Construction of a world-system for social navigation must choose a sound basis for understanding and practice in the real world, rather than a view of what we would prefer society or the world to be. If this is not possible, then we cannot conceive of a different world and a different way of doing things. Among the crudest approaches is the economic approach. Economy, from the Greek "management of the house", at first entails exactly that. It is the management of sundry affairs that we conduct every day as our business of managing our person. It must be clear that this task involves the management of a person, rather than a body, and it is the management of those affairs rather than the nature of those affairs, that is of importance in the economic task. The question of economics implies answering more a question of relations to society and to the world at large, than it does about what we are materially or what our basic nature must be. Economic thinking, in some way or another, has often been the basis for political thinking, as the management of a person with regards to the state must concern itself with definite values and actions, just as the management of daily life will. It is not the sole basis for political thought, and politics proper entails much more than a crass economic calculation. Political economy as a subject has been often maligned and misunderstood by its critics and advocates alike, who are looking for something in economics that was never there. Economics concerned a problem that humans face, whether they are socialized in one way or another. A man in savage conditions still must manage his affairs and resources. His approach to doing so may entail a different concept of value than one we adopt in state societies where exchange is common, but there is some concept of value that is held individually, and values held by other entities in the world that savage may encounter. The savage has to presume that other actors like itself hold some values which orient the behavior of the other actor, because the savage, or even an animal, holds some value leading to an objective he has in mind. Simply living, if that is the value, entails certain commitments that cannot be ignored, no matter what he may think about the world. If the savage does not want to live, or knows that continuing to struggle for life is futile, he may cease, in which case his value judgements will change. Not all of these values are reducible to the same root. This economic task is, at the core of nature, completely futile and pointless. It does not matter to the world's objectivity what we think about our personal standing, and it does not matter to the world whether the body lives or dies, suffers or thrives, or if we find tranquility. The world and all in it will continue without us, and we could if we wished simply give up on the economic task and proceed through life by some inertia, or choose death on our terms rather than the terms of another. The particulars of psychological motivations are not, for now, relevant to this problem. We can assume that people want to live, which entails definite requirements. Answering them at the individual level is necessary to answer them at the level of society and the world.

We may think of economics as a material problem, but the "management" and "person" parts imply an idealist framework. Material science is not, and should not be construed as, applicable to economics as a discipline. This claim was never actually made by the moral philosophers who considered this question of economic value. The moral philosophers did seek to place this moral philosophy on some scientific footing and attach it to reality, because all morality must in the end contend with a a real world rather than the world of our preference. Ultimately, though, this economic thought is entirely in the realm of ideas. Money has no intrinsic worth, nor does labor or utility or any other baseline we would use to find value. We look for things we consider constant in this world as a thing that monetary economics points to, but the truth of money is that it has always been a contrivance. The nature of money itself has never been fixed in nature, as it progressed from ad hoc arrangements to commodity-money to state-issued coinage, and from there to banking establishments which could issue paper notes representing so much gold or coinage. The paper notes came to be just as good as gold for legal tender, but more paper notes could be printed than there were pieces of gold, and this was done deliberately. So was the practice of usury done to make money off of money, and usury as a practice has ancient origins. Everything about money flies in the face of any idea that money has some materially ordained value whatsoever. It has been instead an extension of individuals, which may be transferred in parts to represent some value that is socially accepted and enters circulation. Once this circulation and social valuation begins, money tokens abide certain rules, but the money itself does not need to exist. It is perfectly possible to ignore the currency scheme altogether, or write off debts as unpayable. The important use of money is that humans regard it as valuable if not spiritually significant, and so it is granted legitimacy so far as money points to something humans morally and spiritually desire. When money is no longer suitable for this purpose, those with the means to circumvent the monetary scheme invent a new one, either imposing it from on high or resisting an existing monetary scheme by various means. The monetary token and all that it concerns ultimately must concern information which we process in thought. That information may tie to some material reality, but the true material concern is not the money itself, but the things money can motivate humans to do. It is for this reason that money was suggested to point first to the command of labor - and it would be the command of labor, rather than a vague relation that was just sort of taken for granted, so monetary economics was understood to imply slavery in all of its forms - and then to some utility that was a sentiment of human beings, because the use of money shifted from management of some quantity of labor-power to management of particular qualities that could be extracted from labor. This shift came with the move towards urbanization and large bureaucracies which could, for the first time, possess technology and the means to force an entire nation into service to the state, or service to those who held the state - which was, nominally, the whole capitalist class, but in practice was the leading monopolists of the nations and those who affiliated with them. The mission of the state and these monopolists changed from the accumulation of capital to the management of the world, with the most capable of them seeking nothing less than a takeover of the world. The ambitious, who were not just capitalists but anyone with leverage to gain position in the coming world order, saw this and scrambled to the monopolists. The long run ambitions of the most capable monopolists required an alliance of capital and science, and this is what happened in the 20th century. That explanation requires a sound basis for asking a question first of what social relations are, and then how economics developed as a strategy for managing those relations. If we are seeking to arrive at an explanation of economic treatments of social relations, we would see the world best as data and information, bypassing the complexities of physical motion or our emotional, moral, and intellectual tasks which entail far more than an economic logic. Information must be understood solely as the resolution of uncertainty that we face, rather than some essence of the world that possesses a moral quality for its own sake. Only after the numbers in our information line up do we ask ourselves what any of it actually means, so that we can do something with those numbers.

The most basic mathematical model for communication studies in modern times was conceived by engineers working on electrical communication. This model consists of five components:

An information source, which produces a message
A transmitter, which operates on the message to produce a signal suitable for transmission over the channel
A channel, which is the medium through which the signal transmits
A receiver, which inverts the operation of the transmitter to reconstruct the message
A destination, which receives the message

We can see the bridge between peoples' minds is the material world. It should be clear that "mind" as a whole realm isn't real in the sense that everyone's minds are floating around in space. We each have concepts of mind and what other people are thinking, but the only reliable method we have to know what others think is through communication and through our interactions with them. There is no way for us to assert we can know what everyone else is thinking, or a default state of mind, and no theory of information is possible if we assume there is a universality of "mind" that must be respected, or that only certain minds are valid while all other concepts of mind are inadmissible zombies. The past two chapters established "mind" not as some baseline of rationality or intelligence that we hold as a conceit, but as a process certain animals do which creates a conscious experience, about which some things can be said. A basic empathy common to humans suggests to us that other creatures like ourselves think and live much as we do. That empathy was never premised on a rational universality, where we declare minds unlike ours to be utterly alien and sinful, and only people who think like us possess "real mind". The empathy instead is a faculty most of us possess, whether we would like it or not. An instinct in us doesn't just see suffering as a superficial behavior or an act. We can sense, to some extent, someone acting like they suffer and those who we know to suffer, due to this faculty. To deny this is to deny both common sense and basic principles of what the human brain and body do. Just because we have this empathy does not mean we should expect others to care if we suffer, or that decency from others is expected. Far from it, the most empathic tend to use this faculty to take advantage of others, by various lies and methods that have been perfected over the years. Just as we possess an empathy which senses the suffering of another human as morally wrong, there is another faction that is just as empathic and states enthusiastically that the suffering of another is morally right, or even morally supreme above all. The sadisitc faction insinuates that its thinking is the true universal and only way a rational human can think, but a cursory rational approach to this problem of empathy and moral philosophy shows that the sadistic mindset would fall apart in five minutes if it lacked the honest and forthright to abuse. The other faction, that which naively believes in human decency, has never had its day, nor could it. It would be torn to shreds by the sadistic faction, and so these two false opposites are propped by those whose primary trade is the manipulation of empathy. Left out are those who are largely honest, or seeking to mitigate the sadism in life, out of a belief that there is something other than this to existence, and that we must be more than that if we are to conduct our lives with any dignity. Both a naive faith in empathy for manipulation, where rationality is wholly abandoned, and a pseudo-rational ideology, are stupid and intolerant approaches to this question of mind. We establish that others are conscious both by our sense of other humans, which is not something universal to animals and not something universal even among the human race. Man's inhumanity to man is a long history of grotesque abuses, which any reader of this book should be acquainted with by the time of its writing. If any reader is still naive to the depravity of mankind, I advise him or her to just look outside and see what these people are and what they do every day. The answer should be plain as day if the reader can just hold for five minutes a train of thought that is not created for them by cajolers or ideologues. I cannot have faith that every human will do this, because for many humans, such thought concerning empathy and mind simply does not occur to them, beyond the minimum they need to think of it to scheme their way through human society. Thinking too much about this is just depressing and won't change anything in of itself, unless someone is really desperate and needs to think of this.

Rational interests, which economic interests have to be in order to be meaningfully economic, are a fairly useful way to gauge the basic incentives of some social actor, to find some common ground that is not dependent on an assumption of empathy, or concepts which are not easy to discuss with a stranger. Not only do people tend not to open deep conversations out of the blue, but doing so invites considerable danger, especially in a society where ideological nonconformity or failure to meet social expectations means death or worse. Economics is not so much tied to the basic material wants and needs of an organism, as those wants entail something that does not regard society, personhood, or a problem to be solved rationally. Needs and wants in reality are things felt and acted upon because that is what we must do, and those needs and wants can't be rationalized. There is no rational reason we should accept a generally predatory society that consumes many hours a week of human effort and inflcits suffering because it can, when that predation only exists because of certain people wish it to be so. The motive of the predators does not have a rational justification, but is done because the predatory are that at a basic psychological and biological level, and choose it willfully. The predators insist on predation long after their basic needs and wants were met, because no one will tell them no, and their way of life has been enshrined spiritually. The spiritual motive has nothing to do with economic motives, but is something else entirely. For all of those motives, though, the actors must act in a world where they are beholden to certain conditions. The economic task concerns not our true motives, but the material reality, and morality's necessary tie to that real world. The moral considerations in economics are not foundational for spiritual authority or a suggestion of what base psychological wants ought to be. There are moral consequences for economic decisions, and there has to be in order for economics to be sensical as an approach. If economics were purely a problem of mechanical cause and effect, where our task is to optimize a mathematical problem without regard to competition, the solution in any era is trivial. It has long been known that famine and privation were never necessary conditions of mankind, but were mandated because of political causes and because there was a spiritual hatred among humanity for the downtrodden. It was seen as important for those who had the means to survive and fight to hold on to what was theirs, which makes sense. More important than those who had to hold what they did, was to ensure those who had not would never gain position.

We are aware on some level that all of our information is an imperfect representation of the underlying world, but the only way we can speak intelligibly of this content is as information. Cognition and awareness are a thing detached from the world, yet we can't do anything but sense the world and react to it. The imperfect representation through information is our best lead to know what is really happening, and we must start by having faith that our senses are intact. The moment we doubt what our eyes see or what our native thought faculties would arrive at is the moment our apprehension of reality falls apart. We only really have our sense to tell us what is true and false, and all of our ideas and notions that are not sensical are further removed from what we would believe to be true, in the final reckoning which inevitably must happen. If we have an abstract idea about the world, we always seek to be able to understand it as something sensical, something that would be a thing we can work with. Words that we don't really understand, or meanings that elude us, don't convey anything real.

We can for a moment imagine the whole universe as a computer game, which we will call LifeQuest, which we can use as a simulation of economic behavior in the natural world. In LifeQuest, we envision five types of objects:
- The space itself, a 3-D space of immense size. The space object's members are a list of pointers (addresses in our hypothetical computer's memory) to the other types of objects. Its methods adjudicate when signals reach a target, and pass the signal to the object upon receipt. Objects in the game environment may generate new signals, which are returned to the Space object in an array, so that the Space object can add the new signals to the game environment. We separate the body of an object from the signal it sends.
- Signals, which carry physical or "real" communication between each other. These signals take the form of a 3-dimensional shape, of whatever form is appropriate for the type of action. The signals are the only thing which can trigger a hit detection, and carry a message to other objects. The members are the hitbox, the speed and form of its propagation (does it move in a line, does it expand from the center, etc.) and a pointer to a bitstream representing the signal's data.
Derived from Signal is:
- "Body" objects, representing physically existing objects. Bodies are themselves derived from signals, representing their very existence, but are further developed to describe any complex object rather than the raw bitstream. Because we have a very, very advanced physics engine in our game, it is capable of procedurally generating from a seed - the "genetic material" of the object - the default form of the body, its composition in materials and its structure. This simulated body is complex enough to be compelling for a game, wowing all the young players with the nice graphics. The Body object is the only object which can send and receive signals, which our excellent physics engine can act upon. The Body object, by default, only deals with the signals of physical force, representing the existence of the body and its imposition of force on the world, and its receptiveness to force. The Body contains methods to translate its response to a force acting on it into a velocity, which is processed every game cycle by the simulation to move the object in space.

There are two derived classes from "Body":
- "Animated" objects, representing living objects that are not player characters. These are typically animals, or similar such living creatures with a centralized nervous system. In addition to the normal traits of "Body", NPCs have "Brain" as a characteristic, which animates the body in response to stimuli. This response would be like the AI opponents in most games; limited, occasionally interesting and tricky. The role of the NPCs is to present danger to the other type of object, to compel them to take action. While the NPC behaviors are very predictable, there is enough variety and the AI can adapt to new situations to an extent.
- "Player Character" objects, representing the players of the game. These are analagous to humans. Derived from Animated Objects, they have another characteristic: "Player Interface", representing sentient decision making and rationality on the human level (or the level of whatever user is playing the simulation). PCs still have to relate to the Brain characteristic, as executive functioning is only a part of the Brain, but they are better able to train the brain.

The signals will process in "quasi-realtime", where the undisturbed behavior of objects persists until a signal collides. This process is streamlined sufficiently by the Space object's methods so that the computer is not bogged down in recalculating a very large number of objects every time a collision occurs. For now, though, just know that in principle, the world is composed of signals which interact with each other, and some of those signals are bodies which are capable of transmitting and receiving, acting on signals it receives. Some of those bodies are capable of composing and interpreting information to decide behavior, which would be AI-controlled objects and objects which receive the player's input.

The objective of the game is simple: live, thrive, and unlock all of the achievements you wanted, see new experiences. If you fail, you die and are kicked off the computer forever, and you don't get to see the game with the awesome graphics and physics engine.

Oh, and if you don't want to play - too bad. You have to play - 24/7/365, for every year of your life. Additionally, you are connected to a force-feedback device which makes losing the game very, very painful before you are kicked off the computer forever, and into the abyss. Fortunately, though, you get to play with billions of other users, so you won't be lacking for company, for better or worse. Also - you are playing this game without any guide or foreknowledge that you are playing a game, so you won't know what the hell is going on.

Sound like fun? I thought not. But we're playing anyway.

This example is very obtuse, and not at all how we would design a computer game. It is, however, something we do inherently in building scientific cosmologies of the universe, in an attempt to understand all the causes and effects in the world, and we have no other way of doing this that can create an intelligible model at a large scale. Dialectical thinking is a fun sport, but it is in the end little more than a mystical working to attempt some change in the world, and makes up for our own inability to deconstruct the whole of reality into components. We can, though, build quite elaborate models which successfully break matter into elements and molecules, and we have to be able to do this to explain physical and chemical interactions at a basic level. For our game, the problem may be solved by simulating meticulously every feature and contour of the body; and in practice, actual computer programs will devote considerable memory to constructing and storing every pixel in a 2D game, or every polygon in a 3D environment, because it would be necessary to do this to display objects when push comes to shove. We may have creative means to compress this information and only decompress it when we need to, since memory is not so unlimited. We see already a problem in any computer program - computational and resource limitations. Reality is vast and does not have nor need a central CPU, but our CPU here is the god of the universe and so this one little thing has to process all that happens, one instruction at a time. So, programmers often have to choose between something which saves memory, or something which saves processing cycles, in constructing their programs. Reality does not need to engage in any sort of information economism - reality will do whatever it does, and our science is only there to read from real events rather than suggest by force what science wills reality to do.

The economic task is undertaken by living things. We cannot assume, a priori, that there is some purpose to the economic task, or that any of the information we collect of the world is meaningful. That is to say, life is not self-affirming or self-justifying, and what we set out to do is not ordained by a force built into nature, yet indescribable. We may have reasons to believe that living things generally seek nutrients and whatever they need to sustain their life-processes, but this is something different from a "purpose of life", and the number of suicides tell us there are enough people who override the so-called biological imperative. It is further the case that living is not simply a state of being, but something we do. How we live is more important than the fact of life itself. "Life for the sake of life" leads to a miserablism and circular logic which is among the most terrible Hells we could imagine. For the purposes of our game, though, we have certain objectives, and certain requirements to meet them. A primitive AI character would also have certain definite requirements, and some process by which the brain ascertains what it is going to do. A dog does not blindly march into fire because it lacks some special substance of sentience, or because the correct response to a specific environmental effect like fire weren't programmed. The economic task cannot proceed without some intent, even an intent that was little more than an instinct. This intent is more a characteristic of living things responding to their environment than some special, immaterial substance. A sheet of metal does not have "intent" to retain its shape, or intent to be anything at all. There is no process in the sheet of metal that seeks to repair its own damage or retain some functionality. We could perhaps speak of the "economy" of a giant sun, the process of its existence, and how much fuel remains in it. The distinction is that the living animal possesses some impulse running through its nerves, to move the muscle in some way to fulfill its task. The most basic of these tasks are the tasks of sustenance and survival, carried out instinctively.

There is a difficulty in academia today regarding what "life" is supposed to be. Is life simply any open system? Is "life" something inherent to the universe and the most basic form? These questions are not simply scientific ones, but politically important ones. The reasons why will become apparent throughout this work, but the short explanation is that many of the ruling ideas today revolve around biology and the assumptions made about living things, that have become a justification for the state and for actors to behave. In short, despite the obvious stupidity of "life for the sake of life", the tendency persists because it is a useful control mechanism and an inducement that can be used to modify the behavior of rational men. A fuller explanation must wait for another chapter. We are still left with a problem, in that if we don't have living things, there can be no "management of the house" in a meaningful sense. 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. (Our simulation in the game, then, is consciously constructed with a physics engine in mind, and we would like the user to feel like they're in an environment not dissimilar to the actually existing physical world.)
- 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.

We do not speak of some core point where we identify the position of the living thing in reality. That is, to speak of living things in full, we have to consider all the processes, and imagine a center around key organs. We often see life as the assembly of organs that appear to form some coherent whole that is independent of other organs; that is, we see an organism, and we can count the instances of organisms, many of them similar to each other. These dividing lines though are in many ways a contrivance for us to readily identify the living object. The truth of life are that its parts can split off, or be damaged, and the living processes can still continue. The only essential part is the process of living itself, to say that a man whose limbs and body have been destroyed to persist in living if the brain were somehow sustained. A body with no brain, with something substituted in its place, could move around and appear lifelike. Parts can be grafted onto the body, and technology can be assimilated into the body. Living things enter into relations with the things they appropriate, and in turn the tools at their disposal have an effect on the creature. The simple appropriation of food, and the effects of various chemicals on the body, demonstrate that every day. To be living is to be in a state of flux and mortal, yet at the same time our perception of life and its tendencies is that it seeks to continue much as it has before, and proceed through a lifecycle inexorably. The need of life to maintain the latter leads to a philosophical pretense which attempts to deny the former. That is, we describe life by what it is, and what we think of as its essence, but life in actuality is defined by doing, by processes which meet together to even form the organs around which the living thing's tissues are organized. The life of a man or any other thing is a constant doing of these processes, rather than any particular organ or storage of information. The information that may be stored, for example in the brain's memory, is simply the activation of something that was stored. It could not be activated without the processes of the brain or some process by which the stored information is retrieved. To say otherwise would be to claim that words on a book have some potency simply by existing, where the truth is that a book would be meaningless without someone to read it, who then integrates the knowledge into his or her own knowledge base, and then acts on that knowledge in various ways. More than most things, life revolves around action and processes rather than some thing where a center can be identified.

For our game, the living object is a collection of bytes in memory that are interpreted. It is not that the bytes themselves have some essence, but that the user sees the object in-game, through the interface available to the user, and sees something that appears alive, because it is doing something that the user can sense in some way - for example, a rabbit would move and we would see the visual of the rabbit moving. We must return to the Zeno's old paradox. To the CPU, all of the objects of the game only have the "form" the programmer built them to have. We may, for example, have a part of the object we called "hit points", and we may say "byte 4 of struct for object data is referring to HP", and these "hit points" are a metric we use to judge the overall damage the object has taken, rather than anything that connects to a particular game physics object. If we built an elaborate simulation for "lungs", the virtual world lungs would still only have definite shape to the user. There is, in this virtual world, no "space" as such, only memory and instructions read from a tape. This is quite different from objects with a physical existence. Yet, when we speak of "life", we often are treating the living thing like it is a simulation we can describe algorirthmically, when we speak of "life functions", the heart beat, etc. The actual living things we see in the real world were not programmed into existence, but are organs that developed over time and in a real space. Life is, in many ways, an alien imposition onto what we see as the normal procession of physical reality. There is substance to matter and energy can be measured, but there is no substance or force "life" which is similarly measurable. The living system is attempting to make physical reality conform to the intent of the system's design, at least in some way. Oxygen is inhaled to fuel the body, and the expulsion of carbon dioxide as waste is not the immediate purpose of the living thing's design. All the living thing cares about is that it appropriates the air and that it can expel its wastes. The confluence of processes that comprise life creates a creature that is selfish in its immediate functions. At the same time, the living thing requires an environment, and its basic wants are not excessive wants at all. Even the dullest human being has a sense that they cannot consume endlessly, and that if food is lacking somewhere, it will be necessary to find or create some situation where food will be available again. You can even guess at some basic sense in animals that gluttony is bad, without the necessary injection of a metaphysical hobgoblin compelling life to cease consuming. How these wants are manipulated will be a subject throughout this book, but we see here that life itself is essentially an alien presence in a physical reality where events proceed as they will. Physical reality will send meteors crashing into planets, or absorb whole planets in the fire of a dying sun. Most of the universe, from what we have seen, appears hostile to the very notion of life, or complex ecosystems that are formed by many living processes to create the grass, oxygen, and so on that are necessary for complex life to exist. There is a tendency for complex life to begin terraforming an environment into something that allows this imposition, life, to flourish. At first this process is not driven by any consciousness, but merely a confluence of living things expressing their individual intents. Animal life possesses more minute intent, in that it can move and it possesses central nervous systems that build associations with objects it can sense. Human life has the benefit of conscious appropriation, and can appreciate the concept of harmony and co-existence in ways no other creature can. Humans, and this is true even of children, have knowledge that competition for competition's sake leads nowhere good. A common experience in coming of age is questioning life at all, or whether living is a good idea, or asking the question why we live the way that we do instead of some other way. It is a line of questioning that usually results in no answers, only settling in middle or old age with some grace and acceptance if someone is lucky. The flipside of human consciousness is that while humans can contemplate this question, there is an element in human society that seeks the path of absolute least resistance, and decencies we can expect even of animals can be abandoned by conscious will. One truth that guides both of these things is an understanding, on some level, that life is an imposition on reality, a simulation that seems bereft of purpose or cursed. The more enlightened of us - and it does not take any great secret knowledge to do this - can also see that there is no good reason why life has to entail this much suffering, and that rapacious exploitation of the world is not even a good survival strategy. If given a choice, most people would choose a quiet and happy existence over an indulgent rush and the pressing of the nerve of power. We can even accept that life, even if it is alien to the real, can bring good to the world, and that we can have a beneficial co-existence with other life and can accept reality. We as conscious beings can even find wonder in the real that is greater than the conceits of life itself, and we can find in life things we did not expect. It is a pernicious tendency that revels in the imposition on reality itself and seeks to maximize it. A fuller explanation must wait for another chapter, but even in our thinking of what the economic question entails in a virtual space, we can see that the economic question is not so all-consuming and totalizing, let alone something to which we must subordinate our lives.

Our game on a computer is an unusual example if we want to talk about natural history. We should be clear on what the game entails, and how we structure the economic problem in theory. It is trite to say that the game is "just" the CPU reading instructions from a tape in a loop, while processing instructions from the user. Part of our economic problem requires the user to raise themselves above the physical reality and set themselves apart from the real as their "self". This happens in the real world just as much as it happens for our computer gamer, except in the real world, the "user" is consciousness itself. What is the "user" in the real world, except something brought about by unifying the processes of life and thought around some locus of organs and nerves and so on? In merely declaring ourselves to be a "self", we are necessarily placing ourselves outside of the base reality we live in, with aspirations that we can be something more than the processes we see at the moment. There is no material substance "self". It is rather the case that the consciousness is, so far as we are relating to the world as information and abstraction, like our computer user, tied into a machine - the human brain and body and all of our sensory organs - which give the user an interface to interact with the game world. The model of the world we created in our mind - the subjective experience - is necessarily an incomplete one. We have good reasons to believe that there is some reality of physical things underneath what we perceive, and that events occur in a real world. We can also determine that our senses deliver to the mind a reasonable approximation of what is actually happening, and we have no evidence to suggest that the world we perceive is illusory in the old philosophical sense. The truth inverses a conceit common to elder philosophy. The elder philosophies and mystics would claim that the physical world is an illusion and Mind is the truth of the universe, but reality is the opposite - that Mind is the inferior offspring of physical processes, and Mind is also something quite apart from the real. For every process we can construe as "thought" there would be some activity in the real world linked to it - an electrical signal in the brain, or in some computer for instance - but the meaning of that activity is not self-evident by noting the details of the interaction. We instead only interact with the real by first filtering what we receive from the sense organs through the mental faculties. Everything that can affect sight is received regardless of our processing ability, but thinking life is very adept at finding patterns in that sensory data which correspond to familiar objects, and we have a vocabulary to describe things or the ability to construct a vocabulary if something unfamiliar is encountered. The experience of our computer user is through an interface with data stored on a hard drive and in RAM, where "God" is the CPU animating that virtual world. This design of the computer, or "thinking machine", is not a one-for-one comparison with the real world. Physical reality doesn't have a central CPU animating objects to do anything and everything they do, and we certainly do not have a way of demonstrating such a hobgoblin's existence through the methods of science. In our dealings with the entirety of the real world, though, we have to assume there are things such as "laws of physics" and other laws of nature, in order for us to have an understanding of why things happen the way they do, and it does happen that the behavior of the things we see is predictable. Any good science relies on verification of the theories and demonstrable proof of scientific laws, rather than a philosophical assertion that the explanation is elegant or formal. If a programmer is seeking a simulation that resembles even superficially reality, they are aware that they would like to present their simulation as if it isn't being animated by a hobgoblin CPU, and so it is preferable in a good simulation that different classes of simulated physical objects do not have too many distinct "laws of physics". That is to say, we being good simulation engineers would like a world that appears fair and sensical, rather than arbitrary and obviously programmed to force the simulation to work. Likewise, when we construct our mental models of reality for ourselves, we want and need them to be sensical, and do not want the mental processing burden of memorizing millions of arbitrary laws and sub-cases. More than that, it would be quite impossible to believe in an arbitrary universe with no laws of physics as such, without creating numerous contradictions in our own mental models; and when the contradictions pile up, we would lose our native connection to the real. Even if we are to insert God to answer contradictions, it would not make sense for a God that appears completely arbitrary and capricious, who changes His commandments at a whim and demands adherents believe in a whole panoply of contradictory lies simultaneously. If that carries on for too long, the brain and body lose their ability to function as a coherent whole. The need to protect ourselves against information that contradicts our own assumptions about the world also works against our own ability to correct errors in those assumptions. The important thing to know for our purposes here is that, even though our mental models are imperfect simulations, it is important to understand the distinction in how the simulation is constructed, and that the models are only models. We have an instinctive sense that we may be wrong in our judgement of physical reality, but we attempt to build our understandings of the world to be internally consistent because we want to interface with the real rather than a fantasy. When we are playing this game, we know we are playing a game on a computer, and those experienced with playing computer games often become familiar with the computer's workings and the kinds of bugs that appear commonly in computer games. We continue in this chapter by taking for granted that our common sense understandings of the physical world do resemble the objects we are interfacing with for the economic task, and that our computer game is bug-free and designed with the expectation that it is aiming to be an accurate and compelling simulation, where the player does not feel like the CPU is cheating or the laws of game physics are janky.

Economy concerns a practical objective - how to make computations in order to adjudicate the value of particular objects or particular actions, towards the goal of some objective. Typically, this objective is survival, but after the purposes of survival are met, the economic actor can seek out new goals, new objectives. All of these objectives require definite propositions to be true, and those propositions are not freely exchangeable. If the objective is to not be thirsty, then there is a definite range of quantities of water that will satisfy that objective. Too little water will be the same value as none at all, as the objective will not be met and the result is death. Water beyond anything that is realistically consumable is, for the bare purpose of survival, useless or even a burden because the water will either be spilled on the ground, sitting in your storehouse of unsold goods, drank anyway and simply urinated, or even fatal if ingested beyond a point. The objective of any valuation, though, is not limited to this one instance of exchange, or single action. We can see into the future and know that if we can store water, we can have some to drink in some future instance of thirst. This storage, too, is not unlimited. We can only carry so much water at any given time, and how much will depend on whatever storage capabilities you possess, and this storage has to be shared with every other thing you might want to acquire. The exact acquisition of storage space is itself some thing, some object, that can be acquired, and it too has realistic limits on what is practical to acquire, so far as we are interested solely in survival or personal use. The result of all of this is that no valuation is made in isolation. Everything we value is instead part of a chain of logical propositions we need to make in order to attain objectives we set out to accomplish. Each proposition, each step we take towards that objective, is a definite step. We may value something which is fungible, like money, and we may consider that an endless pile of money is intrinsically valuable for its own sake; but every use of that money is towards some definite object and some quantity that is utilized for some purpose. Just like the water to stave off thirst, the direct utility of a car is that it allows the driver to move from point A to point B. Surplus cars beyond that are only useful for objectives that go beyond this basic need of transportation, presuming you are not expecting cars to break down so frequently that several need to be kept in the garage just in case. The surplus cars may have some utility, for example using a different car to hide your identity or using a limosuine to impress upon others status. Perhaps someone likes to modify cars or collect them for some inscrutable motive. Each one of those motives, though, are discrete and definite. At the basic level, utility can only be expressed as discrete quantities of objects towards fulfilling some proposition, some need. The exact measure for that need may be uncertain or in a range, but there is no such thing as "infinite utility" or "marginal utility", or a "util" that is freely exchangeable. Utility as a concept is only a logical proposition towards some end, not a substance to be acquired mindlessly. What utility we find in things in storage is only partly tied to our need to retain the present state of the body or the present state of things we desire, and in all cases, "the present state of things" as we understand them in life is not a state of affairs that we want to "be", but something that is done continuously, as the stability of living systems requires some input of energy. No living thing is as inert as a lump of metal, and even the seeming inertness of that lump of metal hides a truth that matter to be matter we can interact with has some "motion" simply to produce a response if we were to touch it. We only have to think in our problem solving algorithm that something "is", because we have no logical, rational way to truly describe a world in flux like the one we appear to live in. For our algorithm to work, we have to think mechanistically.

The discovery of utilities of objects towards various tasks is the work of experience, science, and all the thinking that one would expect. The same applies to the utilities of particular tasks, certain things an economic actor may do, and the multitude of uses a particular object may have in the actor's possession. To be used, though, the economic actor must first possess the object in question, or possess the ability to perform some task. This possession of objects and skills is thus the first key to understanding economic behavior. We speak first of the individual in his environment, absent any sociality enforcing his behavior. The reality of social existence is for later, but actors enter our hypothetical game as individual users and need to function as such in the game environment. The possession, or appropriation, of some object or some ability is key to understanding the economic problem. An economic actor only has so much time, and so many resources, to dispose of in the process of appropriating new values. Every objective, too, is a state that is attained. These values are not always things which appear "economic", but they are all things which must be appropriated to be realized, in some way or another. People can and do spend very valuable time and resources towards ends that are vain and baffling, and yet this behavior is perfectly economically rational in a way. The objectives human beings seek are never really rational. They can be rationalized, and the objectives often have something real in mind as the goal. If the goal is something real, then the acquisition of that goal must abide definite realities.

We should pause a moment to consider what this process, appropriation means. The most basic appropriation would entail holding an object in hand, or placing it in some storage close at hand, or physically occupying the space so that the space can be held. The clever animal, or a player in our game, can create elaborate contraptions where, by knowing the behavior of objects in the world, they can "appropriate" the things simply by allowing natural laws to play out, and harnessing something from the outcome. A human being, having a clockwork model of the world, can orient his actions around natural events and seek advantage from them, or seek harmony with natural events. In the seat of the self, and in the delusion that is Mind, the appropriator of things may envision themselves as a petty lord of all the processes they can comprehend. So long as there is no entity or manifestation to tell them otherwise, possession may be as simple as noting that something is there, if it was desired to acquire some material benefit from that thing at a later date. This is not the same as saying that knowledge itself is the thing appropriated, because the knowledge has to concern some real thing that we know exists, and we have to be confident that we can if needed acquire what we wanted out of this thing should we want to. Here again we can see an obvious disconnect between what the brain, Rational Man, thinks is useful, and what will actually be effective towards reaching a goal one might imagine. "Rational" Man might believe he is best served by seeking a supply of opium or cocaine, and it is perfectly within the bounds of reason to invent a world-system that will tell this rational man that the high from drugs is the ne plus ultra of life purposes. Whole moral and philosophical systems are premised on hedonism and seek to aggressively impose those systems on others as a moral obligation, and those systems are in force today. It is not necessarily a state of ignorance that convinces people that hedonism is the most useful thing. Today's utilitarians have a long history of science and philosophy and history and come to the conclusion that drug-fueled orgies are perfectly moral and upright, in the worship of their twin deities Pleasure and Pain, hoping to win the reward of the former and stave off the latter. The things approrpriated do not necessarily need to conform to a moral judgement, and the means by which they are acquired can be through simply grabbing them, or brute force, or clever trickery. There is then the consideration that this appropriation of things is, in light of what the self and Mind are, somewhat silly as a pursuit.

We have first the most obvious utility of things - that to do something, we require so many prerequisites put into the process to accomplish the goal. This is the only utility from which the other concepts of utility can ultimately derive. In this utility, the use of things is not freely exchangeable. Once the water from the hypothetical merchant in the desert is consumed, it is gone forever. Life, though, is tricky and sneaky, and does not think merely about the task directly in front of it, as if it were a computer executing instructions from a tape. It seeks to store things with potential utility, and must manage its inventory of goods towards general tasks. This is where conceits about utility arise, which suggest utility may be infinitely subdivided and measured. They are all, in the end, vanity. The truth of life is that, after all of the conceits of the living thing are accounted for, all of the things the creature appropriated either have to be used for some immediate task in the future, or passed down to a successor. If the storehouse of goods were abandoned, then for the appropriator, those things were worth nothing at all or even a burden to carry. We may envision a whole scheme by which we could measure utility as potential payoffs, where the investment of so many materials is worth so many "utils". This is one way we can conduct the problem-solving algorithm in economics. We may start with a pool of resources, and strategies to deploy them for expected payoffs, and we pick the strategy with the best payoff. There is a problem though - without an agreed-upon unit, what unit are we supposed to use to represent the payoff? We can ascertain the outcome of some strategy in terms of what products are made from the inputs, or we can ascertain the outcome as some goal that we hold as important, but that doesn't become a physical object in our possession that we can use as a future material input. The outcomes of a strategy do not fit intrinsically any particular unit we would use to mathematically compare the results of strategies. It is mathematically obvious, and in line with our experience with many games, that a primitive early state with basic materials can lead to a decision tree in which far more types of goods are available than the limited selection we had with our initial inventory and abilities. If our game is sufficiently advanced, it can account for the emergence of concepts that were not even intended by the game's developer.

The simplest payoffs would find some common unit in framing the problem to be solved. For example, in a race, we want to cover the greatest distance in the shortest time, and all of our decisions are with that intent in mind. If we are seeking to maximize a single resource and use that as our baseline, we could orient the strategy around that resource. If we set multiple resources as the goal, we can determine mathematically the shortest time required to acquire them. We have to consider the proposition of the goal itself, and what could happen to obstruct that goal - which may be probabilistic events or an opposing player. Probabilities and predicting the behavior of an opponent is where game theory finds its applications. The ultimate progression of events which allow us to even realize the payoff is a proposition that each event must happen in turn for the payoff to be realized. The conceit of victory cannot be placed ahead of the progression of events, if some other consideration requires the immediate availability of resources. If for example the probabilistic strategy was optimized with the dice rolls in mind, what to do if the player loses dice rolls must be accounted for, if the strategy has to consider that exactly this many resources are needed for some other purpose. Your payoff of 10,000 tons of iron is of little use if the iron does not reach production facilities to become other things, and those things are not deployed for some useful end. What is that useful end? It almost certainly isn't that iron is shiny and beautiful sitting in some storehouse. Wealth is sterile unless it is put to doing things. A tight-fisted miser may sit on his wealth, and a cautious man may think prudently about future risks. In either case though, absent a competitor, if something were available in the future if it were not extracted and moved to a storehouse, would it not make more sense to not waste the effort of extracting more than is reasonably needed? Absent a competitor, is working at the maximum intensity necessary or desirable, if a lower intensity only means waiting a little longer? When we consider optimal strategies, how we want to approach the problem is important to answering the question.

In our game example, we have an open-ended goal, which we split into a great many mini-games. If we are in a speedrun competition to complete LifeQuest in the 100% category, we can certainly optimize the multifarious tasks for time, if we have enough time to complete the goal or win the most achievements. A decision tree of all possible states of the game, from the perspective of a user, would be immensely large. We would need to break down the game tasks to chunks which can be solved, or at least those where optimal survival and time strategies can be considered. Our strategy becomes more complex when we consider an open-ended world of players whose intentions towards us are unknown, especially if those other players are capable of killing us in an instant, undoing all of our planning if we are careless.

Individually, our judgements of utility as value are not about the real utility of things, but a moral treatment of utility in general. Utilitarian morality in economics is only applicable if it is assumed there is a society which can furnish at will whatever product a society can produce. In other words, it is the moral philosophy of monopoly capitalism, in which the defeat of the working class and the lower grades of the capitalist class is assumed before it is fully realized, and the aim of such a moral treatment is to make real the intent of the monopolist. Questions of whether the workers can bear any amount of exploitation are of little relevance, so long as the desired product is produced. Questions of the cost of producing any desired quality, or an overall schema for developing qualities and measuring them, cannot be confined to this economic logic. The utilitarian economic logic can, though, be used as a psychological lever to manipulate workers into doing things they do not want to do. The crude utilitarian theory would not last long before devolving into anti-historical and irrational diatribes from the Austrian School, while the imperial economists moved to a much more reliable political economic scheme. That was, in the end, Francis Galton's Eugenics and its chokehold on the world. The phase of utilitarian economics was understood quickly as a transition from capitalism to a society segregated into grades of civic worth, all fitting the utility of a clique at the apex of society. All it required was wealthy allies that advanced it, with the provision that the winners of monopoly capitalism could have their seat among the best and brightest, and that no one of the intellectual and scientific class would ever move against monopoly. Utility in the real sense cannot be reduced into fungible units, and this should be evident to a child. The point being made was a moral point - that the decision of what was useful would be made by monopolists and their allies, and a petty-managerial mindset would replace the mindset that sought accumulation and political power. Petty-managers would lord over an ever-shrinking pile of wealth for themselves, while the proceeds of empire and society would feed to institutions that could extract rent and monopoly prices. Gradually, the capitalist logic, which was never what it was purported to be by most who wrote on the matter, would be displaced with a new logic. Some would call it socialist, but the dominant trend which won out was nothing more than pure eugenics. In doing so, utility returned to the most abysmal state of nature, except it was stripped of any drive that once allowed individual humans to survive on their own merit. The new thinking had a simple endgame; subjects would now only be what the ruling institutions decided they would be, and no one would get a single iota more than the institutions allowed them. State society and the state school would, generation after generation, be the vehicle to insinuate this transformation, until by the 21st century, the ground had been prepared and all dissenting forces could be neutralized. The last holdout was the will of many people who had no reason to go along with such a world, but who would be denied any center which could oppose the ruling institutions and their ideas. A scattered resistance, which if discovered would be quickly disintegrated, would be destroyed if it poked up, like a cosmic game of whack-a-mole. Secret societies would be established that ensured the success either of the eugenic creed or a campaign of terror, and they would be tasked with rooting out potential trouble and directing them either towards empty sops, useless courses of action, or to just turn in dissidents to the authorities or kill them. Doing this was not easy, and that is why it took until the 21st century to ensure that resistance would be disrupted. The only remaining path of resistance is a dire, hopeless struggle for life, the outcome of which will be pre-ordained. Those selected to die will surely die, and those selected to live cannot really lose. Those who continue to resist will find that they have no potential idea that will not be rejected by a monopoly that has marched in lockstep ever since the late 19th century. The invasion of the institutions into private life makes any further rebellion difficult, and the public institutions decided a long time ago that most of humanity were alien to it. Even if selected to live, it will not be the life previously imagined, except for an elite few who style themselves divine in the Satanic sense.

Thus far we have considered the solitary player, from a selfish perspective. In real life, and in our simulation, the economic games are multi-player games, and necessarily so. In life, we start as infants, nearly defenseless, and are raised by other people - parents, and the rest of society - to become members of society. Only after this process does a human being resemble the "rational man" of economic thinking. Where we are purely individual actors, we are only looking at what is useful to accomplish our aims. Inevitably, though, most of us are encountering society, and must interact with other agents like ourselves. These agents may be like ourselves, but it is mistaken to assume that their aims and their ultimate ends are exactly like our own. The "rational man" pursuing some universal end goal is itself something fabricated by particularly advanced societies. It may be assumed that the same kernel that leads to rational thinking is going to produce very similar results across the human race. Most humans do have the same basic needs for food and have similar psychological motivations at a basic level. Human variation, and particularly class distinctions within society, will produce very different and radically oppposed motives in developed people with their own history. Solidarity between human beings, and within a society generally, is not a given. It must be built from the parts that emerged from an earlier existence, and made between people who are necessarily individuals. We do not form any sort of "hive mind" or collectivity that can be considered a given. Even the most basic social bonds, like that between a mother and child, can be severed, and we do not always throw out a human being simply because their development in society failed to follow some prescribed, stageist course of development. Human social bonds are versatile, and so far as we speak of "fundamental social behavior", we are really only talking about a few very basic interactions humans have with each other and their environment. The emergence of the individual actor in the real world is very quickly established as the norm, because of the functioning of human bodies and their brains. Human societies, on the other hand, have the difficulty of laggard "thought processes", being dependent on communication networks and the need for common language and understanding, which is not so easily established as our own bodies' unification of their constituent parts. We are practically dependent on some sort of upbringing to produce something as complex as language or nearly all the machines we know in our society, and human collectivity has certain advantages in a great many tasks, but if we were to speak of societies as "superorganisms", they would be very inhuman organisms and should be treated as such.

For "society" to function, we have to start with the individual. The individual elevates "self" above and separate from the world necessarily to define themselves as an entity in the first place. No person can sacrifice their own bodily integrity too much that they cease to be themselves, and it is necessary to assume that you will remain you, that your person will retain its integrity throughout your life. There are of course many things in society which challenge this integrity, by other people imposing themselves upon you and defining what you will be, where you belong, and attempting to mold you into a member of society in such an internal way. We also individually cannot help but be formed by the environment, the tools we use and the people we interact with, even if we are persons and identify as such. The basic assumption remains that the child is the child, the mother is the mother, and a proper name can be assigned to someone (even if that name changes in some different context). The "self" is at least a necessary fiction for society to form, and it emerges from what people are, how their bodies function and the concept of executive functioning. Without it, it would be quite impossible for someone to function alone, let alone form social bonds. This self is not an absolute, because some person can be re-shaped, and of course people die or leave society in various ways. The behavior of people in groups, the effect of social machinery on a person, can be understood and has a definite effect. It is rather that the individual is the most readily identifiable agent through which this thing, "society", manifests in the real world. No social grouping that is real can be imagined without people individually accepting it and realizing it, and believing in a societal bond that is severed - like someone believing that a defunct state still exists today - has predictable results. This "self" need not be conscious - a dog or a baby is in a primitive sense establishing their "self" - but it does imply some sort of processing which could be construed as "thinking", or at least some processing that is life-like. A sheet of metal doesn't have any sense of "self", even if we might treat some metal implement as if it had personified traits if we are particularly angry with its malfunctioning. In our human societies, we exclude non-humans from "society" as agents to be regarded. Societies may define distinct classes of people and exclude them from their models of society, but in practice, slave populations had to be disciplined by communicating to them, with the implication that the slave could if not disciplined break free, and that the slave was not so incapable of thought that freedom was an impossibility. Taking slavery for granted would likely lead to a master overthrown, and no master was so daft that they didn't understand what was necessary to keep slaves subjugated. A dog, on the other hand, isn't going to suddenly speak or express demands for "rights" no matter how kindly he is treated and how much effort is put into humanizing him. The dog might share in consuming the social product, and may have some productive role, but does not have the concept of property as humans have, or any concept of property in the abstract. The same may be said of infant humans, or humans "in the wild" who are not at all familiar with language if they were to exist. We protect infants and treat them as members of society because of their potential to become people, but this is provisional. Human hostility towards those humans who never learn language, due to some defect of their brain or upbringing, is legendary, where such people are treated even worse than animals in many respects, singled out for particular humiliation and sadism that isn't usually considered for dogs or cows or rats.

This society consists of its people, and then the objects appropriated by them - which includes the bodies of people themselves, which are at the disposal of the entire social unit. But, these social units do not emerge as a given, as something hardwired into the universe or into the people themselves. People may have certain inclinations towards social behavior, but these inclinations are only at first very basic behaviors. The relations are between two and only two objects, whether we are concerned with people or with objects that have been appropriated. We may hypothesize some center, some totem around which a group may be organized, but that means incorporating some abstract entity of "the group" to which every individual and object has a relation. The abstract object "the group" is a necessary intermediary to which individual agents relate, and it is only ever realized by individual agents capable of that abstraction. The basic relationships between people, then, are exclusively bilateral. We relate to one another, and to the objects appropriated, individually. Only when we have identified the people and objects can we organize them into groups. We may identify groups simply - a pile of apples, or Bob's possessions - or the group's structure may be complex and we would have words to describe the multitude of relations, institutions, and so on that are a part of that group. All of these groups can be broken down to their constituent parts. Without entities processing abstract information that form "selves", none of these constituent parts can be construed as anything other than those parts, down to matter in its normal motion. We can identify some grouping, some system of objects that are not appropriated by society, and identify that as a whole, and that the system has emergent properties that are more than the sum of its parts. This emergence though is not "hardwired" into the universe in some metaphysical way. The emergence of sociality, particularly in humans who possess language to describe these relations abstractly, is necessarily versatile, and keeps these relations at enough of a distance such that people can break and form relations, and can assimilate new people and objects into their societies regularly. The fixed or ideal form of society is erroneous thinking in the extreme. Societies have to be dynamic and adaptable to be at all functional. Certain aspects of human societies emerge regularly - for example, the society needs some way to reproduce its members, which usually means some institution like the family and parent/child relationships - but the particulars of these relations vary considerably between societies, and at the micro level these relationships are not exactly the same from family to family.

The earliest social relationships then are formed for practical reasons. They may be emergent from some natural process, like sexual relationships and reproduction, but there are various reasons why a child would want to attach to some parental figure, and reasons why children would be viewed as a way to affect the future, or at least there is that primitive bond of mammals to their offspring. Many of the relationships, though, simply happen because of proximity and expedience, because people happen to be close to each other and it makes a lot of sense for them to get along, to have some understanding with each other. There are practical limitations to how many relationships someone could have before conflicts arise, and these relationships exist between people with their own wants. We may invent rationalizations for why someone should relate to another person, but they are just that. No social bond, not even the most primitive, can be taken for granted, and friendships can occur between people with no particular natural reason to be "biologically compatible" or any rational reason. All that is necessary is that two people arrive at some understanding of what boundaries exist, and that at least they are not entirely hostile towards each other. The most basic relationship between people is friend and enemy, but what "friend" entails may be less than total loyalty, and enemies can make relations of non-aggression and respect of some terms of co-existence. Only at the extremes do you find unswerving loyalty as friends, or total alienation as enemies who cannot abide the other's existence and refuse to even treat with the enemy as anything other than a monster to be defeated. All of these relationships are realized by physical exchanges taking place, so far as they can be said to have a real meaning. It is easy for me to say someone on the other side of the world is friend, or at least that I bear no ill will to him and would prefer a world in which all humans can get along, but practically I have little to do directly with this other person. Only indirectly would I be able to affect him, and while someone on the other side of the world may be very powerful and have the influence to make things happen on a global scale, it is unlikely we will personally meet; and if we have any direct communication at all, it has to be realized through some sort of communication, perhaps through fiber-optic cables and electricity. When we start life in nature, or in our simulated environment mentioned above, we do not have the benefit of rapid communication over long distances, or any way to physically affect each other. We only have the limited range of our voice and the motions of our body. It is as a result that social groups arise first at the local level, and that "society" as a global phenomenon, everywhere and all around us, is illusory. There is only in reality the actual interactions between people, that are only possible through some physical medium.

We establish society then as relations of competition (enemy) and cooperation (friend), and we treat the two very differently. Neither can be said to be "foundational". The foundation of society is simply the individual, who may have varying attitudes towards the group he lives in, or the idea of a wider human society of which he is a part. Society is not the definition of our lives, dictating to us what we ought to do and what we must abide. It is a reality we all recognize, or a fiction we believe in and make into more than what it is. Many in humanity have come to find the entire business of social relations to be disgusting, and seek to distance themselves from it as much as possible. These hermits can be found in various forms throughout history, and the ideologues of those who seek domination over other men very zealously deny the existence of such people. Those who seek to leave society and the dominion of those vying to be masters, commit a greater sin than mere rebellion or demands for justice. To be a hermit and be happy with that decision is a direct assault on the very basis for mechanisms of control, for it demonstrates that there is a way out, even if only for oneself. The slavemaster may shrug off the hermit as irrelevant or preferable to full-scale rebellion, but deep inside the slavemaster abhors the idea that someone and something might be beyond his reach and see nothing at all of value in the slavemaster's entire structure and way of life. The rebel seeking a different political arrangement, at least, can be related to as someone with a need for power much like the original slave master. The hermit who scoffs at the very idea of social domination in its entirety presents an existential crisis to the entire way of life that predicates totalizing societies. What would happen if everyone disregarded the norms of the slave master? Many who seek to become their own lords, even if they espouse some revolutionary creed, can be manipulated into becoming just another perpetuation of lordship. Freedom in a real sense would mean the freedom to reject the imposition of the social on the individual. This freedom is not easy to attain, because societies and collective organizations can amass great power and individual humans are dependent on society for their upbringing. A society of free people, who have the time and means to pursue their own ends and can disregard the petty and great overlords, is the most frightening prospect imaginable to a certain sort of imperious person.

Thus there is more than the duality of competition and cooperation that forms the societies we live in. The individual wants for freedom need to be balanced with the need for cooperation, and the need to be able to compete against stronger enemies. First this competition is against larger game animals for hunting, but it does not take long for the competition to extend to the greatest threat humanity has ever faced: other humans. The evolution of human social forms is better left for anotehr chapter, but it is sufficient to say that our language at all, and the words we use to conceive of social bonds, developed over time and around the very real instincts and realities we face as animals. Even very primitive man had understood that the bonds they form and the higher goals they aspire to were not a simple matter of economics. At a basic level, our social bonds have to be practical and realizable in some way, but how we relate to each other and to the world as a whole has some spiritual significance. Such a significance is necessary for us to process concepts like morality, ethics, honor, and so on, and while you may be able to reduce those concepts to logical propositions and calculate them, we cannot treat them as mere entries on a ledger that are freely exchangeable. To do so would lay bare some rather ugly conditions, and would also tell us that at the end our social endeavor is a worthless one and doomed to end in failure. It is our experience, and the gift we have for abstract thinking and language, that allows us to conceive of social behavior as something more than biological impulses or cold calculation. We may be able to consider our relationships to be fairly simple ones, and do not need to make them more than what they are, but we also recognize certain values, certain truths, that are necessary for us to develop the varied social relations we have, and allow us to build trust beyond what our animal instincts would allow us to form. Dire economism and natural instinct would prohibit us from forming much more than small bands, and small bands that would be rife with backstabbing and deleterious social climbing behaviors. Even something as simple as a mother tending to her child has to be able to grow into something more, for the mother to be a good mother to the child and teach the child what is needed to be able to relate to a complex society. There are limits to how far the complexity of social relations can be taken, and they always have to come back to the bare necessities as we are animals with certain requirements. Even these material requirements though can evolve over time, as we are well aware. We need only at a base level food and security, but that latter brings about some very complex demands, as again the most persistent threat to humanity is other humans. The wants and demands of a person are often contingent on the society and environment in which they live, far beyond the basic kernel of needing nutritional sustenance.

So we can know who are friends are, what the language is, who's in charge, and the law of the land in these parts. Even if there is no proper "state" as such, and the leadership of a group is less formal, those latter two are still going to be necessary to define a group, such that they are clear about particular rules of conduct governing their relations and some mechanism by which those rules are either enforced, or the group's cohesion breaks down. In all cases, the forms sociality takes can only be realized by the social agents, that being people. All the objects that are available to the whole society have to enter into the influence of some person in that group. We can recognize that there is a whole world outside of ourselves, and outside of the society in which we live. The world is too vast for most of us to have a personal relationship with too many people, and groups tend to have limits to how cohesive they can be. Even in a very interconnected society, we often interact with few people. Much of how we interface with wider society is going to be through organizations, rather than talking to someone far away as if they were familiar. Even if we could talk to someone around the world, there probably isn't much of a basis for a sustained relationship. Meeting in person comes with certain implications for what is possible, and while fast communication over long distances can alleviate this, the chances are that someone's closest relationships will be close in proximity on a regular basis, or at least were in close regular contact at some point in life. Even within a close group, this group is going to take on the name of an organization, rather than the multiple personal relationships between each member or their personal relationship with the leader. Even where a group is dominated by a singular leader, it is often expedient for that group to present some organizational front, a model which we can use to understand the relationships generally, rather than explaining the full and complex web of every relationship that exists. An organization may be theoretically scalable to a large scale, or it may be confined to a narrow gathering and concern itself with a particular sphere of behavior. All of these organizations are bound by the limits imposed by reality, both in who they can actually reach, and how they can not be encroached on by other organizations / individuals. An organization may be loosely organized, may be an institution, or may be tight-knit. Unlike the above categories of sociality, the "organization" is a completely artificial construction, not bound by any sort of natural definition, and organizations usually present themselves as purposeful. Those organizations, formal and informal, that become stable and valued become institutions, and some of them appear as natural as anything else. Like anything else though, they only are realized by the social agent and the machinery under their command.

Now we have the basis for something, where the value individuals observe can be integrated into a social context. Individually, we only have direct utility and the decisions of inventory management, placed into a game, a situation, that is the player against the world. Socially, we have the potential for the appropriation of something new immediately, which is human labor, and we have tokens which can be represented by some social authority, and we have the ways in which social relationships can be valued. Social value has to present itself as independent from any particular bias, as something that is respected by all within the group, or something that is imposed on the group. A value judgement individually held doesn't have any particular relevance to reality - we would prefer our judgements of the situation to resemble the real world, but at the end of the day, we can assign whatever value we want to particular things, towards whatever end we have in mind. Social groups, unlike individuals, do not think and do not hold such aims as free-standing entities, independent of any of their members; or if they do, it could only be construed in a very abstract way, if we were to posit the social group as some superorganism with a "brain" and "thinking", following some logic towards a conclusion. There is only the stark reality of some valuation that is socially enforced. The members of a society may be able to dispute this valuation, and they may personally diverge in their own thinking, but the social organization needs to fit the value into its system, its framework, in some way. If the members of a society disagree on basic values, and have no way of mediating disputes, cooperation within an organization becomes very problematic at the least. An individual only has himself to blame if the valuation is wrong, and bears all of the consequences of his judgement. A dispute over values socially held is potentially fatal to holding that group together in the first place. This dispute can be resolved in a number of ways, from reasoned argumentation to simple assertion of brute force on the subjugated. Those who are suppressed in a society may disagree, but they are not going to have much recourse to act against the established authority who will tell you what is worth what. A failure of executive functioning to agree upon values, or the failure of the apparatus of the state to justify or enforce those values, is something very different.

The regularity with social emergences, just as with the regularity of the emergence of life and its behaviors generally, leads people to formulate general expectations of how people relate to each other, and how objects relate to each other. This may be at first a simple curiosity, and extension of the human mind's ability to find patterns in everything and gather knowledge of the world. The social existence we find ourselves in, though, is much more immediate. Potential threats lurk around every corner, and friendly relations with any social agent are after simple observation far less common than hostile ones. Friendly cooperation, as a rule, requires far more commitments than hostile competition or neutrality. The cold analytical reality tells us a truth. The social reality, the reality of competition, makes the wider world a potential danger to be dreaded. Further complicating matters is that the world we live in covers finite space, and resources are contested by multiple people even in a purely cooperative venture. Cooperation or even neutrality may fray if one finds themselves in a position of resource scarcity. Even if we live in conditions of plenty in the present and the forseeable future, the threat of some enemy claiming that plentiful existence is ever-present, unless someone is capable of viewing from afar all the potential threats and somehow defending against all of them. Of the basic requirements for existence, security is typically going to be more difficult to attain than the productive and sustaining necessities and wants. The problem of meeting the productive needs of society is usually not the problem in a real way, and this is especially the case with modern science. We would know, assuming everyone did their part and were happy to cooperate, how to produce the food and necessities in great abundance, and sharing the land would simply be a resource allocation problem to feed so many mouths and provide all the necessities. Human societies, though, are not harmonious organizations where everyone follows and abides by a central plan. Even in the best of conditions, human society is rife with threats, hostility, and demands that purely exist because of human pigheadedness. Human societies are also concerned with questions of dignity, of freedom and the security of the people against predation. The predators need not come from outside, either. Predation occurs within a social organization, and we can and do live in societies that are entirely predicated on rent extraction and manipulation of large numbers of people, to the benefit of an opulent minority. If we were simply in search of solving the resource consumption problem, the solution in every technological epoch is predictable, given the technology of the time, and this solution rarely involves culling the population of excess mouths. I would wager that every single famine that has ever happened in human history has been the result primarily of political strife, rather than reaching some "limit to growth" defined strictly by nature. To believe these "limits to growth" are naturally ordained is to indulge in a belief that human society has not been, from its earliest inception, not defined by endemic or extreme violence, war, slavery, exploitation, oppression, senseless cruelty, and a host of other characteristics that would certainly constitute a human-made "limit to growth" rather than a hard limit being set by the planet itself. For reasons that will become increasingly apparent throughout these books, the cost of human strife and senseless competition for competition's sake has wrought incalculable and largely unnecessary damage upon the human race, with the result of nothing particularly good at all. Some of this strife was perhaps inevitable, but a large part of it served no purpose other than the vanity of certain people. As with the question of slavery before, ultimate responsibility rests with the chief, one way or another.

We must leave our example that we laid out of the simulation universe, and deal now with the real. A simple question is this: is the description of an information universe valid? We started from the position of the subjective economic actor and its consciousness, but that consciousness is not the starting point of the world. We described life in the last chapter as an almost alien imposition on the real, a system which seeks to assert that it is a thing and modify the world around it through some intent built into the system. That intent, though, had to originate from somewhere. We can make the assumption that this intent of life is not a wholly unusual occurrence, as the building blocks of living matter and systems are made out of common elements.

There are two questions of historical importance - abiogenesis, or the origin of the living processes, and evolution, or the change in living things over time that produces the various kinds of life we see. Both of these questions are open questions, and the answers so far have not been terribly satisfactory. The answer to the first question is one that is left as a great mystery in the dogmatic teaching of science we endure today. We have reasonable guesses that the processes by which the base elements and compounds become living matter are not too uncommon in the universe, but there is to this day no satisfactory chain of events to tell us how cellular life formed. All that is assumed is that the conditions are commonplace enough that simple life appeared not long after the geological period where the materials were plentiful on Earth, with the possibility that living matter could have arisen on another planet and traveled by meteorite to the early Earth. In either case, an environment rich in materials to consume would be a prerequisite for life to persist on Earth. The second question of evolution would be, by the late 19th century, of key importance to the ruling ideologies of the world, and there was no way it would not be seized by those who see the biological science as a key science for ruling people. If the narrative of evolution just so happened to support the people who ruled in the late 19th century, and this narrative could justify a permanent dictatorship on scientific grounds, it would displace the role once enjoyed by the Church and by ancient cults, and would inevitably enter conflict with the older religious rule. The reasons why the question of evolution became this contentious do not change that some process would have had to happen for life to exist in the form that it does, and any theory would at least have to appear plausible, with demonstrable experiments that show the theory is operative at a smaller scale.

In answering the real question of evolution, we must first dismiss some of the clearly ideological beliefs regarding the process. The first and obvious is that evolution, in some form or another, was the "default assumption" of science and naturalism going all the way back to Antiquity at the least. It is creationism that is something newfangled. Past religions were, in recounting tales of creation, not making scientific or literal claims; the stories of creation were always allegorical, often stories told to children. Children would be, for reasons that will become clear, inquisitive about the world they find themselves in, and an adult or a priest would be there to supply answers that weren't readily apprehensible by explaining the origins of babies in sex or the origin of the group or polity they live in. It made intuitive sense that something could not arise out of nothing and that a chain of events could stretch back to the distant, misty past, before the reckoning of anyone who was there to write down history. The creation myths of various cultures were almost nakedly stories intended to impart a moral foundation for their society, and there are similarities between many of the creation myths and myths about pre-civilized history, like stories about the flood and usually some myth involving the sun. Genesis in the Bible is clearly retelling the story of Adam and Eve as the story of the Fall of Man from God's grace, rather than attempting to stake a naturalistic claim. The story in Genesis is even less devoted to the material details of creation than most creation myths, as the story of Genesis is largely a story about the origin of the human mind and Man's fall to temptation. It is a story of the origin of thinking Man and the conceits people hold about themselves. The precise details of God's creation of the world, animals, and then human beings, are not so important to the story, other than to place God at the head of creation as the primary mover. The myth of the primary mover was common to all of the myths as the origin of the causal chain of events, and remains to this day an unspoken assumption of naturalism. The mythical and religious view almost always, for reasons that were expedient, described the universe as a fundamentally spiritual one rather than a material one, and that was the important part of the creation myth, rather than a divine explanation of why there is a sun, moon, rain, and so on. A religious interpretation in the older myths could have easily integrated a theory of evolution as "God's working", but one that was ultimately irrelevant to the spiritual cosmology religion was establishing. The creation myth has more to do with why human beings and thought exist, than a master theory that seeks to arrest the entire physical world. Our present discourse on creationism arose specifically in modernity, as the evolutionary question became politically and ideologically necessary because science had increasingly commanded the physical world to such an extent that the question of biological science was unavoidable. At the time, in the 19th century, virtually every scientist except the blindest ideologue was an evolutionist. The question that was contended was how evolution proceeded, because the answer to that question had great importance to the future of humanity, if this evolutionary process could be commanded or harnessed in some way once its fundamental principles were arrested in scientific knowledge. Creationism emerged not as a religious theory so much as it was a theory that claimed to be science, usually with the science being nakedly ideological and a blatant attempt to appeal to the vanity and greed of some imperial logic; or at best, creationism appeared because the intent of Darwinian evolution and the evolution discourse at the end of the 19th century meant eugenics, and creationism was offered as a cowardly escape from the biopolitical question (if the position was believed honestly), or as a cynical "alterna-eugenics" which reified the ruling order in the minds of simple-minded bigots, which was often the kind of creationism promoted as a faux-opposition to the growing influence of eugenics among scientists. Creationism required terminating the thought process that would lead someone to the very natural assumption that life has an origin story that could be rationalized. The position of early naturalism, one that survived for a long time, is that the universe simply had no material origin that we could ever identify, and that the procession of events had always been happening in some way or another. After all, it had been commonly accepted that something cannot come out of nothing, and a simple rule of thumb is that matter could not be created nor destroyed, however it was understood. Even before formally stating it was so in a scientific or philosophical theory, it was a common sense assumption. Naturalism still had to allude to a prime mover, but that mover was placed outside of time entirely and was left as a question of spiritual rather than material importance, and the answer was in metaphysics rather than physics.

With that out of the way, the question of primary importance to this work is how we arrived at creatures like us who can contemplate the economic question. This transformation was not a sudden transition, where we passed a threshold and we can speak of Rational Man, the economic actor placed above reality like our imagined computer user. Living things must contend with the physical world, whatever their biological imperatives tell them the world is supposed to be. How humans acquired symbolic thought had to proceed from the prior conditions, and the language we use today is very artificial compared to anything that would be used 100,000 years ago. We also have to understand that symbolic thought and the ability to express those symbols for the first time changed dramatically how those who can now speak would be able to live. This speaking did not start with fully formed sentences and thought as we would have today, but nor was it purely something inborn that had to wait for a biological mutation. We can speculate on the origin of the brain and the central nervous system, and whether there is a tendency for brain mass to increase. What is clear is that at some point, a critical juncture in development was reached where symbolic thought was both something that could be processed by the brain, and there were readily available means to express those symbols in some way that could be communicated. This combination was not solely in the brain, as if the being of pure thought is the sole mover, but required the development of the tongue and motor skills, the ability to walk upright and free hands for tool use, and so on. We would face difficulty expressing symbolic thought without the tools of the body allowing them to be expressed, and if there weren't a particular receptivity to spoken utterances from other people in the human being. These developments would have reached a critical point where the crucial advance is made - that vocalizations, that were once simple grunting and shouting, could be translated into concepts that allowed a human being to explain finer concepts than those that were possible for animals. The tendency to nurse the young and protect children, and the displays of sociality in the animal kingdom, certainly informed the spread of this proto-language. There is no reason to believe that the expression of any symbolic thought had to conform to our normative expectations today, or at any point in recorded history, of how humans are "supposed" to talk. We can see in our history, and even in our recent history, how the way people communicate with each other in spoken language has changed over the years. In the past several decades, the ways in which people talk to each other have been deliberately engineered to be as toxic as possible, in an effort to beat people into accepting the dictates of neoliberalism, and this has produced a new barbarism in daily life. This new, degraded way of speaking can only be fully explored in some future writing, but evidence of this new speech is apparent to anyone who thinks about how people spoke to each other even 100 years ago, and how basic decencies once assumed were replaced with a grotesque parade of snark and denigration. It is only because of the overbearing institutions looming over us today that we are forbidden from speaking too frankly about what has changed, because criticism of the social norms cannot be tolerated in modernity and especially in the kind of society we live in today. If we compare the normative language of 100 years ago to 300 years ago, the departure is even greater, but still recognizable as early modern thought. We know less of how people spoke in Antiquity, and then of how someone would have spoken in the earliest city-states or primitive agricultural villages. We can see even in different sociological niches how the manners of communication differ, if for example someone lives in the country or an urban environment, and the different manners of communications of different classes in the present society (and a meaningful understanding of social class and institutions is also not something we are permitted to discuss with too much truth, as social class has been endlessly mystified in the present discourse). Why would we assume that someone in early hunter-gatherer society would speak at all like we do today, or share our presumptions and biases about value? Why would we assume much about language at all is inborn, let alone conforms to particular genes? The one thing that is inborn is that the brain's capacity is there, and there is some mechanism - the tongue producing spoken words - which would be the means of transmitting this symbolic thought, in a way that was accessible to most people and not energy-intensive or requiring resources beyond that which provide the normal sustenance of life. Even this brain capacity is not a fixed quantity for the species. The mechanism of language is something people do, not an essence of some special ingredient separating humans from the animal kingdom. We have already mentioned the obvious, in that conceits about whose language and thought is "real thought" have been used to justify any inhumanity to man, to the point where children who can quite obviously read letters on a page are declared illiterates because they do not conform to the institutions, or the institutions simply assert by imperious will that the child in uneducable and must be damned. There is certainly a distinction between the brains of homo sapiens and those of dogs, which are much smaller, but the development of whole sections of the brain for language would not have been something left inert until the magic genes tell us we are permitted to speak. It is far more likely that the critical period of development which allowed proto-humans to put 2 and 2 together - literally - spurred further development over a rapid time-span. This would have meant that a feature of the brain that was previously minor would be strongly beneficial in the future.

An even greater consequence of symbolic language is that the development of a knowledge base could proceed, at first at a very, very slow pace, out of the primitive sociality inherited from the monkey kingdom. There is a pernicious tendency today that believes that words can only be taught by pedagogy, and that the master must pass the knowledge to the student, but this process is not at all how humans acquire their language faculties, even today. A sensitivity to other people and the noises they make leads the young child to find patterns in those utterances, and if the adults around the child are eager to speak to the child and around the child, this process is facilitated further. Wordplay can then be developed at first as a game, some recreation, because in this primitive state of mankind, the bare necessities of hunting and gathering required far less time than today's work-week and far fewer obligations to some lord or manager. The conditions of this primitive society would be far different from the antagonistic relations in close quarters that are a given of civilized man. The formation of language did not happen because a pedagogue moved its development from on high, nor did it proceed in any prescribed stages that were fixed in nature. We have to consider the conditions in which language could have developed, and conditions which would have been hostile to the formation of language. Overbearing, domineering control was not only costly to the development of language, but was costly to the organization of hunter-gatherer society as a whole, and those costs could not be borne because there was no large-scale appropriation of resources that could support a managerial class of the sort that might be imagined.

One recurring myth that needs to be done away with is the "notion of Tribe" in vulgar discourse. This is not a problem for experienced anthropologists who understand history and their field well, but it commonly appears in conversations on the internet. The way the story goes among the vulgarizers is that the ancient tribe was a tight political unit, in which the chief or wise man was the Great Leader issuing orders and wisdom to the rest of the tribe, and the customs of the tribe imposed egalitarianism "from on high", ensuring that everyone in the tribe got their equal share and that all strife in the tribe would be vanquished by the wisdom of the noble primitive. These retellings of history usually include references to tribe-sanctioned orgies so that the sexual losers of the male populace would receive their share of pity sex, all organized in the tribe which appears to be hermetically sealed and oblivious to the environment (thanks to the wise stewardship of the rightfully anointed wise men). It is easy to see how this argument is trotted out to grant some legitimacy to a very modern conceit of what the managerial state should be, by claiming that the legitimacy of a managerial practice is rooted in ancient human history, or more commonly, the legitimacy derives from "human nature" which is dictated dogmatically rather than from a serious analysis of what human nature would actually entail. In this retelling, the actual sociality that would have been likely is displaced with a thoroughly modern conceit of sociality, imposing modernity as an eternal state of affairs that was baked into the DNA of homo sapiens. The development of the modern managerial state, or technocratic state, is a large contributor to this narrative of history, even though the errors of such thinking have been evident since modernity began. No amount of clarification from the actual wise men of modernity, who have ways of determining these things through actual science, brings an end to these tropes, and every generation a new crop of suckers and grifters latch on to the tropes because they are nakedly self-serving. It is not self-serving in a subtle or imperceptible way, but blatantly self-serving and usually a dogmatic appeal to nature argument, deliberately so because when someone does make these assertions, it is better to go as big as possible and assert everything is as someone would prefer it to be. None of these arguments demonstrate a shred of intellectual integrity, yet they are presented often as "super-science". For reasons that will become clear later in this book, this manner of dogmatic assertions as "scientific" is an intended feature of the society of today, and it will not go away easily. The more elaborate forms of these assertions are enshrined in discourse and often taught as dogma in universities, and the most pernicious of the dogmas are so pervasive that it becomes impossible to criticize them without a torrent of outrage directed at the heretic. Still, modern science and the study of anthropology sufficiently demonstrate that many conceits held about primitive societies are clearly erroneous or even impossible if they are considered for five minutes. We only need to ask ourselves where sociality would originate, and the conditions by which it could have developed, to disprove notions of the "inborn tribalism" conforming to the kind of polity that is prescribed in these retellings of history.

I have only a theory, and one that certainly cannot be tested, but I believe it makes a lot of sense and conforms to what we do know about extant primitive society. The matter of what more developed hunter-gatherer society was is not controversial and well documented in anthropological literature. These societies though would presume a reasonably advanced history of language development, where tribal affiliations were understood as a thing that existed. The tribe of hunter-gatherer society did not correspond to a polity in of itself, but a culture and relations between people who were often familiar with each other. The tribe as a more formal polity only came about late in hunter-gatherer society, where the need for defense against more organized polities, and especially settled city-states, became necessary.

The most basic organization that could have been construed as a polity would be the band - that is, the immediate associations primitive humans would make with each other. This would consist of their families for reasons that are not difficult to divine, and the size of bands could range to very small to a collection of 50-200 people. Beyond that size, it would become increasingly difficult for the bilaterial relationships to not run into difficulties, with too many potential rivals stepping on each others' toes. Outside of the immediate band was outside of the law for the most part. There may be people like yourself not far away, and you probably understood their language once that culture had developed sufficiently. What is known is that these bands would have been largely egalitarian not because it was dictated or a biological impulse, but because egalitarianism was both necessary and a preferred organizational structure for these relationships. Overbearing command and control wouldn't just be unenforceable, but a burden towards the members of the tribe doing their job. The specialization of labor was not too great. You didn't have so many people in the band, and your relationships were with the band that knew who you were. People were not easily replaceable. There were not at first totems that preserved a band generation after generation as essentially the same polity, nor a presumption that the members of the band should be tied down. It would not even be possible to teach in the pedagogical approach that has become standard to civilized society, and such methods are even now an alien imposition. A convoluted hierarchical structure to learning and doing would have been extremely counterproductive, and the abilities expected of the hunter-gatherer band were often fairly simple. Trust would also not be something given easily, given the lack of wider society that would keep anyone honest. All of these factors and many more would make the egalitarian form very natural for early society, far beyond any "innate" structure to human sociality or a fundamentally psychological cause. The methods of enforcing customs and the effective law would be the taboo or whatever force may be available for brute imposition or retribution. It is inappropriate in our time, of course, to acknowledge the long history of the hermit, the man who walks away from society altogether to eke out what existence he could find away from people. These figures, very likely, wanted less to do with society or perpetuating themselves at all, and so they come and go. Given the prevalence of tropes regarding the hermit, even in our time when having an existence outside of a totalizing society is anathema to the basic values of the state, this had to happen often enough that it was an option - that if primitive man were too overbearing, it was possible for someone of sufficient independence to leave, even if it meant going alone. The only thing that would truly stop them would be a threat that would remain the greatest threat to human beings up to the present day - other humans. To create the dependence that would lock primitive man into a condition like slavery, though, requires the exertion of some energy and deliberate action, and absent much in the way of technology, the manager or overseer would need to watch the subjugated like a hawk. There were no greater institutions held by a privileged minority that could be trusted, and so the malcontents of primitive society could only be forced into compliance so much. Egalitarian relations were the most quickly evident way to establish trust between those who did not have a necessarily dependent relationship, and basic decencies by the moral code of that time would have made life a little easier for everyone involved. This primitive morality was hardly a rule, and the endemic violence of this society demonstrates this, but it was not possible to hoard the surplus of wealth and energy that would enable the most violent repudiation of this in a systemic way. That is to say, it was not possible to create the conditions of a grossly unequal society that would claim the whole of the Earth, and it would have been counterproductive to do so since the needs of the social unit were to field hunters and gatherers, rather than possess people for servile work that would have been ill-suited for either, and that would have required a whole new specialization of managers and overseers that themselves would need to be overseen. The command of language and tool use in humans was only effective if humans were able to develop it unencumbered, and human cooperation with language was effective between equals in a way it wouldn't be in hierarchical relationships. Lording over a hunter and commanding him like a dog would not be effective. New hunters would need to be taught through oral tradition, which first means a period of infancy where the young boy is given ample affection. The same is true of gatherers, the other main role in early human societies. Demonstrating domination on a persistent basis would cost more energy for not much reward, and once humans did develop the knowledge of something like freedom, it became that much harder to impose ape-like dominance on early humans. This is not to say that early human societies were devoid of violence or shows of domination - they were still commonplace. Nor did this mean that early humans actually lived in something like "primitive communism" - it is more likely that there simply wasn't much to acquire, beyond the implements that a human being likely learned to manufacture themselves rather than relying on any specialized manufacture. It is rather that for this "hunter-gatherer" strategy to work, human bands couldn't afford to build too many institutions or too many chiefs, and lack the hands to do what needed to be done. Besides, if someone didn't like the chief, it really was easy to leave a would-be chief to the jackals.

Language did not develop highly abstract ideas like social relations immediately, nor did these things require language to be understood in a meaningful sense. All the ideas we have in language derive from some experience, or at least a potential experience that is independent of any particular language. Language simply gives those concepts a concise token which can be communicated and shared, and now whatever abstract thinking prevailed in early humanity could be built upon. Humans with some familiarity often are willing to engage with each other, especially in an early society where there really wasn't that much work to do or other activities to engage in besides hunting, and humans possess a curiosity about the world and its patterns. In this way, the information processing that was once difficult to communicate could build some "intellectual base" independent of any one person, in a way that people could recognize and draw from. Oral tradition would be the means by which new people could learn to speak, learn the names of tools and natural objects, the names of people and the names of the relations they have. Although this would not be understood as "technology" in the modern sense, and technological advance would proceed at a snail's pace, there would be at least a perception of the wider world and the conception of a world far larger. Humans can now remember there are other humans, other organizations of people and organizations of animals, catalogue what they are, and have a wider concept of "the world" that can be communicated. The conception of the world then becomes part of the social network itself, and can appear to be something independent of any individual person's interpretation. Societies require certain values to be shared in order to remain cohesive in any way, and it starts to appear that "society" at the local level, and "Society" as this vast interconnected network of intelligent activity that is potentially everywhere, really are independent entities themselves. The true reality of course is that societies only exist because there are people. All of this information ultimately is propagated through human beings, or things human beings create such as writing or markings in a cave or any other media. But the social reality is that organizations are what we usually have to operate through to relate to the world to accomplish much of anything, and that individuals don't have that much strength outside of those organizations, and individuals can be preyed upon by those organizations. Language itself built up around organizations of people, and would have had to, and over time the various words were taught and passed down because those terms were necessary to interface with the world, whether they wanted to or not. A world full of predators, already extant in nature to a considerable extent, is reproduced in the abstract. Friendship is difficult to find, even within the bands that are supposedly "friends", and predatory behavior is so common that it is almost considered a joke. The endemic violence in hunter-gatherer society is a testament to just how cooperative these bands really were. The formation of the bands, and a language to comprehend the wider world, simply means that the predators are difficult to avoid. It is no wonder then that the aspiration of many men was to simply walk away from all of it as much as they could. Outside of the band meant being outside of any law, but if the law was to be predation and the presence of people who were fast becoming intolerable, death may be preferable over living in such relations. The curiousity that led to the development of language would, after a point, settle into conditions where that curiosity would be suppressed, and for many thousands of years, human society changed remarkably little. The curiosity necessary to develop language and the hunt would be stopped, and thanks to ruthless competition, the transitional period between the animal kingdom and humans recognizable today came to a close. There would be no more great evolutionary advantage to brain development, yet technology could not advance much beyond the basic tools of the hunter or gatherer, and nor would there be any intrinsic reason why it should advance. It is also the case that development of tools and the body of human knowledge through communication far outstripped the potential of modifications to the body, which could only have happened by processes outside of significant human control and understanding; that is, they could only have proceeded by the laws of evolution, and thus at the slow pace of such processes. Attempts to impose evolutionary law on all the epochs of humanity in which communication and culture flourished are woefully out of place in describing the changes to the human body and experience that would determine the success of human organizations. This would remain the case until the workings of the body could be understood scientifically, so that biological modification could proceed with deliberate understanding, which is to say - due to the present retardation of biological science and understanding - it has proceeded very little along those lines, and the approach used by those who would affect such change in the biological constitution of humans has produced very little in beneficial changes. Movements like Eugenics only affected humanity for the worst ends and in ways that will be explicable later in this book. This is not to say that the biological constitution of human beings would be irrelevant or unalterable throughout history, but it is to say that the period of evolutionary development largely ceased as the culture of hunter-gatherer society settled, and the change from hunter-gatherer bands to pastoral and agricultural society was a change in technology more than it was a change in genetic material. The effects of humanity becoming farming Man and then civilized Man did produce significant biological changes, as changes to the diet and the social conditions of people produces very different types of men in ways we can measure, but these changes were less essential changes, and in the capacities we were concerned with as far as the development of language, the faculties have changed very little. There is nothing suggesting later hunter-gatherer Man was constitutionally a wholly different creature from the human seen in technological society, or that any of the social forms that came about were the product of a genetic essence in the people. Cultural history overtook the few things that could be determined by a genetic constitution; if we want to speak of genetically determined traits in humanity, we can only speak of some very basic things that would affect social behavior. Whole social forms do not encode themselves in DNA, like some intricately written computer program, and the adaptability of humans to a variety of social forms within a culture already shows the argument of "genetic sociality" to be facile and stupid. Humans today still carry the instincts and expectations of an animal adapted to hunting and a nomadic existence, and all the effort in the world hasn't created an inborn preference for docility in civilized man. Attempts to do so have never been terribly successful, nor were they desirable for most of humanity's recorded history. There is not a single inborn tendency that suggests humans were meant to live in cities at all, let alone technological society as we know it. Everything about us is downright hostile to the idea that we could even form cities without facing constant strife, as we have known throughout human history. It is only with considerable effort that civic life is maintained in any society, and civic life entailed the division of the city into classes and professions. There has not been a single city beyond a small village which could say to have overcome class division in the whole of human history, let alone something as large as a nation-state.

As adaptive as the development of language was, and as versatile as the social band was, technological advance often occurred in spite of the humans' newfound culture, or only out of necessity when a situation changed and new words were necessary. The pursuit of endless curiosity was not really the point of the new social organizations. The purpose was to hunt and gather more efficiently, and more importantly, security against potential predators. From a very early starting point, the legitimacy of a band of human beings, and of those who might lead them, was tied to something that remains the case today - victory in battle, and defense against being conquered. An early development would likely have been that since endless war would exhaust a small group of human beings, some sort of understanding across a culture would have been possible, such that the state of human organizations would not be a state of perpetual war and mutual destruction. It should never be thought that there is some naive "human spirit" or "tribal consciousness" uniting any tribe or nation, as if holding the same cultural signifiers were somehow the entire purpose of human enterprises. Much of what defined the area over which a culture operated was dictated by either natural boundaries of where the food would be - you weren't going to have thick human habitation in a mountain range - or by boundaries that would be contested in war and establish territory. The wars need not be fought under a common tribal banner - cultural distinctions are not political distinctions inherently - and struggle within the culture was as much if not more a factor than struggle from outside. The common understanding that allowed for anything like peace was established out of necessity, and part of that was that the early tribal formations - and these "tribes" should not be confused with actual polities at an early stage of human development - had to permit significant autonomy to individual members. So far as there were tribal institutions, they arose for reasons that were practical. Friendly relations were only possible after hostilities were precluded as something against mutual interest. Friendship was never to be given freely and unconditionally. The expansion of human war-making ability, now that concepts like "strategy" and "command" could be better articulated, led first to an explosion of intellectual production, then to long periods of stasis as the demands of socialization were towards hunting, gathering, and war. Early society had no concept of "science for the sake of science", and the rise of war would lead to rather incurious people. People would favor oral tradition and upholding the taboos of their culture over attempts to discover the mysteries of the universe. Those who could be construed as making some sort of religious or philosophical inquiry often had to do so largely alone, or operate only when someone really needed answers to the deeper questions of life, such as early humanity could formulate them. The young bloods though, back then and no less today, care little about such inquiries and go out of their way to mock such curiosity as counterproductive or weak or a sign of absentmindedness. If it were not for the limited practical reach of what could be considered polities in this time, it is likely human development would have been entirely subordinated to the lust of warriors for glory and very little would have changed to the present day, with all the miseries of primitive society simply accepted as unchangeable. In all hitherto existing society, competition has been the prevailing force over cooperation, simply because competition is easier to establish and cooperation is first contingent on competition being ruled out mutually, or an uneasy "cooperation" develops out of a ritual interaction that may be hostile or disinterested.

The early, natural existence of man does not necessarily enshrine some man as a chief, or validate some state, and these functions as formal functions did not exist in the way they exist now. There would be, though, a need of leadership to guide early human bands, and some wise men who would be recognized as elders. There would be, too, a basic sense of territory and defensibility. Hunter-gatherer society may have been nomadic, but if there is no need to move, why do so? Shows of dominance would have been almost certainly a large part of that endemic violence in hunter-gatherer society, whether they concerned domination of sexual partners or domination over some piece of land which yielded fruit or game. Living a meager existence might have been possible, but the overall condition of hunter-gatherer society would have been crude, and only the difficulty of asserting lordship over land and people in a persistent way prevents the arrangement from developing into the familiar hierchical chiefdom. Only in a primitive sense that extreme hierarchical society would feel like a bad idea, did the people at the time understand the way things were done would favor something like autonomy. ("Freedom" as a concept is of course quite recent; at most, such a concept would have only been understood as the lack of some particularly oppressive condition one might live under, and the earliest analogues to the concept "freedom" particularly concern the release of some person from slavery and their return to their family, rather than some principle to be upheld.) All throughout primitive society are demonstrations of conquest, petty and cruel and senseless as this was all the conquering impulse of mankind was capable of at this time. The conditions of nature early man finds himself in are not conditions of his own choosing, however much he may convince himself that this is better than the alternative of being preyed upon, and however much it might have been impossible for social organizations to impose power upon him. Even in this primitive state, a loathing for the general state of war and strife in society is evident. Few people wanted this or thought it was the height of human experience, but nature gave the predator so many advantages that it only takes a few predators to force the behavior of all mankind. To speak of our primitive men as innocents is a modern indulgence, and is at odds with the most basic human experiences that would have arisen. The blessing of this primitive society is that, in the end, it simply couldn't impose the kind of mental control that would exist in civilization. Those who were naive to the treachery of the human-ape would in time receive a rude awakening, and have to adapt if they were one step behind in the competitive game. It is only because of dire necessity that humankind were able to relate to each other with anything like friendship. Even the mother's affection for her child could be tainted by this thing, society, which compelled the child to be raised in the warmongering ways of society, for the good of the collective. This arrangement, on some level, is repellent to a great many people, and many could imagine there was a better way that didn't involve killing and glorification, or at least mitigated those things to an appropriate minimum. The development towards that better way, though, always had to start at the individual. Collectives, social organizations, did not possess the same deep loathing to their bones towards these patterns of conflict. Even if one were to indulge the naive belief that all of these conflicts were some sort of accident from a prior state of harmony, some conflict likely would have arose which may have presented an intractable social problem, for which the only solution would have been for people to accept the situation, whatever their personal fate may be. But, as it turned out, there were a considerable number of men and women who were happy to exalt glory and violence for gain, either laying bare the horror of it all or masking their intent with kind words that this glorification was for some greater good.

For the models we make of real-world thinking, we must abandon the conceit that there is some central arbiter, some computer, on which the software of information processing is being run. The world is potentially limitless, the boundaries of our knowledge being what we can sense and what we can effect in some way. Some like to argue that the Earth itself is a giant computer, a "great mind" that is regulating the life on it, but this is hogwash and a symptom of man's conceit, whether it arises in primitive animism of technocratic ecologism. The Earth does present a system of biological agents which don't affect much outside of the Earth, which are reliant on the input of solar energy and the occasional asteroid to feed the processes of life. The Earth, like an organism, is a consumer, but it excretes only upon itself. The truth is that "social consciousness", the culture and institutions and machinery that comprise it, is filtering our thinking just as much as our own flawed brains are a filter between ourselves and the real. We often defer to the social machinery out of necessity, especially in our modern era. How this is manipulated and turned against us is a matter for the later books in this series. We are of course aware on some level that we need to trust our own judgement, and that the social consciousness has no monopoly on truth or reason. The words we produced, after all, were created for a reason, to give expression to the real and explain the variety of phenomena that exist. Early religion offered answers both to the nature of the world and why it presents to us the way that it does, and also deeper meaning and answers and a sort of ethics for how we can relate to each other. We should not be so quick to dismiss this primitive wisdom, but a certain pernicious attitude in modern times is the trope of the "noble savage" and a celebration of superstition and ignorance. The people of early humanity were making the best sense they could of a world, and they had the advantage of far less cultural baggage in their interpretations. Human beings, as in the object-oriented paradigm of computer programming, relate well to other objects and entities, rather than machine code. Many a programmer can find a gripe with object-oriented programming, but to our primitive man, it made some sense to explain thunder as the act of a god, abiding some pattern that they were trying to figure out, rather than posit the existence of electricity or some mathematics they lacked any symbols to express. Primitive man could comprehend numeracy, and while some make the point that primitives might not have had words for any large numbers, primitive man could have understood "ten and ten and ten and ten..." comprising some higher quantity. Much of how any human being has to interpret the world is practical, to the social niche they inhabit. The actual "information processing" happens only at the local level, rather than at the level of the abstract central computer. That we live on a spherical Earth with trees and plains and seas and so on is an observation we make, and our primitive men may lack certainty of the spherical Earth or its dimensions, but they can readily see the trees and sense that they are part of some larger existence. All of our practical conceptions of the world, and what we need to react to, concern those things which we will make some contact with, or that form a chain of indirect contact that we can figure out. The earliest proto-humans or apes, before speech, knew of little more than their turf and themselves, and that was "the world" by their reckoning beyond a hazy feeling that there might be something far away, that they may remember for themselves but had little way of expressing to another ape.

All of this information world should be understood with the knowledge that all of this information is really the resolution of uncertainty, rather than the substance of things itself. We relate to the world as information because this approach is useful for the economic task, and the economic task is something any thinking life will orient their actions towards, so far as it is necessary. Were it not for the economic problem, we would relate to the world in a way that is more appropriate to what we would feel is right, and our concerns would be spiritual rather than intellectual or crass material ones. None of this economic thought should be seen as something inevitable, which always dominates the rest of our behavior. We would, in a good world, meet our needs for survival, and settle all questions of competition and cooperation in such a way that much of our economic potential is spent on something other than the economic task itself. This is not even a question of accumulating so many resources for spiritual development or luxury, but rather a question of what we would do with our time and why we are doing any of this. It could very well be that we choose simple luxuries over expensive ones. The simple luxuries are not chosen for the sake of austerity or because we are always acting as if others will judge us with the marshmallow test. They are chosen because we can, with little effort, see the futility of bourgeois opulence and its distorted value system. People of any class can understand what they really would want out of this existence, and service to social status or signifiers of dominance are not the purpose. The purposes of sustaining life and the material necessities of growth are a means to an end. Truly overcoming this problem is not a question of reaching some level of development in an economic sense at all. We do not have to do the things we have been made to do, and in the conditions of the early 21st century, it became clear to any literate person who has seen enough that all of the rituals and humiliations we are made to endure are utterly pointless from an economic or productive point of view. Civilization is at this point very efficient at industry, and has developed agronomy such that it would be trivial to increase food production by simply developing more land and employing more labor. In the most basic necessities of life, it would be possible to produce those necessities with only a small part of the populace employed in industrial or agricultural labor, including distribution. It is also known that the strategy of overworking the menial laborer is totally unnecessary. A shorter work day, rather than the 60-80 hours or more that workers are made to endure, would increase productivity and retain the life of a worker. Even 40 hours is onerous. This is more evident when looking at the "work ethic" of the bourgeois, who mostly spend their work days sitting at an office and engaging in political struggles with each other. So many office jobs do basically nothing, and then there are whole sectors of the economy that purely exist to manage others, so that overwork and torture of the populace may continue, not for necessity but because it meets the ulterior motives of depopulation, and a moral sense that the lower classes must suffer. The reason this continues is quite obvious - if the cycle did stop and economic life were efficient, the people who were made to toil and suffer would not just have no reason to accept their fatass managers' continued presence, but would immediately ensure that the exploiters are suppressed, and this would necessitate a violent retribution the likes of which the world has never known. The motives of all social actors are not truly economic, whether they are capitalists, communists, anarchists, people who live day by day with little expectation except grim survival, or the madmen who believe they will build some antiseptic utopia and brag about their plans in secret or in their disgusting propaganda to the world. The motives are only understandable as the motives of people who consider doing what they will the primary want of life. Those who want to do predatory things, out of some sense that this is in of itself morally good, will not be persuaded by any reason or economic necessity to do anything else. Those who want a world of peace and prosperity, with as little violence as possible and certainly the least predation, will find themselves constantly herded and manipulated. This is because the predatory way of life is not morally equivalent with another way of life, as if moral relativism neutralized all things. Moral behavior is not just economic behavior, but is ordained by certain natural laws. It should be clear to the reader that capitalism and the free trade system is at heart a moral claim. Adam Smith's area of study was moral philosophy, and the moral consequences of free trade for good or ill was the foundation for political economy. A failure to grasp this is at the heart of so many misunderstandings of what capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchism, and fascism are even referring to.