The exact history of what happened when to bring hunter-gatherers to pastoral society is only vaguely understood. What is known is when this transition happened, where the familiar hunt and gathering was displaced with herding animals, and this herding of animals facilitated the development of the agricultural strategy. These two activities at first displace the hunting with herding and gathering with agriculture, and should not be thought of as entirely oppositional strategies. What is clearer is that while herding appears in many places, agriculture only originates in a few areas of the world that are well-suited for the strategy, before agriculture is developed and exported throughout the world as a more general strategy. The growth of cereals and livestock produces both surpluses and a means to store the surplus in facilities. Earlier society certainly had the concept of a surplus, but mobile bands could not build or maintain institutions and centers around which the surplus could be stored, and the accumulation of surplus would have been recognized as a danger. Almost certainly, the pastoral and agricultural society was not a choice, as if technological development made this obvious and inevitable. No technological development in human history is purely incidental and "just so" happens. If it was possible to catalogue the behavior of animals and perfect the hunt to the point of making it the herding, it is not a great stretch to extend that and ask the question if humans can be herded too. It is not simply a matter of primitive man finally discovering that agriculture was possible and then the process was immediately adopted. Organization of society into farming activities is not as simple as the knowledge that putting seeds into the ground will allow them to grow. The far more likely case is that chiefs formed their domains by means of warmaking technology before the question of a surplus being produced was something to be appropriated. The bow and arrow, the spear, and primitive warcraft increasingly meant that professional fighting men would fight better than ordinary hunter-gatherer warriors, and the early chiefdoms would be the first hierarchical society. It would not at first take the civilized form of antagonistic relationships in close quarters, but rather than agricultural surplus gathering in a granary controlled by a village chief, it is likely that early agriculture developed either as an offshoot of the mobile band, or the early agricultural villages were paying tribute to the warriors who lived outside of the city. The implements of war did advance, but they were still made of stone and could be constructed out of simple tools. The formation of settled society into city-states coincides with the working of copper and then bronze, where organized mining operations, the expertise of forging, and the accumulation of knowledge of what could be built in settled society occurred in the towns rather than among the nomadic herders. This working of metals, too, did not "just happen", but was something discovered over centuries of seeking advantages in warmaking and control. There is a naive tendency to portray this early technological development as purely happenstance, like "random" genetic mutations in genes that are considered ineffable expressions of biological destiny. The thinking goes that you simply cannot change genes, and thus, the answers to natural history are inscrutable except as the result of random processes. This thinking is carried over from views of natural selection in evolution, particularly in the modern synthesis which enshrined genetics, and it is little more than a just-so story of why things are the way they are as the result of something random and ineffable. Deliberation on the part of the actors involved is entirely removed, as if the people of this primitive society were just evolutionary flotsam that happened to collide with a piece of metal. We have no reason to believe that someone 12,000 years ago was markedly less clever than someone today, or that their brains simply couldn't process the idea of dominating other life. Combined with this thinking is the "noble savage" myth, in which primitives are seen as creatures in the Garden of Eden, untouched by the wickedness of knowledge. They couldn't possibly know what they were doing without the guiding hand of modern scientific institutions, the story goes, until civilized Wisdom came to conquer the savage, as if Wisdom descended from Heaven to affect change in the world. The far more likely explanation is that cruder metal-working was known as a possibility, but there was no easy way to get people herded into the cities. It would take the development of slavery and the foundations of a more elaborate economy to make real the ambitions of those who sought to make the rule of a few men stronger than ever. It would take an insight into how human beings could be ruled and managed, and this insight likely had its forebears in far more primitive states of mankind. The new development of settlements meant that there was an opportunity for the greatest swindle humanity ever developed.

In the economic task, there are conditions which preceded us. No economic agent exists without being formed itself out of some process, and so the conditions in which the economic task is undertaken are not wholly conditions of our own choice. Primitive value is simply the understanding of the reality of how this economic problem is framed, and the conditions that preceded us. We do not declare intellectually what we would like the world to be in science, but we interpret what the world is and then act accordingly. This includes the conditions of ourselves, and what would be necessary for us to continue functioning. We can make the assumption that we want to live, and that certain objectives are things we would enjoy, and other situations are things we would want to avoid. This primitive pleasure and pain, though, is not a great moralizer or a justification for much, and it is not the only condition in which we live. We did not have control over the conditions that made us thinking animals, but much of what we have done since then has been the result of us thinking animals responding to our environment and communicating among each other. No matter how clever we may be, we are confined to the conditions we live - our thought does not make us the god of our world, and we cannot delude ourselves no matter how clever we might be. We are also aware that the basic impulses built into us are not always what we would like to be. We know better than to surrender to temptation, and if we forget this, reality provides us with many cruel reminders of what base pleasure and pain lead to. We may also call this primitive value strategic value - that is, that in economics we are making decisions by some process of thought that makes sense, and events do not "just happen" by happenstance, where human agency is removed. Part of the manifestation of humans, our primitive constitution, is that we are thinking animals, and even if we dismiss our thinking as just a process of nature, it nonetheless happens. Humans are not unique in being the manifestation of a central nervous system and attached body parts which react to the environment. Animals proceed in ways which are predictable and rationalizable, even if they lack the capacity for symbolic thought that we as humans express and can communicate. Nor is it the case that human thought is inscrutable or something to be held above nature entirely. Any serious investigation into psychology, though, should tell us that humans' self-awareness and symbolic thought, and most especially the ability of communication, changes what humans do dramatically. Humans, as a general rule, do not like to be reduced, because we know what happens when the base material nature of the world invades our self - we are obliterated and reduced to a jabbering mess of impulses and nerves to be preyed upon. We can accept that we are in the end the result of determinable processes in nature, while accepting that our native faculties of thought and expression are every bit as valid; further, if we are supposing that nature is a deity commanding us, we cannot point to some central organ of nature that commands us, like a CPU commanding its peripherals. We cannot personify nature as a manager or planner of our lives, and so even if our thoughts are determined by primitive conditions, we as individuals are as free as we ever were, until there is some center of command and management we can speak of that is compelling us. "Nature" itself is an abstract idea, not something to which we can ascribe a will like our own.

The real conditions of economic actors, whether we are speaking of socially constructed economic orders or "economy of nature", are that people and the things they interact with are at first sight local events. A person is generally contiguous over a space, and if we were airy and comprised of disparate parts, we would be very different creatures and this would be understood. The tools we can wield in our hands need to be compact enough and things we can grab, and we have knowledge of what would make a tool the most effective for gripping, slashing, torque, etc. Our immediate social interactions are first with other people, before we can speak of a wider, more amorphous or general society. It is a simple physical principle that movement over distance is very important when we speak of anything happening. If there is "instantaneous motion", it does not appear to operate over great distances, and we readily understand what it costs to transport something, for example our bodies or crops, over a distance short or long. All of these conditions are things we did not engineer, but are conditions placed on us; but at the same time, what these conditions say about what we must do is very little. Material conditions do not define the entirety of what we do, but only the most basic actions we may take. Our common sense tells us what many of those material conditions are, and they are not something that can be wished away by some great ideological mysticism. The things we aspire to create for ourselves in this world are not simply regurgitations of these basic processes, but something that has to build from them. What are the immediate aims of us, assuming we want to live? Living is not some simple substance, but something requiring a number of inputs, like nutrients if we wish to live well and all the things which allow us to grow and adapt to the environment. Simply enduring as a pressing of the nerve of power is simple, but this is not "life" in the sense that we are familiar with. We could sustain the barest minimum of life functions, but there is an impulse of growth and adaptation that would be lacking without something more than the barest minimum. There is also the very important question of survival, and this brings the organism in relation with other organisms, whether those relations are competitive or cooperative. Survival is not a given, but something which must be organized to defend against predators, or to overcome challenges of the individual organisms in cooperation. This survival can never be taken for granted, or assumed as a natural birthright that a Nature-god would uphold for us, or that an overbearing authority from above would protect for us. We can, in our mind, divide the costs between that which is necessary for sustaining the organs of the body so that they are in working order, that which is necessary for survival in competition or towards cooperative tasks, and that which is available for us to pursue aims of growth and aspirations that are not in service to mere sustenance or survival.

The first of these, sustenance of the functions of organs, is a seemingly simple one, and surprisingly inexpensive even when we consider what is necessary for the functions of the body to remain in good working order. There is a game played in our social value systems, where the individual person is told they are gluttonous for wanting things that were once upon a time basic, and the individual is told that to pursue something as simple as a home to call their own is asking too much of nature. This social valuation seeks to claim that it is nature's law, when it is really something imposed by those who hold the dominant institutions of society against the individual. There is no law of nature demanding that we cannot have food under any circumstance. The claim rests on the belief that life functions could not persist without overbearing authority lording over the individual body and declaring that they may live, and that the ruler will bless the individual with the privilege of continued bodily functions. This is clearly a state of affairs created by societies, in which the means of sustenance are locked behind a secure wall, and people are forced at gunpoint to enter these social relations where they cannot win. The food is often very clearly there, but we have in the present society a barrier where people require money or the blessing of the authorities to obtain food from the market, as people are stripped of land where they could grow their own food, and increasingly cooperative sharing is forbidden in favor of private property and the rule of a minority over the multitude. It is only possible to enforce this famine in conditions where the food is either not produced, or all the surplus food is locked away and people are forced into social competition, where food is held as property by some against others. Otherwise, if people see food and are hungry, it takes great effort to enforce stupidity and blindness in the individual so that they do not see that food is there and that a better way is possible. Efforts are made today to produce exactly that stupidity, as a first line of defense so that a more violent defense of property may be used more sparingly. Even the conditions of production, which may produce a famine, are really the result of social relations and the difficulties of distribution, rather than a rigid rule of nature demanding starvation in regular cycles. The relevant point here is that what we think of as the cost of bare sustenance cannot be confined to the simple question of managing physical processes to acquire the food. If that were the case, the economic question would not be terribly difficult in any era, as the processes by which food may be grown are not the greatest of secrets. This knowledge of life processes and how the things we consume are brought into circulation is too mystified by the ruling ideas of our time, but they never really were so mystical, and the knowledge of reality is something inherent to all of us at a basic enough level, so that we know and don't need to be told what it means to have food today or tomorrow. An ideal we may hold in social production, something we might hold as the objective of the cooperative social enterprise, is that we would eliminate the many barriers between a person and their sustenance, so that we do not have to re-litigate and destroy each other over a matter that is actually quite simple. It costs far more to maintain the present system of forced famine and deprivation, if we have attained conditions of sufficient abundance. We have, for instance, vast dislocations in agricultural product as a result of this pricing system, and this system is maintained so that agricultural work remains at the bottom of the economic pyramid and food can be with-held as a way to condition mass behavior. A rational distribution of the product could arrive at a much lower price point of the needs for sustenance, and this distribution does not even need to overthrow the market system necessarily. Even a liberal can understand that conditions of famine and dislocations of wealth are undesirable, and that paying more simply to enforce deprivation would be less preferable than regulating the market activity so that this question of sustenance is available at the cheapest price possible, so that we as a society could move on to other matters of economic importance. If we are considering it virtuous to force famine out of some pigheaded sense of demanding that the individuals of society must earn their existence, when otherwise food would be thrown away and eventually markets lose sales, we are dealing with something quite different from an optimization problem to solve the economic question of sustenance.

It is the second, the question of competition and cooperation, which takes up much of our economic problem, and it is here where we are introduced to a primitive condition which affects all future society. The answer for individual security and survival against predators is something different from the security and survival of social organizations. Individually, we are driven by a need to remain individuals for our functions to remain intact. We relate to the world first as individuals, before wider social valuations can even be considered. Our question of competition and cooperation is not just a question between social actors, but a question that we ask of our relation to the universe as a whole. The universe or nature as a whole doesn't care one way or another what happens to us, and does not have any center that we can attribute as the prime cause of whatever we encounter. We are nonetheless presented with an immediate question in our relation to the whole of the universe. The universe is, in our youth, largely unknown, and we spend our formative years acquiring a knowledge base of what is what and how we are going to live the rest of our lives. We know there are other creatures in the universe and definite features, but we do not know without experience the extent of the world, and one of our first questions is to ask why the world is what we see, or what the world is if we cannot see it. We do not enter immediate relations with the other things in the world simply by virtue of existence. There are only relations if we can speak of some causal chain, even a very weak one, between physical objects that are apart from each other. We may not understand the causal chain down to its finest details, and we may not need to know for us to apprehend that some body, some thing, is a whole system that we interface with. If we are to speak of a system though, we are speaking of definite parts we can isolate, even if the system definitionally is something more than the sum of its mechanistic parts. To speak of competition or cooperation is to speak of interactions between real objects, not some struggle that exists outside of the real interaction between them, and not some struggle within the objects which would be accepted as inherent in nature. These struggles are not inherent to the natural world, either. To nature as a whole, it is just matter proceeding in its normal motion, and any concept that we would appreciate as "struggle" is only relevant to us and our thinking. The question of competition and cooperation is ultimately a geist in our perception, and something that arises as a consequence of humans being selves. The most primitive consciousness is localized in the individual, and not something constructed socially. If we were to speak of "social consciousness" we are speaking of interactions and communications that are quite different from those that are internal to the human body, and something different from the real interactions with have immediately. We must remember that social organs are not something we take for granted as a given, absent actors who would comprise the society. We may speak of a common body of information, a culture or some patterns that are recurring, but cultures do not have central nervous systems or deliberate action in the way the organized self or a more coherent organization of men would. The question of competition in particular seems like a bizarre one if we were able to disassociate ourselves from the social struggle that has defined much of human existence. War and conflict are, at first appearance, incredibly wasteful activities that do nothing for either participant. They are the equivalent of taking men, material, and the energy expended in the effort, and setting it all to fire in a spectacular display of waste. Yet, without this competitive struggle, where would we be, and what would we be? The war is senseless when cooperation seems far more useful for everyone involved, but we do not all get along and there are between people irreconcilable differences that come to war. A world without war would be a world without self-defense, and without at least the prospect of war, we would be at the whim of the first malevolent actor we came across. All it requires for the malevolent actor is the will to act in such a way.

It is time again to dispense with another myth - that malevolent actors are the minority, in an otherwise orderly world where everybody acts as we believe they are supposed to act. The common cruelties we see every day should be a reminder of how false this is, but we also suffer from a failure to appreciate just what the malevolent act is and how it perpetuates. In the mythological retelling, malevolence has to be the result of something sinister, unnatural, and appropriate to our modern society, irrational and illogical and thus "evil" in the view where science has spiritual authority. Thinking about it for five minutes should tell us that this malevolence is not just natural, but banal and has obvious outcomes. The primitive state of society was one of endemic violence and cruelty, but also one in which that malevolence could be limited by the tools available at the time. The key question is how it perpetuates, and the need of human beings to defend themselves against this malevolence. The crudest form, simple violence, has limited applications, and while ultimately malevolence needs to be realized in the physical world, malevolence in society is primarily a mental malevolence, a game played between humans and a relationship between them that is reproduced in a million minute ways. The methods of violence and killing another man are too numerous and not of great interest for this writing. Human communication and symbolic expression meant that, for the first time, it was possible for animals to ascertain in a minute way the mental state of others, because there would be symbols and names associated with feelings and ideas. Where people do not express their thinking openly, it is possible to read subtle cues. This function has a cooperative and practical purpose, but the most immediate use of this new technology is to accomplish the competitive end - that is to say, to dominate mentally. What the hunter does to seek his prey in the animal world, would also be applied in the abstract, mental world. It derives from animalistic displays of domination and the cruelty of the animal kingdom, and it would be intensified when the hunt was replaced with the herding of animals, and then the herding and enslavement of other humans.

It became necessary in thought and deliberation, then, to abolish all barriers between the predator's will and their assessment of the prey, and the realization of claiming the prey's body. This finds its parallel in the appropriation of simple things and the animal, but in these cases, the prey's body is not considered to be animated by a thought process. The step to claiming humans is not just a claim on the body of human beings, but a claim on their thought process itself - that is, the domination of the predator's will over the prey's will, such that the prey is subordinated and the thought of the prey is negated entirely, so it can be replaced with the predator's will. This way not only allowed for the total appropriation of the prey, but it was often cheaper than direct violence or an attempt to use brute force to resolve the problem of social competition. Small incursions of the predator could evoke temporary responses from their prey. Large incursions would entail that the prey would be humbled, subordinated, and claimed outright, so that their thinking may be replaced with the "right ideas". This incursion of predatory thought is something very different from the organic learning process, or a cooperative process by which people could receive wisdom from others and then act on it. This is the impulse at the center of our present situation of competition within a society, between humans who are all deemed to be capable of rationality. We can speak of the numerous ways in which domination over other people is affected by affecting their material conditions - by depriving them of food, or enacting violence upon them - but the ultimate core of these efforts is to compel the fealty of the prey to the predator, such that the behavior of the prey is modified. In order to do so, the two minds are opposed to each other in the abstract world, in order to realize a change in their real, physical conditions, with the predator victorious and the prey subjugated, whether in a small way or the very large demonstrations of domination and fealty. If the mind of the prey can be adjusted, the material domination would follow, while the reverse - using brute force to override a defiant prey - would be less effective and wholly incapable of attaining certain ends, like for example reducing the prey to slavery and compelling them to work for the predator. To accomplish this, attachment to the real world must be substituted wholly with an abstract conceit of what the world is, and then the abstraction must be enshrined as a "super-reality". The true nature of the world is inverted; instead of thought proceeding from the material world, and thought leading to a genuine understanding of the thinker, thought is declared to be the truth and the things we interface with are declared to be illusory or lesser forms of thought. The independent growth of the thinker is replaced instead with the imposition of thought on another - and in actuality, this takes the form of some concentrated will of one over another. How this is accomplished may vary, as the explanations to arrive at this goal depend on the existing body of knowledge and understandings of individuals in a society of people. The first step in every case is to take advantage of the inherent limitations of the thinking individual, the self, to induce the intended targets to internalize the thought-form of the predator.

The third, our aspirations, is where we can speak of economic behavior as something planned and deliberate, as something the organism wants to do rather than something it has to do or is forced to do becuase another entity has compelled it to react. The three sectors correspond almost neatly to the division of labor philosophers imagine - those who work the menial, mindless tasks, those who work the bureaucratic tasks to manage the daily affairs of state and business, and those who are the thought leaders. In practice, all of these functions must meet in a single person if that person is to be whole. No division of labor could ever be so perfect, and just why this is so becomes apparent if we examine the extremes of the present, 21st century society. It is also the case that these functions are not actually the end all be all of life, or the actual division of labor and classes in society, however much it appeals to a philosopher. We make this demarcation because it is separating three parts of the life-form's economic task, rather than the demarcation corresponding to particular specializations of people. Those functions could be distributed evenly among the individuals of that society to manage themselves, or they could be organized in armies and present machines specialized for each. It is because it fits the core economic task of life that this division of society into thinkers, fighters, and workers is something aspiring revolutions seek to reproduce. Effort and resources spent in one of these functions cannot be spent elsewhere. These three functions correspond to three groups - those who possess the leading intellectual and spiritual authority, those who possess the means to fight and manage other people, and those who are engaged at the base level of commerce and industry. The slaves, foreigners, beggars, and various outcast elements are, in the ideal society, simply not included in its vision, except as some resource which might be catalogued. Since most societies have employed some form of unfree labor, or labor that is obliged to work in clearly onerous conditions, this vision of society divided into three great classes is of little comfort to those who are entirely or largely outside of it, only dragged in because they were forced to. The division into these groups is not reproduced because it is functional or because societies actually need to balance these tasks as a matter of their core functioning, but because the contest for power and the contest to hold the state only concerns these three groups broadly speaking. We don't actually need fighters or thinkers as specialized tasks or something so distinct from the core tasks of working, if we simply concern ourselves with survival and perpetuation of a society. Neither function would be possible if they didn't parasitically feed off the productive labor of those who work or who are engaged in commerce of a forthright nature, so far as commerce ever can be considered forthright. The further description of this construct will be revisited in a few chapters, in discussing the philosophical state and its origins. It is important to note this distinction now because it is pertinent to our understanding of the economic problem life faces. It is not hard to see the problems with reliance on the first and second functions - the producers alone would be mindless and reduced to lumps of utility, and while this can allow a society to persist, it would not withstand any pressures or corruption if it were extremely disinterested in fighting or thinking. The second function, the militaristic and proprietary function, is the function which dominates most human societies today in practice, and its ethos is very simple - violence is the supreme authority, and there is no possibility of negotiation or reconciliation. The third also presents some obvious difficulties - that thought, on its own, is illusory, which leads the philosophers to engage in vanity that no worker or petty manager could, and enables a kind of stupidity only philosophers can execute. Because any non-trivial approach to economics or technology requires some development of this faculty, it is this which should be of most importance for our question of determining what the economic problem is.

Economics presents a problem which is, at first, one of our own creation. It doesn't really matter what happens in the economic problem, in that our existence or non-existence is of little consequence to the workings of the universe. If we die, we die, and life would march on without us. Our most basic motives, instinctive or reasoned, are not rational at all. We may be able to rationalize why an organism would persist in living, but all of our economic behavior - sustenance, survival in competition, and higher pursuits - is not an end unto itself. Economism has an obvious endgame - everyone eventually dies, or at most would just repeat the cycle of existence without really going anywhere. The aspiration towards goals is indicative of what life is - that it proceeds through its lifecycle and faces experiences which will change it, and compel it to adapt in one way or another. We could choose to not participate, or only participate so far as we wish to continue playing the game, seeing the economic task as something we merely abide because we have to. The economic problem is pressed primarily by human actors who want it, for some reason we keep for ourselves. All of these economic problems have to reckon with a world that existed before us, yet our valuations in economics are always at odds with what things actually are, or what the situation is. We are made to value things which are clearly the result of humans forcing other humans to buy into a lie - for example, the obligation to participate in higher education that is of dubious quality, largely to perpetuate the class distinctions appropriate to eugenics rather than any learning or development of knowledge. The university has long been understood to be a gigantic impediment to scientific growth, only managing to accomplish what it did because scientists were allowed to operate with a relatively free hand in the past, compared to the conduct of science in the 20th century which became conspiratorial and the interest of national security states. The university of the past century has been dogged in its effort to slow and control technological progress, so that it may only be directed towards ends which would enslave the unwashed masses and subordinate them to the coup which seized the governments of the developed world during and after the first world war. All of this is to say, in answering the question, we should not be focused on one academic paradigm or the conceit that education is only pedagogical, received from the master to the student. In practice, in our information world example, any information we learn, any process in which we learn and add some information to our storehouse of wisdom, is treated as if it were received - one experience is processed and the relevant information, if any, is stored.

Most of the information we learn is concerned with practical and immediate tasks - what food is edible or nutritious, how to built a shelter, how to fight, and how to negotiate with another person, among many others. We may formalize this knowledge, and doing so often greatly accelerates our ability to utilize this information, but without connecting knowledge to action and practice, all of that information is only a dream, an errant illusion in our mind that can never affect the world or mean much to us. Perhaps we value dreams and contemplation for its own sake, or consider meditation one of our deep wants to add meaning to an otherwise dreary existence, but it remains the case that most of what we do, and most of what we think about, will be those things which are useful to us in the here and now. How much knowledge is devoted to production and how much to fighting may vary, and there is a tendency of those who specialize in fighting, management, and exploitation to avoid any muck of productive work which they feel is beneath them. The conceits we hold about this knowledge, or which talents are favored over another, is not immediately relevant. We must in the end be able to confront the tasks before us, rather than merely think about them. We know the raw resources available to ourselves and the condition of our bodies to a reasonable enough extent that we're not uncertain of what those conditions are. They are, without any plan to acquire more resources or improve the body, fixed and known quantities for the sake of our problem. If we truly did not know ourselves enough and doubted our most basic abilities, we would be in a dire situation to say the least - which may often be the case, as human societies like to impress upon their members a sense of worthlessness and dependence, knowing that such conditions are conducive to slavery and maintain the illusion of passivity. This knowledge, which constitutes much of what we actually do on a daily basis, must be reproduced and stored and put to action. It inevitably branches off from some basic principles we hold, either because of our constitution as living, thinking animals or because we have developed formal methods of thinking and accumulating this information. If we were to learn each of these talents as disconnected acts, as if we were programmed to carry out instructions and think no more of them, our ability to learn or apply these abilities towards useful ends would be diminished. Knowing the qualities of particular foods, tools, or actions does nothing for us in of itself. Since our basic abilities before language and the accumulation of formal systems of knowledge are limited, and even the nurtrition required to grow properly is something we struggle for as animals, we first seek to establish a concept of ourselves, the society we live in if any, the world we live in. The first priority is always to retain our sense of ourselves and our connection to the world. If we are to change ourselves in a considerable way, we would want it to be on our terms rather than terms imposed by another or by the world's imposition on us. We would at the least seek harmony with the world around us rather than utter capitulation, but one constant of our life is that we are always wary of struggle and potential threats. Fear is always at the heart of the human experience and psychology, but I will assume the reader is aware of this and does not need a further lesson. This hunger for knowledge is usually not a pure one. Humans seek knowledge not out of a sense that the truth has an ineffable power, but because knowledge is necessary for us to conduct even basic affairs. Once enough knowledge has been accumulated, most humans are perfectly fine with ignorance, even considering ignorance a strength that would allow them to resist unproductive or hostile thought-forms. There is never a pursuit of "true knowledge", and such a pursuit is ultimately a fools' errand. We know the limitations to our scientific inquiry, and certainly in our time the danger of granting science too much spiritual authority, particularly science in the hands of people who make it clear science is a weapon against the people rather than a tool the people could wield themselves.

Once we are established, we are concerned with the location of resources - what to extract, and who to extract from the world, so that we can continue existing. We would also be concerned with the placement of our tools, buildings, and so on in the environment, which territory is defensible, which is worth holding, and so on. This volumnious information of simply knowing where everything and everyone is has been the work of bureaucracies for a long time, and it would be until modernity a task that could only be done so far, as spending the human effort to catalogue every pig, cow, man, building, tree, farm, and so on - and crucially, verification of the record and trust within a bureaucracy to not lie to one another - was exorbitantly expensive, when the size of states was small and the leadership of states was wary of something too large usurping imperial authority. This information of location is crucial, and because information processing is a local event for a particular thinker, much of this information is not readily verifiable by sense. We rely on memory, written records, and assumptions about what would make sense. Naturally, keeping knowledge of what is where secret would be the goal of someone who wishes to claim lordship over the world. This is not normally possible, as it is difficult to truly constrain people to not see and not move wherever they want, and the storage of some secret hoard would be a menace to everyone who is denied access to the location. The claims to resources and claims to territory are not enforced anywhere in nature. Nowhere in nature is anything stamped with the name of an owner. The claims are instead something enforced between people, and by the knowledge of who is stronger, who possesses authority, who has convinced another to accept the rule of the owner, and so on. What follows is a psychological game between people, that we have been forced to play since birth, and the game was rigged so that those who won in the past would win today and would, if they can engineer it, win forevermore. The knowledge of how to fight, and knowledge of peoples' behaviors and ways it can be controlled, is another resource to be harvested, and it does not take long to see the people themselves as just another resource. It was not a great leap for someone to ask the question, if we can harvest plants and herd animals, why not herd humans, or grow them like livestock - or in modern times, conceive of humans grown by machine and plucked from a garden? All of this knowledge ultimately relies on a conceit of someone who can manage the project and reap the rewards. Merely knowing how such a machine may operate is only useful for bringing it into existence. Very often, the creators of machines are not the beneficiary of the machine, and the users of the machine can easily be dispossessed of things they created through their labor. Nothing in nature is stamped with the name of its genuine creators, and social labor always implied both cooperation and a managerial intent that was above the cooperative venture. Nothing in the world was premised on fairness - the schemers and swindlers have historically won out, and the rewards go not to those who work or think, or even those who do the active fighting, but those who were able to perpetuate an idea that they had a right to own and rule, regardless of anything they did. Who thou art was far more important than what thou shall do, or not do. The sciences of ruling would become the chief disciplines, even though they have always been an onerous burden on the entire process of accumulation, and aren't even necessary for fighting in a strict sense.

It is here where the economic problem becomes necessarily political, for economics ultimately concerned a social relation when it concerned the money tokens and territories that were contested by people. The knowledge of man's conflict with the natural world is not, for the moment, necessary for our book.