Some of the information regarding the "state of nature" was laid out already, in which the conditions of life are explored to arrive at some likely characteristics of early mankind. The traditional political view is that the state of nature was "nasty, brutish, and short", and this description from Hobbes endures to the present day. We must distinguish first what actually happens from what makes political sense to our human actors. The latter eventually must reckon with the former. It is the latter that we hold in our minds when we make political judgements, and when we take this leap to become political animals, we are necessarily turning off our understanding of the natural world for a moment and dealing with humans, or any other political actor, as agents in a game, disconnected from any environment they would inhabit. At first, there are no restraints on the political animal. Man is created free, even when he is dependent on the mother as an infant and at the mercy of a highly predatory world if that freedom will last.

The state at first is a conception in the minds of people. There is no such creature as a "state" in nature with any consistent characteristics, aside from that the state is a settlement reached between people or any entities which are contesting with each other, implying that there is some thought process animating the contest. Trees and clouds do not compete in the state or care about the state in any way. It is a creature particular to animals who possess the freedom of motion and some cognitive functions that would lead the entity to behave as if it were competing, and sense in its thinking that it is competing with other entities. There is no actual "state of nature", or some entity compelling this behavior from without, and nor is there some ineffable tendency of life that produces an immutable structure of the state. Our concepts of the state arise because they are useful and conform to expectations we have about other humans, but our concepts are never as universal as we would want them to be. The expectations held about any state or the natural order fit the people who hold the conception, rather than the expectations truly taking a life of their own. The natural order does not care who wins, nor selects the victor in any consistent way. Pure dumb luck or shit happening that was the whim of some organism can decide the fate of empires, and we only work backwards to present political theory as a narrative where rules of motion are observed.

People are, in the first instance, tied to their immediate social units more than any state or abstract idea. Connection to the family, clan, tribe, or nation tends to overtake considerations of ideology or crass self-interest taken to its ultimate conclusion. Attachment to a particular social unit is not an absolute or guaranteed, but if conscious humans see the motor of politics as pure self-interest, they really only have their own delusions and whatever space they can call their own to live for. This motive only lasts as long as you do, and alone in a very hostile world with organized gangs, the individual lasts not very long in any political setting. Even to an animal, perpetuation beyond itself is a concern. At the very least, the need for reproduction requires a man to seek a woman and vice versa, and if this doesn't happen, life ends with you and what happens next is irrelevant. Any state and any social organization must perpetuate itself. The biological perpetuation of the actor is helpful and makes obvious sense, but the thought-form can spread by communicating an idea, displays of dominance over space, displays of genuine kindness - a thing which is abhorred by all practitioners of the political arts - and the adoption of the thought-form by new members. Humans being nurturing creatures, we have a natural inclination to care for offspring and see their education, however it is conducted, as necessary if we wanted to perpetuate ourselves by breeding new humans that are like ourselves. Social organizations with a complete disregard for the rearing and education of their youth cannot persist for long and are usually displaced or subverted by organizations which will reproduce themselves intellectually rather than simply materially.

A general fear is not so much a given, but an observation of potential that every person will make. We know from experience that fear is not the only thing and could not be the only thing that guides human behavior. If it were, even the most basic growth would be impossible. We would not be able to have anything to call our own, and the world would be nothing but maximal fear and predation. It is not the conditions of fear in nature that create the state, but our perception of potential threats. So long as our information is imperfect and we do not control everything in our reach, we will always face the potential of a threat that would destroy us or seek to command us, or do some terrible thing to us. This realization is reproduced in every single human and in the animals in order for them to function in the actual environment. Whether there is actually something to fear is irrelevant. What it is we must fear, and our description of any substantive thing we relate to, is irrelevant. The most basic concept of the state only concerns the fear, and that fear is something particular to animals. In any domain, there is some way in which things are governed. It does not have to be a person or something with deliberate intent, but it is always something we can define. The state is never truly an amorphous entity which we cannot describe. Every state that exists must perpetuate itself through the only agents available to it. It is only when those agents can successfully create the impression of something to fear that the fear is acted upon by all within the state, and all who see the state from the exterior. Without that, the state is nothing more than a fever dream that is best forgotten.

It is the general fear that is the foundation for the state, rather than the fear of any particular person or any conceit they may hold about the state. The state exists to attack and defend against something that may threaten it or stand in its way, and absent any knowledge of specific things, everything and everyone is to be feared. Greater emphasis is placed on attacking than defending, for the first reaction is to snuff out that which must be feared, rather than wait for it to come to you. Very quickly, the holder of the state, or the people who are its agents, are less relevant than the general fear and the sense that something resolves that condition of general fear. It is the resolution of the general fear that the state ostensibly provides. Some thing will be dominant in the struggle, and it will be that thing which in fact rules over a given domain.

It is only about fear of attack, or inspiring the fear, that makes the state the state. The state, true to its name, seeks to arrest any behavior that threatens a status quo it holds to be worth defending, and that status quo usually entails the aggression of those who hold the state against enemies. The drive to control others, to exploit, to inflict suffering, and so on is not state business in the strictest sense, and malice can exist for many reasons other than the state. What is constant is that the state does not have any kindness to show to anyone, as such an instinct is contrary to what the state does. The state cannot have an incentive to favor prosperity, even if it would make sense for the sake of security. The prosperity of any single person is an affront to what the state must resolve, since every resource available to individuals contributes to the general fear. The easiest course of action for the state, if it operates on its own devices, is to snuff out any prosperity and keep its subjects at a sufficiently low level of development so they can be controlled. This is the fate of so-called anarchism, and the reason for advancing anarchism was for the freedom of would-be monopolists and the conversion of freedom to nothing more than a word token and pretense. Freedom in any genuine sense has nothing to do with the state, but is a condition the state abides to be a state. States rule over societies of people who will, out of necessity, consider their self-interests. The imagined world of human cattle going on the train to be exterminated can only be engineered with great expense and considerable energy. If humans are to remain cattle, the behaviors possible from them will be limited, and at an individual level, only crass incentives can be used to cajole people into this behavior. Collectively, humans in herds will recognize principles that are averse to the aims of a predatory minority. The tendency of humans in herds is to be in the biggest herd and live, rather than march to their death. Only through extensive manipulation can a minority cajole the herd to fight for things that are alien to their collective and individual interests, and that is exactly what state society seeks to impose. Efforts to do this have been the long-run mission of those who hold the state. The holders of the state themselves have ulterior motives that have nothing to do with the general fear, even if they are given over to the ideology of state society and pursue crass motives as the leaders of the present society do.

Nothing about the state is unconscious or accidental, as if we just happened to fall into such a condition by dumb luck. We do not fear the wind or an ordinary animal in the way we fear a human, as if the lesser entities were as capable of us or more capable of deliberate action. Fear is the basis, but for any political actor to be effective, they must be more than an accumulation of fear. The political actor must know, in some way or another, what it is doing and orient its behavior around an intent it holds. Something in the thinking animal compels it to behave in this manner, where it regards the general fear and any object which constitutes a threat. There is not a minimum threshold of intelligence, nor are the intellectual and physical abilities of the participants equal. The standard of intelligence is instead set by what is typical in a given society, and this standard becomes the baseline for participation in political activity. Animals of a given species might have something we could consider political behavior among themselves, but they will not operate at the level of humans with language that communicate the idea of the state and act with far more precise deliberation than the crude mechanisms an animal would possess to assert its position. This applies within humanity as well, and very quickly, members of society judge who is intelligent, who is capable, and who possesses certain knowledge and secrets that are useful in the struggle concerning the general fear. Any political behavior, to be considered truly political, must be considered as the deliberate choice of the political actor. If it were unconscious, or something ingrained in nature and unchangeable, it would not be in the purview of politics or the state. Unconscious behavior, or anything considered to not possess the qualities of political conscsiousness, is something to be commanded by political actors, if it is to be acknowledged at all. A political settlement may regard unconscious behavior from political actors as inevitable, and it may deem that behavior which the actor did not intend was very deliberate. It cannot, under any circumstances, allow this unconscious behavior to be equal in legitimacy to politically recognized behavior. If that barrier is crossed, then the argument for the state and politics is broken, for nothing can be said about anything or anyone and no one would be held to account for their actions. The political actor, however it is constituted, is expected to discipline its unconscious behavior by every means available to it. If it cannot, and the actor is controlled by urges, they are deemed insane or invalid and all of their actions - including their existence - will be treated accordingly. The state proper can only exist when it has an intelligible representation. This representation exists in people and can communicate its intentions as distinct ideas, rather than vague gestures and insinuations. How advanced this construct is may vary, but it is always the result of deliberate action in response to a situation living animals face, and it is only possible through deliberate action. To speak of any political actor as unconscious or animated by some force far away is to not speak of politics, but of something else entirely. It is a common ideological tenet of any state to claim that its construction is rooted in natural processes, and so its rise is inevitable, but the only constant is a condition of general fear and predation. The particular form of a state, and its value judgements, will vary based on the conditions political actors encounter. These conditions are not limited to the political actors themselves, and all of these political actors are in some way beholden to the environment they inhabit. It is because they are beholden to the environment that political theorists often look for economic causes for the origin of the state and the origin of institutions, which lead to the reasoned arguments for some institution's existence. The cause is not the effect. Once the state perpetuates itself as an idea, it will have to take on a life of its own, with its own imperatives. The economic necessities of a state or an institution are very different from the necessities of organisms, and usually the state's interests are antagonistic to all of the individuals subject to the state. This especially includes those subordinated by it, but in some way includes the holders of the state who are obliged to concede to the realities of imposing judgments on subjects and each other.

This process of intellectual development to create the state did not arise fully formed in the minds of actors, but at a basic level, the demands of human politics were understood before any formal theory of the state or the establishment of physical centers of political power. In this chapter I concern myself with the basic requirements of political activity, rather than the more elaborate theory which would be constructed when philosophers wrote treatises on the state. The theory of political power would accumulate long before someone could commit written words to scrolls, and the earliest theories of political power did not simply provide the answers ready-made to a general audience. This development is something I want to write about in the next chapter. After that I want to evaluate the basis of the state proper in the division of labor into distinct tasks that human societies perform, and while this is not the sole basis for the state, it certainly informed what states could do. The earliest forms of the state did not bray about the rights of any institution or bother with pretenses. They were instead the domains of whomever could assert by force, intimidation, fear, or whatever means, control over their environs and their fellow man or woman. Even a simple mind can extrapolate from its cruder victories in establishing itself a general rule that it could follow in the future when contending with its environment or another political actor. At first this conception of the state of nature can only exist in the mind of a person who is contending against the whole of the world on his or her own. Anything like an ideology can only extend as far as one's voice, the reach of a weapon, and whatever fear that might persist in the minds of other humans who are thinking about the same problem. There is perhaps a vague sense of what is necessary to rear children in savage conditions, and a natural instinct of children to seek something to suckle on and a caring instinct towards another human.

Without a historical record, we can only guess what primitive society was based on some assumptions of what an actor would do there, and on what little archaeology allows us to know. We cannot insert ourselves in that position without asking ourselves how we would have developed in a very different environment, but we have to attempt this even to learn about our own present-day society and the society of the recent past. The first is that, for the vast majority of humanity, the state or anything like it was not their idea. Most people are too self-interested and too concerned with their life to enter the business of compelling others, and there are very few people habituated to love servility even in today's society which trains people to be so. Where they have social relations, the state in any form has been antagonistic towards them. What the state wants is almost always at odds with what is good for your family, unless your family holds the state, and even if your family did hold the state, the business of state obligates your family to compete with rivals who are not interested in following your orders. The state proper does not form organically, but must be reproduced day after day. It is almost certain that the scheme to develop a surplus to allow the state's existence was not something that simply happened. Farming only appears in a few places before it is exported as a strategy by settled states, and the first farmers would have been either slaves or subjugated to a life of farming, paying warriors tribute in order to continue existing. Primitive farmer man has no interest in the state as such, as does not need the state. His farm is his, and the state's claims run counter to what the farmer hoped to maintain in farming life. It is likely the formation of warriors to extract tribute preceded an agricultural surplus. The most basic warrior formation does not require that great a material input to be effective. Primitive man did not need to be taught how to hold a spear, as if he were naturally passive cattle. All we know about humans suggests that reducing them to livestock has been problematic, even when their subjugation could be taken for granted. If the human livestock is too stupid, they won't be able to follow orders or be productive. If they are allowed space of their own, they desert or rebel from their conditions, seeing no reason the relations should continue. Even those who are not as capable of fighting as an experienced and athletic warrior will fight out of dire necessity. Failure to fight means that the omnipresent fear that necessitated the state can overrun any plans you might have had. A slave's life has never been so tranquil as the masters like to claim. Slavery usually meant being humiliated and made to jump through hoops just to continue living what little life you could be said to live, and doing whatever you could to work less. Hard work just made the master's lashes worse, for no meaningful reward to speak of. It is thus unlikely farming occurred as some sort of agreement or contract between the parties. If it were, the farmers were horrifically screwed in this deal, as farmers almost always occupy the bottom rung of the productive classes. A naive understanding of history suggests that the agricultural surplus preceded the state, but it is far more likely that it worked the other way - a predatory society saw the potential for surplus when slaves were tasked with farming, and this wealth provisioned the army. By no means is agriculture with an aim for a surplus an inevitable or desirable state of affairs. The aim of the small holder of land is not fundamentally to produce things, for others or for himself. Had it been the choice of those who would be inducted into society, the state and its predominant institutions would have been very different. The concept of paying tribute, worship, lurid rituals, and so on would have been so obviously repellent to a great many people that anyone suggesting such things were not just normal but natural would have been put down like dogs. Why would people just so happen to accept the rule of a few when there was no good reason and no reward whatsoever except staving off the reaper for another day? The formation of the state proper, and much of society as we know it, was not a voluntary process. Violence and deception were necessary for this entity to exist. It was only when human knowledge of war advanced and the technological means to impose this system were sufficiently understood that the project could begin. Who did what and when, we may never know, but civilization and politics as we know it could only begin as a conspiracy against the world and all the humans inhabiting it. Before then, there wouldn't be a concept of "society" as what it became - something large and incomprehensible and ruled by someone other than you. Primitive social units were close at hand, with relations broken off and no expectation that the relations were to be maintained in perpetuity as-is. Friendships end, and eventually the people in these relations will pass on. Had society been premised on a cooperative venture or some social contract, it would appear to us as a very different creature, and the thought of society as this omnipresent antagonist would not be so self-evident. Yet, that is the only concept of broader society we possess that can really claim it has persisted throughout all the conditions of mankind.

Before there is an economic cause for the state, there is the general fear which created a situation where one thinker could attack another. The political actors did not arise from a purely natural origin, for politics only concerns those who think, and in the natural world "thinking" and consciousness are not actually real things with their own vitality. Thought arose from certain natural origins, but in becoming proper mind, the political actor is first differentiating themselves from the rest of the world and from other entities like itself, which it will recognize. The greatest fear of all is not the natural world, but other minds like your own or minds that are utterly alien yet recognized as capable of deliberate action. We do not really fear earthquakes or diseases in the same way. Even if we did fear the natural world more than people, the natural world has nothing to do with the state or politics, except as an arena that is set apart from the political actors. This is a conceit only of people rather than people possessing a fundamentally distinct essence from the rest of the natural world. We would not place natural events on the same level as political actors. The fear itself is not some essence, but a condition of life that is an appropriate reaction for maintaining that life as-is. The state concerns predation and defense against it before it can define itself further, in order to be a state. Nothing about the state is natural or even implied by nature. The natural state is that we don't exist as ourselves, as creatures with minds or souls, but are just matter in motion doing its thing - the question of the state becomes irrelevant in any naturalistic view. The state and politics are wholly artificial creations, even when political behavior stems from material realities that the actors must contend with. We do not need the state to manage the sundry affairs of economics, as if we had no ability to think without it. Such a justification for the state has been offered throughout human existence, yet the state does precious little to govern any productive task efficiently. It is difficult to take a beast that was created to respond to general fear and predation and turn it into something constructive, and states have incentives that directly contradict any productive aim we would imagine. The wiser holders of states recognize this failing of state authority and know that to even reproduce the martial behavior that a state requires, the members of society must first possess freedom that arises from something other than the state.

Fear alone is the foundation of every state, the only root from which it can spawn. It will always be confined by that origin, but fear alone does not make for a very stable state. It is not violence, though violence is a common outcome of fear. There can be great violence without a state as such, and despite the state's claim to a monopoly on legal violence - a concept that only exists when there are laws and judges - much of the violence in the state's territory is not immaculately planned, and in practice states face internal opposition. Since fear and thought are all local events at first, the foundation of the state is the fear of particular people and their interests, before the state as a formal institution asserts its objectives independent of any one actor. Without any strong non-human, non-living cause affecting the polity, this means primarily the state concerns people rather than things, and is defined most of all by the distinction of who is in the favor of whatever rules, and what does not. This struggle is not won by declaring it so, but is enforced every day by the state's agents and contested by the malcontents. Not the person leading the state, the elite which may dominate in the society, or the general fear alone would suffice to do this. For a state to have meaningful definition beyond an impulse of fear - for the state to be the state as anything we would recognize as relevant - it must become more. All it can ever become arises from the general fear; if it ever broke away from that to reject the general fear altogther, it would no longer be relevant to the task, and that task does not go away because the fear is a basic concern of any individual. It did not matter if the state proper has not yet formed, or if some society rejected the idea of a state or rulers and were governed by seeming anarchy. The fear itself was something more foundational than the state, that has meaning for reasons other than a state's intent. The only way to remove this fear is to overcome it, or invade the people so they no longer feel emotions. A human who did not know fear would be a very different and debilitated creature. So long as there is a single person in the domain with cause to be afraid, the general fear remains, even if those within the state's protection do not need to know fear. There would be a need to police the fearful actions of those in the domain who will act in accord with the condition they find themselves in, and so even a state that fulfilled the need for security thoroughly would face the potential for unrest, or must remain eternally vigilant. To eliminate fear altogether implies eliminating the concerns of individuals, and such a world is beyond the scope of this book or anything that has existed historically. It is an important end state to consider, as the implication of many ideals of the state is that the ideal will conquer the general fear and resolve the struggle for life, but a cursory investigation into human psychology tells that fear is everywhere in this society, and it has always been acted upon and cultivated. To question fear altogether is to question the struggle for life and the relevance of any such pretense, and this has some dark implications for the question of what we are even doing here. I must leave that question behind for now as we move on.

The material needs of a creature are met alongside the struggle over the state and competition. The fear is not a fear of mere starvation. Living things can accept death and deprivation without too much struggle, and in the end must do so if they are to accept what this world is. The material needs are not merely for a quantity, but qualities that are desired in the material things, which includes the body of the living thing itself. The greater fear by far is the fear of other people and their intents. The basic things encountered in the world are, in the long term, predictable by some method, whether it is science or some system that had been worked out by a thinking animal. It is other intelligences like ourselves which present the greatest challenge, and present a threat greater than mere death. The fear of torture, humiliation, and so on was understood early in humanity's existence, inherited from animal forebears who already practiced shame and ridicule through various rituals. That torture could now be understood and harnessed with a deliberation previously unknown, and if someone thinks for five minutes about the possibilities, it becomes clear that there is far worse than death in the world. Even the crude thinking of a savage can imagine the orgiastic thrill of sadistic apes beating his body, either becuase the savage wanted to do this himself or because the savage is aware on some level of a predatory instinct in life. To not know this would severely limit the possibilities for a man even in savagery, and it does not take long to encounter human deception. If that doesn't happen, then the failure of one's senses may be enough. All we pursue has more to do with the fear of suffering and torture than it does with the mere act of survival. We may consider survival or the conditions to thrive only after answering the general fear sufficiently. It is not enough to simply take each threat as it comes, even if we must in practice do this. Every creature that is thinking about the world must see the world primarily as threats to its existence, and that which it can apprpropriate which is not a threat.

This division should not be confused with the distinction between friend and enemy. At a basic level, the concept of "friend" does not compute so easily, as it implies a sustained relationship between people, rather than what those people are at a basic level. Friendship is never so secure, and taken to an extreme, every single thing outside of the body and its impulse to dominate is an irreconcilable enemy. The basic distinction is most readily understandable as "friend" and "enemy", but it is rather "what is to be feared" and "what is not to be feared", out of which classifications and reasons for the fear or lack thereof are established. Friendship as a meaningful proposition simply doesn't exist in the most basic operations of the state, and in the end the state's operations are what we meaningfully understand as the state. Granting someone the title "Friend of the state" is only an after-the-fact statement, and the state in principle can revoke any such friendship or pretend it doesn't exist. Friendship among humans who think and feel in the real world has nothing to do with the demands of the state or its actors. As it turns out, in real life, friendship as a meaningful relationship is exceedingly uncommon. The real nature of the state and its politicians is fickle, betraying constituents at the first opportunity and encouraging backstabs as a matter of the state's daily business. Such is politics. A century of fascist politics has shown the world their lust for backstabbing and pointless insinuations, none of it for any outcome worth a damn.

At first, the state is no more than a supposition we must make. To see the world as chaotic is to say nothing meaningful about it, and we cannot actually do that and remain functional. Even if information is woefully incomplete this cannot work. Even if we are trained to not see things that are right in front of us or lose the ability to make basic connections with material reality, we have to suppose there is some order, some rule, over a domain, for any sense of the world to be made. It does not need to be a conscious or willful order necessarily, but we can say things about a world with human will that we cannot say about the reduced form of ordinary matter. If we suppose human will exists in some form - if the thoughts and emotions we sense are believed to be real and have consequence through our actions - then if we imagine something else governing the world, it would have to be at least equal to the human will in affecting the world, or treated as such. To speak of "nature" in some vague sense controlling us is saying nothing at all, because "nature" is not a coherent entity and cannot be ascribed thought or any organizing principle except the crudest ones. If we are speaking of general natural laws governing the world and thus society and the state, we are speaking really of action at a very base level - how low we wish to go depends on what model we are constructing for the natural world. Nowhere outside of us do these natural laws have an existence independent of the objects in motion. There is no metaphysical hobgoblin dictating that the particle will move in accord with what model we constructed. There may be a way in which things happen, like the Dao, but this is not something we could construe as truly governing. Rule in the end arises from material actors, and if we suppose natural laws or a god as the ruler, those only act through their mortal and material agents. In effect, it is claiming that we are governed by the behavior of each and every particle, and only in concert does the full picture of the "natural state" appear. Since that natural state includes people, whose willful action exists regardless of what we think about it, to speak of a state of nature or natural order is really saying little, except that certain tendencies follow from certain facts. The true natural order would be defined by whatever mortal will dominates in a given domain, or through a meeting of wills where consensus is manufactured - and a natural order would manufacture it, rather than reach it between men and women who acted in their interest. Any philosophical, scientific, or pseudo-scientific claim would only be made after the fact, usually as a thin excuse for something that was decided arbitrarily by people. To say that we are governed by the law of gravity is nothing more than a tautology. Gravity does not have an opinion on the concepts we value in social relations, and has little to do with those concepts.

It is in defining what is to be feared and what is not to be feared that the state moves from supposition to realized entity. At first, this happens without conscious deliberation, but there are reasons why some things are feared and some are not. The first state proper is the body of a singular mind itself, though it would not be called such or treated as such. The individual mind is well positioned to be the dictator of what happens in the associated body and its property. It institutes rules of thumb and an understanding of the world, and it must do this not only to understand what the world is but to navigate it. This is the starting point for investigations into the state, politics, and society. While politics is what happens in the state, the demands of people move beyond the general fear and to the interests as the participants see them, which involve more than response to a general fear. The state as an institution cannot resolve those demands, but inevitably those demands enter the political arena if they interfere with the state's need to resolve the general fear. Society and the daily desires of people largely persist outside of the state, and individuals would be right to beware handing this alien creature any power over their desires, wants, development, and the things an individual finds spiritually significant. This applies even at the local level of regulating ourselves. The human spirit, soul, and mind, do not exist purely to serve this function of survival, and if it did, the outcome of such a thing is known to be futile from an early age. It does not take much insight to see that eventually an individual dies, and in the long run, everyone and every institution dies or must transform into something new. Even if institutions did persist forever in a permanent state - if history could be arrested - mere survival and the thrill of victory are hollow promises. It is spiritual, religious, and higher development that must be considered when looking at formal states, but for this chapter, only the most basic concerns of a state are considered. Living for fear is the most futile and silly thing, yet it is a compulsion at the heart of any state and any institution that wishes to join state power.

It should be clear that the state exists in the mind in this nascent stage. The mind is something that came out of physical events, and so it is a real conception, but there is not an identifiable entity called "the state", and no one would think taking care of oneself is a political affair. At a basic level, though, these affairs can become political matters, if they are undertaken to answer the general fear or the general fear leads to a situation where your ordinary life is subject to state business. The body did not begin as a political organ, nor did the mind. Politics and the state spawned from a rather foul seed, and that seed is not the lifeblood of the whole world. We mark what is feared and what is not, but this is a concern for us and not a total concern by any means. The barest minimum for us to be secure is to simply possess a space and the resources to live, and these resources are not eternally scarce. Many times the resources desired are only made scarce by human, political intervention, or because no one has an incentive to produce or draw from the Earth the food and resources needed, or build the things that are desired. Before civilization, the technology coveted was very simple, and all the way up to modernity, technological advance was not as decisive as simple arithmetic or the cunning of a tactician, or the relations of society which produced the food and fodder that was the chief economic product. Most important to classical societies was the maintenance of rule and the institutions which placed men into this or that class; it was this that informed what the armies of the ancient to medieval world would be, with modern armies inheriting this tradition. In a later chapter, the nature of war is something I wish to examine further, but war itself is only a limited part of political life. In primitive society, natural resources are what they are, and there is little thought that more can be extracted from the land through intensive labor. However scarce the natural resources may be, no amount of struggle would create more stuff to contest, beyond that which was required to tell members of a band to gather food or wood. The purpose of material accumulation was not to acquire and hold a surplus, but to acquire the qualities desired for victory against a general fear. A surplus was only useful if there were a means to channel it towards something commanded. The surplus would not have just happened to exist, with class society being an incidental outcome of that surplus. It is far more likely the surplus was planned because a method to command slaves and men was already devised, and agricultural society was merely the implementation of what was always a control mechanism. More men does not in of itself lead to victory, as the greatest enemy a society faces is itself and the most immediate bonds between its members. Those who do not like the current leaders will, if sufficiently pressed, refuse to fight, be useless for fighting, or will actively subvert their ruler in favor of another ruler. The competition for natural resources, and then territory and the concerns of settled states and civilization, is an consequence of the real competition between people, which for various reasons became the norm long before someone locked up the food and the people.

The competition for natural resources is by no means a fixed demand, or one that necessitated the state or the general fear as a solution. There is a belief that this competition is life and the core behavior around which it developed, but its first objective before obtaining sustenance from the world is simply to remain intact. If this does not happen, then all the food consumed is meaningless, for you do not exist even as a pretense. It may be common sense to conclude that so much food is necessary for life to continue as it has, and the same can be said of other resources. For the competition for natural resources to even begin, there must first be cognizance of what is available, the domains where food can be found and knowledge of what is likely to be found. It is insufficient to simply state that this need for resources is a constant for life that it will doggedly pursue with all of its energy. A short-term thinking about sustenance leads to lemming-like behavior. Even animals demonstrate some sense of territoriality, and their hunting is typically pursued less because the animal thought rationally that hunting brings them food or hunting is a moral necessity. Animals hunt because that is a behavior trained into them, and because the quickest way to obtain high-level sustenance is through the flesh of another animal. Carnivorous species would not survive off of plants, while herbivores are practically allergic to hunting or any sort of violent activity. The strategy of an herbivore would not favor state-like behavior except as a dire necessity, and the strategy of a carnivore in the extreme would be suspicious of any such entity. To a committed carnivore hunter, the hunt is something more than violence spawned from the general fear. The hunter is not afraid of their prey at all, but the hunter is cognizant in some way that its actions would inspire fear. Hunting as a strategy for gathering resources has been a dismal failure throughout history. This extends to the strategy of pastoralism and the slaughter of animals for sustenance. So far as basic caloric intake or nutrition is concerned, the killing of animals is far more laborious than it is worth, and historically much of the human diet was cereal crops and things that grow from plants. Nomadic, savage man was no different - the gatherer did more for sustenance than the hunter, and the hunt was pursued more because the hunter doubled as the band's warrior or muscle for fighting other humans, and because the hunt was intrinsically interesting for a lot of humans. The hunt took on a social role that went far beyond any need for a state. Being a hunter was a test of manhood and status in society, and this mentality persists all the way up to today. The hunt is not the foundation for the state because the hunt was virtuous, or even the largest part of the state's foundation. The hunt and all that came from it did inform early humanity of what was possible, first by herding the animals who were once wild, and then by asking the question if it were possible to herd humans in the same way. Endemic violence in nomadic society already habituated humans to a generally violent world, and little of this violence between men served any productive purpose nor any real purpose of security. It persisted because no one was there to tell another man no, and the strong could do as they pleased to the weak. This is not very effective as an ethos for life, and even a savage can figure out that this doesn't work if he or she thinks about it for any length of time. Had it been so central to society, as certain idelogues must claim, the endemic violence would be total violence, and all of mankind would be nothing more than a non-stop orgy of violence and depravity. There would be little purpose to such an existence and nothing to Man except an animal that anyone with a thought would wish to stamp out. It will become clearer throughout this book why such a view of the past is promoted tirelessly in our time by certain sorts, but even our savage forebears had enough sense to mitigate the worst of this rather than celebrate it. The emphasis on the hunt only went so far. Eventually, it was time to tend to the various other affairs of savage existence, actually cook the meat gained from hunting, tell stories and all the things humans do to recreate themselves. A less fortunate man, of which there were many, didn't get to hunt and got used to taking a lot of shit from other humans, and could expect to lose the reproductive sweepstakes unless he could hide himself and his bride very well, and this presumes a woman who rejects an ethos she would have inherited from the animal kingdom to reject weakness and those who lacked social proof. Such women may exist, but they are not common and their unions with failed men are not likely to end well, nor without scrutiny from other men who do not care about any promises another man made to a woman who was fresh meat. It is not surprising that a common cause of endemic violence was fighting over mates.

It is trite to say the cause for the development of the state is "human nature", as if the state's imperatives were fully formed and baked into life itself for it to be life. So too is the claim that an anarchic society would celebrate the imperatives that only make sense for an ordered state. The origins of the most primitive state can be found in the proclivities of human beings, or the consequences of the mere recognition of competition. The general fear that the state alludes to is in the end a problem for thinking life only. The most immediate concern for a state is the material perpetuation of itself, and so both reproduction of people and the appropriation of material things become an immediate concern. It does not take long for this beast spawned by a fear of people to take on a life of its own, for the general fear applies to everything and everyone in any given domain. In a time before territory could be claimed reliably, what counted as the state concerned the relations of people - who was in the elite of a tribe, so far as a tribe could be said to have an elite, and who was in the know of what was happening, what threats lurked around the next bush. Even here, the general fear quickly spawned new creatures; authority and virtue. The leadership of men was a prized asset in war, as was the will to dominate an opponent. The material goods by which these were perpetuated could be meager, but the values to be contested - honor and standing in the group, security against anyone who would challenge authority - would be hoarded by a few. Egalitarian conditions only extended so far, and the existed more out of necessity than a conscious will to promote equality. A grossly unequal society in primitive times would have been unenforceable and likely eliminated the virtues desired of fighting men or women tasked with both mothering and the various tasks that were usually the productive tasks of that society. Someone barking the orders of a civilized state would have been rightly seen as depraved, sick, and someone who should just be fed to the jackals as soon as possible. A lack of faith in the virtues of civilization would remain well into the classical period - the steppe empires viewed the decadence of the dominant empires of their day as something to be avoided, that made men soft and wicked and depleted their will to fight. The steppe nomads do not do this out of some exaggerated belief in toughness, as the later fascists would allude to in the lies told to the lower classes. Civilization has startup costs, and in this situation already-existing trade networks could produce gold in far greater qualities than any productive investment. It made far more business sense to knock over a few cities of the empires and threaten to never leave until so many pounds of gold were delivered to the conquering barbarian. This strategy kept working for a fair number of centuries, going so far as depopulating the leading empire of the time when the Mongols conquered China. The Mongols were among the last to really operate the old way. Gunpowder and cannons gave the advantage to civilized empires and a stable tax base, and the smash-and-grab strategy would be done in a much different way - this time not by the rough people, but by the civilized. That is how the story of colonialism portrayed the struggle for conquest, anyway. Gradually, the virtue of violence and the supremacy of struggle would become a religion of the civilized, in a way that past empires could not contemplate. Old style empires were not shy to resort to violence and imperial authority, and usually had no moral system that favored pacifism or an aversion to conflict. There remained though a way in which wars could be prosecuted, and costs of civilization made professional standing armies a potential trouble source. The most illustrious example in Antiquity of the professional army, the Romans, was also a cause of its imperial decline and internal strife. Civilization in the later empire could only keep its rivals at bay, as all that was required of the opponents of civilization was a will to form confederations and enough knowledge of how the civilized fought. The end of the old empires comes with the rise of conquerors who could displace civilization wholesale, and when these conquerors were shaken off - if they were - the empires afterwards were not the same, and had to come to terms sooner or later with early modernity, new technology and the change in social forms that came about. The state can take forms compatible with the situation of its actors. In primitive times, it is little more than the local roving band of warriors and all the little things people can do to make life miserable. In the past century, states are necessarily totalitarian, and it should be clear that every single state in the 20th century adopted totalitarian measures. Part of this formation of the state depends on intellectual development - for someone to dare to think that a new kind of state is possible, and transgress decencies that would tell someone that the state is at heart a foul creature with an unpleasant task. Part of this is from the technology available to perpetuate those ideas and the force necessary to impose what cannot be spread through indoctrination, education, or psychological appeals.

To claim that a state exists, a presumptive claim is made on everything imaginable in a domain. The most basic expression of a state cannot accept anything less if it is to be a going concern, and this is true even of the most primitive hill tribe. Those who think like states will necessarily see their competitors as the same sort of entities, in a grand game concerning all that exists and can exist. Here is the root of totalitarianism plain and simple. It is not something new or something that could not be conceived until modernity, as if modernity unleashed sin and a demon that was simply impossible in an imagined good time where things worked the way they were supposed to. All of the features of the state that came into prominence in the 20th century, that bore the toxic fruit seen in the 21st century so far, were implicit in the very conception of such an entity, even before philosophers expounded on theories of the state or the state's existence as a formal institution. It is not that the particular technocratic conceits of today were always sort of extant, but that technocratic society and its consequences were never permitted to be described with too frank a language, and one of the first advances of 20th century society was to abolish historical understanding of the world before this scientific revolt. This concept must be developed at a later chapter, but the drive to dominate all space and claim all the people in it is an old one, and it does not reduce to some ulterior motive or alternative explanation. It is not something imbued in the natural world, that drives men to struggle for position without purpose. The totalitarian drive of the state is never truly realized, and to arrive at something factually resembling it implies a number of conditions that are presently impossible and will remain so for a long time to come. It is not that the totalitarian is reduced to the purest form of the general fear inherently. It is entirely possible for the totalitarian drive of a state to aspire to tranquility, the highest wisdom, and a heavenly order in this world. Inevitably, though, the drive of the state to command the world and arrest the motion of those in its domain relies on the mechanisms appropriate to a state. The state cannot create the good or produce, and it cannot be a creature of love or wisdom in its true foundations. It existed because certain conditions required such a construct to be conceived, and any institution or work of men to accomplish this totalitarian goal will encounter many in society that disagree with obedience to the one authority, however it may be understood. The total claim of a state is the necessary counter-argument to the general fear any living thing faces, if they must struggle against entities like themselves to survive. There is no version of the state which makes a limited claim from the outset - if it did such a thing, it would be rejected as a distinctly inferior creature. This applies at the lowest level of an individual person, who must retain autonomy in order to function in society. The individual will, out of necessity, oppose the whole of the world to retain itself. Submission and wholesale transformation are not real options in light of history, however often that offer might be extended. Those who are to be transformed would be beholden to history, and those who would willfully transform an individual never forget the history of the creatures they are transforming. The total claim is not just over space but time. It is the state's claim that it will always exist as a going concern, and that the past cannot be forgotten. The state may claim an alternate version of facts as a self-serving lie, or claim that it creates its own reality, but when doing so it cannot forget its true origins or the actual conditions it faces, and that history occurred outside of its control. The state cannot change the past any more than an individual will can, and it cannot change what it is without passing through processes it does not absolutely dictate. The state is therefore built on a grand contradiction, where it is a mortal and fickle creature but must insist that it will exist forever. The moment it gives up the claim of immortality is the moment it is weakened against any opponent that will make that claim and back it up by force.

It is with this is mind that state authority can persist in a form that is useful for the purpose laid out. Even the youngest child imposing their will on the world will operate in these conditions, however poorly the conditions are understood. It is implied that they will, and those who are mistaken will receive throughout their life reminders of what is needed. The harsh lesson of human society is that the criminal, venal, and unfair behavior that is a symptom of state society is normal, and decency is the exception in the political realm. That is the "natural order", when someone is proclaiming the state's origin in natural processes and claiming that the natural order is the true and absolute sovereign over any particular man. It is also true that there is nothing wrong with this assessment of the natural order, in that we can see that such an ordering of the natural world occurs. Nature itself does not comprise a state because nature is not deliberate, and the natural order is up-ended the moment human participants say no. It is not an obligation to participate in the struggle for life, let alone on the narrow terms permitted by ruling ideas. For most people, an early lesson is that no matter what happens, the natural order will not be won if playing by the rules set out by oppressors. Nothing about the state is premised on fairness or letting the losers win. History has shown that it is the exact opposite - that the earliest authority of the state is hypocritical and cares not about the truth or any honor, and it is only after the fact that the state cynically claims law and order.

The body of a state, like the body of a person, is only comprised of processes which play out, and these processes are not a singular whole. Unlike a thinking human, who possesses consciousness and mind, the state is a creature without sensation or any genuine thought. If the state is to be incorporated like a living thing, it is an utterly inhuman life, a shambling mound of incentives oriented around the general fear. This is much different from a human being in practice. It is a common article of faith that fear is the foundation of individual psychology, but individual psychology must become something more if it is to integrate the parts of the body and its property as well as it does. The state as an institution cannot deviate far from this general fear, because it was built for a purpose of responding to it, and a state that ceased to do this would no longer be fit for the task. Individuals to be individuals must be more. The body of a living person has definite requirements in order to produce the mere thought that allows them to fear or think of anything beyond that, and human beings did not exist purely as political animals, to accomplish political ends. To truly live is to be something more than fear. The state has no such concern - it is through and through a creature of fear and avarice, and cannot escape those imperatives to remain a state. This means that the constitution of a state, or a person who is purely a political animal, is much different from the constitution of a whole human being. The human body creates a creature that pursues art, passion, wisdom, and life. The state at its core is a creature of death and suffering, which seeks to invade and appropriate life towards its purpose. It is possible for people to reduce themselves to the predatory drives that necessitate the state, but the material manifestation of states is necessarily limited. It claims absolute power over life and in the long run absolute power over matter and reality as a whole, but all of this power can only be directed towards a limited set of aims. The state cannot on its own overcome itself and render itself unnecessary, or interface with people as anything other than an alien influence. That task, so far as it is pursued by states, is delegated to their human agents, who must do this simply to have the state accomplish its mission. The proper material manifestation of the state is that it is a disease ravaging the world, and the general fear that spawned it is much the same. Cultural practices and the celebration of violence are nothing more than the same old rot that is more common than dirt on this Earth. The manifestation of the state - its violence and what it must do to sustain itself - is more than its pretenses, and an altogether different beast.

The state is a creature of rank hypocrisy. At its core is a conceit that it will endure forever, and that the thought-forms comprising it are eternal. The state in practice only exists because it can hijack agents that will serve it. The state presents itself as an immortal edifice handing down laws. Its actual order is deception at every turn and a game of trickery played from the very start. This contradiction confuses the naive, who did not ask for this alien to visit them, but it makes sense if the state of general fear and predation is accepted as the origin of this beast. If the general fear and predation are acknowledged as what they are, then no one should ever abide such an entity even in its reduced form. It would be far better to ignore such an entity and its pretenses as much as possible, so that human beings can do the things they wanted to do before it arose. That is not the world history left us, and for many reasons it was not going to be the ideal where everyone is happy and struggle is averted. It is not possible to use the mentality and thought-forms of the state and its philosophies to overcome the struggle. To overcome the struggle requires something very different, which can only be the product of human beings rejecting the call for violence. This is far from an impossibility - in truth, it must happen every day for anything to be done. The state in its purest form will, at the first opportunity, arrest any motion contrary to its aims. The answer to the general fear will always be more fear and a counter-force, which is justified after the fact as the solution to struggle but never does such a thing. If struggle were defeated, the reason for the state's existence would be moot, and the state enjoys its exploitation. In the later philosophical state, it is claimed that natural slaves will produce on their own accord the goods masters of society desire. No slavery is ever passively enforced, and even if the ideal slavery were suggested, the masters themselves have no interest in it. No sentiment in the master would undermine slavery, for slave systems abide the same general fear that the state does. It becomes apparent after looking at history and labor relations that slavery would be central to any formal state, or any rule beyond the most primitive. No society has ever escaped some form of slavery, or the threat of such a condition being imposed from outside. The freest nation is aware of the danger of slave society's encroachment on that liberty, however liberty is conceived or the society is constituted. The simple answer for slavery is that the master has no desire for a benign slavery, because the promise of greater rewards for greater suffering will always be chosen without a truly compelling reason. Slave systems are only overridden at great expense, and the partisans of slavery always regroup along new lines, recognizing that the true end of the institution would mean that they lost the thing that distinguished them and protected them from the general fear.

The first tool available to the state is the living agents that think of the state, and must respond to the general fear. It is living things which fear, rather than the dead objects that are appropriated. Life and death are the first things a state and political thought command, and though life and death are not foundational necessarily - a state can hypothetically be comprised of dead agents or agents that are disembodied minds - command of life and death has been throughout the existence of mankind the first interest of a state, which secures all of its claims on material objects, territory, institutions, and ideas. It should be made clear that, like the state becoming more than the general fear out of necessity, the state must become more than simply the assertion of command over life and death generally. Reducing the state to "command of life" or "command of death" is missing the point, because states in practice must make specific demands of life, and command from it qualities that are desired. Because the state starts off as a concern of living things, its first and most primitive instinct is to advance a view of all things as living, or under the command of living. To be dead is to be inert and pushed by a will, and so qualities of life are ascribed to non-living things, ideas, and metaphysical constructs. That most of the world is dead, and life is a vanishingly small part of the world, is not relevant. The most primitive reaction to the general fear is to attack it, so that life may persist against that which threatens it.

The obvious disconnect is not lost on those who think in line with the imperatives of politics and the state. Thinking animals can recognize with little effort that much of the world is dead, and that life is mortal and fleeting. Like a living body, states are concerned in principle with homeostasis. The parts of the body, however, developed over time to work in concert. It is not typical for a body's organs to compete with each other, and the organism thrives best when its parts synchronize towards cooperative ends. The state, being spawned from not just a simple fear but the general fear and without the filters an organism would possess, does not and can not synchronize its parts - the human agents and their machines - without a foreign will imposing that cooperation. The native cooperation in sociality is limited and cannot be taken for granted - which is not to say that native instincts of cooperation should be discounted, but that cooperation was premised on mitigating state society in favor of the more immediate task two or more people accomplished. The state does not, by any natural inclination, possess any mechanism by which competing agents truly resolve their struggle. We may invent a scheme by which debts or scores are settled, but these are only ever ad hoc and are the creation of men. The natural order simply meant the general fear, the response to which is up to the thinking agents. Without the thinking agent's input independent of the state, the state's institutions have no vitality with which to act, and fear itself is a terrible condition to construct a mind that would compete effectively. Every single competitive framework was established with a binary win condition in mind - one shall live, and the other shall die. There is no middle ground which does not imply that the competition simply continues the next day, that can be asserted as a natural order. Compromises and settlements only ever exist between people, who likely have some incentive beyond the general fear. If it were simply about temporary alliances to stave off enemies, then no word of cooperation is worth a damn in the end, and all parties in state society are at each others' throats. The resolution of this in society is not a given of nature, but something that occurs between adults who recognize their situation and how to act in it.

The state is not simply a recapitulation of the model of life as its thinkers would wish it, built in the image of their personal preferences. That is nothing but a fantasy, one that is often sold to convince others of the natural origins of the state. It has no bearing on what states and institutions actually do. The state arises out of a recognition of the general fear, and so its practices are oriented not towards life as a whole but a particular function of life, and the other functions must be balanced with this predatory function. Predation is rarely an absolute in nature, for reasons mentioned above. It is not the purpose of life to hunt or torture, and such a purpose would be obviously unacceptable to most. If that is what the state must be, then the state must play a grand game of deception, or convince its members that circular reasoning - power for power's sake, life for life's sake - is not just valid but demanded of socialized members. A brutish ignorance has been common throughout human society, in which celebrations of violence overrule any other authority. In the final outcome, violence will decide the fate of life, when a confrontation is inevitably reached. The circular logic which lionizes predation as an essence does not produce a very effective competitor. It is a fool's idea of power, a celebration of impotence that masquerades as strength. Such an ethos can persist for a long time, so long as it can burn through human sacrifices to prop itself up. The more effective strategy in competition however is to attain sufficient stasis, such that the state and its actors can through knowledge, action, and the substantive means available to them ward off all potential dangers. Every act of predation carries with it a cost, no matter how many myths are spun where predation is the lifeblood of society that generates its own vitality and truth.

A strange attitude towards life and death is the beginning of political reality, as something opposed to the material reality you and I live in. It is not life as life that is the concern, but the conceit of life as a going concern in a predatory environment. This view of life responds not to the actual demands of life, which are multifarious if it wishes to continue as the thing it was or something greater, but to a most basic urge in life that must express its mission. The state as we know it wouldn't exist if it were simply decided in a moment of clarity that none of this predation served any genuinely useful goal, and that there were far better ways to channel the energies of life towards productive tasks if someone were that interested in leading or managing other people. It is because of the general fear that states exist, and management of people and then economic planning follows from that general fear rather than a direct need of life. In politics, what is true is not what is factual and proven with material analysis, but what can be consensually agreed upon by competitive actors who are responding to the general fear. In the realm of the political, to speak of a world where the general fear did not exist is to speak of nonsense. If we were to speak of such a world, nothing political or concerning the state would be sensical, but since we do live in a world with predators and things to fear, the political concerns that. This is sold as a response of the state to an existing condition, but the agents of the state are themselves the provaceteurs of this general fear more than any other, knowing that its perpetuation secures the political consensus. Only at the limit of what is acceptable does a state relent on its aggression towards all in its domain. That is how the state must constitute itself - not by maintaining a steady state imagined as some ball of light and virtue that is inviolate. The state's stability is premised on its regular deployment of violence in everyday life. Without it, this burdensome presence in social life would be ignored as much as possible, and the members of society would attain independence such that its presence could be out of their lives forever if it were decided that an onerous institution must go for mankind to live. The holders of a state never desire this to happen on a permanent basis. They may accept at rare points that the response to the general fear must change, or that institutions must adapt to new conditions, but they will never accept a genuine resolution to the general fear. If such a thing is imminent, those who hold the state and profit from the general fear will act out of the greatest fear they ever knew to prevent it. It is too much for those who benefit from a predatory arrangement to surrender it completely, for a number of reasons. One is that their instincts have nothing in them to suggest that predation as a way of life is morally and factually abominable. The idea that it is has only been dimly understood by most people. The second is that those who have long suffered the humiliations of predatory society would, once they saw that the beast was no more, seek reprisal against those who did this to them. The actions of states are not forgivable, for the mere memory of such a predatory order and the commitment shown by those who joined it are evidence that the general fear exists for the formerly oppressed, and revanchism is an inevitability if the meek do not pick up their former masters' arms and do what needs to be done. To do otherwise is to concede the rebirth of the beast, in a worse form than before. Why this is so must be explained further, in this chapter and in the next. I will start briefly here but save most of that for the next chapter.

The state to be the state is a creature of absolutes. Nothing about the state is uncertain or fuzzy or something that can be magicked away dialectically. There is only in the end cold analysis of the situation, and the assessment of threats. That is the nature of the state, for it to be an effective apparatus for what it is there to do. The rationale for the state is the existence of predatory society and its agents. The agents themselves pursued predation for causes that do not care about any argument raised against it. Predation, in some sense, feels good to those who do it. The utilitarian moral philosophy, if it can be called moral, enshrines this as natural law. Even those who are skeptical are drawn to predation because it answers cleanly the question of the general fear - violence and the will to dominate overcomes the world. This is inherently a selfish desire, but states where predation is the order of the day demand this selfishness and predatory behavior even from those who would not want to participate. It may be counterproductive for the state to do this, but there is no mechanism in the state that stops this, and many mechanisms encouraging the predatory to join the state and become the state. If enlightened reason and a desire for peace were to rule, it would not be through the state or its mechanisms, but in spite of them. The state in its most basic constitution is an instrument of aggression, and must be so. There is no version of the state which relies on passive conditions as its primary method of propagation. Even if state actors are overwhelmed by a natural order which rejects state society, it is only through aggression that the state's demands are met. Inertia is only the result of past aggression habituating subjects to accept that this entity exists and has a right to parasitically extract wealth, labor, and suffering. It may be imagined that the subjects actually love their slavery, but if that is the case, the state doesn't just refuse to return the affection, but actively rejects this demonstration of love from its subjects. The state goes out of its way to demean its subjects as a rule, because it is not there to extract definite conditions from the people. States may write constitutions and laws suggesting this, but the state is not what is written in any legal document or the pretenses it creates. The state as a functional entity is responding to the general fear only, and has no place for a single iota of mercy. Such things are toxic to the mentality of the state, going back to its earliest forebears in roving gangs of hunters terrorizing the world. It is well known in politics that no politician can ever admit wrong, even when doing so would be clearly expedient if we were regarding government as a practical instrument. To do so is to renounce the claims of a state's history. The moment the holders of the state lose faith in some part of the violence, such that a formerly oppressed class is no longer oppressed, is the moment the state's reason for existence is threatened. If the state is to transform its target of the day to a new suffering class - the meaning of this suffering class is something to be discussed further when discussing the division of labor in society - the state must insist that nothing actually changed, or baldly declare a revised history which excised the old attitudes or justified the new attitudes to align with the foundation of a state. If a particular state is recognized as a temporal thing that can be overthrown or removed, this is not necessarily a problem - the holders of a state can ditch the current construct and make a new one, or play the typical game of revolutionary musical chairs where the powers that be and the interests contending for state office shuffle.

Philosophically, no new state can renounce the rule of violence against some group destined to suffer. If it does that, then the entire enterprise is undone. Likewise, the oppressed peoples cannot forget the long history of what had been done to them, and even if they tried, reminders are present throughout the domain, always nagging at the back of their minds if they were to somehow liberate themselves. Reconciliation would not be possible unless the predatory lost everything, and that will always be a step too far. Predators, being free men, would rather face certain torture than change position on their accomplishment. The predatory always find a justification for how it was, or simply state that what is done is done and they're not giving back the land or money. Ask any white man in America if he would truly give the land back to the natives - the natives who were depopulated. Ask the natives if they would actually gather in a circle and sing that this land is my land, this land is your land, etc. etc. It would be insulting to pretend that all of that didn't happen or was somehow a thing that could be reconciled while the pretenses of a state exist. It could be resolved in material reality - the way it has been resolved so far has been a terrible and bloody affair - but it could never be resolved in principle. The early Americans did not need to play a game of phony moralizing, as the Germans would perfect in their brazenly fake apologies for Nazi atrocities. The Americans knew they were bastards, and their chief justification is that the natives were going to attack foreign encroachment no matter how much honor the settlers may extend to them. The natives just did not want to share, for all the reasons that made sense. In past society, conquest was a part of the geopolitical game, and contrary to the stories told in revisionist histories, the natives certainly had a concept of land being stolen and territory being violated. Something so preposterous as a "right of conquest", the claim of every craven imperialist who didn't have to think about what empires need to sustain themselves, would be laughed out of any realistic political settlement. For those who only deal with philosophical pretenses and narratives, who tell themselves sweet lies about what humanity is and is supposed to be, the preposterous pretenses are the only sensical ones, and reconciliation with an actual past or flesh and blood humans who want things is alien. This contradiction has always been present in state society at every level, from the casual dismissal of an outcast by their peers to the fantastical claims of those who ruled. Modern society with ideology exploited this in a way that was not previously possible, and it is that which I dedicate most of this book to describing. Even in cruder forms, though, political sense tells a politician to never walk back anything that concerns a key plank on their platform. Which planks are key for the state may vary, but an attitude towards war, conquest, suffering, and rule remains constant. Those things are so foundational that to truly question them is questioning the state and the beneficaries of it.

It does not take long for the practice of war to lead to the cult and ideology of war, and that is a topic better left for other chapters. To summarize briefly, at the center of every state's actual manifestation is a nexus of interests around war and claims to property. All pretenses of what a state is, its laws and rituals, are a cover for what the state does, which is wage war and secure property. It does not take much to see the innards of a state and its institutions have little to do with the stories told about it, or the society which this cult of war feeds off. The war itself is a cover for something much more banal, and a thing that is obvious to us but never enters any of the theories of the state - the state and politics is in the end nothing more than a game of gladhanding, partying, and social skullduggery. The spoils of the state are not just the material things extracted from it. More important than the material spoils is the simple thrill of being on top and being in the in-group, because the state was never predicated on any substantive necessity. It was premised on the general fear, and the greatest fear by far is other people and the games they choose to play because no one will tell them no. Anyone who has tried to appeal to a bully's decency has figured out that this works precisely 0.0000% of the time. Any such argument is so farcical in light of the philosophical basis for this enterprise that it is a wonder such a thing is attempted, but futility leads some people to believe in strange things. The state by its nature mocks any belief in fairness or kindness, and rewards those who revel in predation if it can. It is only sobering material realities that bring consequences, if such a thing happens, and this is very unlikely under present conditions. Great expense is made purely to ensure that those in the dominant groups face no consequences, even when their actions are acknowledged and blatant to all in the society. The entire point of state society is to emphasize inequality, and the cult of war is a great way to do that. It is not that the cult of war created inequality atop a blank slate where all men were equal. Men have never been equal in political status or ability, and social inequality itself becomes a prized value in society, because a premium can be charged for nothing more than a title or a protection racket against the out-groups of that society. What is war in the end but the thumping of chests by those who have never faced serious consequences? If wars were about their stated purpose at all, they would be so monstrous and risky that it would be in the clear interest of state actors to avert war at all costs, and not tolerate the rituals of war that are undertaken with the belief that certain classes of humanity are off-limits to war's predation. Had the rich or the priests faced the kind of brutality due to civilians who had no say in the war, perhaps the general fear would have driven people to a very different attitude towards war. It is imperative for every state to never allow equality in brutality, and conversely it is imperative that the lower classes and outgroups are never freed from that brutality in any real sense. Even in pacifistic societies, the threat of war or some form of aggressive punishment is always awaiting. Independence of the ruled in any serious sense will not be tolerated. None of this predation is for some ulterior motive of material benefit, and certainly isn't for the good of the whole society or any actual protection. The former is usually the intended answer sold to the graspers, the latter a sop told purely to insult the damned. The cult of war, and the grand competition for resources, only takes place because certain people see it as a game that is no risk to them, or at worst they feel they're good for a fight and have no reason to not take from their enemies. The overwhelming majority of violence in state society, not just from the state's agents but among all actors, is between one party with nearly all of the advantage smashing and grabbing from someone who does everything possible to avoid violence. This is not merely just so because it makes immediate sense, but because state societies are allergic to the idea that equals would engage in direct combat, or that someone who is attacked has the same rights as an aggressor. Aggressors are in the philosophical pretenses granted a free hand to take what they desire, and only rarely are aggressors punished by their targets. When such a thing happens, the defender must be ruthlessly punished, and if that is not possible, the state and its pretenses will face overthrow from the discontents. Usually, the defender is punished until habituated to being attacked, then just paying the money and accepting slavery in one form or another. Sometimes, though, the general fear inspires in aggressors enough apprehension that they may, against all the imperatives state society holds true, not attack the first thing they come across.

If there is one business the state engages in with any efficiency, it is the protection racket and the defense of predation. Defense of the city, commonly cited as the purpose of the state in classical political theory, is better understood as a defense of predation, which after the fact is naturalized and explained as totally normal behavior. There is no ulterior motive behind it. Predation must be defended at all cost, or the true reason for the state's existence is lost. This is the truth of the so-called "state of nature" - that it is a clumsy attempt to advance an essence of predation as something imbued in all things, when even in the demands of life it is only a small part of survival let alone the potential of life. There really is no state of nature as such - only individuals struggling in a general fear they imagined before it could be realized by those with a will to impose it. It is only after this general fear manifests into its familiar outcomes that there is a sense that the conditions could be different. Absent the real consequences of the general fear, it would only be a musing of someone that maybe the world could be nicer, but it is only after sobering influences assert themselves that the necessity for something other than predation is readily apparent and possibly in the interest of the holders of the state. When the holders of the state question predation, it can only ever be to mitigate it so that life can continue, with the implicit assumption that a world without predation would be unable to defend itself. This is of course correct - a society without a concept of war at all would not withstand the first malevolent actor, and no built in decency will appeal to something which habitually laughs at decency. The further development of the predatory element in society must be considered throughout this book.

If we are to regard state actors as deliberate actors, then the treatment of the state as a natural phenomenon is insufficient. Fear may drive the actors in the conditions they find themselves in, but the thing to be feared is another human being, and so the government of society cannot rest on a reduced naturalistic concept. Governments are formed by men to rule men, and humans individually stand in opposition to this state of nature. Societies and civilization may require a material basis, but the state in principle is a contest of wills which siphons off the material world and the flesh and blood creatures preoccupied with political business. The unit to be controlled is a will, however it may be construed. This may be the will of a human being with flesh, or the collective will of an institution or organization. The characteristics of will may be ascribed to things which have none, except that which is assumed to exist as a political fiction. For example, nature as a deliberate actor has no will, but the way in which events proceed can exert a force on people that has to be acknowledged as something independent of them. The state cannot command wills just by wishing it so. The state always contests, from the starting position that the dominant will in the state claims all at the apex. The state itself is attributed the will not of any one individual but of the dominant interests in that society. The particular man or group that is visibly at the apex does not at once command all the interests that contest the state, but who is at the top and who sits where on the seating chart is very, very important for what will happen. The dominant will and interests does not inherently present as a political class or political elite, but that is the common outcome of the contest to hold the state. No one person or interest can easily dominate because there are numerous avenues by which an agent can be relevant to the state, whether they have political rights or their existence is regarded as a political alien to be controlled in the domain. The particular interests vary, and the size of an elite relative to the whole population may vary. It could very well be that the political class truly is the majority of human beings, and exceptions are the minority. This is not how it has gone, but the elite - and what qualifies as an elite, for there are strata with more or less political influence - is not a foregone conclusion. An investigation into the intellectual production inherent to state societies would explain why elites form as they do, and what decides who is an elite at any given time.

At its core, every government in state society is despotic without a single reservation or hint that it would be anything other than that. The rule, however it is distributed, is certain, and the general fear inevitably derives from a perceived authority. In any stable government, there is one who sits above all others as the executive. Whether the government formally is despotic or republican, there is always one or a small number of people who hold imperial authority - power over life and death - and this must be accepted for stable government to present. Even when the true holders of this power are obscured by smoke, mirrors, and a grand game of deception, as it has been for the past century, the implicit assumption of this despotism is made. All other forms of government, including the philosophical defenses of despotism, are obfuscations of what it means to rule, and for the state to respond to the general fear that spawned it. There are no gradients or stages in which despotism rises or wanes - it is just despotic rule through and through, passing from one contender to the next. States of genuine anarchy or strife are contests between rival despots, and the outcome of such anarchy is usually reconciliation between the competing despots. The despot needs not an ideology or rationale for being where he is, or even to demonstrate his legitimate authority. All he needs is a mechanism by which his rule can be imposed. Individualism is just despotic government delegated to individuals. Every free man is the despot of his own body, and every slave is presumed to be simultaneously controlled by the most despotic means imaginable and the despot of what domain the slave holds against the institution of slavery and his condition. If freedom did not allow this despotic self-control - if freedom were qualified to the point where it only meant obligations to the ruling despot and obligations to a spirit of freedom unmoored from the genuine concept you and I would have - then it ceases to be freedom in any form, and is in fact its exact opposite. In practice, the ruling despot has no sentiment for individual liberties and will transgress them at will, and the free individual is perpetually aware of violators regardless of what the society says about freedom; but the despot at the top does not possess an inherent power over his subjects. Despotic government can only be realized by force and continuous vigilance of the despot, and this applies to the master's despotic control of slaves and the efforts of individuals to maintain themselves against society. At this early stage, the concept of society is nascent, only dimly felt and usually understood as a creature to generally fear. If people inherited an organic sociality, state society and the drive for power in it will erode those bonds and test every friendship and every familial relationship. By the time philosophical treatments of state society arise, the stark opposition of state imperatives to the native sociality and sense of subjects is present in every such treatment, deliberately so and with knowledge that an invasion of private life is necessary for the philosophical state to carry out its directives. Whatever the end result of despotic contests may be, the basic understanding of what it means to rule does not change. The reality is felt every day someone receives a lecture from the manager with utter disregard for anything but a despotic drive for capital, surplus labor, or the simple thrill the manager receives from making subordinates squirm. The ultimate result of state society, in all of its permutations, is that some form of despotism is seen as the true government, whatever we might tell ourselves the arrangement is, and the locking of ranks along class lines or any other division of humanity is only possible with greater awareness of who is in and who is out, and what it means to be in or out.