1 billion. Plans to choke the world's environment are drawn which openly declare that any human without a college education and eugenic approval is a cancer on nature, an alien and parasite. The reality is that depopulation serves many purposes, and the goal as they say is nothing. The movement is everything, and 1 billion was chosen because it was a sufficiently low number to suggest a society-wide purge and favored roughly 20% of the global population. In other words, the number is chosen because it fit a conceit about political elitism that was shared by all political minds by this time, and any evidence that this number is "naturally ordained" depends entirely on the belief that production is manipulated and commanded entirely by the will of oligarchs and institutions under intellectual control. The reality is that depopulation has sought to eliminate whatever low hanging fruit and aids along conditions of decay and death, which has been the ruling principle since Thomas Malthus openly and gleefully suggested:

"Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague."^[4]

I maintain that to find truth, it can only be in the world. That is where it came from, and to speak of it as anything else is no more than an effort to assert reality control. Such an assertion is not needed to prove its viability. It has long been understood that a formal thought system need only be internally consistent, and it can be so by inventing myths. Knowledge is a trap, but a very useful trap to see. We choose knowledge not because it is the master key or any light, but because knowledge is a fact of the world regardless of any claims about intelligence, the sanctity of mind, the rulings of institutions, or however much rejection from humanity we face. To forsake knowledge is not to embrace unreason or stupidity or foolishness as somehow virtuous, but to see that we have exhausted all avenues of readily available progress of any popular idea, and if something is to exist, it would have to begin off the foundations we have available to us. If we wish truth among each other, it is not enough to share information or meaning. We would suggest out of necessity a way of speaking of these things and comporting our expressions in ways that are suitable for this world. We would work steadily towards our own social engineering with knowledge that perception of reality has been controlled in this way, and that reality control in perceptions is only fully realized by controlling reality to the extent that these methods can do so. To understand the limitations of genuine reality control, rather than mystify it, is a crucial step in learning what this is. I do not claim to possess a master key, but I do intend to produce some insights that may be of use for readers, and I welcome contributions in this vein if others are inclined, who have little better to do as I do.

I finally close that there is that part of the world which our knowledge does not readily access, for which we have no very accessible meaning or symbols. These things of us and the world are things occasionally revealed, and it must be clear that all of our knowledge begins and ends with revelation rather than the process. The events we see, including that which is not known to any of our readily describably faculties, happen before any knowledge process can act. The acts of our knowledge process, however vast, are not absolute or even explanatory of everything we know to be possible, even if we must make this presumption to develop knowledge properly. For all that we know and can possibly know, all of our lives and the entirety of human civilization remains a fleeting connection with the world. Humanity can barely get over their long-standing hatred for long enough to form a stable city, without the deployment of a brutal state to control its inhabitants and luxurious rituals that do nothing more than feed the vanity of those who rule. To grant to the knowledge of such creatures a vaunted and holy position seems absurd, simply by properly comparing our meaningful knowledge about ourselves and society with the processes of the world as a whole. It is not that we know nothing, as many a philosopher will humblebrag. All of us, even the lowest of us, know enough of ourselves and what we have seen, and even the most basic knowledge presumes considerable development to reach the attainment of a very dull human or a clever animal. Prophecy and the strange idiosyncracies which are noted throughout legends are unreliable and have little to say about this situation. So too does a sphere of fatalism await us if we somehow surpass a sphere of higher mysteries about which common knowledge says little and reliable reports are sporadic. The greatest wall facing us is a truth beyond easy knowledge that we really have no reason to be here unless we really want to, and we have no reason to let the world become this. Even many at the apex of this beast cannot say they have any actual plan beyond their conceits of knowledge, and do not wish even the development of this faculty we know to be possible today. We might be able to find something in a world apart, first by finding this world for ourselves in whatever way we can, and then sharing it in the ways that are appropriate. It is not a mission most of humanity would accept or could. Such visions of life are not a thing that can be produced by any education or a course of learning, and it is not a desirable thing to find this. To find it drives someone mad and only happens for some at the end of desperation. Often, this sense is derailed and directed towards the primordial light, a futile quest to reify this with a crass theory of knowledge, or filling the soul with nonsense, hopium and copium to tell ourselves all is well when all is very clearly not well. Nor is this necessary at all to resist, or a thing that will give easy answers for here and now. If someone does understand this passage - and it is perfectly acceptable to ignore this if it seems like drivel to you - then it behooves us to not forget that there is a world. Those who turn to this desperate solution or for whom the desperation finds them are often most vulnerable to falling into the creed's traps and the traps of the dishonest, for the sort of honesty that might be expected in a different world where we didn't have to do this is not at all what humanity was meant to be. I do not even believe humanity can be honest or should strive to be so for this reason. What I speak of has nothing to do with the lies or truths humanity purports to believe in or any expectation that this will be a next stage of anything. If we wish honesty, we would have to be very careful with our limited time and faculties, not out of fear of being detected and censored, but because if we are to speak at a vast disadvantage in informational output and practical force, all of our actions will need to count for something.

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If we are to regard general systems thought as a legitimate science - and "legitimate" has been described meticulously in prior chapters - then its only acceptable basis is in facts. The elements of a system are factual, and all relations described in a system are factual. Systems to be relevant are rooted in knowledge as a process rather than any other basis, and how facts may be derived from knowledge determines what sort of systems thought may exist, and whether the enterprise has any explanatory potential. In other words, general systems thought implies an ontology that is compatible with the emergence of facts from knowledge in some way. To speak of systems without an ontology, or some ability to infer that ontology and compare it to others, is to speak of something that would not be any more meaningful than tautologies, just-so statements, or is at worst a pure fabrication to declare that a system can overlay our prior understanding of something. This ontology need not be one that is particularly favored by institutions as the only possible one, so long as its meaningful statements on what it is for something to exist can be tied to a world that allows others reasonable critique of the system.

What this means is that general systems thought seeks to arrest all motions and potential in a system, describing the motions as factual things. In the aforementioned example, I suggest that this motion is itself the isolated parts of a system that we regard as factual - that is, that what we would regard as a billiard-ball proton in the model is really concentrated energetic force and motion that we regard as a solid object, and this force confers to the proton certain properties which can interact with other such energetic forces like electrons, neutrons, and so on. We have to be careful about defining "motion", "force", and so on in this description, and I do not claim here to have discovered any grand truth to particle physics. It is rather that I say we would understand the proton or any other particle by what it does, and this "doing" of things is not a passive thing or an expression read as if reading some tea leaves. For us to speak of a proton as an actual thing, or something we regard as real enough that we would believe in it, implies something much more than expression or the sleight-of-hand tricks that are often used to obfuscate systems or any scientific subject. For the whole system of a molecule, we describe the parts and their motion, and facts regarding any other relationship that is noteworthy. This is extrapolated to describe a universe comprised of such things, and other systems they interact with. This is the only way in which systems thought can be sensical in light of facts - that there isn't an arbitrary hierarchy of systemic levels where rules are different at the larger or smaller tier, and there is no absolute segregation of systems from other systems. It would not be possible to cleave the domain of science from politics or religion so cleanly, if systems thought is to be accepted as a valid approach in science instead of a useful expedient for individual knowledge. We are then left with either the conclusion that systems thought is a pseudoscience, or that systems described factually should not be taken trivially. It is entirely possible for a world with systems to contain things which are not recognized as "systems" yet interact with systems. If those non-systems are accepted, then they are things without symbolic representation yet meaningful, and their meaning can be symbolized without existing as such. If they are not accepted, then there is no way to derive the behavior of systems generally without resorting to spooky metaphors. This is not the only ontology that allows for general systems thinking, but it is one that allows someone to assess quickly the meaning of those systems and compare them to other systems, whether operating with whole ideas by some rule of thumb we have developed or analyzing the system in great detail.

What I have suggested is a way in which knowledge, originating from a shared material world, would have allowed for systems thought to be comprehensible without contradictions or misunderstanding of what a system would mean. In that view, the "system" is a useful token for symbolic expression - in fact it is the only token, as any symbolic thing that is a simple and single thing is still a system - but it only exists in a world where meaningful events occur, and the symbolic parts of a system - that is, what we recognize as "parts" at all - are really concentration of something being meaningfully done. It becomes impossible to speak of something "being" in a meaningful way, without inserting that being is a type of doing that results in very particular outcomes simply to call it "being". To say something "is" carries a host of connotations, even if a world of inert objects described by metaphors and stories. When these stories are told, we cannot help but insert our understanding of those stories by considering what those relationships mean - that is, what is happening and what is told through this story. It may be possible to dismiss this thought, or arrive at a different interpretation of the story. Very often, stories in the idealist sense are intended to be read by someone and interpreted as the readers sees fit to assimilate the story's meaning. An idealist story is a very poor tool for producing minute propaganda, unless it is beaten into someone's head and insinuated very dishonestly. Effective propaganda is always active and makes its impression either in the moment, or over a long period of exposure.

No natural basis other than knowledge can be found for any "system", and all systems are a way of transmuting real things with substance into either information or facts. Systems do not in of themselves contain any meaning or purpose that is inherent by definition. There is no evidence of any system in nature at all, unless knowledge is considered a natural phenomenon. If that is the case, then it is knowledge and thus the nature of ourselves that is the real root of systems thinking, and nothing else can be found for it. We could invent by clever manipulation any "system" we like if we just make it sound credible. The common thread, however, is psychological and centered around a subject who is presumably controlled. That is, the subject who thinks about a general systems theory is someone whose mind has been probed and whose behavior is predicted. This may be fine for someone who thinks for themselves and asks questions about their thinking. If we leave the judgement of another mind to the dictates of an expert, for example a psychologist or a board of jurors, while maintaining the systems view, it grants to the expert carte blanche to say anything is anything, so long as the mind can be claimed to be whatever the expert decrees it will be. If the study of the mind is to be based on information or facts, then who controls the facts and who controls the information is very important, particularly when it comes to a model of how someone thinks if thought is construed as mere information processing, or a factual reconstruction that is adjudicated by an expert claiming that scientific domain. Since most of us are not trained in psychology, and there is serious doubt if professional psychologists actually know the high theory to make proclamations, this places the adjudication ultimately in the hands of a small class that is granted permission to tell us what we are, what we think, and what we must do.

If knowledge is a genuine basis for systems thought, regardless of any theory - that is, if humans really are natural "systems thinkers" in some way - then it begs an investigation into what we exactly are studying. We would not be given a system as a series of facts or information and told to "believe the science", or believe that only experts can access the meaning of that information. We would instead be tasked with discerning meaning from those systems, and likely discover that the system as a concept is either pseudoscientific or superfluous. Yet, we do behold a great many things, and we cannot help but do so. Calling them a "system" seems natural enough, so long as we make the association with the word to refer to basically anything, including things which are not actually systems in a worthwhile sense. Government bureaucracies are not "systems" in that someone, somewhere has drawn up a detailed management chart of every government function and ensured the machine is a well-designed clockwork, and the design of the government or the state is something ideal and built around any high-minded intent. Governments are systems in that we can examine their workings and diagram them, and someone in the government has a considerably detailed idea of what the government is and why the various parts do what they do. Few in the government, if anyone, can really say in total the actions of the United States government, because there are so many moving parts, and the design of the bureaucracy is that no one person will ever be held responsible or be expected to know more than their role in the machine. There are plenty of people who can see the overall orientation of the United States, its governing ideas and the men and women who actually do control the machinery of society. The design of the United States consciously utilizes deception and occultism at every level, and this is something built in to the country from its origin. Occult imagery, injokes, and hoodwinks are displayed on the currency and throughout American society, and by extension global society due to American influence on basically everything that happens on Earth. The purpose of the machine is to ensure that the ruled never actually know who rules. The position of Big Brother was not invented as a parody of Stalin or Mao, who were documented real persons with personality quirks and noted styles of leadership, nor was it a reproduction of Hitler whose symbolic role and function was never the "all-knowing planner". Nazi ideology and the institutional ideas in force downplayed Hitler's central role in day to day planning and instead emphasized the political neutrality of the army, a highly unusual condition in a country where civic institutions were always invaded by the state. The invasion of private life in Germany was by the state as an entity rather than the visage of a man or a story. The functionaries of the state in Nazi Germany were highly visible, and while every state occults its actions to a large degree, much of the Nazi system is explicitly stated. No one in Germany was under any illusion that the Nazis were anything other than what reliable history showed them to be. Whether someone considered the Nazis the worst thing ever or a force of progress and enlightenment depended on your attitude towards eugenics.

A systems theory is not needed to rule the United States operationally. Most of its officers don't really know the systems thinking, even the people who claim to be expert in it. It is helpful for those outside of the regime to comprehend how and why the United States does what it does, and explains the rationale for their behavior since the end of the second world war. The general systems thought is an understanding of occulting, if viewed properly. Those who were aware of the possibilties for processing information and cybernetics had a better sense of the greater objective than those tasked with managing or planning day to day affairs. To this day, the use of systems thought for planning purposes is haphazard, and many of the things done with computers are not done for efficiency or productivity but to obfuscate and strip control away from workers and place the machine in the hands of people who operate in the shadows, unaccountable and their actions scantly documented by anyone let alone revealed to the public. If the United States and the global economic activity it is tied into were planned by any rational approach, very obvious and gross inefficiencies and downright stupidities would be fixed immediately simply by removing bloat that was intended to intensify antagonisms and run the country and the global order into the ground. Even those who can comprehend systems thought and utilize this approach would have difficulty doing that unless there were both a concerted effort to diagnose all the things wrong with this apparatus, and no entities in the shadows who insist that the rot and internecine struggle for its own sake is actually good. Literally nothing in the United States had worked for anything except exacerbating human misery since 1980, and the open rot and depradation glorified by Reagan was nothing less than deliberate and systemic cannibalization of anything productive. This makes sense for the rulers because they never wanted to produce anything, and hate the idea of poor people maintaining living standards. That the institutions are designed not to work does not require a systems theory. The dogma of pursuing depopulation and various cockamamie schemes to "combat global warming", and the gigantic grift feeding money to contractors for dubious work, benefit from promoting as much rot and death as the rulers can allow without the country completely collapsing or mass refusal to comply with any part of the project leading to enough people so disgusted that they would throw themselves suicidally at the managers and intellectuals who glorified doing this to them, and conducting these suicide attacks not as isolated stochastic attacks but a coordinated "fuck shit up" campaign. The rulers of the United States have chosen to manage the country as poorly as they can get away with, and throwing out one lie after another to cajole Americans to attack each other, with the promise that attacking your fellow Americans will win you a spot on the lifeboat in the great lifeboat ethics exercise that was taught everywhere in the 1990s. The only thing preventing the scenario I just described of a sufficient mass of Americans deciding to spite their masters is an immense preponderance of fear and terror and the realization that everyone who is guilty has secured themselves and has underground cities to hide in. The extent of how fucked the American people are, and their inability to name anyone who brought them to this, makes such violent retaliation problematic. Indeed, goading Americans to lash out in suicidal rage has been part of the strategy, just to rub in the intent of the ruling plan. When too few Americans were willing to bite, it was necessary to stimulate the violence with gangs and countergangs or just sending a few ill-paid agents to pose as terrorists due to the lack of homegrown terrorists willing to throw themselves away at low-value targets. Every site that would protect an important person is heavily secured and anyone who knows their guilt knows not to be seen outside of contexts where he or she wields total power and traps their prey. So thorough is this strategy that the elite of the elite live in an entirely different world, where they never have to see a filthy pleb and make it clear that anyone who speaks a word against the true power can be killed on their command without the slightest hesitation. I have said before and will say again, the sensation of a knife held at the throat of every American is no hyperbolae. It is a threat made and acted on, and it is only because that threat is operative that the enablers of this rot are so emboldened, knowing that their instigations and terror tactics are sanctioned and that enablers enjoy open impunity against any target selected to die. To understand how that works, and how best to maximize this rule of terror, requires a systems thinking like the one I have described, or something compatible, in which systems can be picked apart and rapidly assessed, rather than the laborious and plodding proofs that are typical of academics forcing the fools through a humiliation. The laborious proof is helpful if you want to truly appreciate the theory and meaning of systems thought, but the systems thinking is adaptable to allow for those trained in it to compartmentalize their actions and train themselves to do complicated operations with a small amount of self-examination or training by actually competent guides.

The proliferation of information technology and processing is the reason for the rise of systems thought, rather than its explanatory power. Biologically, systems thinking doesn't explain anything. Cybernetics, while it is involved in the thought on systems, exists in principle without a whole "general systems thought". It would be simple enough to relegate cybernetics to the science and practice of automating governance, without a greater "system" implied than that which the cybernetician diagrams. A good cybernetician has always been aware of the need for a better theory of cognition than the politicized one, and can separate human cognitive biases from the problem. A good cybernetician is not given over to this "amoral turbo-hedonist" idiocy that plagues the internet and society today, the stock and trade of every teenaged pissant and their stunted future selves who are trapped in that dogma. Cybernetics is not a moral science, but it does not take a genius to figure out that the humans who are to be automated will be moral creatures, and that too would be a factor in any equation to automate governance. The human component in a cybernetic network is not just a thing to be understood, but the key component in any serious application of cybernetics. Cybernetics to regulate machines is useful, but all of these machines are intended to be used by a human at some point, or the machine is used to govern humans in some way in which case a proper accounting of the human component is obligatory. Any idiot who actually believes in the amoral hedonist idiocy outs himself as a damned fool - and it is almost always a male who thinks this way, as the female version of this stupidity rarely becomes that obnoxious or odious, nor is it a thing encouraged the way it is among failed men. For understanding biology, the question systems thought originally pertained to, systems thought is hilariously inadequate and manages to make biology even less comprehensible and mystified. On the other hand, the attempt to resolve this problem in biology was necessary, not because it explained that many new things, but because the idiocy of charlatans in biology had grown so monstrous that this stupidity had to be regulated by some framework other than making shit up. The older thinking of life as organs was no longer sufficient to describe machines and things like machines in a technocratic society. The ancient anatomy concept originated long ago, in a time where far less was known about the human as a machine or mechanics generally. It worked well enough to fit together the parts of the body to make an educated guess about organs doing particular things, but in minute details and on many questions, evaluating organs is inadequate for understanding a whole life-form and its functions. I have maintained that life conceptually is an alien imposition on a world that is by default dead, and nearly all the world that we know of is dead. Even our own bodies are, in a sense, dead matter animated by this geist called "life", which does not have any recognizable center or inherent form as a basis. We could easily imagine parts of our body eliminated and we still live, so how living are each of the cells or some strand of DNA in reality? That has been one of the great difficulties of understanding life - that we are trained to view life as a necessary whole, because politically that is expedient and conceptually it makes enough sense for us to operate on life as such. When we must investigate finer details, and when the threats to living things in the present society are everywhere and methodically produced with an intent to degrade or destroy us, or mutate us in accord with managerial intent, our conceit of wholistic life breaks down spectacularly. It is the need of information technology to control life, to assist a general societal plan obsessed with the management of life down to its smallest detail, that made general systems thought relevant to us today. That is why the language of systems is omnipresent in the global health governance scam that launched openly in 2020. There was no attempt to hide that eugenics was back and gained multiple levels during its supposed absence, and the fanatical screamers are hungrier for torture and carnage than they've ever been.

This leads to a question I hope to answer as best as I can; how do we, the lumpenproles largely disconnected from this machine, approach the system? Many are drawn to scattered accounts of the occult and the ways in which secret societies fuck with the losers of humanity. The seemingly "random" violence instigated against the losers is stoked as part of the rites to become a member of those secret societies. That's one of the major functions of such organizations, to remind the losers that they are out and will always be out, so that we all believe it's the Ancient Mystic Society of No Homers. It is not for any particular purpose, but that rejection and shame are the point of life, and demonstrations of it boost the esteem of someone who is in the club, no matter how petty that gain is for them. This is not something that just-so happens to be true, but is something that can be understood in a wider system, and with adequate knowledge of the incentives of all agents involved, and the game theory scenario with a proper modeling of the psychological state of both parties. The ritual would never work as a "random" event out of the blue, unplanned. This rejection, all arranged by third parties in the know who remain in the shadows, is deliberate and repeated often. The rejection and shame are publicly displayed to make the point that this is the way it is. The act itself is not as relevant as the pattern and assertion of its reptition as a fact of life. When the ritual is complete, the saying "life's not fair" or something similar naturalizes the act that is entirely the choice of individuals in the know. In effect, it declares that the rejected is not a part of the world or a part of the natural world at all, but a stain to be wiped out. That is the point - to shout "die, die, die" without actually saying it, and in the long run, making the curse real by intensifying the rejection and shame against those out of the know. In a Satanic morality and philosophy, it is inadmissible to acknowledge that any of this happens, and anyone pointing out the strategy is attacked ruthelessly and deemed retarded or insane for suggesting that it could be any other way. A Christian approach reaches the same solution, but with more steps of elaborate lying, which makes the rejection much more pointed. Rejection and shame are then associated with a whole theory of sin, and if you were rejected and selected for this attack, it was proof not just that you're stupid, but that you're a sinner and should be stoned to death. An even more elaborate game of lying convinces the condemned that this organization of habitual liars is going to save you somehow, because society has advanced enough to guard this enclosure, and the general predation of humanity leads one to accept Christian mercy under threat of pain. Mercy in Christianity is never a kindness given freely. It is not surprising that today's secret societies originated less with some occult or lurid ritual, but from brotherhoods with a Christian background that took on occult symbols, with a wink that you weren't actually supposed to believe the shit in the Bible. If you actually did, what are you, retarded? All of these things would need to be understood to have a better understanding of why this shit works. The taboo against acknowledging this is itself reliant on a system to make it first an unmentionable, then to convince the damned to internalize the taboo. A strategy to drive people mad through controlled insanity is an old one, worked out not by happenstance but with considerable knowledge of why this strategy worked, with full intent. No bully is ever unaware of this thinking. If he did not know this, he would not last long as a bully. Bullies must have more than an inchoate sense of who they can fuck with, because that alone is a way for a bully to get got and face brutal retaliation. A foolish bully getting got is one of the most glorious sights, though it means very little in the grand scheme. Usually, the foolish bully is not thinking of his actions, but is pushed into action by pure threats and crass inducements, then tossed aside once whoever pushed him to act got what they wished from their agent. Bullying to be meaningful is always entangled in a system, where all agents are known and considered in a game theoretical sense. Even the stupidest bully or street thug adopts this awareness, accelerating dramatically the application of his intelligence towards this task due to its very high priority in human society. It is really one of the few things humans actually show an interest in learning for its own sake, and one of the few motivators to convince humans to learn more than whatever they feel like learning, which is not much. The Satanic ape that is a human is remarkably incurious, even by the standards of a creature who is biologically a deformed ape with a half-conscious brain, drunk most of the time and easily influenced by anything, but given the promise of credit in the great game of bullying and status climbing, he manages to present as vaguely functional. Natural curiosity in the human is typically fleeting and scattershot, without considerable effort to discipline such a filthy creature to sit still in a classroom, because that is too much for these fucking disgusting creatures despite all of the obvious reasons to sit down, shut up, and make the school experience slightly less miserable. If humans were at all inclined towards reason let alone defined by reason, none of that discipline would be necessary beyond a year or two of schooling, if it was necessary at all.^[1]

We would do well to consider in most cases that humans are deliberate actors when it comes to aggressive actions, and have considered this game theory. It is not the case in defensive or reactive actions or under severe pressure, but the bully to be a bully is sacrosanct and given license to behave as he does. We see the value in occulting, even when the lie is obvious, to enforce a taboo and eventually internalize the shame. This is one of the ways in which humans stratify society at the basic level. We can blow up the strategy to what a technocratic polity would do on a mass scale once it decides it will openly exterminate selected in the residuum. Let's say there is an underground city, the inhabitants unknown, who direct agents on the surface to do this killing. They require human agents to do this, of which there is no short supply. Do you, as a target, fret about the man in the bunker? Whatever you may do, you do not know his location, identity, or any method by which you can kill the source. Very likely, the source can be replenished with new people who are in the know and invited to fill that secure space. The enforcers, who may be ill-paid, are given sacrosanctity in this eugenic task, which is holy for the whole society. You, the residuum, are alone. All of your friends have abandoned you. This is a harrowing situation, and knowing the Satanic apes very well, you are certain you are not just dead, but will be tortured if captured alive. Because the siege is active, your killers know they can wait you out until you starve, assuming they cow the rest of society to accept that you are a public enemy and must be denied all sanctuary. Most of the fellow low are not too happy about this, because they too are next, and many of them will go out of their way to ignore you unless they absolutely must abide the edict. So long as you avoid them or entangling them in anything that causes problems, they are unlikely to be your threat. If you are seeking some charitable soul resisting this out of some sense that making this harder for the bastards will give everyone a little longer, you will have to be very careful and know a secret password and code to indicate who can be trusted and that you are trustworthy. This cannot be taken for granted, but we might have a sense of who can assist us. But, we know that we don't have long, and even if we live, there isn't going to be a life for us. What are the motives of the middle class? They might receive a paycheck, but fidelity to the creed is an absolute above material concerns. Failure to obey it means exclusion from this middle, so the middle class will never, ever side with you in a million years openly, and will be far more cautious about anything that draws suspicion to them. Your options in this scenario are limited. The intended outcome for the utilitarian and Fabian is that you either self-eliminate with a feeling of shame, or that you are so paralyzed with fear that you allow yourself to be captured, where you will be maximally tortured for the best utility in the moral value system of eugenics. You would need to be aware of this intent to properly judge your game theoretical options, which I have based on considerable evidence and the open statements of the eugenists at this point in history. This is a bad outcome for you, but you are told that all other choices are inadmissible. There is, after all, no moral claim to make against eugenics if its values are dominant. It does not allow someone to be outside of it. Killing some random person coming at you, or throwing yourself suicidally at a random grunt, doesn't change much, and in a sense actually hurts you because eugenics considers this middle class expendable. With what time you have left, what can you really do? Does shouting change anything? Not really. They all know. They don't care or they know they're next.

This is where a utilitarian view makes the proper game theoretical solution inadmissible. In their moral philosophy, all payoffs can only entail pleasure and pain, or attainment of a "rational" goal - that is, a goal in line with the political philosophy. Since the political philosophy is eugenics, all of your payoffs are zero in that thinking. More importantly, from the moment you were marked for the residuum, your civic worth, intelligence, purpose, and everything about you was valued at exactly 0. This is ideologically necessary - that the residuum must be utterly negated in principle, then in spirit, then in fact, and then in physical reality. No other interpretation of the eugenic creed is sensical, and so their approach in all such situations, which we see ad nauseum in every institution, is predictable and intended to be so. The only thing that they keep a surprise is when you die. See, they don't like letting stragglers find time for themselves, because it allows them the "irrational" choice of suicide or sacrifice to spite the creed, and they cannot abide this as a possibility. Reality suggests you have this choice, and it is not the only choice of how to spend your last day in this hell. So, because this is an exciting ritual, and the buildup and suspense is itself a thrill and pleasure in accord with their moral philosophy, the eugenist has always enjoyed fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and likes the idea of bombarding the populace with propaganda proclaiming the creed's eternal glory, its thousand year reich, et cetera. We have seen this ritualistic preparation for a torture thrill often enough in humanity and particularly with the Fabians and their ilk.

Yet, a game is not a theory. A game is always played out in some environment which we regard as real, and even if the game took place in a computer simulation, where all agents are rationalized information and the game plays out an algorithm, the human user and the programmer of the game think of what all of these agents do. It would be necessary to think this way to solve the mathematical problems of the AI in this game even in the most basic task. We have a sense of how a pathfinding algorithm like A-Star works. You are no less capable in principle than the programmer, because in actuality, you do have a brain and yet breathe, and if you're reading this, you probably are capable of far more than my analysis, and know the particular conditions of this game scenario better than I. I have simplified the scenario to a trap that is often used in interventions, and the intervention need not be this torture-kill-death-thrill scenario that I outlined. Lesser repetitions of this cycle are seeded throughout education, so that children selected to die are presented with the unwinnable scenario in utilitarian game-theoretical terms. Institutionally, you knew from the start you were going to lose. No matter what you try, you are intended to lose, and if you fail to lose, you WILL be made to lose. The humiliation and defeat, a boot stamping on your face and marking the word "retard" on your forehead forever, for all to see every day and laugh at, is the point. If you insist on not losing to the bitter end, it doesn't change anything. You're still marked down as retarded, and the other kids are taught that you failed, and because of your insolence in refusing to fail and be maximally retarded, your refusal to internalize the creed in all ways as intended, the authority wants to make a bigger example of you. This is where you ar reprimanded for having a case of the s'pos'das to start, and then the humiliations come harder until they find something that breaks you. If you survive the institutions, you are marked as non-compliant and troublesome, and thus barred from work. Your reputation may be attacked if you transgress and take jobs outside the few that are occasionally permitted for the residuum. A caste system has long been implied by eugenics, and its lowest caste has already been established in the public mind as a fact. In lesser form, this exact scenario is implied, and when cornered, a counselor on a power trip will drop the mask and take glee in seeing you squirm and she throws your life away with a keystroke. I've seen this happen multiple times and you will encounter them. That's what counselors are there to do, make you suffer for the most arbitrary shit and begin the cycle, and choose when it stops to habituate you to your assigned grade of civic worth.

To be able to make adequate comparisons to the game and account for scale, the true stakes and severity, is not a mere calculation of some quantity measuring the win condition. I mention this scenario here to show the importance of viewing systems not as an assembly of information or facts, or as a wonky thing that can be described with airy metaphors in the typical continental philosophy fashion. To adequately approach systems thought from a critical, analytical perspective, as many of us learn not by formal education but trial and error and figuring out a method to make the machine go, requires an ability to discern meaning and sense the human component's bias in adjudicating it. We know meanings to be things that are not vague in description, but they are vague in the sense that they are not informational or factual. The games of psychological manipulation that are shown ad nauseum in Fabian-inspired education, or the latest shit Bill Gates wants for your kids, are intended to destroy this process of establishing meaning, by imposing fear, doubt, confusion, and often physical interventions intended to weaken the brain, with knowledge that this will stunt development not just in a minute way, but permanently and over all the faculties of knowledge. That is the only way in which this reality control regime, which in principle should be able to control reality completely, can control reality. The conditions of reality control, and the conditions of eugenics in any conception resembling the political policies and interventions in force by eugenic institutions today, are conditions of degradation. It is not possible, using this method of reality control, to impose this without degrading the faculties of the ruled in dramatic ways. No slavery is ever passively enforced or without consequence, and a slavery premised on absolute deception is intended to degrade and destroy as quickly as possible. A method of reality control that understands similar principles but adjusts properly in a way that works with our native knowledge faculties and sense of the world - a more benign reality control - would recognize the model that I set out as what happens in practice, and would not need to pretend it is something other than it is. It would still be mind control - the view I describe suggests mind control is not just possible but trivial, and in some sense the default human interaction with each other. The dialogue between social equals that remains terse and distrusting, or earnest in limited ways, is the exceptional condition rather than the rule. Most human relationships are hierarchical and entail authority, not just on the dominant end but with expectations of the subordinate's expectations clearly defined, and often the subordinate retaining some status. A subordinate with no status whatsoever is not a slave, for a slave is recognized as an asset with some value. A subordinate of the most abject status, who "loves their slavery" as Huxley dreams, is an absolute retard and can be nothing else. In that slavery, all of us become Epsilons and it gets worse from there, and this is the world the Huxleys want.

How do we account for scale and comparison without factual measurement? While factual measurement is very helpful for forming our knowledge of any system, we need to be careful about "facts" adjudicated by highly suspicious sources. For example, posting a propaganda report as if it were absolutely true and couldn't be falsified - a standard eugenist and logical positivist trick^[2] - is absurd, especially when the figures written are falsified by a simple eyeball assessment or logical inference that a child could understand. Very often, children without any great education do see this insanity and point out its absurdity with clarity, and there are children who will announce to an audience of adults that the ruling ideas and propaganda are so ridiculous and explain, point by point, what is obviously wrong, just to drive home the stupidity of this logical positivist mind virus.

Where we arrive is that truth is not reducible to a single source, but is our best composite of all sources available through knowledge. Each source without the others is, in this view, woefully incomplete. We have seen at length that the process of knowledge, which is our root for any of this discussion, is a thing which can be manipulated. Whether we believe knowledge is emergent from the world or existed outside of the world in some way that reconciles with our ability to sense a reality, or knowledge was a gift from God, all of our views of knowledge itself suggest that it is corruptible and never a thing taken for granted, sacrosanct in all cases. The processes of knowledge in any worthwhile concept of it are things which can be verified by some authority, whatever we conceive of it. Knowledge without this authority or self-critcism, or without anything outside of knowledge to know, is solipsism, controlled insanity, or worse of all, autism. We may wish to shield our knowledge process because we know of this malleability, even if we lack any theory suggesting that it is so. Our living experience tells us of this malleability, unless we pretend that everything outside of "me wantee" is an illusion and we can control reality by just deciding up is down. We have seen where that leads. Data by itself is not just meaningless, but not even information that we could admit into the record, but in science we need some data which is the subject of study if we wish to speak of anything substantial. That is always the case regardless of our approach to knowledge - we always refer to something that is at core a thing that is substantive or rooted in substance. If we want to talk about fantastical unicorns and a theory about them, we could invent such a thing, but for us, all of these fantasies require something to imagine it, and so in my view outlined earlier, all such fantasies are constrained by conditions the world will allow us to fantasize. If we suggested that the fantasies were in a realm outside of any substance or ability to detect it, and held that this was valid, then our theory and science for such a thing would only be a toy for us and doesn't pertain to anything others would need to find significant. Maybe someone would find that interesting for whatever reason, but they won't grant it the same moral value as a substantive thing. Information without context suffers the problems with any algorithm - any part of the process, or the veracity of information gleaned, can lead to garbled output from the symbols, and so the meaning of it is distorted. Granting to knowledge the conceit of infallibility is another Big Brother trope the neoliberals pioneered first, and it relies on a belief that information has this quality that makes it an idol. Meaning is very close to arriving at a truth we use, but it is a thing that is too vague without specification and refinement by symbolic representations that we can condense it to, and operate with. We would do well to maintain an awareness of meaning in things, and be able to catch the joke. Without meaning, the symbols we write and communicate and detect as the superficial truth are just utterances fed into a machine, and we can keep in mind a connection with what things do and our deeper knowledge about those things. To understand meaning means we can systematize anything, but we would not look to a "system" to make claims about things that are meaningless or koans we repeat. We are able to draw from very different systems in concept to elaborate our understanding, without conflating things too readily. Facts are very relevant for verification outside of our own conceit, but facts are facts and not definitional for us to conceive of science. Science ultimately is a process, and it was a process originating in those who worked and built, and those who directly fought or took any interest in planning a battle in any way that entailed an actual fight or even appearing as if their army was a credible force. Science was not the toy of priests and intellectuals, but the exact opposite. The intellectual charlatan never forgets that and hates that. We use all of these things to arrive at the best truth knowledge can provide, all things being equal and not considering that which is not a thing easily gauged by knowledge.

We should not rush to embrace "science" or any particular method as the authority of choice, as if there is a One True God in the gnostic senses of the concept. Science is not a master key to tell you everything, but a process we do for a lot of reasons. Our truths about the world are never purely derived from science, let alone institutional science which prescribes a catechism telling us how we're allowed to do it. The institutions of science, which I remind the reader again stole science from the rest of us, derived their philosophies of science from something real, if their theories are to hold water. The general systems thought has been criticized as a pseudoscience, but I believe there is a lot of validity to this approach if appropriate caveats are taken. In short, it would properly developed overcome the crippling overspecialization of intellect in technocratic society, without necessitating that all men and women be singular geniuses or "brain bugs" dictating the management of lesser minds. The key is an ability to engage in worthwhile dialogue about the meaning of any of it, and an independent faculty for studying philosophy of science or the ways in which we have spoken of truth. That is, one of the best tips for a budding poor philosopher or anyone who finds learning intrinsically interesting is to set aside some space, some computer, for a library of good reading material and things that allow a growth of stuff that is truthful enough to offer a lead. It would be great to compile "mini-libraries" on topics of general interest, so that we would not have to sift through too much trash to find something worthwhile, and we could teach ourselves without the intermediary of pedagogues in the unfixable educational institutions. This is basically what is expected behind the scenes, if someone can survive the filtering process and isn't beaten down for looking too capable in a world that selected them to die. Ultimately, we are creatures who do more than think or perform science as a ritual. We would ask ourselves if any science is oriented towards helping us, rather than "believing the science" whether the exhortation comes from imperious liberals or hectoring ideologues from the left or right. The Right for many reasons is a creature so contemptible that it is scarcely worth engaging with, kept at a distance and barked at to shut the hell up if they start their usual shit, but by now they know what they are and they're never going to be anything else. They can figure out what the hell they actually want, but I doubt many of them have such a lofty thought at this point.

In general, the politicization of science is a problem, but has always been a factor. Even for ourselves, we conduct science not for its own sake or to be mindless producers, but to adapt to a hostile world. Recognizing political intrigues and hectoring for what they are goes a long way to doing what we need to put aside the bullshit. If we are to engage in anything regarding politics, it would be to defend what position we have, regarding the hostile interests as something we expect no friendship with. Ultimately for us of the low, the only trust we have is with each other, and the hope that the other guys realize what a stupid mistake they're making in this mess. That trust should be premised not on blind faith or exhortation or a fickle sentiment, and certainly not on lies and a shared interest in kicking down some other poor sod. We have enough of that in this world, and if we need to do that, that is a matter better settled by less-than-pleasant means. There is no way to make politics nice, and for a socialist, politicization of the economy is one of the worst things you can do. We would seek to shield our productive affairs from the political beast as much as we can. We would do best to recognize a principle Henri Saint-Simon articulated so well - that the objective of socialism must be the elevation of the lowest class. It is this that is the most poignant draw for any socialism, because it spoke of something that was not political or grasping, or an intrigue, or a wild fantasy. The man made his plea that the entire business we have been made to follow is really pointless and serves not one purpose we would want if we knew a better way. The better way is not a unicorn, but something that is so obvious we could see it plainly, if we weren't told that such things were not allowed. How that is possible is the question, if it is even possible. It is my deep belief that it was always the residuum that the war entailed most of all. We were the ones shamed and sacrificed and told to keep our heads down while the others squandered their opportunities. So long as it was always expedient to attack us and hate us more than their superiors, that would always be the threat used to discipline the whole society. It was the same with slavery in America, but with slavery it was more elaborate than a simple sentiment or sense of who was stupid. Slavery in America is not just a relation or a story, but an institution as any slave system must be to be meaningful. Slavery was in the past tied to the height of finance and a whole way of life that for the slavers is a science unto itself. Today, the drive to immiserate humanity and celebrate the depravity and ridicule is no less of a financial juggernaut. Vast sums of wealth and human effort are spent on nothing more than making the poor miserable and torturing them. The expense spent on this apparatus, so dominated with contempt and existing to cater a middle class of "helpers" that make everything worse and backed up by a ridiculous preponderance of police force and militarization, is mind-boggling compared to the cost of letting us have the food we wanted in the first place. A middle class that hates us more than the people who are by all reasonable accounts the party capable of and actively intensifying the misery is a middle class that has no right to win and deserves everything they have been getting from the masters they supplicated to, out of a sense that hating the ugly was morally righteous and condoning the sadistic and depraved was even moreso. Above all, the middle class forgot how to hate their masters in a way that is so beyond me. More than that, the sense of scale is so distorted that many of the middle class shriek incessantly about the ugly poor being the problem, despite all of the overt acts of the influencers and this beast lording over them. That the middle class live such desperate lives, made to pay into scams and lies to get on a lifeboat whose ingroup was selected before they left high school, is a sign of the times. Perhaps it was not possible to overcome the preponderance of force held by bureaucratic states and all the talk of moral sentiments really meant nothing compared to a raw will to attack. If that was the case though, then what was the point, and what is the point of letting it happen when it is clear this beast won't stop at letting us die off naturally? I can tell you the mentality of the true believers is not a passive disdain, but an active crusade and a lust for purging. This is no passive thing doing this to us as if it were by nature. Any time that stupid idea is recapitulated, the assholes win a little bit more. There is that which acts without us and outside of society, but society itself is the product of actual humans with agendas, and they do not get to mask their acts with the "law of nature", no matter who they are or what they did. No one will ever forgive me for a crime of Being, and that is in the end all they cared about. They do not care about what I did because in their mind, there never was a "thing" I did. It was negated in principle and the negation was actively and pre-emptively enforced, with word of mouth and the new record-keeping ensuring that the lockout would happen. 2020 was a long time in the making, and even the worst of the reports hide that we live in a depopulation regime. We know the situation is insane, but we are trained to believe depopulation is something far away, not happening until a thought leader has written down that history has in fact moved. It is that sickness that is one of many driving me to write this, even if I may doom me to say these things.

Above all, we must reject the dictum of the pervert Galton to destroy all sentiment. Beneath his wealth is a cowardly man, and because I know these type of people and know my own cowardliness which I will admit to here without elaboration, I can smell it and sense it. Fear and depravity can smell fear, and I can look at a face like Galton and the manner of his writing and see what that is. It's not hard to see these people for what they are, and they aren't even clever enough to hide what they do. Offensive stupidity is among their calling cards. Even their more capable functionaries who have some ulterior motive and a flashy uniform are not so clever that they deceive anyone. Too many people have seen enough. It is not that sentiment in of itself is strength or something to treasure for its own sake. Sentiment and a desire for something other than venal grasping and intrigue is something that allows for more to exist at all, that would make life at all worth living. The way of lusting for some imagined happening that is orchestrated by powerful men and intended to toss anyone who follows back to the gutter is a waste of energy. If politics comes for me or I have to pick some side, that is a different matter, but I will say right now that anyone who thinks they're going to have a glorious boogaloo moment is an idiot and does know basic shit about politics or history, and anyone pushing that insanity should just get the fuck out of my sight and not even bother. I embrace my moral sentiment not because I'm a simp or because I believe it gives me some moral essence, like I'm superior. I do so because I've seen and lived through what the lizardmen want and the mentality they impose on everyone who isn't them, and there is absolutely nothing there. If people still want to blow their energy on that stupidity, which will not win no matter how hopeless it may seem for us, that's their call. I and those who have a sense of what this really is have given enough hints that this death drive ends not with some end state of eugenics, but with the next thing that will be something very different and doesn't need any of the idiocy given to us down in the residuum and the general public. It is not a secret that there is a world of people who are safe, who do not suffer the way us down here do, and who do not suffer as much as those are pressed to attack us mostly because they were induced by threats to do this.

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Without any preferred forms to guide us, systems originate out of a seeming chaos, so that what was at first data is resolved into something organized and understood. The concept "system" refers philosophically to something beheld, and so they are established not in nature or as a just-so story, but are products of knowledge and a thing for us. If general systems thought is to be a legitimate science, and I believe it is a legitimate approach and the proof has been borne out in history, then its final proof is not in theory or statements but in facts which are not contingent on systems thought. Therefore, the proper origin of systems is not any preferred reference point, such an life, heat, energy, physics, or any other "grand unified theory" someone might imagine. Systems originate in metaphysical claims, and for the concept to be valid, it must comport with an understanding of things which does not require us to believe in any system. The system is not a "thing-in-itself", but an explanatory tool of processes, so that all we study in the natural world is not rife with contradictions or just-so statements of no use for our knowledge.

We are not "natural systems thinkers" in the sense that all we can possibly imagine are systems. There are truths and meanings in the world which are not at all "systems" as we would define them, nor are all systems apparent with trivial knowledge. We can invent systems for things which have no easy evidence, and so long as they are demonstrable with facts or some theory that is credible enough, the system can be as real as that which we readily acknowledge as a thing to behold. There are also things described as "systems" in vague aspersions which are nothing of the sort. Governments as a whole are not "systems" in the sense that they are necessarily integrated wholes that adhere to any central plan, or a plan that would be the result of a rational process from a executive of any institution. Governments may claim to rule a "system" and exhort people to follow it, but governments and states are in practice assemblies of men and women who contest the authority states and governments possess as an idea, and this leads to factions within the institution with divergent aims. The officers of a state do not have any intrinsic reason to follow the leader or some executive asserting that authority derives from will or force. The nature of entering government or the state is that officers of those institutions control directly the levers that constitute the meaningful force a state or government can summon. If the officers of the state are to be disciplined, the executive of the state can only compel subordinates through fear and coercion. This is the nature of the state and government as institutions - that they are instruments of rule, and so to rule states inherently follow imperatives regarding the ruled. The ruled are not just people, but all of the objects and things that a state considers its domain. In principle, the state as a going concern must make a presumptive claim on all the things that exist in its domain. This does not require any "system" to be asserted. It is instead the nature of the state if the state were envisioned as a philosophical idea held above the world, as it must do to constitute itself as a singular body. Even if the state's doctrine and laws are premised on transactional relationships, as they would be in a feudal society for one example, the principle of state rule is that all of those relationships tie into a ruling idea or principle. Without that ruling idea and the executive who represents it, there is no state as such. If the ruling idea is republicanism in which there is no designated king or executive above all, but instead a ruling class or interest, or in theory rule is diffused to all valid citizens, then the republic envisions an abstract executive necessarily to constitute itself. It is for this reason that the symbol of republicanism was the fasces and why fascism was in the tradition of republican political thought rather than despotic thought or the thought of monarchy.

The system is not a fact in-of-itself, but a reproduction of institutional knowledge. Even if the institution is ourselves - or more properly, our sense of ourselves and management of our knowledge process - the system exists not because that is what the world is, but because systems are reproductions of institutional knowledge. We behold a system not because we have to, but because it is an approach that is very effective for formal thought, which itself is rooted in processes that had a lot of reasons to suggest that this approach was effective for knowing what the world is. The vast confusion regarding what a "system" is and its function is a sign that this systems thinking is not natural or something that humans adopt by any process behind the backs of the producers. Far from it, processes behind the backs of institutions have found the systems approach to be a direct attack on their efforts to occult knowledge and science from the managers and aristocracy. The workers themselves did not need a rigid definition of "systems" to conduct science and produce useful knowledge, or even a cruder definition of philosophical thought that spoke of systems in a way that suggested all that exists can be systematized. To a specialist in some field of science, chemisty and biology were very different areas, and the systems described - the things worked with - were not intrinsically linked in a way that suggested one was beholden to the other in any way. They could be studied as separate bodies of knowledge, and their inter-relation was not intrinsically necessary. It was entirely possible to view biology and life as the study of some will inherent to organisms, and the question of chemistry or physics was irrelevant to the study of life. Life in principle did not need to prefer any chemical or physical structure, and the language of life in principle could describe systems that were not physical or chemical at all. In practice, living organisms were physical objects and so they entailed chemical reactions, but none of those chemical or physical acts were inherently definitional for life as a process at all. Far from it, the life processes are described mathematically as something that need not regard any chemical basis. So too did sociology arise not as "applied biology" taken to the next level. Society entailed agents which were knowing in some way and behaved as such, and social agents did not need to be living agents for a society to exist. Indeed, I have made the argument that life as a process is parasitic on the world, and society overwhelmingly regards objects that are dead, whether they are objects appropriated by society, objects outside of society that may be claimed, or the parts of the human agent that are considered lifeless or something neither living nor dead. Life as a process is a scant part of society and the things we do, and life as a process does not possess any intrinsic authority to dictate what society ought to be. Life can dictate to some extent what society must be and what its history was, and the history of life and society are facts which are demonstrated often enough that they need not be questioned by any reasonable person. Every field which is in part dependent on a prior field contains within it definitions which emerged not from a combination of existing sciences, but concepts which are novel to it. If that were not the case, then there would be no need for the diversification of science into so many fields, and the eventual splitting of consciousness which has left humanity with the disease of crippling overspecialization and compartmentalization.

What general systems thought accomplishes is not a path to the truth but a path to institutionalizing all that is knowable into some framework. The quality of the science produced by such a process is dependent on the institution adjudicating every fact that is subjected to systems analysis or declared to be a system that can be analyzed. If that institution is nothing but personal opinion, then it grants authority not to individuals to create their own fact, but to those individuals who are capable of convincing others of a theory and structure that sounds good. Other individuals can only contest this persuasion if they are capable of holding their own ground through will and determination, rather than by some frank admission of the facts or some process which will resolve on its own the truth for all of us. Nothing about the practice of science or knowledge is fair or regards justice, for justice is ultimately a moral and political concept rather than a law of nature. There is no justice in the natural world, and very often human societies are less just than what the world and nature would have settled by its uninterrupted process. General systems thought could only develop in an environment where it was decided knowledge could be operationalized and held by institutions which excluded the workers and peasants, who had in the past been the men and women who utilized productive science and had the sole genuine interest in science as a tool for improving the conditions of everyone.

Systems thought would have appeared in some form because it was evidently useful to anyone who saw a connection uniting all sciences and technology, and it was latent in human society since Antiquity. It was explicit in the conception of liberal society that came to the forefront, itself a higher form of the philosophical state that had become standard for anyone with any interest in political thought. The approach towards systems as a thing commanded by institutions of the state, and the particular choice of systems that were seen as more relevant than others, was a choice of those who valued the eugenic interest over other interests that prevailed in society. Had it not been the eugenic interest that prevailed, and this was by no means destined to happen without hindsight to know how humanity did turn out, the institutional approach to science would not be overbearing or so obsessed with legalism and formalism. The very likely approach to systems thinking in a different world would have considered the system a mental tool like many humanity developed through their knowledge and reason, and we would not face this confusion concerning systems and what they are. The facts regarding systems would not be adjudicated by imperious institutions which insist that facts are decrees of will, but would be established on the basis of sense and reason shared by the general public. The default thinking, and one that systems thought relied on for so long, is that science inherently favored democratization, because science was understood in earlier times as the domain of common men and women and independent verification of facts was encouraged. It was independent verification which lent credibility to science as a method at all. It is entirely possible that a distinct authority regarding facts and truth could assert legitimacy. German, for example, does not have a direct translation of the English concept "science" that retains the meaning it acquired in English society, that was often understandable to non-English speakers as roughly what we expect. The German "Wissenschaft" entailed institutions adjudicating fact that included natural science and the humanities, which historically were not a subject of scientific inquiry but philosophy and political thought. There was no rule that human societies and politics were outside of the purview of science in the sense that word was relevant in English, but these things were never morally equivalent. It is also the case that science is practiced by humans, or knowing agents generally. Science is never conducted as if it were mere information processing or an assortment of facts connected only by formal arguments. Science to be useful had always entailed that the scientist can interpret meaning from information, because it was only by doing this that information could be relevant to the adjudication of facts. This is no different whether the practice was natural science or the humanities as they were commonly defined. A political thought or an inquisition like psychology is no less concerned with facts and evidence and meaning than science would be. Neither the human subjects nor science are beholden to any truth outside of knowledge or the institutions where it is carried out. The triumph of "Wissenschaft" is that the institutional approach to science would be internalized in humans, and this approach to science would override the native faculties that allowed science as a process to emerge independent of any formal institution. At some distant origin in the past, science was conducted by no institution at all in the sociological sense. Very often, science would be independently developed with some method approaching the scientific method in force today, without any institutional prodding to suggest that we "ought" to conduct our knowledge in that way. Many who practice science as a method can do so without knowing the word "science", and despite the lack of an adequate translation in many languages, it was never a great difficulty for a human of any race to comprehend the scientific approach to the world. Science and technology in some form was a practice stemming from knowledge that could be assembled with little formal knowledge, beyond a language and a few rules of thumb allowing someone to adjudicate scientific fact as they required to make judgements relevant to their life. Adapting to a formal institution of science is not as simple, and there has been throughout the history of institutional science and education a great struggle over which approach to science is valid. No singular approach to science can assert that it is self-evident and complete, thus eliminating forever further inquiry into the philosophy of science. It is also the case that no scientific paradigm can claim that it was the inexorable result of human progress, or somehow natural. Naturally, humans are not beholden to science or knowledge in any way other than to acknowledge that some process of knowledge exists. Even with this, humans are not beholden to regard knowledge in any particular way, and can just as well presume knowledge came from a god or some part unknown, or is unknowable, and continue operating in some capacity as if nothing had changed. It is entirely possible for a human to only periodically think in a way that is honest or scientific, and spend much of their knowledge process committed to lies, petty pleasures, indulgences, or some other pursuit that has nothing to do with honesty, truth, science, fact, or anything we would consider relevant to our cause here. It would be as if science, like so much else in life, were another absurdity with no spiritual value or authority, and there is not an argument in nature to suggest it needs to be any other way.

The intent implied by systems thought and systems analysis is not, in of itself, scientific. There is no way to adjudicate meaning in such a way that all meanings may be declared fact or fiction. Definitionally, science as a process does not concern itself with demonstrating all meanings and creating a "scientific world-system" which is total and irrefutable. Such thinking is the domain of institutional philosophy and alien to how we have conducted science. Nothing about science inherently suggests that there can be a state of "Absolute Idealism" or "Absolute Materialism", where all meanings are arrested and commanded, as a matter of fact. Science rests on a presumption that such a thing is theoretically possible, though it is not necessarily the desire of science to command the world, in some vain effort to cajole the world to do our bidding. Science has three functions that are apparent in our society. The first is that science exists for our pursuit of truth, without regard to anything we wish to do to the world. Some lines of science are pursued not for any goal or moral purpose, but because the scientist finds them intrinsically interesting or pursues something whimsical that may be of value at another time. We may expound on these hunches or develop from a rational kernel a very large theory and attempt to reconcile the theory with empirical facts. We may through the gathering of facts modify our initial hypothesis, and we can modify existing theories which we hold to be irrefutable. A theory in of itself does not constitute incontrovertable fact simply by writing a logical proof. Empirical evidence disputing the theory will remain a possibility, and all theories withstand sufficient evidence and independent inquiry to be credible. No matter what institutions may adjudicate to be factual - and this institutional adjudication is inherent to facts anywhere in knowledge - science as a process suggests that empirical evidence or any observation which does not comport with the theory's explanation can allow for revision of the theory, or throwing it out entirely. This can be pursued for purposes which make sense to the scientist, or for dishonest purposes. Nothing compels the scientist, or any human, to be honest about anything, and this applies to institutions as a whole. Science relies on fact to be definitionally science at all. There is no "science" that is contained within knowledge or meaning alone, if it cannot stake claims to facts that can be adjudicated. If science is reduced to a distinctly inferior process to the judgement of facts by philosophy or institutions or religion, then it is not meaningfully science at all. No religion or philosophy has ever stood opposed to science as a practice, nor could it, save for a few pernicious cults. All of these cults have only prevailed in societies where institutional science had established spiritual authority, which is to say, the bizarre thinking regarding science is a product of modernity alone. Specifically, the pernicious cults are all a response to the rise of the eugenic creed in the 19th century, and all of them are flagrant violations of spiritual authority with the intent of clearing the way for the imperial institutions. None of them would have been sensical in a different time, where the charge against science was against institutions, many of them contesting the right to claim science.

The denuding of spiritual authority is in the end the denuding of science as an institution and a daily practice. What is debated in "the science" is not a legitimate question, but a struggle for institutional control which is unmoored from any genuine history or truth, and intended to be so. The root of this, and this is clear as day to this author, is eugenics and the imperial cult surrounding it. Eugenics is premised on multiple fundamentally irrational claims that a child could see through and exists to deliberately cannibalize science and institutions, with the ultimate goal of cannibalizing the people, including its own adherents. It is, in short, the most absolute death cult humanity has ever created, and it escalates its crusade to new heights in the 21st century. It is that which inspired me to begin my writing.

The second aspect of science is something we have already dealt with at length - that science is perceived as a method to command and control the world, and systems thought seeks to realize that command and control. That is a topic for the next chapter. The third use of science is to purport a master theory or key which is total and inescapable, and it is this that institutions of science seek to describe, rather than the genuine truth of the world that science originally entailed. Grand theories and maniacs jumping up and down with mad prophecies have nothing to do with scientific inquiry that any of us would or should value, but this potential always existed in science because it existed in knowledge and the philosophical conceits surrounding it.

There are fourth and fifth interpretations of science which stem from the view I have described, which are often not explored. The fourth would be the full development of scientific thought if it were not fettered by these institutions and the conceits we hold about it. That would require us to be able to reckon with systems thought, among many other steps that are nowhere near realization. That world, if it ever exists, is far in the future and has never been a serious expectation of science that we have known. It only exists in a vague sense that does not yet have any institutional authority or practice, let alone credibility to overcome this impasse. In short, it would entail the full democratization of science and the defeat of imperious authorities dictating truth to us and ruling over us through their version of science. Since that is a topic far beyond my ability to write and would require writing a very different book, I elect to leave it to some future writer who might be able to save us from this beast. The fifth interpretation is the occulting of science, or the creation of multiple pseudosciences and an overarching theory for creating fresh pseudosciences. That is something I believe is already in effect, and I can only partially describe such practices for they are highly adaptive. At present, all such approaches are directed by institutions of science which control what pseudoscience has institutional authority. In the future, pseudoscience and occultism are likely to become the primary exposure to science in the lives of everyone, and science would appear like magic. This concept was something the imperial projects of the British Empire reveled in any promoted, and this was one instigator for institutional science taking the stance that it did, at odds with any interpretation of science we would consider useful.

With that background described, systems thought did not arise in a vacuum, as if a revelation from on high came to tell us like Prometheus how we are to think forevermore. Any new paradigm does not arise as if it were universally accepted by all in unison. Systems thought arises from humble beginnings in the 1930s, and there are disparate efforts in science to formulate such a thought from various angles. Nazis, Marxist communists, liberals, and people with no ideological bent all had variants on this. Imperial science had the greatest influence of all. Among the imperial projects was a "thinking machine" or a device that can automate governance. This began with the rational thought process and philosophical work on computability, which arrived eventually at the work of Alan Turing and many like him who found the computability problem fascinating and something that had wide applications in the long run. Turing's machine was a philosophical construct rather than an actual machine - Turing's paper envisions a human performing the instructions by rote, to simulate a machine that would theoretically accomplish the tasks Turing envisions. This machine was not definitionally any particular machine like an electronic computer today, but was any theoretical device that was capable of reproducing rational algorithmic thought. Cybernetics develops not just as a theory regarding information, but the governing of systems generally. Systems at this time still abide a thinking from earlier times which dealt with whole ideas or constructs conceived in the way philosophy had done for centuries. The work to regulate governance has immediate applications in war technology, and is expounded into a general rule to describe what this is. Cybernetics then suggests the origin of systems thought as something worth pursuing for its practical effects, rather than being merely a theoretical exercise.

Systems to be valid are described with facts which are contingent on a world existing, and in that world, facts are often informational. Not all facts are presented as information in pristine form - it is possible to accept as factual a thing which is not reducible to information alone, given our present understanding of what can be modeled. We may presume that all facts could be reduced to information which is propositional, and conversely that the whole of existence can be reduced to such facts and declarations of fact or fiction - substance or void. Whether that is an accurate assessment of the real world is less relevant than an ability to support that fact by reason, sense, and some authority which we hold to be valid for adjudication where reason and sense on their own are insufficient. Reason by itself possessing authority by virtue alone is meaningless, because in some way, any expression may be construed as "reason". The madman or a stupid man is still engaging in some process which is rationalizable, and in his own mind, the madman may have an elaborate reasoning aligning with what he knows the world to be in experience, or even regards facts which are no longer admissible to "official Reason". The only way capital-R Reason can hold this throne alone is to make assertions about what that Reason is that rely on claims that are never substantiated. The implication is that the throne of Reason is the arbiter of imperial authority alone, and that violence in the end is the supreme authority from which all others are derived. This is the propreitor's core claim about poliical legitimacy, stripped of any spiritual connotation. It is, at heart, the defining trait of the middle class in the prevailing political thinking, and the preferred image of the middle class to those who rule - that the middle class is definitionally venal, grasping, and obsessed with superficiality and cheap sentiments. This makes them very easy to control and steer, like well-bred cattle who will drive the lesser cattle in the mind of a small intellectual clique, hidden in plain sight because it is no longer admissible to suggest that what is happening is happening. Therefore, the rule of Reason alone, by any logic, is stupid and pointless. It would not matter what philosophical theory suggests this. It is so stupid that a child can see through it, especially when the throne of Reason is the aforementioned crazed man in a labcoat threatening nuclear war if anyone doesn't like the program, and that there is no way out. Totalitarianism describes most of all liberal democracies, who brag that they have done this and that the cattle have no way out. No knowledge or analysis would change the trap that has been set. If that is the case, what is the point of analyzing systems? If that is the case, then all systems are comprised of just-so facts and our analysis is irrelevant no matter how hard we try. This, in reality, is exactly the point. By expending the struggle of the cattle in futile exercises, where it is taboo to acknowledge any truth at work, reality can be controlled and all analysis is useless. Even if you know the truth, it is never admissible and no one can act on it. Knowledge will not set you free in its own right, and no praxis will dethrone the sitting regime no matter how many clever schemes are imagined to cajole the world in your favor. This exhaustion is the default state of the lower class, induced deliberately from early education and reinforced by the daily humiliations of managers. It is a science known to every human resources worker, who knows fully their function is to destroy as quickly as possible the despised workers who weren't useful, and have no place on the lifeboat or on the USS Make Shit Up.

If that is the case, then why should we bother? The only answer I have is that, in the end, knowing these things is intrinsically interesting, and it is better to see what the rulers are going to do tomorrow. Ignorance is not bliss, and I can tell you that over 40 years of seeing the result of that stupid koan. It is no surprise that every such koan, every pithy saying, is the exact opposite of what a reasonable person should do or believe. "Fake it until you make it" is a disgusting game which promotes the venal rat race, when it is clear that your qualities are tracked from birth and your assignment in society is dictated by others. No initiative of your own will ever be rewarded, and this is a line given to slaves to motivate them to work towards futile goals of the manager. "Never blame on malice what can be blamed on stupidity" is the exact opposite of the genuine situation. All of the terrible things we see in society are the result of malice which is known to some extent, rather than some accident that just-so happened. Genuine stupidity or ignorance is typically averse to any interaction with the world at all, and part of the reason for this is to induce fear in anyone who doubts themselves. This doubt is drilled into anyone who is not selected to promote or given expert status, thus regulating cybernetically who will be where and who is allowed to say what at any given time. I do not seek knowledge or information or meaning because I expect to win or change the world in any way. That is clearly no longer possible, even when the arguments for making even minor changes are apparent to everyone. If those who can wish to change anything, that is entirely their call. I do this because I have nothing else to do with my life, and to live in ignorance only makes the situation worse. I can know and save myself considerable aggravation, or I can encourage the rot like most do. I see no reason to encourage this rot any more than it has spread already, and at this point, there is no more keeping one's head down. I have nothing more to gain by pretending that this arrangement of society can work, and it appears that world has ended anyway.

Our first step for truly analyzing the system is to remove the human element so far as we can. We cannot change ourselves, or unilaterally declare we are no longer human. We are in fact products of humanity and its project, regardless of our status as human in the eyes of the law. That is not in dispute by anyone who has retained sanity. Any claims of transhuman ascension are delusions and the product of infatuation with technology and superficiality. No new technology changes significantly the stain and filth of the human race and all it entailed, and often those who embrace transhumanism are visibly degraded and insane individuals who are an embarassment by the low standards we hold for this race of apes. I hold that truth to be self-evident and it requires no further explanation, if we are familiar at all with the transhuman dogma. What this means is that we see the system not as a thing apart from us, but a reflection of human knowledge. If we wish to truly analyze systems, we would ask ourselves how human knowledge would differ from other hypothetical knowing entities. This opens us to many vulnerabilities, and so few people can actually think like this without going mad. Yet, we would have done this to become human in the first place, from the origins of humanity as a concept and the biological origins of human knowledge, or from our individual experience of being humanized from a state where we were born as animals, with no moral worth at conception or at birth in the eyes of society. Humanity is never something taken for granted or a singular proposition that is apart from the world. Those who act as if it is are profoundly anti-human in their outlook, and have advanced such a dogma deliberately. At the same time, this gives license to a belief that natural rights are "rights for the sake of rights", rather than an explanation of the origin of institutions. Those who advance that dogma advance an idea that all rights are hoarded by the strong against the weak, and that this process is natural and already decided. The intent is to declare the victory of eugenics as inexorable and asserting itself as if it were something spooky and apart from any will, and then to abase oneself to it as if it were God, or Satan depending on your stated proclivity.

The intellectual defense against this is to claim that they alone possess a monopoly on knowledge and analysis, and that is what has played out. It is insufficient for such intellectuals to merely claim that they are men and women of merit or distinction. They must claim all virtue, regardless of their stated ideology or rationale. Eugenics is just the latest form of an intellectual conceit held for a long time. It is a symptom of promoting knowledge as something with meaning far beyond anything knowledge ever possessed, and exhorting humanity to accept the primary of knowledge and particular institutions above anything that would be productive, useful in any defense or attack, or even something that would promote knowledge for any goal other than defending the institution of knowledge. Anyone who doesn't agree with this faces the ultimate charge and a crime greater than any other - political retardation. To suggest that these institutions do not possess this monopoly, however spurious the claim is given evidence, is tantamount to a hatred of knowledge in total, as if anyone who disagrees with this ruling idea were too stupid to see the Luciferian light. That we would consider this knowledge of the institution a thing that is either bullshit, or knowledge that could be taken by us at gunpoint and denied to them, is to be either insane or an unmentionable taboo. Intellectuals may have to concede temporarily that their institutions are not what they are purported to be, but this is only a temporary retreat. They are never going to abandon anything that feeds them, and few people would walk away from institutions that they see feeding them unless a replacement institution is in place. The intellectual conceit is that if one institution fails, they can invade another and co-opt it. This has always been their strategy, and it is the only one they ever need. The development of any independent institution from them must be ruthlessly attacked, and this is not something done because it is materially necessary or an inborn trait of the human race. It is a specific intent of intellectuals and the forms of government that they willfully pursue.

It is with that in mind that analyzing systems from outside the institutional authority can begin. We regard the adjudication of fact as what it is - a judgement from some institution - and judge for ourselves the institution. Never do we place trust in any institution, for we know the tendency of institutions in this regard. We even know ourselves to be liars to others, as we must in a hostile and antagonistic society. Trust given blindly is irrelevant to the proceedings here. We never trust another person. The only trust we place faith in is that there is a world, and that world is not beholden to any institution or any entity telling us what to think. If we look at systems as if they were emergent from the world, without regard to our conceits, we can then correct our own biases if needed, and we can through our biases and human faculties expound on those systems to meaningfully integrate them. We will never isolate perfectly all potential meanings and information in the way a crass systems thought insinuates, because the human subject itself - the part of the cybernetic network that is governed and automated, rather than the institution or its machines which operate freely and without regard for our law or will - is adaptable and resents greatly something which is a clear threat to its existence and happiness. If we cannot trust other people in affairs between humans, and we cannot do that any more, and we cannot trust the institutions that tell us that they will automate our thought, then we have only the option of engaging with the world directly as if we were a part of it, rather than subordinated to it. The alternative where we claim to be above the world is not the behavior of anyone who can function, given the clear imbalance of force and that we would be making ourselves alien from ourselves, as we are always part of the world no matter what conceit we hold about knowledge and mind. The best we could do to rise above the world is to imagine some other plane of existence that is yet tied to the world, but apart from society's value system. That is, we would need to detach as much as possible from the conceits of rulers and a belief that society is inescapable, especially when that society offers nothing but threats and lies and barely credible lies at that. If we see the world as something we are connected to, and human society correctly as an alien to our genuine existence, we have a proper framework for viewing systems. This does not merely apply to social or political systems, but any information system that is subject to those governing systems. And so, if we wished to study physical systems or biological systems, we would need to eliminate the pigheaded biases that willfully create confusion and retard our discussion. We would engage with physics and biology instead to observe the things we actually wanted, rather than social values pedagogically rammed into us. With biology, the systems taught in school are clearly political, where genetics is described with language unchanged from Mendel and stated incredulously, as if 150 years haven't passed since then. With such a poor grounding in biology, it is not surprising that idiotic science fiction tropes sell to a mass audience. The two feed off each other to perpetuate ignorance and the self-serving myths of the eugenic creed. It would be trivial to call bullshit on this, but institutions dogmatically assert eugenics because it is in their interest to do so, and it is similarly in the interest of many - but far from the majority - of men. To regulate the systems thought on biology, the institution only needs to associate any disagreement with eugenic biology with laughter, humiliation, shame, failure, sickness, and defeat. Imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, which you will see very often in eugenic society and its education.

By now, facts that are easily accessible from the world and our sense and would be adjudicated if judges were concerned with truth or fairness confirm what I have written, and it is not seriously denied. There is enough to admit what is happening. The way this adjudication of facts functions is not denial at the apex of the institutions. Those in the institutions have long understood the flaws in their machine. The way this is sold to the masses is to throw obvious lies in their face, one after another, and dare the masses to speak against it. If someone from the masses calls bullshit, they are ridiculed and destroyed, and the rest of the masses receive the hint that if they speak up or act out, more terror will happen. When mass riots result, snipers are posted throughout the city to shoot anyone who transgresses a planned riot and looting, which is assisted by mafias and functionaries drawn from lumpen who are amenable to this. In this way, the typical mass response to such lying, violent retaliation towards the insult, is controlled. Eventually the lying is perfected to trigger a response from the damned, and this is why ritual humiliations are encouraged as the greatest terror. This lie is then thrown in the face of mass audience through television and internet communications to shout "retard, retard, retard" at anyone who is not with the program, and the true facts are secured and occulted for a select group, who are alone allowed permission to speak of reality. It is a crime for the lower class to speak of reality beyond a limited purview permitted for them, and this purview is shrunk every year so the lower class can speak of less. The lower class is denied even genuine friendship or trust among each other, by the introduction of agents and invasion of private relations. The same methods are used on the valid classes, who have the reminder of the lowest class to see what happens if they refuse any order. In this way, behavior can be commanded, with full knowledge that this has worked as a totalizing machine for over 100 years. When living memory of a time before this machine has faded, it is possible to move to a higher stage and new depredations. That is what we live through presently.

We could consider the information of a smaller system, like a machine we commonly use, and dissect it with our native faculties quite easily. We would, if not encumbered with fear of knowledge and fear of how we would systematize knoweldge ourselves, be able to do this and record in a library what we did, and in this way, assemble for ourselves a working model for machines generally. It is the fear of knowledge and the demands of institutional authority which lead someone to choke and freeze when operating any machine, and this is generalized to interrupt any operation. This is intended, and this is why propaganda of technocrats bombards the subject with fear and a sense of inadequacy. Only in a limited purview is the exploration of machinery permitted. It is a fact which we must abide that even unencumbered, our knowledge faculty is limited, and a human only has what is available to it to build a knowledge base of facts. We are able to discern and work out meaning even without this laborious process, and through some vague recollection attain familiarity with machines. We may learn by doing, for example, without having a factual recollection of mechanical principles. If we do possess this, though, it would be trivial to formalize that knowledge and record it in some written account, and be able to adjudicate the facts of a machine and how we use it, in some way that can be communicated and verified as a useful method. We might compare other methods that are known to exist, and consider our method with the machine to be inferior to another. The aim of the technocrat is to tell you, whatever you do, that your method is wrong, and the only correct methods are fed pedagogically. No matter how flawed or ruinous the technocrat's pedagogy is, or if the method is intended to ensure your failure as a student, the technocratic idea insists that only institutions can adjudicate facts of systems. In this way, the social machine as a whole is regulated, so that each subject is sorted into their appropriate vocation. If that vocation is in the residuum, then this only intensifies the strength of the technocratic institution, regardless of the moral philosophy at work such as eugenics or some ideology or the grudges of officeholders.

Systems thinking as pure "information systems" promotes this self-doubt and managerial fear. The electronic computer as a device exists to manage. We can, if we are adept with the computer, recognize this characteristic about the algorithmic computer, and not allow it to corrupt our genuine knowledge and meaning. The algorithmic computer does not necessarily have to be this disease. It is the managerial society and its overlords that are the problem, rather than the computer itself having some ineffable force that degrades our consciousness. By understanding the principles of the computer and computer science, we would mitigate this invasion of the managers, and workmen would write their own programs. This is in fact what did happen as industrial automation gained traction in the post-war order. The trained managerial computer scientists were often not aware of industrial methods they sought to command and control, and their efforts to do so were always hostile to the working class. Ordinary line workers, out of necessity, wrote programs because the trained computer experts with a managerial mindset did not know how to connect basic meanings to allow the program to produce the desired industrial result. At this time, programs were simple things, as the computational power of the machine was limited and many programs could be understood as assembly or machine language. The computer as a mechanical device is remarkably simple, and what comes out is a great example of emergent properties in systems.

Let us suppose you are an ordinary computer user at home, and you like many home users have a setup with a keyboard, monitor, and all the things that a PC can do well. You have secured your computer by disconnecting it from the internet and any malware which may report directly to some authority. Having sense, you know not to let out any information that might be seen surreptiously, and that information should be occulted to prevent interlopers from their typical habit of interventions. What, exactly, do you do with this?

The mechanics of a basic computer are simple enough - a CPU reads instructions from a tape, one after another, and is attached to some hard drive and RAM memory. It is a little more complicated than this when considering firmware and operating systems, and particular formats for data storage, but essentially, the device is simple enough. The CPU's registers allow it to perform the basic operations of each machine language instruction, and every instruction is an operational code or opcode that performs exactly one instruction, or "rule of thumb" that the CPU is designed to carry out mechanically. The particulars for this can vary from one CPU to another, but generally the instruction set allows at the least for a machine as demonstrated in computer science that is essentially automating a rote rational task that is very simple. The computer does this very quickly, but doesn't have any inherent knoweldge - it just reads its instructions from the tape and carries them out faithfully, and if the program loops or encounters an op code telling it to break, then it does exactly that. Loops carry on until power to machine is lost or some switch is activated to tell the computer to stop doing this. Typically operating systems have some failsafe to break a loop, for example "Ctrl+Alt+Delete" which the operating system recognizes as an interrupt to stop whatever program it is running and either reboot or execute some routine. All such routines are exceptions that must either be implemented in the design of the machine itself, or are software which is intended to balance multiple tasks on the same tape. I leave out parallel processing or the cooperation of multiple CPUs for the time being, as this is something that is not directly a computational problem. Whatever the mechanical principles at work, the operation of the computer is similar - read instructions from tape, carry them out algorithmically, and respond to interrupts. For example, one interrupt common to many computers will be activated every frame to refresh the computer monitor, and the computer monitor is often set to refresh every 1/60th of a minute. Some refresh rates may be different and configurable, but the point is that this interrupt is called every time the CPU wishes to deliver instructions to draw something, and it is something most computer programmers are familiar with. There are other interrupts possible, and these interrupts are necessary so that writes necessary for monitor output are only executed during the period of vertical blank, as doing this during the period where a monitor is actively drawing the image will lead to difficulties. The interrupts and particulars that interface with a user are not relevant for the algorithmic task the computer performs. As mentioned, Turing's machine could be a human performing the instructions on paper, with the same intent as the machine. In that case, the true machine is the human body which operates on principles we are aware of, and all of those faculties are reduced to this task that is for the computer very trivial.

The human brain is not structured like this, because it was built not to compute but to first interface with a world in ways that we know well. The rational task is one we only hacked in after many millions of years of development in life, and humans being what they are do not follow rational instructions blindly. Far from it, everything about the human body suggests it is intended to correct errors and defend against their introduction into the machine, so far as those errors are the sort that would cause program crashes for an algorithm. This question of the human faculties is interesting but too elaborate to expound upon here, and not relevant to the points for the rest of this chapter, but the reader should be reminded that humans are not computers. We may imagine the human body is reducible to information and may be envisioned functioning as a system which can be analyzed and regulated, but it is a very large clockwork and a machine which by the nature of knowledge interfaces with its tools and the world, and so the faculties available to a human are never constrained to its body or brain. Humans, and most animals, are built specifically to allow this, whereas for the computer, every peripheral device, every output device, every input device, that interfaces with the physical world we know, must be communicated with through rational instructions. Monitors, speakers or audio output devices, keyboards, controllers, and so on, are all mechanical devices which must be engineered in ways that conform to the rational task of the computer. In this way, the computer is like us, in that the faculties accessible to it are expansible and conceivably as vast as our own. In some ways, the computer can assimilate appendages and tools very rapidly, whereas humans are rightly suspicious of being assimilated by new tools and have reasons to distrust technology. The computer crucially does not think about this problem, because its "knowing" is no more than the carrying out of instructions on tape, and the similar processes carried out in its peripherals. Speakers are designed to translate algorithmic instructions to something which must create a sound in the physical world, and sound is not merely digital information but a thing with properties apart from rationality alone. We may rationally model the function of the speaker and must do so to engineer one, and for digital information to translate to audio output. Likewise, audio input is translated to digital information, or some form of information that is computable. By no means are computers limited to digital information, but for many reasons, digital information is the easiest to work with, and is identified as the "lowest common denominator" of information in a rational sense. In principle, all that exists may be reduced to propositions of 0 and 1 - false or true, on or off - and construct out of this the full complexity of all possible things. There are difficulties in realizing this from a simulation, constucted in our abstract model, to something that can be displayed. This is a problem of reducibility - that in many systems, they are not reducible to abstractions that can adequately display the meaning that a user would need to believe the simulation to resemble its sense of the world, and thus the real world. Even by simple facts, this problem of reducibility implies something about computable problems and how systems may be abstracted. It may be that a system is only reducible to itself, and cannot be reduced any further.

It beehoves the user of any machine to be familiar with the constituent materials and their physical properties. All of the devices of a computer, and all of the devices of a human body, are material things about which we know much. With regards to information, we regard information as a limited thing, because it only exists in the processes of knowing entities - that is, entities like us. Computers are built specifically to do a thing we would do but found a way to automate, and the computer executes this instructions rapidly. Even if we imagine a very advanced computer processing vast information, architecturally it is still as described - reading instructions from a single tape, which is the sum total of all it actually "knows". This knowing is not knowing at all, as similar processes exist throughout nature without any direct information processing. We can construe all that interfaces with the world as information, but this is always something for our sake rather than the true form of anything. Information for us is limited to what knowledge deems useful enough or can even process as information, and in all events, information processing in any entity is limited. There is no possibility of "infinite information", but in the natural world, infinite regress would not in any way impede the function of things. Far from it - the natural world implies infinite regress is common and necessary for us to speak of any contiguous space or reality, and there is no argument that can withstand scrutiny to suggest that reality itself is discrete. Even if space were discrete, reality cannot be, for if that were the case, we would not be able to imagine unlimited subdivision of it - it would be something that is not admissible or a fantasy, yet we can easily imagine splitting a thing in half, then half again, and so on, and seeing infinitely many segments. Those splits are not always fungible. There is no way to split a car, a mechanical device whose parts must all be in working order to be functionally a car, into two and create two cars out of one, nor is there any substance called "car" which is freely exchangeable. In descriptions of space and reality itself, though, there is no defined lower boundary that we can identify as the smallest possible thing. Of all the things we identify in the world, such a particles, we may consider a smallest possible size or default size of the form, or that these particles conform so closely to expectations that they are effectively standardized in the natural world. If that is so, then we could not split these particles or atoms into two and imagine two halves of the same substance, operating at a smaller scale. The system that is an atom or particle implies that it would need to be unitary to remain stable, not because this is a law written by a hobgoblin, but because to be the thing we have described, it must remain in one piece. Splitting a particle would release energy contained within with consequences we know well enough, and in any event, the system of a particle would not split into two inert wholes, but would disintegrate and scatter into whatever its constituents would do, whatever those constituents may be. We may imagine some raw energy or substance that we cannot describe, but the moment we describe it, we would need to fix it definitionally and in doing so, breaking or subdividing it would not be a trivial thing, and we would not be able to prove apropos of nothing that this thing could be arbitrarily divided and retain the same meaning. Even if we describe it as a substance, the very definition of a particular substance as a real thing implies it is fixed in some way as that, and any transformation or change in it would either abide the mechanistic properties of systems and thus not be a true philosophical "substance", or the essence is effectively immutable and change is impossible of that thing. It would be something seen as fundamental to the universe, and while we may operate with that principle out of necessity, such an essence is of no relevance to systems thinking. To isolate something as a system places it as something which is understood mechanistically, and any essence of substance would be in the system accepted as-is or "just-so", about which nothing more can be described. We could place these essences into systems if we like, but when we do so, we are inserting a thing that is really a product of our conceit about the world, rather than something we can prove as a philosophical reality that is incontrovertible fact. We may take it as self-evident that there is such a thing as substance or essence, but we would be unable to speak of it other than assert its existence, or the existence of multiple such essences. Such things are not subject to any analysis of mechanics, other than to assert their existence in a model. In other words, the essences would really be symbols for us which we declare meaningful and factual, rather than true things that are automatically adjudicated factual to all observers. We can easily disagree about the nature of the substance or essence, as many have throughout history in matters ranging from natural science, theoretical physics, theology, to arguing over the essence of stupid things in casual conversation because we're too lazy to think about what those things are, like for example which video game has the "arcade feel" which is dubiously asserted to be real.

The material components of all of these things and the mechanics acquired by common sense is an exercise for the reader to dissassemble, if they choose. Such an investigation is interesting for our approach to systems because the approach is rooted in rational thought, which entails a number of systems already extant for us before we systematize and formalize all of that knowledge. We would be stuck in self-indulgence if we elaborated all of those things, and it would be apparent that there are general laws describing all systems and all things we do. We do not need to systematize all things, and not all things are "system". Highly abstract concepts need not be things to behold as if they were objects, but are concepts understood and rooted in something that can be seen in systems. We do not systematize "honor" easily but we can comprehend the concept and its affect on systems, treating it as a thing not systematized but not essential either. It is instead a meaning attained from considerable experience, which is never fully written down and is adaptive to new social situations in which the question of honor may be reconsidered. New technology and mechanisms create circumstances that our consideration of honor did not consider. The same can be said of love, hatred, malice, and concpets which appear fixed in our sentiments, but change when we encounter new situations. We leave the passions, sentiments, and very complex concepts of meaning or things defying easy systematization for another time. The point relevant here is that while we can systematize many things and it makes sense to do so, there are forces guiding our thought and purpose in assembling systems which are not systemic, and which are not things that can be easily modeled if we integrated them into a system. All of the moral sentiments can only be understood as ethical statements processed by rationality in a systems thinking, and ethics in of itself does not provide any motivation. Ethics instead is a rational way for us to ask if systems, among other things, align with our moral considerations in light of reason. If we are to consider our moral question in systems as something to reduce to a crass symbol, or a very poor ethics, we would cheapen it if moral sentiments and convictions are at the heart of the system. For example, describing social systems as the movement of passionless agents elides many of the true justifications for human behavior, and so studying sociology must either limit its models, or provide for an accurate accounting of moral behavior to make certain claims about the purpose of society or institutions. As I will claim in another writing, institutions face a persistent difficulty in that they never do what they purport to do, no matter our design or our faith that certain institutions possess the dominant moral sentiment and monopolize it.

The only moral sentiment which can be consistently modeled in systems is one we recognize instinctively - suffering. All other moral stances are eliminated if morality is reduced to a substance defying description. We can of course describe suffering as meaningful in various ways, but the one constant is that this suffering is a thing we do seek to understand and recognize symbolically, and we seek to recognize the sources of it so that they can be avoided or destroyed. With moral sentiments in any form that can be useful for systems, each moral sentiment is taken as-is and granted a scalar quantity, even though this eliminates all consideration of the qualities inherent in that moral position. The moral position is never defined as a scale between two opposite ideas which in reality detail completely different moral concepts, but as a quantity of that one trait - for example, "badness" or "suffering" or "love" - to be measured. There is no reason we would have to do this by nature, as if moral sentiments were some substance of the universe. Quite to the contrary, if we were concerned with psychological stimuli, it would be possible to manipulate receptors or feed a subject ideology to attach to minor events great moral significance. The substance of opium is not energy-intensive or intrinsically meaningful beyond its use as a painkiller, but if we wished a simple pleasure, we would feed a subject quantities of cheap but effective drugs and allow them the comfort to enjoy them safely. The comfort is often a fixed condition of security, and the simplest security we could find is to not allow others to contact us in the first place. There is no rule to suggest that humans are obligated to abide any social relation, and given human history there is a lot of evidence suggesting humans are too hostile to be in many social situations without an elaborate understanding between the participants. No social relation can be taken as a natural order or something built in to humanity, and those social relations which are closest to nature have clear mechanisms suggesting their function. For example, every human is born to a mother, and the mother's nurture and child's attachment is so common that it happens without great training for the mother or the infant. Even if humans were born in some vat, industry would find it difficult to strip humans from a condition where they seek nurture. The mother need not reciprocate this as if she were naturally inclined to breed and nurture, and many times mothers do not want their children and throw them away callously. There is in humans a sentimental attachment for causes which are never wholly explicable by facts, but many facts suggest rationales for this attachment, like a need for security given knowledge of a highly predatory society and the known predatory qualities of the human race. Banding together with superior numbers is a simple enough strategy that animals can manage it, and humans being what they are can figure out the arithmetic and count as high as they like, knowing that more is better than less in a struggle of force. Suffering stands alone in that, in some sense, it is the great force binding humans to the world no matter what their conceits. We could have chosen to be part of the world or acknowledge it for what it is, and recognize that life entails much more than suffering, and that the world is much bigger than the sum total of our knowledge let alone moral conceits. Perhaps in that way, we would have a fuller understanding of moral stances and why we would regard them. We would, if we were a race with any sound mind, recognize that suffering would be such a small part of existence, if not for a persistent will in the race that saw in suffering an advantage to gain, and some enjoyment in its infliction which takes on a moral value of its own. It is that sadism that is the true meaning of the utilitarian's "pleasure". Put another way, pleasure and pain is a way of recapitulating the master-slave relationship or dialectic, and insinuating that this is the only thing there is, with pleasure associated with a certain morality which emphasizes not the ideal of a master, but the act which allows masters to command slaves most of all - that pleasure is defined by the command of others, and the easiest inroad to command others is to make them suffer. The view of quantities of pleasure or pain is not a genuine fact of the world, because such quantities are indescribable and wouldn't be freely exchangeable between each other. The slave does not need the master for anything, for the master and the entire institution of slavery is nothing but an imposition founded on threats and lies, and the master could kill the slave for the thrill it gives him and do the work himself.

In the system any such complexity would itself be a system with multiple parts, and so each part is reduced to that which is useful. The system to be meaningful scientifically can only concern facts, whether it is the parts or their relations. In the abstract, we assign to the parts quantification describing their weight and qualities describing their form and functions. The facts only concern those things which are, and the functions that can be ascribed to them. In this, the system appears as nothing more than a mechanistic clockwork. To analyze it though is never purely a question of observing each part and stating matter-of-factly that this part does one thing, or another. To meaningfully make use of a system and analyze what in total it does, we describe the whole system, which need not be centered around any particular part or relationship. Simply by the proposition of the parts and their relations, a wholly different part is envisioned as the whole, which can be described in ways that the original propositions cannot. The concepts in systems can be things which only make sense in the context of multiple parts, which would have no reason to exist otherwise. For example, we know the players and equipment required for a game of baseball, and the actions players may take that are mechanistically obvious, like pitching, batting, catching, throwing to members of the defending team, the status of tagging a player as "out", the status where a player is safe if he is on a base, the status of scoring a run, the conditions in which a homerun is scored. That is, the basic terminology of baseball concerns parts which by themselves are meaningless. It appears as if grown men are hitting a ball with a bat, which is not particular impressive nor demonstrates any particular athletic skill or tactics that are evidently useful. It is the description of plays, strategies, terminology which is specific like "sacrifice fly" which don't need to be understood mechanistically to observe the mechanics of the game but is strategically relevant and understood to those who have seen enough baseball games or consider baseball's game theory or the science of the game. The conduct of the players and the pressure of the batter varies based on the conditions of play, which are assessed by all players and by spectators to figure out what is going on. The meaning of scoring or why anyone cares about this game is not explicable without context, some of which is supplied outside of the system. It is, after all, a game, not a total system or institution that have life-changing importance. Morally, little is at stake with such a game, and reasonable people understand that it is a game, then go home whether they are players or spectators. A fun time is had by all hopefully, and the rituals of baseball spectators are not mechanistically important for playing the game, but a large factor in the sport's appeal to afficionados. The players may sense the crowd, interact with spectators, and some obnoxious spectator in the crowd might shout something to demean a player he doesn't like. A professional player will tune this out and focus on the task at hand, but it would eat away at a player to know that he is hated throughout the league, and there is some reason why that happens. It may not be a good reason and it may be based on bullshit, but it might have something to do with the game itself or a prior game, and the mechanics of the game - some failed play or error that should have been obvious - play a part if some player is known to choke. Impressive feats are noteworthy, and season and career statistics are an obsession of those who follow the science of the sport or just find statistics fascinating. Any game is, in total, a system about which many meaningful things can be said, and this is just one example of how relevant meaning arises not from a flat description of facts, but meanings that are contingent on facts both within and outside of a system.

Because every part of a system is substantive in some way - even a system held in the imagination is rooted in some substantive thought to be held, and the parts are always imagined to possess substance of a type if they are to be valid parts or acts, for the purposes of some thought experiment we are conducting - that substance is never purely a unitary quantity, but a quantity assigned to that part. It often is a unitary quantity, and when dealing with certain facts regarding a sysetm, non-unitary values of a part are not conceivable under normal circumstances. The quantity only becomes a value in the sense we appreciate it when that quantity or number symbolizing quantity is associated with a meaning that is contingent on a world that exists. No value truly exists alone or in isolation. Even if the value is a judgement we made in our mind, with no relevance to our conduct in society, there is a reason why we saw that as a value rather than just a number or a fact of some quantity. For example, a bunch of 7 apples is ascribed the value "7 apples" rather than "7", and we are able to make the comparison when considering other units, so that we do not conflate apples and oranges. If we were to model this bunch of apples in a computer program, the object type "apple" and a part of it we will call "quantity" are not intrinsically linked. We could in memory store the number "7" at some memory address, and if we were to speak of something at a particular memory address in some computer, that number is considered a value associated with that memory address. By itself, though, "7" is meaningless, and without a memory address holding it, it has no substantive existence. If the memory address is somehow lost to the programmer, which happens in some large programs with dropped pointers, then the only value of 7 is that it is sitting somewhere in computer memory, but not associated with any object in the simulation. The number is only appreciable as the value we intended when it is associated with the object "bunch of apples". We could attain a similar result if the program simulated each individual apple, and an object named "bunch" pointed to each one, or contained pointers to any type of fruit in the simulation. We could write a function of the "bunch" object to count each object it is pointing to, and summarize the total of each type of fruit. In this way, the program would generate the output of "7" and we would have for our purposes the value of 7, even though the symbol is nowhere in the computer program. It seems pedantic and silly to make this point, but for a system to be meaningful in the abstract, it implies meaning can be read from it, and it must be possible to do this for the system to be "beheld". Without this meaning, the whole system is nothing but disconnected parts and associations, and we would piece together the mechanics part by part and construct a whole simply by a definition of its parts, or some definition which presumes the wholeness of the composite and doesn't deal adequately with its parts. For a whole which is comprised of disparate parts which can be rearranged to produce funcitonally different wholes, which can be described with language that is not applicable to all possible wholes, a simple mechanistic description is limited. All of the systems considered must be mechanical at their heart. There is no system without parts doing things. If the parts do nothing, then there is nothing genuinely uniting them except the arbitrary will of someone who decides that this thing is in fact a system. Systems to be meaningful consider their relations to be mechanistic. Otherwise, the system is a pseudoscience or a metaphorical description that is granted the status of theory or fact because it might be useful.

A difficulty with general systems thought is that all aspects of systems must be formalized, and so these meanings too are isolated and documented laboriously, absorbing all meanings into some facts which are symbolic. The effect is that systems thought of this sort is very prone to reifing things which are abstract, simplifying things which are not easy to explain by some grand theory, or things that simply don't exist at all and are made to exist by calling it a system. When analyzing systems, it is most helpful to recall that they are always the result of mechanistic actions in concert, and no part of a system can "just be" while remaining factual or meaningful. The "vitalist position" of a wholistic system does not grant to the whole special properties. Accumulations of multiple parts of a system, no matter how disjointed, can still be described as "wholes" and ascribed properties as a collective. It is possible to carve up a country into three and call each a whole system, and then say that the carving never happened and it was actually one country, thus subsuming the "wholistic" sense of the three parts, which consist of many parts themselves and mechanisms.

It is only through the development of meaning, and the proper foundation for originating systems thought, that systems thought can be appreciated as a useful approach to things which naively appear as clockworks or mechanistic actions. Mechanism by itself does not allow this approach. There are consequences to doing this. The systems approach is very knowledge-centered and centered on human observers, which has been a pernicious disease in science leading to grotesque pseudoscience. Sometimes this arises from the continental refusal to speak of non-institutional science and spread bullshit, and other times it comes from deliberate Anglophone bastardizations to prop up the moronic pseudo-philosophies of liberalism in the late 20th century. Both of these were developed during a period of deliberate mystification and propped each other up, and their overall effect was to shout "fool, fool, fool" to anyone who was not a member of institutions that adjudicated science now. General systems thought originating in institutional science, rather than a sense a normal person would have assembled independently and frequently, explains these biases and why it was chosen as a paradigm. Yet, the institutions elide any part of knowledge that would give to systems thought useful applications. That is either established in elaborate philosophies which formalize the process, or it is a secret that members of the institution and would-be hackers figure out themselves, by some dumb luck or haphazard discovery of philosophical principles. The advantage of many systems thinkers and the prolieration of reading material is that this haphazard discovery occurs far more often than it would in the past. Widespread availability of philosophical texts allows many without any institutional buy-in to figure out what the philosophers wrote and did, without the necessary bias of the institutions or a commitment to their pedagogy and format. Many without any great grounding work out by reverse-engineering principles of knowledge similar to the ones I described. That is, they note, whether they acknowledge it or not, information and meaning as distinct steps in the process of knowledge and its communication. We are able to tell the difference between information that is meaningful or factual and information which is garbage. As many millions of people are familiar now with the computer, we are more aware today of information and the dangers inherent to it. It is a belief of mystifiers that information can be fetishized and reified by ideology, but many ordinary people have called bullshit on this entire approach. These ordinary people did not need any great philosopher to teach them how to smell bullshit, and often the ordinary people saw philosophy as a disease to be avoided. This prudent choice often spared them from indulgence in ideology altogether, while exposing them to vulnerabilities. Ordinary people are, whatever the propensity of the human race, too decent to consider the volume of lying that has been undertaken in the past 50 years, which is a thing far beyond the lying of the previous 50 years. The habitual lying of neoliberalism is a very different beast from the Big Lie of ideologies and the interwar and postwar propaganda and psychology projects. Political insanity was at first the mainstay, but under neoliberalism, political retardation and charges of inborn ignorance become the preferred line of attack. Where political insanity favored the development of systems thought and in some sense corralled its interpretation while leaving open avenues for those who were a touch mad, political retardation sought to streamline entirely the interpretation of systems by dumbing down the general populace and bombarding them with so much disinformation that they could not possibly compute the full extent of what was done to them. There are many who understood the general approach of neoliberal society, but few who could describe in full the depravity in the institutions. So many had to believe that there was, at least out of some self-interest, nothing so thoroughgoing as the program in force to lie to everyone about everything every time. To conceive of so much lying required computerization to even allow propagandists to spew that much information, and to collect all of the information and sort it. The eugenic clerk is obsessive with assembling information, producing a false record for public consumption and institutional obfuscation, and the real record which is always following you. This is how it appears that the Thought Police in Oceania are so efficient - because a dual system of deliberate and malicious incompetence is instituted as the official science, while the real science is practiced by specialists, sometimes limited to the purview of the specialist as is the custom, but with a growing number of thinkers able to work across fields, and those with a knack finding that they have a taste for sadism and ample employment opportunities if they believe the right things and have no shame.

That knack is often reduced in thought to a concept of general intelligence or pattern recognition. At root, this general intelligence is nothing more than a heightened ability to recognize patterns, some part of which is inborn in a way that is vaguely specified but generally accepted. There are documented metrics for testing this pattern recognition which are well known by now. Those metrics are not in of themselves the thing "general intelligence", but are an indicator which presumably ties to an ability to connect meaning, which is necessary for analyzing systems formally and for assessing what things are generally. Therefore, tests for general intelligence often concern basic pattern recognition, discerning shapes and picking up language patterns, or composing speech or writing. Those tests are considered neutral enough that they are acceptable enough to make some assessment about baseline intelligence, and because this pattern recognition is necessary for grasping systems and abstractions generally, it operates over a wide number of fields, and is picked up without any formal education. There are ways to hone and practice this talent, and ways to degrade this talent either by moral sloth of someone internally, or forceful intervention. There is no way to pedagogically force this talent to improve significantly by commanding it to exist, or cajoling someone - typically a child - to think faster or different. Learning this talent and practicing it for improvement implies that the self is motivated to do so, and that is not always the case. It could very well be that a child, recognizing the society, knows that exposing this general intelligence only leads others to demand more from the child, for no reward. What usually happens with general intelligence is not an honest assessment or any effort to improve it out of a sense that doing so would be beneficial to oneself or any part of society. General intelligence would be, from the outset, politicized and used to make claims that have nothing to do with general intelligence or its wider functions. This is the central claim of the eugenic creed, from which all of its baldfaced lies, sadism, and conceits about intelligence and society arise. General intelligence for the eugenist is conflated with the sadism of their race and their preferred belief about perfecting that race, which effectively meant selecting for other sadists and calling that "intelligence" or proof thereof, rather than any general intelligence that would be useful. Far more often, the eugenist seeks to destroy and degrade anyone demonstrating this intelligence, or any moral drive and will to act contrary to the creed, first with humiliations and threats and violence, and then with biological interventions and more sophisticated torture and death that would only be possible with scientific deliberation. That is where the use of forced drugging, chopping up brains, and more elaborate torture mechanisms are developed. This is among the projects of the eugenic creed that are central to the current situation, and the true nature and extent of these projects is mystified and conflated with other things which are not this project. "MKULTRA" is often used as a code word for this, but the MKULTRA work - which was documented to a large extent and the general purpose of that discernable, which concerned a wide range of matters - concerned primarily the control of healthy subjects that were deemed fit for reality control. Stupid or insane people were not worthwhile mind control subjects, and the tools used to degrade those cast out of society were older, much more thoroughgoing, and of little interest to someone who wanted to mind control people they considered worth mind controlling. The particulars of that project are far beyond the scope of this writing and I have little interest in writing about CIA work in that area directly, as that has been done by far better writers who work with the source material, or were themselves active in MKULTRA work. What I can say is that the work in that area is vast, and continued until multiple fronts for much different reasons, and there is a considerable part of society that has no problem with mind control and even envies those who can follow that. America and the Empire are a vast torture and mind control chamber, and the ways in which we are lied to and brainwashed to accept anything extended far beyond a single CIA initiative, and permeate in the society in many ways. It has long been an obsession of every ruling interest and class to possess this ability to control minds, so it is not as if the CIA, through some magic, did something that was previously unspeakable and taboo. So much of education, philosophy, and religion, entailed mind control and manipulation, and the mother commanding her child and making him - usually her boys because males were the sex allowed to enter political affairs - into a puppet for her advancement. The question is not whether mind control is possible, but whether it can be resisted, for efforts to control the mind and cajole subjects have been a feature of human existence for as long as we can remember. The advance of the past century has been to demonstrably prove that humans have no resistance to this mind control by nature, and that the cost of shielding oneself from can be set as high as the state and ruling power, or any interest with a mind to control another, can make it. In short, the advance of the past century is that freedom in a genuine sense is no longer a serious proposition, because freedom implied security which is physically impossible and technology appears as a geist from afar, rather than a tool in the hands of any particular person. The mechanisms which make this apperance possible and reproduce the illusion en masse are too vast to describe in any one book, and are not the topic of relevance at the moment.

I bring up this general intelligence here becuse intelligence would take on importance in the past century that it did not possess historically. In the past, whatever faculty of intelligence one possessed, the tools and mechanisms available to any person were not so different that a single man or woman could appear to command functions beyond the reckoning of mere mortals. However mighty a king or priest or pharaoh appeared, it was still understood that behind the trappings, prestige, and allure of a cult there was still a human whose baseline functions were not terribly different from the commoner's or the slave's. Whatever the talents of the favored groups, there was no mechanism for those talents to allow them an individual advantage so great to appear as if they are actually gods, and peasants and subjects in any society have long called bullshit on aristocratic pretensions, whether it is legal to do so or not or whether the political theory is republican, despotic, tribal, urban, or some form of abject slavery through fear. Whatever the story, the prestige of rulers was contingent not on some great technology of secret of knowledge, but on their command of other men, by quantities of wealth available to them, and by whatever machine they possessed to rule subjects through fear. It would be great in principle if a soveriegn or some philosopher-king could rule by the kinder virtues, but the general rule for most of human history is that humans are nasty, and no one buys any theory suggesting humans are good because they are smart or intrinsically good. Republican philosophers don't even suggest humans are "natural good", but rather suggest the opposite - that humans are so nasty that no one man should rule despotically, and that it is through the world and the rule of intellect over genuine material conditions that the republic is secured. Nothing about that structure suggests goodness in the lower classes, and further suggests that goodness would be enforced by violently exterminating any subject who did not conform to the philosopher's conceit of good. Republics as a rule have played out this prejudice of the intellectual, and this is one of the reasons why nations where despotism is the rule look at it and say that republics are a terrible idea. This will be revisited in another writing, but for now, the drive for general intelligence and eugenics at the level of the state is latent in the republican form of government, and it pursues this aims not for the genuine benefits of those qualities but for political conceits that are at odds with the material benefits of technology. Any society would value knowledge and intelligence for all of the reasons that make practical sense, and tribal societies throughout the world are no less interested in tests of intelligence and judging social advancement by this intelligence. The particular political conceits about intelligence that are a sickness of republican societies are the petty biases of classes, who revel in the superficial and this program of deliberate lying and sadism that now defines the republican mindset.

The elaborate formalism regarding systems thought described here arose in societies dominated by this republican idea, and in particular the conceits regarding life. European autocracies, whether they were monarchies or what became fascist states, inherited less the traditions of despotism or the simple instinct for rule that is the norm of the human race. They always refer to a republican concept of society that seeks to impose the state on the world, and the same is true of republics that retain the genuine intent of such a form of government, where no one autocrat or interest is dominant and the state forms either an oligarchy or is governed by some virtue which was considered worthwhile. A full accounting of why this happens requires a mechanistic view of republics from the world they arise in, to the agents who are governed, to the institutions that are built and their available technology in a given era, which will change dramatically the outcome of such a government. Systems thought then is informed by the dominance of this idea in the philosophical and aristocratic mind, and the rest of us adapt to that out of necessity. It might have arisen independently, for this concept of a philosophical state was not something handed down from heaven, but something that itself was rooted in premises that were discovered by men in the world, no different from observations someone would make independently. The consolidation of institutions in modernity allowed the potential of those institutions to take over knowledge, whose natural seat was in actual human entities with bodies and interactions, and those institutions sought to override and command most of the people because they could and had developed an ingenuious means to do so. If that is possible, and it is clearly possible or else we would not speak of systems thought, then ordinary people who are not by nature "systems thinkers" adopt the thinking of it. They may do so in imperfect forms that they reverse-engineer from seeing the society they live in, or they receive bastardized interpretations which mystify "the system" without describing a single mechanistic action within, or they are pulled aside and taught the formalism and granted by the ruling institution a place in that machine, and trained to fill their part and only perform the mechanistic actions dictated by the institution. In this way, the vision of a republic reaches its endgame. Institutions rule as airy and vaguely defined abstractions, intentionally obfuscating their mechanisms in ways that were previously impossible, for there was no ability to produce such a volume of lies and cover the whole society, and every minor mechanistic interaction between agents, with such lies. Had such a thing been attempted in the past, it would meet eventual resistance, and the encroachment of institutions into the mind of agents could only proceed so far. In the past, this could only proceed so far, and encroachment was counterproductive for the genuine goals of the institution, because republics had to contend with a world that did not share their vision or incentives. Therefore, struggle between states was a matter of life and death rather than a game, at least in some sense. Struggles within a republican society are always stoked by the ruling interest, who are never truly at risk and find ways to adpat to any superficial change of government or changes in the ruling interests. Men are inclined to move from one ruling interest to another and are never obligated to any particular institution or practice due to the idea being greater than anything real. As modernity progressed, people in particular institutions understood what they held and that they could, through an elaborate game of deception and the deployment of technology in every interaction in the domain, lock in their status and proceed to maximize the reward they extract from agents in the society. This was in line with the purpose of republics, which had nothing at all to do with kindness for its own sake. The republic historically has been a construct of nasty men and women who think nothing of glorifying war and torture, and consider that virtuous. All modernity did was grant to the worst of them the means to impose their heart's desire to the maximum, eliminate anything else in the knowledge of those who are rule, and strip from their own ranks anyone who would break from this practice of rule.

At the same time general systems thought would be promoted as a paradigm to the general public, it was necessary to mystify it and control precisely theories of knowledge, so that its genuine purposes would be understood not for what they would mean if we were not encumbered by institutions and their adjudication of facts for us. This took not just two forms where one group knew all and another knew nothing, but it was necessary to promote the idea that knowledge was all-or-nothing - that there was a valid group who was allowed to speak, and an invalid group that were transformed into animals. In practice, members of both groups are given a version of systems thought that is appropriate for their assigned task, often emphasizing their field of specialization or a mentality that serves a crass incentive, and told that this system is the one total system. Comparisons between them are treated for the believers as heresy, insanity, or "speaking retarded". There is then a morphing of the ways in which people speak at a minute level, and control of speech patterns. A superficial standard for accents and phraseology is promoted as "the normal", but each group is granted a distinct vocabulary and way of expression which makes them alien to other groups. The expectation is that this alienation in speech, fed by pedagogy and enforced by taboos, laws, and violent interventions of educational institutions, will make each group live in its own bubble and world, where their thoughts can be controlled minutely. The same process is carried out with individuals, whose peculiarities and quirks are documented and recorded. The institution governing correct thoughts and expression compiles this information which follows the subject everywhere he or she may go in the society and the world it commands, and it is taboo to acknowledge that this even happens, let alone communicate across different groups who now are told they represent different interests, and that all interests outside of the ruling interest are diametrically opposed to all others, simultaneously and equally. We see here the formation of groups around identity or around crass interests, where all members of society are told to hold on to their patch of the world that allows them standing in the republic. That small patch of property is then systematically threatened by the ruling interest, with no ability of the ruled to contest this, but the purpose of the threat is not necessarily to take all of it back, but to leave the ruled with as little as possible while maintaining their loyalty and internecine conflict with one another. Those who rule revel and attend secret parties, which is understood as the only "real" thing in the society. The lives of the ruled are fake, called spectacles and treated with the utmost contempt, whether they are the habits of the lower class who are fed garbage and degeneracy, or the habits of the middle class where stupid and infantilized pseudo-intellectualism is presented as high wisdom, with a wink and nod to suggest to some members of the middle class that they "get it" more than others. No one really gets it unless they are invited to the ruling interest parties of the high, and those who are in that club laugh at the entire apparatus. They do not suffer the way the lower classes do at all, and everything the High will do flaunts this and throws it in the face of the ruled. The republic reaches its inevitable conclusion, and the true purpose of such a government form. The End of History is declared, as had been the dream of would-be autocrats, and this is embraced by liberal societies, communist socities, fascist societies, and every other society because it feeds the conceits of anyone with any leverage in this machine. A whole society ruled by vanity and empty pursuits can be made true and meaningful by decree, and every independent analysis will tell you that this is the only way it could be - because that indeed is the state of affairs in humanity, so long as such an apparatus in the interest of enough people. Those people who benefit from the arrangement select each other for promotion and for mating, and those who reject the idea are systematically demoted, humiliated, and weeded out of the population altogether by one means or another. This function need not be eugenic, as it can conform to a purely ideological or political conceit of rule, and this function may be understood as a way to build the world of tomorrow, where a lie is told that this state of affairs is only temporary. Visions of a bright and happy future are promoted, and sometimes these visions entail fairness and kindness that are always with-held from the ruled so that their behavior may be controlled. It never happens, because no one in this arrangement has any incentive to allow the world to be anything more than it needs to be, and an element in that society see that they can, through the machine, maximize torture and suffering and that, properly arranged, nothing in the world would stop them. That is not inherent to systems thought or repoublics. It is possible that the holders of the institution could see on some level that this must transform to reckon with conditions in the future, and that some of the holders of the institution can see the intent of the worst in humanity. By nature, though, the venal and sadistic are favored in the arrangement, and have indeed insinuated themselves because there was nothing in the institution that would stop them, and those people have through a number of means expanded their numbers and suppressed anyone who wanted a different society and different mechanisms, or at least mechanisms compatible with life beyond the misery of Malthus.

It is expected for any participant in society, regardless of the political settlement, to discover for him or herself what the rules are, and it is often taboo to mention the rules too elaborately. There are perfectly reasonable causes for this, among them being that an elaborate formalism of the rules is a lengthy explanation and would be incomplete in meaning. The strategy of those who govern today is to deny all standards of comparison and create a lie, such that no one can correctly discern meaning of anything that is written, and increasingly anything that is seen. Mass media is held by those with every incentive to lie and destroy the masses. Eventually this invasion enters private relations, and then it enters into the most mundane relations, down to the way people are trained to speak with each other. Violation of an increasing number of taboos, always unwritten and forbidden to discuss, becomes nearly inevitable, and the mechanisms are designed to ensure that at any time, those who rule or hold the machinery can insinuate a taboo has been broken, with or without evidence. Over time, the concept of law itself is destroyed and replaced with a labyrinth that is inscrutable, and this is celebrated. Obvious criminals are protected purely for their eugenic qualities or because they are politically connected, and honest men are punished not for anything they do but for crimes of Being, which are the only crimes considered worthwhile in such a society. Those who rule have never particularly cared about the deeds of criminals, because they view their subjects as driven by their being and essence, and must do so. If someone is habitually criminal, they are unlikely to change because the criminal likely figured out that even if he did reform, the society will just recapitulate his crimes and suggest that he should remain a criminal. The agents in society see it as more important that the essence of subjects never change, and consider it anathema to their moral values that bad men ever reform at all, or do anything other than the role assigned to them. This is the point - crimes of Being have always been more relevant to the philosophical state than anything people do, because the presumption in principle is that all subjects, including the rulers, act as appendages of the state and its interests, rather than act in ways that are contrary to it. Contrary actions promote factionalism and discord, and in all forms the philosophical state takes, whether they are republican or despotic or some other form, the presumption is always that the state's temporal authority commands immediately all things. Any spiritual authority is held by philosophers who interpret the Heavens as they please, and this is almost always in service to their cults and wishes. More importantly, even if a high-minded aristocrat could see that this doesn't work and suggests that the lower classes deserve better, or that something must be done with the lowest class which is morally necessary for human society to resemble anything it has been up to now, they will find that after all the lies and betrayals, the lower class has no interest in reconciliation and seeks nothing more than the removal of this beast, with no compensation for the aristocrats at the least. Very likely, the deposed aristocracy would, out of dire necessity, be imprisoned or eliminated, due to the threat they have posed and continue to pose by the nature of their Being. No persuasion from the aristocrat would undo century after century of these betrayals. To the lower class and particularly the lowest classes who never were a part of the political settlement, the whole of human history is a story of one atrocity after another, seemingly random and pointless and serving some foul deities.

How this systems thought developed in the present society is something I wanted to describe, because it did not arise "just-so" or because some lightbulb went off in the minds of some smart person in the 20th century. It is the culmination of many things latent in human society and the states that rose since Antiquity, and manifested as if it were an inexorable trend of historical progress. There is in actuality no such thing, of course. The steps which allowed the formation of this beast are all traceable in some way, and can be envisioned in a grand model. I sought to apply this analysis to human society and history as I have used it to solve questions in my own life large and small. I saw that to do so properly, the mechanisms at work, which involve human agents and great complexity, must be seen in some context which is approachable to a reader without any great education. I have no great education or status in this society - I am by social distinction among the lowest class, and have no authority to be taken seriously, nor do I want such a thing or present myself as such. I write this for myself first of all, but also for some like myself who have the same question and asked why it had to be this way. I cannot claim that this is now and forever how it happened, but I can at least provide some insight and leads that could be useful to construct a proper understanding, and make sense of what others high and low have written on the matter. It may guide in the future to something that would actually be worthwhile, but I highly doubt this machine will ever stop without reforming into another round of rulers and ruled, whatever the arrangement may be. There are too many incentives to maintain rule, unless humans became very different creatures, and it may not even be possible for that to happen short of terminating the entire line of human descent in total. At that point the question would be left to whatever entities may exist in the world, far away from Earth and likely never finding a trace of the human project. I do not believe the human project is inevitable or the only way it could have happened, or that the human project is complete. Very likely, knowing entities with biological origins on another world would have thought and acted nothing like humans. Humans, by any frank analysis, are a race of deformed apes that were barely capable of figuring out tools, and this is evident in the haphazard arrangement of human society. Their knowledge and conceits are so stupid that it boggles the mind that any philosopher can dare claim they have any vaunted seat, and even a comparison among humans and their genuine relations to the world should make every intellectual hang their head in shame for what they have done to us. I doubt that shame will ever be felt by them, or that some great soul will emerge any time soon to correct this stupidity, or that such an outcome would even be desirable. All I can do is continue to answer the question for myself, not because I have any great design to change the world or even represent myself in society, but because I have to do so if I want to live with myself and tolerate these beasts I was cursed to live around. I would be much happier if this were no longer a political question and I could live on some pittance, writing about whatever I like and contemplating things that are actually interesting to me. I do consider the topics I write about interesting for various reasons, but in a different world, I would be far less scathing and hateful, and I would balance this writing with things I enjoy for their own sake. I might even have had some sort of life and happiness, rather than the facsimile I fashioned by resorting to desperate acts that made it clear I would never be able to reconcile with those around me. I am not the only one who did this, but I would not wish what I have done on others, and would encourage others who have resorted to desperate measures to not fall into familiar traps in dealings with the predatory.

This discussion is useful for demonstrating why the analysis of systems is often conducted as it is, rather than in a way that makes more sense to our native faculties. It is not that systems thinking is alien to the native knowledge process in humans. Far from it, systems thinking is implied by our genuine existence and the pursuit of meaningful knowledge, which is what we would do in life regardless of any pernicious institution or our failings, personal and those imposed on us by another. All of these systems are viewed critically, and there are many aspects of reality which have nothing to do with any "system", or are things which can be integrated into a system that conforms to our conceit. In the main, though, systematization of knowledge is the natural progression of how we institutionalize science, even if that institution is ourselves and whatever processes we create for ourselves for the development of knowledge and its recording. It is not sufficient to simply believe that knowledge will set us free, as if those who rule do not know the truth. Those who rule have known the truth all along, often more of it than any of us, and those who rule are aware of the lies they tell in every circumstance. There is no such self-doubt among those who govern, and no great ignorance we should assume of rulers. We should not assume the rulers ever possess perfect information or that they would know everything we know, for rulers like the ruled are only able to experience what is possible for them as individuals. Any institutional knowledge accessible to the rulers, and their occulting of information, must proceed by general laws, and the rulers do not possess any natural monopoly on this process. We can, for ourselves, form our own institutions and understanding, no matter how many times they are annihilated or co-opted by the ruling ideas. This is expected, and the current ruling idea is to allow the people to form weak institutions, but train people to believe that they would want their institutions to be co-opted and folded into the dominant institutions. All ideas are permitted, so long as the only idea that is truly relevant is the singular ruling institution, which abides no law or external inquiry. The ruling institution seeks openly to be a total institution, which alone adjudciates all admissible facts about systems. The final way to accomplish this is to control the knowledge process itself, construing it as such a system in this institutional thought, so that all potential meanings and development of a system is commanded and controlled. This is highly expensive, and will go through further transformations in the future as greater information is gathered and the processes of knowledge are isolated. At the core, the pressing of nerves to command humans will become more and more pronounced, until it seems that all thought is barked by a Satanic center and beamed directly into the brain. Any independent thought will be entirely at the mercy of the ruling institution, and it will be an unspeakable taboo to acknowledge even trivial meanings or statements of fact. If taken to its natural conclusion, all facts will reduce to a singular fact, the pressing of the core moral purpose of those who hold the institution. The moral thought of those who hold the institution becomes of prime importance, for no morality is favored by natural law as if the universe has any stake in a particular essence. Whatever the moral thought that prevails, there remains interests behind the curtain who see what they hold and direct it towards some ruthless goal that does not need to regard morality. There is an interest occulted within this society, and such interests have long existed in any human society complex enough to form persistent institutions, which has an ability to direct the direction of this development, and it does not conform to any particular institution or school of thought or identity of persons. The interest of the occult is broad and involves a considerable number of men and women, including functionaries from the lowest classes who are of use for the cause.

There is no way through any amount of analysis to circumvent this, for reasons that may be clearer when evaluating society and its history with this systems approach in mind. Nor is it possible to truly deny that systems exist, for their utility is readily apparent. Even without formalization of systems thought, earlier institutional science and philosophy operated on principles that observed things, and since Antiquity, philosophers concerned themselves with proper classification of things and suggested general methods by which this may be done. It is not something particular to one civilization, and the same process of classification and systematization exists in more primitive societies. Tribal societies are not ignorant or blank slates, but develop knowledge and systems to recognize their environment, the qualities of plants and herbs, and communicate them as civilized society and its institutions would. The mechanisms available to tribal societies and the conditions they operate in differ, and tribal society should not be confused with a political settlement - very often, the political unit of relevance in tribal society is not the chiefdom imagined as a modern technocratic polity or a city-state, but the band and family. For most participants in such a society, the immediate relations a man or woman maintained were "the law", and any custom outside of that unit was dictated not by any agreement or stable polity, but by the rule of fear and threats of retaliation if taboos were transgressed and an understanding in that society were broken. A republic, for all of its pretenses, is at heart nothing more than the rule of fear, but does so with more sophisticated mechanisms. In all societies, the true form of government for mankind is in the end despotism - ruler and ruled. To speak of anything else is not to speak of people being governed. Placing the despotic rule in the hands of a republican body, some imagined spirit, or a vast machine operating as some clockwork whose existence and mechanisms are the greatest taboo, does not change that the rule is despotic. Despotic governments in practice recognize the world and society and could not afford to do so; and so, the inevitable result of such societies is not any stable cycle in which republics in some form maintain class struggles. The true end is that the despotic nature of the human race returns, and the idea that it would be any other way, against the interest of the vast majority of humanity, will no longer be entertained. This is the trajectory we are on, and any effort to maintain republican stories or a democratic idea is at present a fantasy or something that is not even comprehensible as a genuine arrangement between people. Democracy in any meaningful sense, for instance, is so befuddled that even the vague understanding of such a thing in the past has been completely overwritten, and only now are a few people figuring out that humans have never known a democratic idea even in principle. This would have been something students were taught in school if they got the real story, which many including this author did, in one way or another. It is not that democracy as a concept is a lie, or even something unworkable. It is rather that democracy in a meaningful sense entailed a very different concept of humanity, and every time that concept would be developed - even in ways that were non-threatening to the opulent or those who were the true governing force, where the democratic idea was seen as a way to feed the development of humans into the ruling system - any independent function of the members of society would be terminated, because the ruling interests did not concern themselves with genuinely productive goals or the goals of knowledge and human development for moral good. The ruling interests in the end were the eugenic interest that harkened to an ideal state arresting human conditions, and the technological interest by which the former would be able to accomplish this. These two interests united regardless of the particular ruling idea, and saw in their alliance a way to freeze out the unwanted residue who wanted to live and did not buy into those interests as relevant to their moral objectives or anything they wanted out of this existence. It is presumed by this ruling interest that everyone should grasp for position like them or be exploited ruthlessly, as if sadism and cruelty were God's command - which for most of these people is their God's genuine meaning. Even when this sadism is clearly ruinous, the ruling institutions cannot fail in the minds of their holders. They can only be failed, no matter how ridiculous the outcome. The higher interests that might have governed human societies, such as a spiritual cause beyond the mere facts of existence or life itself that suggested there could be a world outside of society where humanity could live harmoniously with neighbors, each other, and the world around them, would too be supplanted into this eugenic and technocratic alliance. The other possibility of rule, where humans accept that they are governed by occult mysteries and that their society might as well be absurd, has some hold on the minds of all classes, but this idea in practice is negligible and always would see the ruling interest as favorable to their own schemes and games. It would seek not to end the cycle but to let it continue and section off parts of the world for their petty pleasures.

What can be done with analysis is to see this structure for what it is, such that it is possible to even navigate such a society with some sense of what is going on. We are exhorted to seek truth from facts because this is ideal for us to make sound judgements, but because of the volume of information presented to us, which is intended to contradict and confuse and transgress and appeal to moral sentiments that we cannot deny, the society presents a construct and intentionally denies to the ruled any standard of comparison. Factually, standards of comparison cannot truly exist, except through the mediation of thought leaders, because all facts and all reified forms of information are adjudicated by institutions, and those institutions are the only representation of the actual humans and knowledge process that can be communicated. We have no way of directly communicating meaning in a way that is understood. The intent of the communicator is never perfectly transmitted. The proliferation of communication technology, and the means to transmit material goods and electricity over long distances, had much to do with the ability of systems thought to assert command of the physical world, and with it, command and forcibly integrate society. The overriding aim of the technological interest, whether it is a benign or malevolent project, is to drag all people into science, technology, and philosophy, and insist that all people are obligated to like knowledge not for anything knowledge actually does, but the conceit of knowledge and symbolic representations of it, such as the idiotic flexing over IQ. Intelligence and knowledge is granted spiritual authority and status of fact that was never warranted, and the symbols and conceits regarding intelligence override any actual knowledge faculty or even information processing. People who are by more objective measurements perfectly capable of processing information, or arrive at genuine contributions to meaningful knowledge that is written down, are dismissed as "retarded" because they do not conform to conceits of the eugenic creed, and to the venal grasping behavior of those who became technocrats. Meanwhile, the "best and brightest" blow the wealth and potential of humanity away because they would rather snort coke and engage in endless internecine conflict, because intellectualism as a practice and institution always was a get-powerful-quick scheme. Intellectuals have never been obligated to embrace any moral probity or concern for anyone outside of their clique, and this is the sad fate of the human race, this race with miserable origins that dared to hope that it might have been different. Analysis operates not on information or a crass deconstruction to attack things for the sake of doing so, but with developed meaning. We can never guarantee that the facts we accept, for ourselves or in institutions, will be the best they can be, as if there were natural laws valuing honesty in that way. We can, though, retain the faculties of ourselves that made any institution possible, and ask a simple question - is the path we have set on really what we must do, given the obvious conclusion? Perhaps it is too late for us, but if we are damned, we have no reason to ever meekly submit to the butcher's knife or agree to the moral sentiments of eugenics. None of us who stand to lose have any reason to go along with the ruling ideas, for compliance or submission have never been options. If the development of institutions cannot be allowed, then we turn to desperate measures to draw out this conflict as long as possible, since that is the only language those who rule regard. Pleading with them as if there will be dialogue is a fools' mission. I turn my pleas instead to people who clearly have nothing to gain, whose position in this construct is clearly miserable and for whom the moral philosophy on offer only makes their situation worse. I would say this to the middle class that still exists, but they have long ago decided what they are, and will never turn on anything that expels them from the institutions. That is a foregone conclusion, and changing the institutions by pleas will not work, nor would insinuating change over a long time be a project with meaningful outcomes. I plead instead to the low generally, not because I wish to tell you I have the right ideas, but because I know most of the lower classes are extremely dissatisfied and have no reason to go along with this. Even if what I write is the words of a madman, I believe the low have every reason to see that the lot assigned to them is pointless. I write most of all for the lowest classes who are like myself, who have been railing against this beast the whole way, and have to form their own ideas because we are not even allowed to exist in the world of others. I would believe it most necessary for science, knowledge, and machinery to be taken from the proprietors and the intellectuals, and from the political conceits the working class has been drawn into which do not serve the workers as workers. There would be a fourth group which is not an amalgam of this conceit of knowledge or political machines, but a group which acquires its own spiritual authority and holds the conceits of the other classes in rightful contempt. If that is established, then the other three groups can choose to follow that which was the rightful origin of science and stop this infantile crusade to assert an alien spiritual or political authority. In short, there would be a group which exists in defiance of hitherto known intellectual conceits, without succumbing to anarchism or pure anti-intellectualism, which has long ago been co-opted. It would be necessary then to let the institutions that were promised by technocracy rot, and to break the sentiment of the eugenic interest by embracing fully a will to reject them entirely, for the eugenists have nothing to offer but torture and death and have never been anything else. Anyone who would pretend that is not the state of affairs must be ignored out of hand and forbidden from polluting worthwhile analysis with their bullshit.

The fifth group, the lowest of the residuum, has no objection to this, and is not and never has been the enemy of the workers. Every inducement to convince workers to turn on us, and every inducement to recruit from the desperate to produce shock troops for the eugenic creed and the ruling interest, must be disrupted. At no point is solidarity with the predatory interest or their ideology desirable or worthwhile. The workers as workers, and the interests of the low as a whole, are clear as day, and they do not conform at all to this story that originated in bourgeois society or the fantasies of perverts. They are instead interests that have always made sense to us, and could easily make sense to people of bourgeois extraction, who are for all the pretenses not terribly different from us scum. The only beneficiaries of the present status quo are the venal who have commandeered all institutions and made them into breeding grounds for their sick religion, and that game has always entailed the outcome playing out in the 21st century. The lowest class, of which I am a member, is the class that senses most acutely the danger posed by eugenics, and so it is us who are the last tasked to develop any idea suggesting it actually would be different, and how that might be affected in some small way. The fourth group has yet to assert itself in any consistent and independent way, because any effort to do so has been systematically destroyed by institutionalization in every form it took during the past century. Only after the institutions which have clearly been a poison injection into our lives are recognized for what they are can we evaluate society and history in proper light, and we must stop lying and pretending it is something other than it is, or insinuating with snide remarks that we can throw away billions of people and act as if humanity didn't show its hideous nature. If there is to be anything good, it is no longer in some naive faith that the spirit of humanity is good. Those who understood the human condition never actually claimed such a stupid myth, but those who opportunistically presented a vision of humanism that fed their vanity have done their part to defend the institutions and the grand lie. Humans are liars, and I will hold to that for the rest of my life. The claim of the humanists is that if this is true, then there is nothing and the terror of the eugenic creed is a fait accompli. This was the fate of socialism up until now, where only vaguely did the original idea mobilizing socialist thought survive.

I hope to elaborate how I have come to this conclusion in further books, and this by no means is a total system or something to follow as gospel. I would desire better minds than my own to build on the topics I describe, and decide for themselves if the course we are on is worth pursuing. In the meantime, it beehoves us to view human societies and systems that involve humans not as spiritual constructs dominated by woo woo dialogues or stories, but to view humans as machines with moral sentiments and history of their own. If the basic mechanisms of knowledge and how humans came to construct society are elaborated upon, perhaps it would allow us to properly consider the human role in these sysetms and in cybernetic regulation, without insisting the machine exists to obliterate the subject or to feed a managerial class in some grotesque ritual sacrifice, the type of which have been a secret ritual within the American way of life since the foundation of the country which has its partners in tradition around the world. Those people who think like that should never have been allowed to go as far as they did, yet they have and have marred this world forever for a bunch of horseshit. It is there that I wish to begin the next book evaluating the machine of society and economic behavior without reference to the political, so that the political influence on human behavior can be better understood as something emergent from its daily economic behavior.