In the previous three chapters, the economic problem has been approached first as it immediately presents as - the management of tasks from the mundane to the elaborate - and then as a political problem, which it always had been. Our views of economics are dominated by political concerns. If economics were merely a matter of finding the optimal allocation of resources for a problem set, then the solution would be trivial in any era. At no point in human history has there been a genuine ignorance of the basic laborious processes at work in society, or how they might have been allocated under ideal conditions. Political leaders feign ignorance far beyond their actual state of knowledge, and political leaders lack the total control of information they desire that would ensure their domination of economic life and life at all of its levels. The primary tasks of state society are not the crude productive tasks but the political and martial functions, and all of these functions imply some world-system that must be perpetuated by education or a knowledge base that humans act upon. The cruder base-level tasks are acknowledged as a necessity, and political leadership makes the presumptive claim that those base-level tasks are things that can be abstracted with enough knowledge, such that the menial labor of society occurs "under the hood", out of sight of any political concern. The only concern for the political class is the wage fund, or whatever arrangement the political class devises to command labor. The particulars of labor are, in the political task, considered irrelevant. So too are the mundane tasks of fighting and deception, or even scholarship for its own sake. The knowledge that is most valuable in state society is purely political knowledge, and so the most valued product of all is initiation into the mysteries of the ruling class, so that social actors possess the proof and security they desire. So long as the social actors are in fear of predation from above, they will not be able to accomplish any other task they would want out of life. The only solution to this problem in the end is to gain the approval of "society", such that this security is guaranteed to the degree that is sufficient for someone to pursue something other than the cost of survival in competition. The approval of society requires both knowledge of the password or whatever proof is required to attain it, and a knowledge base allowing the human to function in such a way that he or she can acquire that proof.

It may seem to an ideological individualist that this is a sign of insecurity, but the reality of human existence is that it is defined by insecurity unless you are at the top. Those in the know have always insulted those who are not with supposed advice which is wholly hostile. Whether the damned believe this "advice", which is always given in the most insulting tone possible, is less important than the thrill of seeing the damned locked out. That is, at a basic level, humanity in state society, and what political life at its basest level will entail. The entire purpose of the society is to make sure those who are locked out and alien to the society are kept out, so that the integrity of those within the society can be maintained. This belief and practice is maintained at all costs, even when it is clear the state or institutions which are valued by some are collapsing, and when it is clear that the arrangement works for no one and will not truly secure those with the access password. When the inevitable happens and this wall of rejection and shame fails, whether for an individual or for a given collective, the only response for those who are true believers in state society and its ethos is to find someone to kick down and sacrifice. The idea that this approach to society could possibly be fundamentally wrong, counter-productive, or just pointless and not conducive to the goal its advocates seek, is anathema is one accepts the values that the true believers do. Even if the political class must feign belief that it made errors and must allow reform or accept revolution, the political class always schemes to reverse this and claim first that any reform is a temporary measure, and then must wipe out any memory that there was a reform in the first place. "He who controls the present controls the past," as the saying goes. It is not enough to simply turn back a reform and acknowledge that a revolution happened. For political myths to survive, it becomes necessary to maintain a fiction that there never was a revolution or anything wrong with the original constitution of society, and then it becomes necessary to fictionalize the origin of a particular state or society. All human societies would do this to some degree or another, and the political myths required doing this even if the explanations were farcical and not really believed. In reality, it could be admitted that the past did happen and there was a time the state was not what it is today, and this is something state actors have to accept even if they don't like it. For political purposes, though, it is necessary to lie brazenly about basic facts to maintain the peace. Modernity and the particular advance of fascism merely systematized something that had been going on for a long while, made it absolute, violently suppressed anyone who would contradict the political line, and then amplified the insanity of these claims to the maximum.

In a later chapter, the philosophical state and the state proper are considered. I note this here to make it clear that all politically relevant divisions of labor, whether by dividing functions and tasks into different categories or assigning agents - human beings - different roles or classes are not premised on a quantitative or qualitative distinction of what someone does, but membership in a group or claims to some property that is upheld by the state or that is respected by society at large. The first aim of any such group, or an individual representing him or her self in political life, is to attain enough respectability that they can even act without being attacked on sight. It is not so much that nature compelled a division of labor by limiting the human brain or the length of the day, or that the division of laborious tasks is inherently necessary or fixed in place. Every scheme to divide labor is something that is conceived by people, rather than something that simply is. This means that rather than the different tasks being intrinsically different interests, the different tasks are the basis for certain classes to exist, and become property. Extractive labor is tied to ownership of the land and relations to keep subordinated workers on the land, and it is the classes of peasants, landlords, serfs, slaves, and so on that come from it. Industrial labor is tied to guilds, unions, industrial capitalists. Scholarship is tied to priests and churches, universities, technocrats, and to some extent technical workers who owe educational institutions their credential and networking opportunities. Larger coalitions of these classes can form either as an alliance holding an institution of importance to the state, or an institution can in its own right command people from many different divisions in labor towards some novel interest. The interest in money cuts across every social class rather than just merchants, and typically the merchants know they exist to facilitate this or that faction, or play the competing interests off each other to build their own portfolio. The most effective merchants know financialization is a gigantic shell game, and that their financial empire has to translate to something useful and politically solvent if they really want to survive. Many small-minded merchants end in the dustbin of history, and no merchant will actually believe the myths about money they tell to the rubes.

I have segregated human labor into seven different tasks that are <i>politically</i> relevant. Very often, professions of people will involve more than one of these areas, or don't conform to any position in the schema. Only in oblique ways does the segregation of classes follow from this division of tasks, and very often, full members of society are expected to carry out functions of production, fighting, and learning. The monopoly on violence held by states and delegated to nobility and warriors was less about the common folk being literally animals and incapable of fighting naturally, but the nobility exercising an exclusive right to violence and adopting an ethos which emphasized the glory of their violence and the subordination of production and commerce. The separation of classes into producers (which is split within itself between commercial enterprises and labor), warriors (and proprietors whose claim to wealth is not about exchange but property rights), and clergy, did not occur as if it were just so and made sense, but because there was a nobility to take this right, which made a point of asserting it over the objections of everyone else. All of these tasks devolve to a simple truth of human society - that it lives an environment, and all societies extract from the land to perform any of these tasks. Even the basic functions of human thought and the body are extracted from the world. Virtue is never a given in people. It is always taken from somewhere, and that somewhere is typically the humiliation and degradation of another person. Nor are the productive qualities of humanity things inborn and inviolate. Everything we are is the result of the root process in societies that allows for everything else, which is extraction of raw materials from the land. We quickly move beyond that basic requirement and must become something more to develop society in any recognizable form, but even the most basic laborious task we conceive in our mind is at its core a physical and chemical process. At no point can its existence be taken for granted. Physical and chemical processes can be changed, and if that is true, then all social processes can be engineered by scientific means. This is obvious even to a child, but political society requires upholding a lie that it is not so, despite every act of the political class stating that they engineer society as they see fit. Because humans are aware of this without too lengthy an investigation, political consciousness diverges from its material origins, and must present labor proper as something opposed to the world, done to the world by willpower and managerial intent. So thorough is political thought that in adulthood, the material origins of these things is abstracted away, and the division of labor is presented as something natural yet obviously the design of people, as most labor is either something done by choice or something commanded by a manager who chose it. That is what marks labor as something distinct from other sources of motive force in society - it is willful, and it is managed either by the agent themselves or by another agent. The division of labor is rooted in what is politically useful, and only after this consideration are social valuations made and associated with some token, like money or credit or reputation. Whatever non-political associations someone might make with labor do not factor into the division of labor, until some political value however dim is attached to it. It is entirely possible to make a type of labor more or less valued simply by arbitrary diktat, so long as the impression can be sustained and it suits whoever would maintain it; or some labors whose political utility is not immediately evident have gone on for long enough that they become more or less standard. It is not strictly speaking necessary to pay the "social wage" - the various benefits and expectations members of society have about what it means to be human and to belong. The argument of raw material necessity would reduce to a scenario where humanoids are crammed into hive complexes, fed a diet of soylent and drugs, brainwashed by the most efficient means possible to be reduced purely to the functions programmed into them, and the social wage would be ever-lower until it is almost nonexistent. Nor is it easy to measure what the social wage will be at any given time, because the expectations of people shift. A drive inherent not just in capitalism but in political society and education is to grind down all conditions to their barest minimum.

From the outset, scientific treatments of political economy entailed transgressing expectations once upon a time thought basic, and inventing new expectations that either marked a transformation of mankind that was an inevitable consequence of the scientific mindset, or new expectations that valued a thing that was worthless or even harmful. Once it became possible to invade private life and create a vast impression, when the general fear was harnessed by scientific management and control over society, the social valuations ceased to be related to the productive aims of the past, all of which could have been planned rationally without money as such. Instead, the social valuation of eugenics would be misery itself. The infliction of misery on undesirables became the paramount good, and all productive enterprises would be oriented towards the objective of increasing human suffering and the marked distinction between the residuum and the valid. Vices that were once upon a time a nuisance tolerated or only partially accepted in empires became praiseworthy and expected, while decencies and probity would become a luxury for elites only. Decency and any sign of virtue in the residuum would be deliberately and viciously attacked on all fronts, as such a thing was anathema to the dominant values of those who made decisions, and these decisions would be passed down a chain of command and follow interests beyond mere ideology, which did not always line up with the core eugenic creed. All of these ideas about managing the economy have to encounter a world that existed before them, and the most virulent ideas sought to abolish the material world entirely and supplant it with an entirely politicized concept of reality, going as far as claiming reality is "always mediated". This is stupid to anyone who thinks for five minutes and isn't indoctrinated with slavish loyalty to institutions over their own sense. At the same time, political conceits take on a life of their own, and are reproduced by the machines people build and the actions they take. This is not particular to modernity, nor is the present state of affairs the only possible state of humanity or its "true" state. The present state of affairs is in true reality far removed from what it is purported to be in the ruling ideology and the dogmas presented to those who were selected to die, and a dual system of political values is created. For those selected to live and participate in valid life, the real situation is known to a sufficient extent, and there are a fair number of hints in mainstream media and culture about what is really happening in economic life. For those selected to die, blatant falsehoods about basic political values are uttered repeatedly, and those selected to die are trained, in various ways, to internalize the lies and present themselves as living abortions to the valid. The lower one's rank among the castes of the residuum, the more abject the humiliations, with a small minority singled out to be nothing more than humiliation targets, so that the rest of the residuum has an example of what happens. If such a class did not exist organically or did not exist in sufficient numbers, it would be necessary to create it, and once the idea of the suffering class takes root, it is morally necessary to tell all who aspire to be valid that open torture and humiliation of the suffering class is the most sacred civic duty, the basis for any republican society. To do otherwise is to give up the project then and there and surrender to rot, perceived or real, and should the damned live and attain any means of vengeance, the damned would be obligated out of dire necessity to take back whatever of the world they can, or at least enact retribution for what was done to them.

It must be understood that the categories listed here are not so much fixed in nature, but fulfill various requirements of what a human society would do to remain relevant. These can be conducted by a single person, or by a division of people into classes, or by dividing the tasks among the people by some scheme without class distinctions as such.

<b>Extractive labor</b> - The most basic task is to extract raw materials from the Earth, or some space, and bring them into possession. In order words, reaping rewards from the processes of nature. This process begins with the formation of life itself in some natural environ. It does not occur to non-thinking life that it is doing anything at all. Animals, or any creature with a central nervous system that causes the body to react to the environment in some deliberate way, begin the emergence of the other types, and the fullest emergence arises with humans due to symbolic language and politics in any meaningful sense. The quantity and quality of the output is dependent less on the input of labor-power and more on what a particular piece of land or space will yield. Examples of this type of work are farming, mining, oil drilling, and processes which are dependent on claiming territory, from which some thing may be extracted that is useful for another purpose. The output of this work provides the most basic resources a society has to do everything else it would want. The view of the proprietors, in the final analysis, is that they are exploiting territories, and the people in that territory are just another natural force to be harnessed. The crudest view of society is to view the whole economy as a farm or plantation, all life as livestock with definite utilities, and that the size of the output will be in the end fixed. The role of the proprietor and manager is to lord over that fixed output and allocate it as he sees fit, and this is simply the way of the world. This reasoning makes sense because at a basic level, it is the true form of living economic activity if seen from afar. Even the crudest task of extraction, though, implies some transformation that was initiated by a human being, or a machine built with intent by a human, in order for the extracted material to enter social circulation where it could be contested. Those employed in extractive work cannot through their labor alone induce the land to yield a larger harvest or contain more metal, and any attempt to push extractive workers harder reaches this limit where extra motivation to work changes the output very little. Earlier human societies were predominantly extractive, first living off of what could be gathered on the land and then being predominantly agricultural.

<b>Basic labor</b> - The next task is to fashion that which is extracted from the Earth into either other products, or to consume the raw or produced materials to reproduce social life. In settled society, this means the most basic tasks of industry and reproducing cities. There is necessarily a baseline of "unskilled labor" that is accepted as necessary to speak of labor possessing various gradients of skill, and it is common observance that many abilities of human laborers are so common that they are expected by the vast majority of humans in society, or that the laborious tasks are trivial enough to learn that education does not need an elaborate ritual. The ideal of this basic education would be that the workers, and all members of society, reproduce the baseline expectations of a man or woman of their own volition, or through familiar relationships that are associations people would make because they want to or see the relationships as more beneficial than the alternative of not learning. In practice, no society can acquire freely every labor it would want for a managerial purpose, and every society faces internal and external pressures to maintain its cohesion and its existence against foreign attack. A disciplinary function to ensure this basic labor is socially valued and brought into society is necessary, even if the discipline where originates from an abstract organizer rather than a willful person. The most basic disciplinary functions are expected of the people themselves, individually or collectively. Environmental factors outside of society only have so much effect, because even the simplest laborious task requires some thought of the laborer to be useful labor, rather than simply a natural force to be harnessed like any other. The workers respond to events in the world only through the sense that occurs to themselves, and any sense that society would provide through education has to end with the worker's own learning, to change the worker's response to events or the volition of the worker. The most basic industrial tasks are to transform raw material into other consumable products - grain from crops into bread, wood from chopping into all the things that wood could be fashioned into, and so on. We are concerned here only with articles of consumption, rather than the particular craft going into the object, or the manufacture of tools, though any tool from the simplest to the most advanced machine is also a thing that is consumed like any other raw material.

The earliest industry is little more than workers who would extract engaging in some craft on the side, in addition to their primary extractive duties that would have been seen as the actually important productive enterprise. Perhaps someone makes pottery, or another fashions clothing. Formal industrial work, at first, concerns specialization towards making these things in larger numbers, and so the home pottery is replaced with pottery produced in some facility. This organized industry exists alongside home manufacture for a long time, and part of the family unit is that the wife would be put to work in some craft for the household's need of industry, in addition to the children. It is not at all instinctive for people to line up in some civic plan to arrange industry in a factory, even when the factory arrangement can be demonstrated to be more effective. Urban society, and then the philosophical treatments of menial labor, maintain a belief that self-sufficiency in basic industry is desirable and that any of the desultory labor that constitutes "basic industry" is beneath a free man's dignity. Further reasons for this can be explored in the mercantile function, or the other functions which discipline labor, but at the basic level of the potential consumer, workers do not like to work for no gain or any accomplishment of their self-interest, and compulsion through fear or any other mechanism is only so effective. Slavery or wage labor can provide basic labor to produce a great many things, but the majority of motive power in any society is provided by no particular relation that is compelled by threats or money. The daily reproduction of one's own life is not strictly a task carried out instinctively like breathing, but is something people do and think at least a little about. Someone will bathe, or discipline their manners for a reason other than fear of the law or social shame or some exalted wisdom. A considerable part of this basic labor, to the present day, concerns simply cleaning the environment around people, so that garbage is not piled haphazardly, or that articles of use in our home are not lost due to a disorganized living space. The maintenance of health is at first something we do for ourselves or for reasons that do not require us to be told what is healthy by a pedagogue. What a person is, of any class, is not merely produced by consumption of the environment around them, but by their most basic behaviors, so volumnious that even the most detailed scheme could not break them down to replicate a functional human in a computer algorithm. The reproduction of a city carries this out in a much more organized way, and of a large empire even more basic labor is required. Therefore, it is often the case that societies primarily concern themselves with how to acquire more of this basic labor, increase its productivity, increase its efficiency, successfully reproduce that basic labor both in the person and in larger organizations, and improve the baseline of that basic labor so that more labors can be taken more or less for granted. This question is essential for most of the more elaborate ideas of what sort of society is preferable for the members of that society. The most successful societies historically worked towards all of these goals, from the starting position that their societies were largely premised on an antagonistic relationship and had to find some way to reproduce their society and adapt it to new conditions in which it exists. The failed societies would either neglect the most basic conditions of labor or their social arrangements would be rife with intercine conflict, for reasons petty or large. None of the historically dominant ideologies have been particularly successful if we look at them from afar and without bias.

There are two extremes in the view of the division of labor, and these views are - in accord with a philosophy which celebrates contradiction and hypocrisy - held simultaneously. One is that all labor is really base labor, which is in many senses a true claim in that all labor must be understood as something that could be equated with similar labor. The view of this in a total society, which sees itself as something apart from the world where matter is extracted and put into social circulation, is that all of this labor can be imagined in a virtual space, and so the value of labor is really a social relation. Therefore, economics can never really answer anything about the material world and remains a concern of human beings with each other, unmoored from the environment and unmoored from the real conditions of the social agents. Empirically, without a rational reason to distinguish different labors, we have to start from the assumption that one lump of labor-power - a human being - is not greatly different from another, and in our experience the abilities of humans are adaptable and similar. It does not matter if a stupid man or a smart man pushes a cart full of mined ore one bit. In the skilled task, it could be imagined that a man of lesser ability could be compared to a man of greater ability by some metrics we could rationally understand, and there is no immediate way for us to claim, without some empirical rationale and evidence to tell us otherwise, the absolute limit of one man's ability compared to another's. In theory, the human animal, knowing what it is, can adapt its most basic constitution in ways so vast that an inborn, hereditary advantage would be rendered moot, or any man could acquire tools that render his hereditary, base biological traits a moot point in some skilled task. To make a claim of some man being constitutionally and permanently of a different substance than another requires either a myth that is known on some level to be a convenient fiction, or it requires a definition of the human social agent in purely biological and biopolitical terms. The conventional social theory is that human beings are at first impression selves that are sentient and quite aware of their physical limitations, but that this is a different matter from claiming that different humans possess different essences that cannot transform into anything else. The other theory, which is quite old, is that every labor is of a distinct essence, and thus every skilled profession, every scholarly task, every fighting task, places those laborers above a base or extractive laborer, or places the extractive and basic working tasks in a position which is the most desultory work possible and thus bad. This conceit appears meritocratic but in actuality it turns into an infantile belief that basic things humans must do to reproduce social conditions are irrelevant or can be abstracted away neatly. The ideal of such a conceit is that human society is driven purely by "creatives", or for the petty proprietors and soldiers, human society is driven by a violent will to power which overcomes mere ideas. The true distinction between different types of labors is only understood by recognizing first a basic motive engine, the human, and the environment they live in, which was neglected by classical political economy entirely.

<b>Artisan labor</b> - This category may be called "skilled labor", "applied education labor", or a number of other titles, but the first evident appearance of this category is the specialization of basic laborers that is not conducted by any grand society-level plan, but by a process that happens "behind the backs of the producers". The result is that some workers possess ability to perform some craft or some function that is not immediately available to any human or a large class of humans. Because this is not a formal process and is not automatically valued by legal codes or the interest of proprietors, this group can be conflated with the workers in many analyses, but in any society, a distinction is made between different skills and their utility, in accord with values that society as a whole might hold. Not all of these labors are necessarily favored, as among the specialized abilities are those of a criminal nature. Anyone can be a criminal, but not everyone can be an effective criminal and survive the great game. Attempts are made to make this distinction a moral one, first because a moral distinction provides motive for basic laborers to distinguish themselves for some profit, and second because using moral shame or praise alone can allow social actors to give the artisan something which is in fact no profit or material benefit at all. However much this distinction may be exposed as illusory or of little consequence, the distinction of different skillsets and the people who possess them is very relevant if we wish to understand the different interests among the working populations. We can exclude from this categories of labor that are not, in their core function, productive at all. Many attempts are made to give the mercantile, warrior, scholarly, and untouchable functions some distinction that equates them with artisinal skill or a particular mark of shame, or present functions that are actually disciplinary functions on the labor of society as genuinely productive of some substance. In some sense these disciplinary functions may produce products that can be treated as commodities or tokens that would be exchangeable in a monetary sense, or by some game theory where the disciplinary forces are equated to the production of so much material. The actual work of the artisan, though, is that their work, for good or ill, is intended to produce particular materially real qualities that are desired rather than qualities that are valued purely because they are political constructs like the value of war leadership or legal knowledge, and those qualities are made manifest in various forms. A craftsman may create or repair tools or work with machines that are difficult without specialized training. An actor or musician might perform some art that impresses viewers, that an ordinary man or woman didn't compose. While the mercantile and warrior roles are specialized and can be respected or feared, the particular form the merchant or warrior takes is less relevant than the disciplinary function of the task. The mercantile function could be performed by a street hustler, wandering vagabond with a trove of desirables, small shopkeeper, anyone willing to meet another market participant in a free market setting, a capitalist, a state planner in some socialist arrangement, or many other arrangements. The fighting functions are not limited to professional soldiers, but come in a variety of forms that represent state force or some violent force, all of which are intended to do the same disciplinary task. The artisinal work on the other hand must produce specific qualities that are desired. Artists or skilled laborers are not, in of themselves, intrinsically worth anything. Their specializations may be, from a societal point of view, not merely worthless but actively harmful and deliberately so. From the perspective of the disciplinary functions, which usually dictate what is socially valuable, they are aware that without people who can do specific actions and create those particular things, their disciplinary functions would not be possible. Soldiers need swords or guns, and a wide variety of implements that must be built. The higher levels of organization for mercantile activity require stable institutions which must be reproduced.

The skilled labor is not merely basic labor with some substance of intellectual production animating it, and cannot be reduced simply to arrive at some combined quantity of substance that is comparable to a quantity of basic labor. Qualitatively different labors produce things which are functionally distinct from the products of some basic labor, or another kind of skilled labor. A simple investment of time in intellectual production does not guarantee that this new quality must emerge, and cannot determine what that quality will be. In order to arrive at some equivalency of the different qualities of labor, a scheme to do so must be implied or made explicit, in accord with some principle that is created rather than one that is truly written into nature. Without this, the different labors and their outputs are not freely exchangeable as the same sort of substance. The division of labor, so far as it concerns actually useful articles rather than disciplinary functions calling themselves useful, arises because those different labors present an answer to some question facing an individual or a social organization. A society cannot freely exchange farm labor, mining, manufacture, and so on once the products are created, and it cannot arbitrarily assign a worker in one sector to another without some loss of efficiency. When reassigned, the worker must move to the new site where they produce or extract or do whatever it is they do. If the worker lacks immediate knowledge of the other sector's functioning, he must learn the new function expected of him, and acclimate his body and life to that function. A division of labor that starts out of physical necessity often produces people who are somewhat different in their daily functioning. We can imagine that the workers start as completely blank slates, or we can imagine some innate qualities they posssessed before they were sorted into particular sectors of work, but the specialization of workers in accord with what they do asserts itself either way. This specialization encounters limits, unless it were possible to reduce a worker entirely to his profession, a task that was not truly conceivable nor desirable until scientific management and biology could conceive of the ideal worker drone made real. The past efforts to forcibly assign workers to a role they could not escape concerned their legal and social status, which was regulated entirely by disciplinary functions. This did not prevent task masters from pitting workers against each other based on their specialization, but the effectiveness of this intercine conflict is limited because in actuality the specialization of humans in their functioning does not make them considerably distinct in their core understanding of themselves and their world. A free worker, whether employed in agriculture or industry or musical performance or any other field, was still free and still a human, and expected to do human behaviors rather than mechanical ones. It is still the case in today's economy that a human is expected to be adaptable to a manager's needs, and the overspecialization of trades is a desultory assignment, largely concerning sectors in technocratic society that the sitting regime desires to lock down and control out of a need for security rather than any natural efficiency of doing so. Overspecialization in industrial capitalism had always been a nuisance to the functioning of that arrangement, and it arose more as a consequence of the machinery in that time and a deliberate policy to segregate the mind of the worker into functions that could be controlled. It still remained the case that in industrial capitalism, the complexity and diversity of products and services would increase, even if the demands on the laborer were de-skilled and the skilled craftsmanship of the workman was replaced with a machine created by engineers and scientists. The de-skilling of labor would be, for reasons that become apparent upon historical review, a deliberate choice rather than an inexorable tendency. The increase in complexity of products is not itself an inexorable rule, but as the sum total of knowledge in society increases, so will the needs and wants in that society to answer a particular problem that someone could conceive. The ability of a society to answer those needs cannot be taken for granted. For most of history, this task was of little interest to the governing ideas and received little attention, only perpetuating as if by some inertia of the working classes. In industrial society it was very important to bring this process under managerial control, and then under the control of large institutions which enforced a network that allocated labor into vocations selected by the machine, and used every carrot imaginable to cajole the workers into certain behaviors in an increasingly controlled environment.

In the disciplinary functions, the distinction between skilled and basic labor is illusory at first. The capitalist or the warlord or the planner has no instinctive knowledge of the actual productive crafts and can only guess at a value to relate them to other skilled labors. There is also difficulty in establishing what a baseline for unskilled labor is supposed to be, especially in light of the last disciplinary function of the untouchable. A general theory of science is necessary to begin in earnest the useful distinction between skilled labors, and it is in this general theory of science and the practices of education that the skilled labors can be linked in some grand scheme. Without this, comparison is impossible. It has been a persistent difficulty in managerial schemes to adjudicate how a monetary value of labor, such as wages or a salary, can translate to different utilities or the quality of different tools. For much of history, the variety of products did not change so significantly that this was a great consideration. Some new products would appear by no particular plan except a necessity that was recognized by an inventor, or a vague sense of a thinker that a new idea may be possible and directions on how to realize such a device. From the start of the 19th century, new devices appeared not just in this haphazard way, but in a way that was conscious of the need to continually revolutionize the products and the means of production. This not only meant a greater motive power from steam engines and industrial inventions which were themselves considerably complex machines, but it would produce products that were impossible to make in the past, and so the introduction of new skills could never be reduced to a quantitative increase in raw products. Not only were the products created of a novel type, but a greater understanding of the substances in nature was available for utilities that were not understood or poorly understood before. A whole field of chemistry and nascent medical advances changed thinking on what material things would be useful. Oil, which was once an unwanted residue of other extractive enterprises, became the most valuable liquid to industrial interests, which in turn enabled new engines and machines which were attached to those engines, like the automobile. The introduction of new products did not simply entail things that led to an increase in the total economic product of a society, but machines that were entirely novel. As with any tool, the industrial and later technological tools had a much greater effect both on the users of those tools, and the surrounding environs. The environmental effects were further made apparent by the crowding of people into cities, which created a need for sanitation and health interventions, and with it societal conditions which politicians sought to remedy with yet more novel ideas and machinery.

<b>Exchange</b> - All things that enter social circulation must have a claimant, and claims may be made on a thing that is entirely speculative. The most evident of these things are commodities, and so the commodity is the first thing that comes to mind to someone with a monetary view of that which is claimed. The claims, though, can be made on land, intellectual property, or anything - again including fictitious things - and the exchanges that are made are not always monetary ones. For everything that enters social circulation, there is an expectation between social actors of how that thing is appropriated by the members of society, and this appropriation ultimately falls into the hands of individual persons at some point if this appropriation ever translates to utilizing the thing for any purpose other than exchange. Social organizations do not have a thought process that concerns directly the utility of these things, and if they did, we would be speaking of those organizations not just as legal persons but as flesh and blood life-forms. It is well known that all organizations are necessarily comprised of human agents and machinery wielded by humans. Within such an organization, there are always expectations of the participants about any claim and what people can and cannot do with the claimed things. This applies in a purely cooperative organization and it applies in a very large organization in which the members' relationship is antagonistic. The inhabitants of a city, even if they do not know each other, or even if they do not know they are living in a city, are linked by their physical closeness and invariably their claims to property or the commons are regulated by some process. The mercantile function broadly speaking concerns this regulation, or discipline, of the claims, and that alone. It does not concern directly the production and consumption of the goods, nor does it concern any intrinsic utility or perceived utility in a direct way. It does not concern the political problem of creating laws or enforcing them, or the force required to do so. The exchanging function may also be called the "mercantile" function, as commonly a medium of exchange is presumed that allows, in theory, an exchange of any thing for another thing. Even if the unit of exchange is not a monetary token, all the claims of a claimant are available to meet the claims of another claimant, and all social agents can hypothetically meet another social agent. Whether someone is willing to trade particular claims, or whether someone's claim is a spurious one, does not change that in exchange, all is up for trade in principle. One party may elect to take with threats or the actual use of force, and the motives of this extortion must consider exchange in the same way a merchant would conduct ordinary commerce. The ability to make a threat, and the ability to act on it, require some claim of the extorter against the extorted, and no force can be taken for granted. All of these claims, whether they are property, money, or some sort of planning scheme, are things humans imagine and believe to be real in their mind, but it only needs to be believed. The actual condition of the thing being claimed need not align with the belief, but it is generally beneficial for those in exchange to be certain that their claim does comport with reality. The merchant must, in any exchange, be able to know in their mind the things that are up for trade, and anything they know that can be claimed. Therefore, in societies, there are schemes to value every possible thing that may enter social circulation, even if that thing would not occur to the exchanging parties as a thing immediately available to them. The participants in society can make claims theoretically on anything in the whole of the universe, and all these things are presumably linked in some way that makes general exchange sensical.

The most common and basic exchanges are the informal ones - the understandings and favors between people that may be part of some common courtesy. These "exchanges" at first appear to be no exchanges at all, but they perform a regulatory function just as contracts in barter or money do and just as any elaborate planning scheme would. The informal schemes may be as simple as asking for the salt at a dinner table, but there is only one salt shaker in this hypothetical table, and it must be claimed by someone to be utilized. Another scheme might be some gambling credit written down by a book-keeper, but the exchange of this token need not be understood as pertaining to money or any substantive claim of legal property. Participants in a game, with no particular purpose beyond playing the game, assign values to the things in that game in order to pursue strategies, whether they are cooperative or competitive games. There is also an understanding, which is almost instinctive, that things in the real world do not spontaneously transform, disintegrate, or spawn, and so a token we possess today will be in our possession tomorrow if it is not exchanged. There is also an observed balance in nature between physical forces, such that matter is not created nor destroyed. The awareness of living in an environment is important, because the participants do not always know the extent of that environment, and one man's knowledge of an environment and the conditions of life may be an advantage over another man who does not know anything beyond what is in front of him. The informal exchanges are not always pleasant ones. Very often, deception and every trick imaginable is used to gain advantage in an informal way, either for petty amusement or because this earlier deception sets up conditions of formal exchange that are highly unfavorable to one party. Trust, integrity, and respect are not freely given and can never be assumed as an absolute, and woe to the man who forgets this against a malevolent actor. We can assume that anyone reading this book has established enough trust to participate in society, or could in the past, but it is never possible to take society for granted. The everyday practices of informal exchange, many of them practices we normally don't think about, will typically reach some equilibrium, where behaviors of an agent in a given environment can be expected and are habitual. No more elaborate mechanism of exchange is possible without this step.

There may be an attempt to claim that because all things can be claimed in exchange, then there is some rule of nature compelling this exchange in people, but this is fallacious. The reasons why should be clear by my listing of counterexamples of imperfect information leading to wildly inaccurate notions of what is being exchanged, and the terms under which that exchange is possible. We can and do choose to a large extent the terms of exchange we will allow without a fight. We can, if we so choose, refuse to pay taxes to the bitter end. We can build a whole network of exchanges outside of the formal economy, or an economy with formal tokens that we consciously keep apart from the mainstream of the world. By "exchange labor", we do not refer to a process we would construe as productive in the first three senses we described, but a process which is not in of itself productive at all. Every effort to regulate the movement of things and ideas in society is an expenditure of some effort. The exchanging function is the most obvious way to accomplish this regulation, and at a base level it appears to be the only one. Distinct roles emerge which further formalize the sort of exchanges that people make in upholding the law and custom of a society or polity. These roles are not concerned with exchange in a direct way, but instead regulate the merchants. There are for example lawyers whose work is tied to the existence of a state which can uphold laws, something that can only be done with finality by violence; and there may be arbiters who are not directly tied to the state, but establish agreements between social participants, or between proprietors and their human property who are not in a legal sense recognized as social members but which can only be controlled by some manipulation. The line between "peaceful agreement" and "coercive force" is often blurred. It is often declared that property and thus exchange is inherently antagonistic and thus all mercantile functions - and in effect all exchange functions - are hostile acts by their nature. This naive thinking is to lead people to believe that producers should never exchange at all, or should only exchange in prescribed ways that are adjudicated as harmonious and purged of all discord. The further absurd claim, by those who make economics into a purely ideological exercise, is that this harmonious society is only possible in conditions of perfect competition in perfect markets with perfect information, or that it is only possible with perfect cooperation and perfect information by some perfect natural process that is somehow not organized by any entity. Both effectively state the same thing, both are stated as the position of the most extreme anarchist ideologues, and both have been somehow sold as the extreme right and left positions respectively. These positions make every grotesque error possible in speaking of what humans are, what societies are, what markets are, what planning mechanisms are, what nature itself is, what the state is, what politics as a concept is, what information is, and even what competition and cooperation entail at the most basic level. That such an abominable discombobulation of reality is presented as an idea should be appalling to every basic decency. The further denunciation of this anarchism must wait for later, but it highlights something at the heart of the exchange function. That is that we can and must have a moral sense that distinguishes fairness and honesty from arbitrariness and deceit, to speak of which exchange functions are predatory and which are the result of reasonable due diligence towards co-existence. The antagonistic relations in close quarters that define the life of societies where settled states are established cannot spill over into open violence too often, or be so deceptive that participation in a market is an uncertain prospect. At some point, whatever the legal order or whatever the customs may be that regulate moral behavior, some attachment to reality is expected of the participants in exchange. Even if the reality is that all the participants in society accept legal fictions or myths, sharing a belief in those fictions and myths is very real, and can make real the value of a token like money or faith in an institution. No institution and no money is a given of nature, but is a thing emerging from something that must make sense to the participants, or must have made sense at some point. The promulgation of the greatest nonsense, spoken to activate some psychological instinct against the interest of the recipient, must be understood as a severe danger in any arrangement of society.

All the claims of a person in exchange may be imagined in one hoard, and as informal mechanisms are insufficient or things that the participants cannot agree upon, informal exchange must move to more formal arrangements, and the simplest way to do this is commodification. The particulars of money, and derivatives of it like interest, credit, insurance, and so on, is not of particular interest, nor is it of interest if the formal exchange remains barter. The simple rule is that more things to trade allows more leverage, and there is no exchange without some substantive claim. We can exaggerate the size of a claim to an unwary competitor, but the exchange of claims is what it is. One party trades the claim to another, and once it is securely in the other's hands, an exchange of this virtual substance is recorded in the ledger. Regardless of the legal status of the participants in the society, breaking the terms of the agreement would require another action to do so. Slaves or inmates in a psychiatric institution do not need the legal sanction of a state to talk to each other and do what they will, even if someone wants to imagine the communication between them to be some jabbering of the mouth that polite society does not consider language. Should a third party wish to step in to void the agreement, that is the third party's action, not a given. To claim, for example, that nature compels the exchange between two people to be something other than what it is, is to ascribe to nature the fickle traits of a person. Usually, such claims about nature or a divine intervention into our affairs are made by very selfish and petty humans who see it as their business to meddle. The prerogatives of a relatively honest state or ruler do not need such an excuse. Any economic plan would abide the same characteristics as market exchange does, in this way. The rational planning of exchanges in society may be accepted as preferable to the uncertainty of market antagonisms, but no such planning regime would be possible if the commoner participants were presumed to possess no intelligence and were assigned the most desultory status and education possible. A planner who holds such contempt will inevitably find that their rational planning scheme will be alien to the commoner who is subjected to it. A rational planning that depends on blind trust in institutions, especially institutions that consciously make themselves alien to the commoner's lived experience, is likely to fail spectacularly. This is not an intractable problem at all, because the simple solution is for planners to not insist on bullish imposition of an idea, but to do what it was the participants wanted in the first place, which was to pay less taxes or receive a fairer share of the social product. A strange idea that socialism entails the obsessive micromanagement of peoples' toothbrushes is yet another anarchist trope, but no socialism in history has been so obtuse to the bitter end. It remains, however, a conceit of the classes that were invested in a socialist ideology and philosophy, who sought to form public opinion rather than heed it in any reasonable way. This is not the central failure of historical socialism as a workable economic program or even a persistent economic drag, as the actual economic governance of the socialist countries had less to do with forcing an economic ideology to be true against nature and more to do with what was desirable for industrial interests in that time and place, and what was possible. It is rather a misunderstanding that socialist thought had in making its argument against capitalism, particularly within the capitalist countries. They failed to understand that what sustained technocratic capitalism was not the strength of its ideology or some conspiratorial mind control that was just so effective for spooky reasons. No concept of planning could significantly depart from management without succumbing to the technocratic conceits.

<b>Fighting and Deception</b> - The exchange function implies that cooperation is possible, while the fighting and deceptive functions - both of which I shall conflate as the same sort of thing - are between hostile parties. Soldiering, spycraft, various forms of guard or security labor, and a number of other professions exist because all other means of regulating tasks have not worked, or other means of regulation are not desirable for the actor involved. It is entirely a drain on the productive economy, and its characteristics do not have a necessary moral implication of good or bad. There are legitimate reasons for antagonistic relations to reach the point where it is no longer possible to assume society's members are going to cooperate. There are legitimate reasons why someone would consider deception worth undertaking for security. There are legitimate reasons for defense, and reasons not to defend, and aggression is not inherently irrational or wrong. A distinction between predation, and further an ideology which exhorts people to be predatory, and aggression must be clear. Predation is an ethos declaring that aggression in of itself is good, for material benefit or in its purest form it declares the predator's victory to be morally virtuous in defining oneself. Predation does not need to be violent, but can be engineered through predatory exchange, the willful construction of predatory goods knowing their use, predatory education and science intended for the cause of predation, and the predatory behavior common to the underclass to self-police and make themselves useful to the ruling ideas. Aggression is simply violent force, for good or ill, and it is not an act of predation to attack a clear threat, or to merely eliminate a rival. Again, a naive anarchist view will claim that all defense is good and all aggression is bad. The defensive reaction can be waged for predatory intents, like a defense of a predatory ethos against those who would fight against its presence in the world. It is a curious trait of our time that defense of honesty is considered a most foul aggression even if it is the most pacifist defense possible, and the most vile predatory aggression is somehow defensive in nature. The inverse - a righteous aggression against those who deceive for petty amusement - is anathema to the ideology of those who believe the purest predatory element to be a fount of sacredness, so much that it must be vigorously snuffed out. It does not matter to the predatory whether the righteous aggression is tempered or if it is, out of necessity, far-reaching. The predatory are great at games of moral equivocation and psychological manipulation, and the predatory present their ethos as not only legitimate war but that this ethos is in some perverse way a productive act greater than the worker's. It should be noted that, in a sick sense, this is perfectly reasonable. The predatory ethos, in its more developed stages, believes acts of terror and predation constitute a substance whose production should be sought for its own right, and so, predatory societies favor lurid rituals, prostitution, drug addiction, and that which is known to be deleterious. The more ruinous, the greater for the predatory ethos. The wicked comes to possess a quality that presents an unchallengable value to the ethos, and the constructive acts only exist in service to that predatory ethos. The practice of war, by itself, has no inherent moral quality, though in practice humans have difficulty waging wars without some moral cause. Historical societies were defined by the rise of warlords and the priests who collaborated with them, and so, the glorification of violence came early, and this informed much of the constitution of early settled society. This only heightened a pattern of endemic predation throughout nomadic humanity that simply couldn't be answered. It is a common belief among partisans of the predatory system that all societal progress is only ever progress towards more elaborate regimes of predation. This works both in enhancing the position of a warrior aristocracies and the machinery of control and deception, and degrading the rest of the populace who are defanged and told of their utter worthlessness. Wherever any significant advance does happen though, even in the field of weaponry, the predatory ethos has always been a nuisance. The most effective predatory societies were not the ones that revelled in predation at the highest level and glorified a warrior aristocracy with silly conceits. The feudal warrior aristocracy of the Middle Ages was utterly ruinous for fielding an effective army, and was only effective in the ecosystem of Europe because it was geared towards terrorizing serfs and fighting wars against other states constituted similarly. What virtue such kingdoms showed in war was almost entirely an inheritance from the Roman tendency of seeking military advantage. Warrior aristocracy and the general veneration of warrior culture has always been a laughably bad way to attain the best army, but they are effective at maintaining regressive social hierarchies and supporting a rise of barbarism generally. It is for this reason that the cultures that venerate warrior culture for its own sake choose such a strategy, rather than actually believing this makes an army battle-effective - or at least, this author hopes the political leadership isn't stupid enough to believe their propaganda.

There have been attempts to join together this fighting task with exchange or mercantile functions, or scholarly functions, to assert that there is some mercantile or scholarly element inherent to the idea of fighting, and conversely that those elements are incomprehensible without the ideology of war. In other words, the familiar canard "violence is the supreme authority". The extractive and productive functions are decidedly subordinated here. From the belief of the domineering instinct, the productive economy exists to serve the goals of domination and control, down to the most basic tasks people do. This is a crude form of a tendency in the philosophical state, but misunderstands just what happens in any human society, and further misunderstands any highly developed society where large institutions must remain stable. The truth is that violence and deception do not need any inherent attachment to productivity or the other regulatory functions, and such violence and deception can stand alone for whatever purpose someone might have for them. Every violent and deceptive act requires a substantive investment of resources, and these resources can be imagined in some sort of exchange with the other actors, but violence itself is not inherently necessary for those acts to be sensical, and the assertion of will has characteristics that have nothing at all to do with productivity, a need for material gain, any scholarly purpose, or even a need to uphold a particular situation where some group is untouchable and undesirable. The competitive instinct in people is a necessary one not because it is economically necessary, but because life to be life must always be able to secure itself and, if it wishes, be able to attack rivals. The rivals do not need to be of a different social class to justify the aggression, nor is it a given that someone is automatically a rival due to some cultural signifier or geographic distance. It is the aggressive and defensive act itself that is important, whatever the motive for the fighting. It may be assumed by a certain sort that all fighting is inherently bad or wrong, but such a position is something people have to choose of their own volition. A "non-aggression principle" inherent to nature cannot be taken for granted, or imposed on all life as a moral cause no matter what. It is instead the case that human beings who can think can usually see that violence for no purpose whatsoever leads to conclusions that are undesirable, if that violence were a general rule. It is even worse if violence becomes the chief organizing principle and spiritual authority. Regardless of this, there are those who choose to glorify violence, and those who simply believe that without some will to fight there is nothing to actually live for. Life cannot persist as merely producers, who would come to be seen as some process of nature. The most basic assertion of self has a seed of aggression simply for someone to assert themselves and maintain their constitution. The extreme of total non-violence is to say that some person does not have any right or cause to exist at all, except as something another actor wished, and so it is not desirable. There is in reality no moral component to this fighting, and this gives rise to another pernicious tendency that the purpose of life is power, and that power creates its own morality. That view has been espoused enough and leads to predictably terrible consequences we have known for a long time, yet it always finds adherents because it is attractive to a petty-managerial mindset. Attempts to make out of the fighting function something more than it actually is are doomed to outcomes that are sadly predictable, which means that morality cannot arise from fighting. Morality also cannot arise from productive or exchange functions for reasons that are not difficult to discern - the purpose of life is not some drive to expand or some practice of exchanging things for its own sake.

The difficulty with isolating the fighting and deceptive functions as a task is that various forms of fighting and deception are built into institutions we take for granted. This fighting is not in truth the province of a privileged minority who are entitled to the sole right of aggression. Such a thing is a necessary pretense of states, which by their nature cannot brook open dissent against the state's authority, but anyone with the means to fight is capable of fighting in some way. Casual acts of aggression are often taken as a joke, and petty attacks are so numerous that the reader can likely find these acts in their daily life. The aggression need not serve any ulterior motive and the motive can be nothing more than petty amusement or competitive spirit, even competition of a friendly sort like a game or sport. Further along, whole bureaucracies and institutions which are ostensibly peaceful are in reality premised on a belief of deception, going out of their way to deceive the public of the very purpose of their institutions. Institutions claiming to exist for the welfare of the people are, by capitalist governments, also tasked with control and management of an underclass, with an open contempt for the recipients. This is necessarily attached to the function of untouchability which is something different from the fighting or deceptive function, but it is conceivable that an institution supposedly for mutual aid can be ruled by the same deceptive intent. In the case of welfare organizations during the 20th century, they were often attached to functions like eugenics and the tracking of the populace to bring them under control, and in return the recipients would receive conditional means to survive, and the particular status of social untouchability was a thing that was relied upon and encouraged to use the welfare mechanism for so-called "moral correction". In practice, no such moral improvement of the recipients was expected, and eugenist societies found the concept of any moral rehabilitation completely unacceptable to their core conceits. So total was this particularly eugenicist idea of the poor that very specific incentives were set up specifically to punish recipients who wanted to improve their station, which even capitalist society understood to be deleterious. Eugenist societies and the greater aims of what I have called "eugenism" must be expounded upon later, but the reader is very likely to have some familiarity with the welfare state and its motives, either from the perspective of the benefactor or as a recipient who has been given the treatment by some social worker whose hostility cannot be contained. The example of the welfare office is only one such example. Many institutions of various functions are premised on deception to convince people that the institutions do something other than what they actually do, or are premised on a social obligation to pretend that these institutions are something other than what they are. This tendency of mass deception reached its height with technocratic society in the 20th century, first imposing a highly alien life to what had existed before, and then using tactics intended to deceive and cajole such that the people were not allowed to speak plainly about anything that had happened and were definitely not allowed to question central conceits of the technocratic states that did exist. It is not the sole tendency, and it is known on some level that the deception cannot hold forever and its maintenance has consequences. For the deceived and for those who are dependent, it is of little use to rail against the unfairness of the deception or the unequal society that results. The dispossessed and the despised can say all they like that it is supposed to be some other way, but the petty-manager and the learned bureaucrat have never listened to that argument once in their entire history and they never will. The proprietors who command the state take this opportunity to say that it is not the specific intent of those who operate the welfare state to do these things, but that welfare itself leads to degeneracy, and by doing so, all the deliberate acts and incentives set up to maintain a social order are entirely the fault of the recipients. This statement is the prelude to ensuring that welfare, so far as it continues to exist, displays an even greater intent to suppress the recipient population. It is not the giving of material things to the poor in of itself that is the problem, but the desultory existence that is imposed for reasons quite apart from any law of nature or society. If instead the recipients were given land and a sense of entitlement to some project that they shared in, the mentality would be quite different. The same people who bemoan the welfare state brag about strucutural unemployment that has no reason to exist and brag about the reduction of class sizes and the desultory education of those selected for an underclass, which is appropriate to the ideology of eugenics that was at the forefront of neoliberalism.

<b>Scholarship</b> - The development of formal systems of knowledge and the ideological basis for organizations constitutes a task seperate from productive tasks. Indirectly, is seeks to regulate economic behavior by rational argument or a faith that makes an argument that appears rational. This can work at the smallest level, where an industrial arrangement could be planned by reason to be more effective, or it can work at a higher political level, where a theory of society and how to do this is advanced. The formality of these systems of knowledge is the relevant part. The core aim of this task, then, is to advance theories and organizations of education, from which knowledge of the sciences and applications of science can be derived. This educational theory, or pedagogy, must be distinguished from the learning individuals understake to assimilate knowledge of the world. People can and do integrate knowledge without any formal system or theory given to them by a pedagogue, and once a system is handed down from teacher to student, the student can use that system as he wishes. If the student thinks the system is wrong or needs to be revised, he may do that. No cult of education is truly ordained by natural laws, and people can integrate knowledge in any way that is suitable. Integration of knowledge into a world-system is ultimately an event local to a particular thinker, and while we may be able to reason general laws of nature informing why we think the way we do and what kind of world-systems are possible for a human to conceive, the actual understanding of a human is local to them. The scholarly task is about separating this wisdom from the person, and presenting the knowledge as some sort of thought form that is communicable outside of people. This could be as simple as writing books and assembling libraries, or it may entail an ethos of education that teachers or larger organizations perpetuate. The thinking of a philosopher's education is the central takeaway from Plato's Republic, and the thing that is supposed to be the true engine of the ideal city-state. Without this, the scheme is not workable at all, let alone capable of producing what the philosopher would consider good.

The larger implication of this is that societies, to become states or any large organization, must perpetuate themselves as an idea, and so tasks like the scholarly task play a substantial role in the perpetuation of society as we know it. Directly, individual people only contact so many other people, and those interactions are limited out of necessity. The formation of any nation as a polity requires some shared conception of a community that doesn't materially exist. We do not know every single participant in the nation in this direct way, or at best we would only be able to know direct information about all the participants in some registry of citizens. It is not realistic for the human animal to personally relate to 100,000 other citizens. If there is a leader of the city addressing the citizenry in a group, the speaker must be aware of how he speaks to the assembled group, and the leader has to give the impression that his authority is worth following. A smaller group may have a leader, and there is always some executive functioning implied for any organization, but the concept of being a leader does not necessarily have to conform to the idea of a dictator waving his mighty hand and the subjects following like automata. That approach historically has not been terribly effective, but once again the conceits of the petty-manager find comfort in a showy dictator like Hitler, or a parody of the showy dictator like Donald Trump, less because this method of leadership is effective or even the actual state of affairs. It is instead that a psychological expectation of leadership is present among the faithful, who sycophantically attach themselves to a leader, and in turn the leader - and in modern dictatorships, a PR machine - enable this sycophancy. The modern conceits of dictatorship do not greatly resemble dictatorships of the past, and the actual functioning of dictatorship cannot be entirely PR. At some level, the dictator must present some competence or the appearance of it to be credible. The magic of PR is to extend what is credible, such that the populace believe in fictions, or at least are too terrified to act against something that smells foul.

All of this scholarship and education is meaningless without the means of production and its associated labor. It is also not possible without some concept of the regulatory functions of exchange, fighting, and deceit. Arriving at some truth or wisdom may happen in a way that is local or largely organic, but economics is no friend to the truth or any honor or integrity. The basic logic of the economic task does not concern the moral or the true, but only the world as it is and that which regulates it at a basic level. A belief that wisdom alone is paramount, or that the accumulation of knowledge is a goal for its own sake, is really calling for the productive, mercantile, and martial means available to a society to be subordinated to some seat held by the wise, who manipulate the lesser functions to their benefit. Truth, on the other hand, exists outside of any one person, and we must accept this very early to even begin the process of accumulating wisdom for ourselves. Wisdom only recognizes for an individual truth that is accessible, in theory, to anyone and anything. Truth does not give us ready-made morals, but it is what allows us to even conceive of morality. Another conceit is that human labor is morally distinct because of this faculty of reason through symbolic language, and that this is an essential distinction of people from any other class of matter. The philosophers themselves understood that the greatest wisdom they know is that they in fact know nothing, and they could see that conceit obscured genuinely useful wisdom let alone the truth. For our individual wisdom, though, we are always limited by conceits we hold because to challenge them would be to challenge ourselves and the institutions we created, that perpetuated the very education that raised the question. We certainly were able to raise this question without any great pedagogy to tell us that it was a question, because there was some time in human history where there was no formal pedagogy to teach us wisdom. With more formal philosophy, and the organization of society that follows, the question would be more pressing even if scholarship and the quest for wisdom remained separate from the other spheres of human activity. Because the philosopher does have wants, though, it was highly impractical for economy and reason to remain separate spheres that never violated the other. The philosophers were very aware of the temptations economic reality created in them, and while they superficially bemoaned the encroachment of economic life onto their leisurely pursuits, the philosophers were also engaged in a struggle with the productive and martial sectors for resources and security. Likewise, the producers have good reason to resent an arrogant philosopher cajoling them, and as mentioned, to the common man this philosophical state appeared like some perversion to their own wisdom and a truth that was apparent to them even as a vague feeling. The philosophical state heightens this economic conflict. Reason will seek, out of necessity or desire, to co-opt the productive and regulatory functions, and the people engaged in production or war or proprietorship have greater need of reason for their own aims and to assert that their own wisdom is worth something against the intellectual centers which promulgate the ruling ideas. It is the propagation of the idea that truly begins class struggle in the sense we are familiar with the concept, because there was a meaningful language to describe the organization of institutions and the overall structure of polities. Even if we assumed the common folk to be somewhat ignorant and unwise of anything beyond what was in front of them, the thing that was in front of the commoner was itself changing in ways that were perceptible. A gentile formation of society that seemed natural to their senses was displaced with a philosophical formation of society and a state that was alien to the older thinking on government and the position of people. Even without the state dictating this from on high, the formal knowledge of industry and trades, and the organization of enterprises by rich men was increasingly apparent.

Here, the adoption of currency and state-issued coinage was very influential in changing the thinking of people, not so much because the currency itself had a corrupting effect on the smallfolk, but because the people most interested in coin were already wealthy interests who desired and attained something that secured their interest. Common farmers and workers and artisans were now in competition with wealthier formations of people. The merchant and proprietor interests were certainly aware of their position, and so were the idle rich who could devote their time to scholarship. The past conflict of classes had less to do with economic roles and more to do with membership in organizations that were held against outsiders. That could be a clan against another clan, a nation against foreigners, or a nobility that served a religious or cultural role against those who were just "everybody else" and had no institution to immediately operate from, as the Roman patricians held the Senate and religious functions of society. The philosophical state heightened explicitly the economic nature of classes and the function of different classes. It described both the functions themselves, and ways in which the function itself could be perpetuated. The Academy, and the newer philosophical institutions, were adoptive institutions with an eye for their particular function, more than some sentiment for blood relations or favoritism of friends. This process proceeded in much of the world, where philosophy and political theory became more prominent, and the means to realize what those theories pointed to was apparent. It only required men who could seize that opportunity with knowledge of what could be possible, and this is what distinguished the classical empires from earlier formations. Certainly we can see some theory and ideology of earlier states, like Babylon and Egypt, but if the political theory attained the assembly of knowledge that of the Greeks or the Chinese kingdoms or Hindu kingdoms learned and put into action, it is lost to our written history. A number of advances, some of which seemingly small like the standardization of coinage, made the formation of the philosophical state closer to reality. Whether the participants actually thought building the ideal state was itself the goal is another question altogether, because for as long as theories of the philosophical state have existed, there have been philosophical criticisms of this construct and reasons for the participants of society to find all of it loathesome. Further, the practical needs of any society and any organization may and often do run counter to the pretenses of a philosophical state, and so the ruling ideas, laws, customs, and practices of a society develop in ways not intended by any rational manipulator or grand conspiracy. The rise of grander conspiracies requires many more technical innovations than the mere conception of this philosophical political theory or the tools available to the classical era states. The basic characteristics of this philosophical idea of the state, though, are very resilient to a change that would challenge the most core assumptions that drive them. The philosophers and proprietors may disagree, both between the two groups and within each group, but there are some political principles they know they can never give up. Among them is a simple rule that the common people must never, ever be allowed to win, and if the commoners by some chance do win, the philosophical idea must quickly reassert its fundamental structure such that it can continue to perpetuate and the cycle can continue. Another is that wealth landing in the hands of little people is generally a thing to be avoided, unless this wealth in their hands can be channeled to some long-term benefit of those whose view of society is managerial or conspiratorial against the commoners. Many such gems of political wisdom assert themselves for no particular reason other than a pigheadedness, backed by a reasoning that those who assert them have no reason to stop, and that they will do it because they can.

<b>Untouchability</b> - The existence of a despised group, or some despised characteristics, has been a persistent feature of human society for as long as anyone can recall. The final disciplinary function in an economic sense is simple - that some are to suffer, either temporarily in response to a transgression, or permanently as a status assigned to them that must be reinforced. Here, the concern is not an act of aggression, a shunning from exchange, or the imposition of an idea that is important. Nor does any productive quality from the world undo the core condition, which is that suffering is seen as necessary in some way. This is often written off as a personal condition of no social import, and the suffering is the problem of the individual. But in any society, the economic behavior takes into account this suffering. The use of violent force can be deployed not towards simple elimination of a threat, but towards inducing suffering. The proliferation of addictive drugs or some other material vice can consciously be directed to produce suffering. Exchanges may be manipulated with a conceit that some despised person or group is made to suffer, and this suffering is not merely by denial of the product of society but a moral outrage that is reinforced in every exchange that is made. It is not a surprise that many ideological regimes and philosophies concern themselves with suffering. Outwardly, many religions speak of offering a relief from suffering, or an understanding of suffering. Within religions, in some of the darker and more overtly predatory religions, or within a rational philosophical framework, the infliction of suffering does not become merely a condition in the material world, but a thing to be commanded intellectually and with full intent of how this suffering is intended to transform someone or their behavior. The assignment of shame possesses a quality that is unmistakable to nearly all social participants. It is not a simple mirror reflection of honorability or positive esteem. More often than not, honor and high esteem are defined specifically by the lack of anything shameful, rather than a quality that is considered honorable for its own sake. Shame and suffering are everywhere, but honor and the higher pleasures are scarce. The ideology which is conscious of suffering can and does seek to insist that normal people should be ashamed that they lack this honor and virtue. The more sadistic create an elaborate game in which the normal people, lacking this virtue, ask what is expected of them, and those who get to lord over the honor taunt and laugh at the stupid, expecting the outsider to play a game to figure out the great joke. In this situation, the ugly truth is that there is nothing to the supposed honor of the favored classes, and that this imposition of rejection and suffering is very intentional for some reason or another. Perhaps it is intended for some elite to get on a moral high horse, in an effort to adjust the behavior of those outside of the honorable sectors, knowing that the underclass will never have the free ride that the privileged attained by inheritance or cunning. Other times, the grand joke and the masquerade is carried out for nothing more than a demonstration that it can be done, or some thrill it gives the dominant over the outcast. Other times, the rejection and scorn is sold as something that is intended to be constructive.

This is the credo of every bully, and the hypocrisy of the bully is plain as day when conditions place the bully in a similar spot. But, perhaps, there are those who are cognizant of the need to inflict suffering to build some moral education. This moral education is played with most of all by the predatory ethos. On one hand, the predatory element loves to get on a moral high horse and proclaim their open hypocrisy is in fact the highest morality, and the ideal of the predatory element in this regard is to advance an idea that suffering initiated by the predatory element is wholly the fault of their targets. On the other, a sinister believer in the predatory ethos will promote indulgence and sloth in the lower class, knowing that it will perpetuate a cycle of victimhood. Every instinct of fear is deliberately heightened to teach the underclass learned helplessness, so that the underclass is habituated to a role of inferiority. It may be imagined that few societies are so extreme as to create absolute suffering or the absolute thrill of the predatory ethos, and there have been historically limits to how far this process could be carried out. To some extent, though, it has always existed. The role of those whose life is consigned to suffering is typically excised in philosophical treatments of society, except as an example to be avoided. It is this that makes the role of the untouchable, the one who suffers, economically relevant. A hated underclass, or certain hated behaviors, will set an example to all participants in society, so that transgressors of the law - and very often, an unwritten law operating in parallel - know just what happens if they are caught. The Spartans would play a great game in which prospective soldiers were instructed to kill a slave without being detected. Only those who successfully performed the task would be true Spartans, but if caught due to incompetence, the prospective soldier would be harshly punished. This punishment, however harsh, would never be as severe as the daily life of a helot, who was despised vigorously. No free man could be hated as much as a slave, and the slaves would out of necessity hate their masters and seek an even greater retribution should the opportunity arise. Such examples are omnipresent, and so, the status of untouchability functions as a large body of unwritten laws concerning things large and small. The need of this function may be questioned by a few timid souls, who ask if this is actually an effective moral education compared to alternatives that do not require such an elaborate deception. No human society has made any significant attempt to ameliorate this, or see it as any problem at all. The hated, in the view of the favored, deserve their suffering, however they wish to justify it and however much they might try to claim that they themselves are above such cruelty. As much as possible, religions teach a familiar trope where the living world can only be suffering, and that all relief from the suffering is either in the afterlife or a temporary reprieve. In some sense, this may be demonstrable by an understanding of human psychology as something originated in fear and a response of nerves we could call pain. The vast suffering, particularly that suffering which only exists because of the conceits of a bully, has no reason to exist and serves no true moralizing purpose. Those of a sadistic, predatory ethos always hold a belief in their hearts that if the world can be proven so horrible and irredeemable, that the people of the world can be bent infinitely to the will of the strong, and will never let go of that belief. Such beliefs infect every society, no matter how many times they prove to be demonstrable failures. The hope of the predatory, as they accumulate greater knowledge, is to find some way to ensure that their regimes are permanent, by smothering any voice or inclination that would tell them no. This is a matter that must be investigated further as my writing continues, and it is this precise problem that has brought me to write the present text and all the books in this series.

The seven functions mentioned above do not, in of themselves, constitute distinct classes in the actual division of labor. They have remarkably little to do with the actual legal division of society into social classes, despite a pretense that usually maintains certain functions are reserved for certain legal classes. We may imagine, indeed, a society full of many classes, for each profession and each guild around which the class organizes. We may imagine a society with many competing institutions, like a federation of competing cities or a league of competing sports teams. We can speak of socioeconomic classes as groups which possess some shared interest. For example, we call the landlords those proprietors with a stake in deeds of land, whether the landlord commands a large estate, a lucrative piece of land in a large city of sacred importance, or owns nothing more than a humble dwelling that they may rent to a tenant. The small holder who only owns their own piece of land to hold their home has a shared interest in a legal structure which protects deeds of land and property, even when the overall arrangement of landed property works against him and the other landlords are seeking to squeeze out all the small holders. We can see a class of lawyers whose interest is in being able to provide those legal services, due to specialized knowledge of the law and the contacts a lawyer possesses that allow him to work in the courtroom. Since representing yourself in court is a really bad idea even for the best lawyer, such a profession would exist even if everyone knew the law. Out of some basic functions a great many specializations appear, which each have areas in society and the world that are interests. A full catalogue of them is not necessary.

A crude schema is to present a grand narrative that speaks of the social class struggle as a foundational essence, and the roles assigned to a philosophical state become total. The presumptions of a philosopher are believed as an article of faith to be true in all cases. In the earlier example, the philosophers and men of science truly are the wise, the warriors and proprietors perform their familiar functions and are at their core just that, and the workers are producers who are by themselves irrelevant unless they are activated by an elite wisdom only accessible by pedagogy, or by some violence that is necessarily the province of those who hold it. In this view, a view of social class arises where social class is reduced entirely to economic categories, and this constitutes the whole of possible formations in a struggle enveloping the world. This bastardization of Marx's theory of class struggle has held considerable currency because it is attractive to the conceits of many actors in society, and it is not merely a doctrine of those who rule or those who own. There are those workers and certain of the lumpenproletariat who will, for very selfish and pigheaded reasons, latch on to such a narrative because it is an expedient narrative. Without a great awareness of history, and looking at ideologies that are presented often in literature and mass media, it is easy to be sucked into this view of a society as something total and inescapable. This totalizing tendency, which I shall call "total society", is intrinsic to the formulation of the capitalist, free trade idea itself, and as a result it was picked up by many a socialist who accepted implicitly its assumptions. It would continue to be adopted by socialists who departed from the free trade thinking, but who saw this totalizing view as expedient for their own program and their own interest in the real struggle between peoples and institutions. The totalizing view would be explicitly the position of the fascists, whose proclamation was that there would be nothing outside the state, nothing against the state, and everything for the state, with that state claimed entirely by private interests. Superficially, this appears as the inevitable endpoint of that tendency within capitalism, which made political economy a moral concern of the whole society. What this actually entailed was something quite different from the presumption of capitalism being concerned with a productive economy or the wise management thereof. It was a tendency built into the very idea of a republic and the philosophical state, and it was similarly true of places where a philosophical interpretation of the state arose but republican forms were rejected. The claims of fascism are the claims that have, for the past century, remained the dominant idea, and so total society became inescapable, and a struggle of economic classes was stripped from its origins. Now, the struggle of economic classes was transformed into a cosmic struggle between deities, from which there could never be escape. The open claim of fascism was that it was intended to resolve once and for all the question of class struggle, proclaiming the victory of free enterprise against the communist and democratic ideas, and that this was the only natural answer and the best answer. Class collaboration was the keyword the fascists used to advertise this stance - the wise "good capitalists" would rule outright, the warriors would be fanatically loyal and the greatest soldiers ever, and the workers would all know their place and glorify the warriors, in hopes that they could kill for the Furher forever more. In short, the fascists wanted to make real a parodic version of Plato's Republic, which itself was a parodic form of something that would appear functional and contained in its basic constitution severe defects. The truth of fascism is that its class collaboration was the exact opposite. Every class, every faction, every interest group, and every tribe of humanity would be in perpetual conflict, and the cartel at the top of the fascist state would be referee and spectator, manipulating this intercine conflict and gambling on the outcome of the great gladiatorial match. Distinctions between people which were once petty or irrelevant would explode into the greatest conflicts, such that a slight distinction of rank would be the difference between life and death.

THE DIVISION OF LABOR INTO CLASSES OF PEOPLE

In primitive society, the division of labor is primarily by sex, and these roles did not develop uniformly across all cultures. Varying attitudes towards the relations of women and men, the functions they performed, the rites and rituals particular to each sex, and situations where the two sexes would meet or cross into the others' typical domains, can be found throghout history. The origins of this differentiation are things that can be explained by reverse-engineering the society as it is observed and noting some basic behaviors of the people. Men and women are not merely divided by their utility in labor, but in many ways exist as two different tribes in the same grouping. The men tend to socialize with other men, and the women with other women, and conspire with each other more than conspire between the opposite sexes. This does not create an automatic solidarity for each sex, as each member of a sex is in competition with each other for mates, resources, living space, freedom, security, dignity, and all the things a person would value. Expectations of predation from the opposite sex form as soon as humans can figure out what symbolic concepts are, and a great game is played in society around all things sexual. This is certainly not the sole origin of social division, and sex in the end does not have the significance it is granted in today's eugenic society. Nowhere is the sexual game what it appears to be, as between people there grows a struggle to deny the opposite sex partner what they wanted in the first place. This struggle can be resolved rather easily, but from the start there are incentives of both parties to deny the other, and when politics in groups and competition within a sex is considered, there are games to deny failed members of a sex knowledge of the great game. There was never a world in which men and women had a preferred natural relation with each other that could occur without controversy. It had been and remains a simple fact that a significant portion of the male population is destined to fail at the game, and a significant portion of the female population will die in childbirth. Attempts to ameliorate this by generosity or seeming attempts at it do not change the fundamental situation. Simply put, men are expected to chase and place themselves at risk, and women don't really want them. In societies where women more overtly selective, they simply refuse men they do not want, as the male reproductive role is superfluous so long as a small number of men are chosen. Men have no such luxury with women. Since reproduction is a necessary material condition for the perpetuation of mankind and thus society and political life, this creates a division that would become politically significant even at this early stage. It is not the sole distinction, and efforts to make sex into more than what it is are ideological, but the sex division is marked in early humanity. The division of labor tasks by sex is less about individual aptitude than the political realities, such as it is, of the sexes. It makes no sense for women to risk themselves in combat, and primitive societies expect every man to be a potential warrior. This would not prohibit the women from learning to fight, and they would have to do so out of necessity, but it makes far more sense for men to meet potentially hostile parties. They are more expendable, and this expendability is entrained into them from the earliest age and the earliest social existence. In practice, males would have to engage in the desultory work of gathering and the sundry tasks of economic life, as this constituted most of the useful activity. Necessity in any case would press a member of either sex to do what was needed to meet core needs, for themselves and their associates.

As always, the needs of a human are sustenance and security, and everything afterwards is free time and resources. The former is, after some searching, not difficult to attain. The world provides plentiful wild food and game to the nascent human population, and humans in cooperative enterprises can spare labor to scout the land and learn the ways of everything on the land. Humans in solitude, or who face distrust, have a greater challenge with security. Smaller groups of men have an advantage in mobility and require less for sustenance, but will also need to invest greater time to obtain them individually, as sundry tasks of the group that are only required once would be a greater expense for the smaller group. For example, building the fire would be a task for one man and feed the demand of a whole group, and in a large enough group, the man who is not really good at hunting or who is assigned the more desultory tasks could be handed this or another such task. The solitary man has many disadvantages but a few really helpful advantages. As a lone man, questions of trust, diplomacy, honor, shame, and so on are far less pronounced. The solitary man enjoys the truest freedom of all, unshackled by the oppression of his fellow man, to say nothing of woman. A lone man does not sense the same fear that would be inherent to any grouping of mankind, so long as other men remain out of sight and he is comfortable in his sense that no threats are coming to kill him. This solitude frees the lone man from obligations that someone in society, even a union of two, would constantly fear. The consequence of this, unfortunately, is that the first sign of another human is potential danger, especially for the savage man who is disconnected from language or wider knowledge of the land and its people. Loneliness may be bothersome to those who have been acclimated to social life and trust, but the company of those who want to kill you in your sleep is a far lonelier experience than a man in the woods with no predatory humans in range.

The drive for competition is not fixed and does not serve a singular aim at all. There are desires in people that are contradictory. We press against the world to find sustenance, but stability involves not pressing against the world and seeking harmony with it. The most basic impulses of life do not move in one direction, or any particular direction. There is in life an overall tendency of the life form, its interactions with surroundings and behaviors which are established. All of these behaviors can be broken down into mechanistic steps if we so choose, but only in concert do they produce a viable life form with the behaviors expected. Reducing the impulses of a man to some singular seed, such as the sexual drive, is defeating the point of the life form. Humans, like any animal, are accumulations of organs which must work in concert. Humans, being animals, interact with the world in ways that non-animals will not, and the mechanisms of the brain must act with some judgement. Humans in particular possess symbolic language to communicate these ideas and establish understanding, and this is something that humans do in ways that are instinctive. We possess an instinct to communicate with each other in most cases, even when we are alien to each other and see the other as a threat. The possibility of dialogue is attractive because the outcome of total alienation between us is not hard to see, and it is not realistic to imagine a world where every human stays in their place. Life to be life will travel where it must to find sustenance and security, and so free range of movement is common in every animal. Territoriality is not fixed in nature but an adaptation that serves our aims. Territory can be established by animals either because it is expedient or because it is an assertion of their connection to the world, by claiming some space in it for themselves. To have no space of your own is to be pressed against by everything and everyone.

The division of humanity into specializations does not proceed inexorably by some force, but rather the force compels invention and developments that were not at first expected. They may have been predicted or anticipated, but until the plan is implemented, it is never certain what the result will be or what if anything will go wrong. We necessarily generalize certain behaviors as a baseline and regard them as irrelevant when we build an abstract model of how events proceeded. The daily life of a man or woman in primitive society should be considered before speaking of new developments as if they just so happened, or that a vague necessity dictated some development. Warmaking technology advanced not solely because a drive to produce better weapons and tactics demanded certain results, but because the needs of man in his environment compelled someone to think how war or any other practice could be different. The environment, being much larger than an individual man, has a considerable effect on what is possible, but after all of the limitation of an individual and his thought processes are considered, there comes a time and place where something new must emerge. Attempts to stimulate this creativity by some general rule can only move so far, because humans being aware of this game will adapt to others using a strategy of general intelligence and development. The struggle is not a given, because it is entirely possible for two or more people to engage in dialogue and see the futility of conflict. They could see the differences of each other not as an alien to be overcome or absorbed, but as something valued and something that should be preserved by mutual agreement. Two people may meet, share information or experience, then walk away with mutual benefit, so far as they desired to produce some quality that was desirable to both. There is only so much substance in the world between the two men, but what is to be done with that substance has a wide range of potentials. This potential is not infinite in any given instant, for all people can only proceed as their true nature will allow, but it is only after the fact that we regard some deterministic outcome as inevitable. Humans, having language and understanding of the past that allows them to consider events far behind them and events that they did not observe themselves, establish a very elaborate model of how events in the world proceed, which is the aforementioned "world-system" mentioned in earlier chapters. It is very easy to expect that events in the near future will proceed much as they have in the past, and that changes in the way events proceed do not happen at a large scale for no reason whatsoever. Every grand change in the conditions of humanity, or a given society, springs from seeds that are not always perceptible or comprehensible. For much of human history, the mechanisms of the brain and thought were only understood through political language, and science could say little about how humans think that was recorded and systematized to the satisfaction of those desiring a detailed answer. We could determine many things from common sense and investigations, and it would be nearly impossible for a human to never think about how they think.

Myself, writing this work, should know by now that I should not take this self-criticism and self-investigation for granted. I made the mistake throughout life of assuming that others possessed a degree of conscientiousness that they never did, and underestimated how much human beings not only don't think the shit that comes out of their mouth, but go out of their way not to think, and always seek to absolve themselves of any obligation to respond to their actions. The utilitarian philosophy of today plays with this to proclaim boldly that responsibility must fall on those who had the least choice in their actions, while the materially guilty parties are sacrosanct. Why this is so is one of the chief reasons for writing this book, and the answer to that question explains much of how human history played out, so it is not merely a question for my life or the modern world. Of course, events in the world are not determined primarily by the mind and will of a human being. All of the prestige attached to the mind is a pittance compared to the inertia of world events, and those who stake a claim to the world have always desired to claim that the world is both total and imposing on the individual, and that the individual must reject the world and pretend it doesn't exist at all. The old metaphor of the chicken and the egg is rehashed incessantly, but the true answer is trivial if a child were to think for him or herself about the meaning of the question. The point of repeating the metaphor is not to share some grand truth, but to insist on a political logic that denies trivial observations a child may make if he or she shows a shred of curiosity. At some point, there were neither chickens nor eggs, so you are really asking where this dialectic originated. To really answer that question with material honesty is not actually permitted, not even for the ruling thought. If that were the case, many of the questions posed in thought experiments would be rejected as irrelevant, and we would proceed with our investigation in a very different way than the way we have been trained to think. Nothing about the way we think in modernity, or since classical times, is natural or in service to the truth or any expedient goal. Humans possess an instinctive ability to recognize patterns and sort out bullshit from myths in the dialectic. The dialectician seeks to impress the gullible with persuasive bullshit, and the analytical impulse in humans will dissect the bullshit.

I repeat this because in the question of what separated species or races from each other, a political logic was injected which is at odds not only with natural events, but how the formation of social classes and politicial distinction would have proceeded. This does not require even a thorough study of naturalism to prove. It is borne out in descriptions of history. Only after the fact are narratives created to obscure what began as very practical questions between people, so that we do not ask the critical question of which mechanism moved to produce which result. The result must be taken in uncritically, and the process only understood as a metaphor which can be played with by the cunning dialectician. There is in this a truth that is uncomfortable for those who believe history can be a fully scientific matter - "shit happens". There are events in the world which don't occur for any world-historical mission. The major trends can be recognized almost immediately after they are set in motion, and some may anticipate wider events and only sense through a vague feeling the finer details leading to an outcome. The grand narrative for many of these changes is the condition of war and the general fear that humans have known from the start. If it is a question of the general fear, then those things to be feared are considered when considering how distinctions in a society are drawn and enforced. Fear and suffering are not the sole decider of these divisions, as every action taken will construct some result, and much of what people do is build and use things. Destruction as a way of life has a very limited utility, and choosing to view world history as a destructive struggle forgets what, if anything, the humans were struggling for. Struggle for the sake of life itself, or for some simple material thing that happens to exist, does not make much more sense, but it will at least root the struggle in some incentive that is understandable and undeniable. The third category, the resources devoted to art and higher learning, can decide not only what resources are available for new lines of technological development, but provide the rationale humans believe and act upon that will guide their general actions. In short, humans diverge into social classes or institutions because at some point, certain humans wanted this. There was not a particularly sound reason for the segregation of social roles by sex beyond the obvious biological conditions, but there would be many incentives for a culture to favor brotherhood or sisterhood, the sexual game, and all that arose from it. It is the same with the technology and practice of war, the development of spiritual authority or religion in its primitive state, the development of practices which required specialized knowledge like medicine, and so on. Specialized roles from the mundane may start as things humans did while their social roles were defined simply as a man, woman, tribe member, or their primary designation as hunters, gatherers, or the less useful members of the group. Every area that can become a field of expertise can become a domain in which a person can establish themselves and their use to a cooperative group. The greater the relevance of that expertise to the problem of survival and flourishing, the greater the influence of someone entering that practice. The practice of spirituality begins as little more than systems a savage might have worked out to organize their daily tasks and contemplate a world that is much bigger than them and their immediate senses, but it does not take long to see the potential of spiritual authority to rule over other people and the rest of the world. It is a spiritual commitment that binds the most important social distinctions, rather than any material necessity or practicality of having those distinctions. None of the social distinctions that secured the priesthood or the warriors were a necessity of technological development, the creation of a surplus, or the basic psychological state of mankind.

There would be in primitive society every reason to resist the encroachment of specialized warriors or priests into the spiritual life of a singular human. Humans were not born with a genetic predisposition to follow priests or warriors, specializations which did not exist until humans had a language to develop them into their recognizable forms. All observation of primitive societies that persisted into modernity, and that entered the historical record when such observations could be recorded, suggested a fierce resistance to the encroachment of civilization and formal education. The creation of a warrior aristocracy was not even a foregone conclusion. War chiefs and the value of leadership were very easy developments, but these chiefs would be invested with authority by men who saw the virtue of the leader, or a virtuous or cunning chief could through gravitas convince men to follow him when the instincts of men in primitive society disliked following any leader. The creation of a formal hierarchy or warrior aristocracy would require time, technological advance, and a sense instilled by education that such a thing was natural or could be perpetuated by continuous impression. Warrior aristocracies or any stable body of warriors that would constitute states can only persist because they impress upon the followers of the tribe that the aristocracy as a group possesses virtue and acts on it repeatedly. Only after the fact are the spiritual or intellectual excuses for this state of affairs made, though the true spiritual mission of the warriors precedes it. This meant that the earliest warrior aristocracies, or what amounted to such, established themselves by intimidation and setting the precedent in society that a few men could push around anyone else. Leadership after this development would be wrested by the strong from the weak, rather than some reasoned debate or simple impression that some man or group of men were strong and must be followed. This is what is observed in many a steppe polity, which did not have elaborate ceremonies of monarchy that civilized states indulged in and mystified. A man could lead because he was strong, and the moment he lost that strength and ability to impose it, his rule and what he had built was difficult to maintain. It happened to Atilla and it happened eventually to the successors of Genghis Khan. These men, like many capable politicians, knew that rule by brute force alone was not a desirable leadership quality, and there is always politics between the men who have any say whatsoever in settling the matter of who is strong. It was still the case that these leaders were not impressed by the idea that weak men had any voice, and if a woman wanted a say in the matter, she would have to engage with the matter as if it were a contest of strength rather than a question of legality or economic imperatives. The economic imperatives were very simple - the basic economy was pastoral, and the steppe empires at this time understood that their best business model was to knock around their civilized neighbors and extract tribute from already established economic engines. This is not a universal rule, nor the result of the steppe peoples possessing some inborn inclination for this strategy. It was a perfectly reasonable response to their conditions, and reasonable to a man like Atilla who would form his empire as an upstart and quickly see the need for a court, diplomacy, and things that would allow him to contest with civilized rivals on equal terms. Any suggestion that the division of society into these specializations just-so happened, or had a singular cause that provides a simplistic narrative, is inadequate. Without the ability to recognize the conditions they are in, no leader can be anything other than an animal led around by some clever schemer, and those who indulge in overly simplistic narratives imagine themselves cajoling powerful men at the smallest cost possible. It is only possible to begin this separation of professions when the first brigand meets the first priest, and the later practices of cults and lurid rituals begin when, as Voltaire famously wrote, the first scoundrel among this alliance met the first fool.

The trick, as you may have figured out, is that the fool did not get to choose his participation in the formative ritual of the cult of power. That would be silly. Fools would be made, and made in great numbers, to make the subordination of one group to another in close quarters a reality. Nature's provision of fools to the world, and thus the easily prepared game for a predatory society, were only available in such quantities and qualities as nature would provide. All things being equal, hereditary destiny only produced a number of natural fools, let alone made them easy to detect on sight with certainty. And so one of the ways this division could truly begin is the mother's hatred of the weak offspring and favor of the strong, and this was already an instinct built into her. The child, who cannot control who his mother is, may be damaged at the mother's will, and there is little to be done about it. The mother would develop a keen eye for weakness, and her sisterhood would share tips and tricks to find out which ones should be weeded out. The surviving adult men of society, being the beneficiaries of the mother's selection and the selection of women in choosing mates, have every incentive to agree with this primitive eugenics and ensure that fools are exterminated and tortured. To do otherwise requires a justification that the believers in such a creed will vociferously deny. To accept the urge to smash to pieces a fool whose existence offends humanity, or to make the fool suffer purely to set an example, is accepted without serious question. Those who would take the side of a known fool would associate themselves with weakness, and this is not a very effective strategy if anyone is familiar with the most basic politics. The argument to preserve a fool or suspected fool is always going to be strained, but it is often made out of necessity. If the first sign of foolishness was met with total and absolute damnation forever, permitting all of mankind to attack mercilessly the fool who is pointed out, it is easy to see the disintegration of society, and very easy for peers to look at each other and see if they can start weeding out the established and valid. Obvious fools, who become a liability to a group, have far less going for them. You can see every day in society the reproduction of the human race; that the human race was born out of vicious sacrifice of the weak, and those who culled the weak enjoyed doing it and will always enjoy doing it. It is never a hard decision or emotional for those who throw stones. The cull of the weak would be carried out with elaborate ceremonies and celebrations to tell the crowd that what they were doing was good and holy and the greatest justice, because in their hearts and according to everything they were raised to believe and act on, it was the most essential definition of justice. After the fact, halfhearted attempts are made to humanize the image of dead fools, who are reduced entirely to victims and props to tell a moral story that benefits the victors. The truth of the sacrifice may be painful to those who believe they lost someone who was human, but the social values and practices of society reinforce every day that the sacrifice is not just necessary but good in of itself, and those who protest too loudly are suspect of sin. At no point can the fool be afforded moral equality. Even moral consideration at all would be a recent invention, always with the proviso that an identified fool was always a fool. The fool should be grateful he is allowed to exist at all, and if kept alive, fools are taught that their slavery is a blessing and the humiliations of their life are good for them. It doesn't matter if the fool believes it, so much as the precedent is made that the fool has no legitimate complaint, and the presumption is made that all feelings and thoughts of a fool are automatically negated. There can be no other way for this mechanism to be effective. Halting the mechanism would impede the segregation of social groups into distinct classes or grades, and would discourage a division of labor that is either desired by some or useful for some aim. Even in mundane ways, minute distinctions are made into grand ones, by claiming foolishness of some group in a particular regard. This does not even need to be a hierarchical distinction. Two groups may see each other mutually as fools to be held in contempt, and both groups of fools can be policed by either a third group lording over them, or by elements within the two groups who take advantage of the conditions the ritual humiliation and terror against the fool provides for them.

It is this crucial step of isolating the fool that dominates the division of human labor. Only by the presumption that some knowledge or ability is lacking can human labor be divided into distinct classes and justified. It is of course possible to assert classes exist on some other basis, but it is in the end a lack of key knowledge which makes the division real in the minds of the participants. If someone lacks property, it is because they lack a legal deed or the intellectual will to possess what they hold, all of which is adjudicated by people in some way or another. Mere possession only becomes property if there is no other person who can, by some conniving or brute force, take that possession away. The inborn qualities of humans and the machines in their possession are, for the purposes of modeling economic behavior, inborn wisdom or knowledge or information that is relevant to adjudicating that the distinction exists. There may be a material cause for the foolishness, but in the models we use to judge who is strong and who is weak, and who is smart or stupid, in the end it is the knowledge of the participants position in society that decides where someone will be. No slavery can exist if there is not a single man in the society that recognizes what slavery is and acts upon it. It is not so much a question of the will to impose slavery as an overt condition, but a question of whether someone realizes they can coerce labor out of another person through fighting, deception, or a clearly unequal trade that the fool is obliged to accept or accepts without suitable knowledge of what he is entering. It is further a question of whether formal systems of thought can perpetuate to convince someone that a subordinate status is desirable. All of the effective slave systems will be formal institutions, or widely understood by those who held the slave system against the enslaved fools. No slavery is ever passively enforced, nor are masters ignorant of what is needed to benefit from slavery. A master who is truly ignorant of what he holds over a slave is no master at all, and his slaves will if they retain some wits realize that no one is really enforcing this condition.

This step may appear inconsequential compared to the availability of resources, the built machines and created adult people with life experiences, and all material conditions social actors interface with. It appears inconsequential compared to political realities like property rights, the establishment of institutions, and the prestige of powerful men and families. Historical narratives tend to either concern themselves with broad material conditions that are identifiable and can be traced throughout history and with archaeology, or they concern great men and their actions and the stories of institutions, religions, and so on. It is, after deconstructing what human society is and what a human actually does, the only possible conclusion that these struggles are in reality a battle over information, secrets, claims, pretenses, and the knowledge of fighting and deception that realizes them. In this arrangement, the laborer working simply to produce some good, whether material or intellectual, is a fool whose product is exploited entirely by the wise and the martial. Wise men, as a rule, do not work and do not pay taxes. They would set up society in a way that allows them to reap the full benefit of all subordinated classes, if they can impose it. The warriors and proprietors hold the laborers and thinkers alike in total contempt, for violence is their spiritual and temporal authority after all pretenses are abandoned.

The violence of the warrior and proprietor is, in the end, supported not by an incomprehnsible drive to fight, but by control of information which is necessary for war to proceed in any way like we would imagine. A war with every single card laid out on the table, with all psychological states known and measured, is either a war to the death, a war with an outcome both sides could determine if they both operate on a mutually intelligible theory and know this about each other, or it is no war at all. If all parties involved, including the fools, knew with perfect clarity what war entailed, no one would dare fight it, and would likely agree to the outcome beforehand, unless they were possessed with a drive to inflict suffering and death knowing that the outcome was predetermined. The loser in such a fight, knowing they would lose, would just be throwing away lives and hopes for the stubborn glory of it. The winner knows that whatever he loses, he really sacrifices nothing that can't be replaced, and if the winner arranged his cards right, those who lead and plan the war will suffer no loss at all. This is something leaders of states have already arranged with each other and their societies - the true rulers are secured against any of the consequences of war, which means that in their purest state, the ruling class will always see war as a way to push a win button, and those who rule have always sold wars on the promise that war will be cheap, quick, and a fait accompli to win if a set strategy is followed. The warriors are told that war will secure the material spoils, which are doled out to the generals and largest proprietors and become a claim they can utilize as they please to purchase the loyalty of subordinates. War is sold further as a ritual for its own sake, which conditions the whole of society to accept the necessity of the warrior. War is sold as an opportunity for glory and social advancement, and out of necessity a certain level of class mobility must be accepted. New members must be drawn from common stock to populate warriors and the priests in the first place, and weak members of the ruling classes must be removed and replaced. The vitality of any of these interests depends on a productive base, and so the cult of war tolerates workers and slaves to the extent that they are necessary for the machine, or can be seen as providing some advantage that ends in military conflict. The wise who concern themselves with philosophy and art see the producers as cattle, not just for their utility as laborers but as a resource to feed the soul of the philosopher.

A further look at the warrior and priestly functions must be dealt with in later chapters. For now, we could imagine the entire political economy and its objectives as a giant clockwork of immense complexity. The finest details of this model are filled in by historical evidence and supposition. All of the intellectual and martial functions at their root are laborious functions just as any other work would be, and they all stem from an impulse in life to grow and do things on its own power. This impulse is directed by feedback from the disciplinary functions of human society, and those events outside of human society which have an effect. Human society will, for many reasons, be the chief concern of political thinkers, as the effects of natural disasters are predictable and never continuously pressing in the way the presence of the state and social actors would be. Occasionally, pieces of this clockwork are designed to produce entirely new pieces that were not part of the previous scheme. If we considered this a computer program, it would be a computer program which wrote its own code by some intelligent mechanism, and this concept is well understood by computer programmers. The best way to see the division of one group from another is to see them in the end as algorithmic steps carried out. In practice the way we communicate these ideas to each other is through stories, myths, and metaphors which allow interpretation, because all of the things to be calculated are too much for us to isolate in perfect detail, and this computer program is abstracting a real world problem by referring to its most relevant ideas and values. Effective analysis would be careful to not ignore the real world and errors in the model, and would not seek to rewrite history after the fact and impose the present model on people who thought very differently. The historical actors can only act in the conditions of their time, with knowledge of their past conditions and expectations of future conditions. Any historical actor is considering past, present, and future when making decisions. The imagined reduction of the model to human animals who only think of the instructions carried out at the moment is wrong. This is not because the saying "he who controls the present controls the past" is reductionist or somehow incomplete, but because any meaningful decision humans make is informed by their past and visions of a future, and this is what algorithms in the present are carrying out when they concern the consequences of human thought. The model of some non-thinking object's behavior is something where we isolate its past, present, and future state, in order to describe transformation and change usefully. For humans, all of our competition is seen as a grand game, while at the same time we separate the "real world" from our games of play that we know to be imaginary. To those who aspire to rule, the suffering and torture of their subordinates is a game and a joke, and this is borne out by the habit of bullying which became normal as humans formed larger groups and consistent language. The idea that the fool has emotions and thoughts of their own that the valid would engage with is anathema to everything the dominant group believes, and even in conditions of dire necessity, the valid cannot countenance the prospect of facing the fool's torture.

I will tell you how this works from the perspective of the fool. It is easy for many to say that you should go on playing the fool, or accept that this is what the world is. I have been told this many times, by people with varying attitudes towards me. Some wanted to laugh as they knew I'd suffer, and some wanted me to just shut up and go away. There were those who out of some necessity believed accepting this would be necessary to move on. I can tell you that the humiliations of my life are not things that can ever change, and the grim advice I would get at the end is that this is truly how it is. The way you were treated in childhood, and the selection made when society rejected a child upon contact with wider society, is effectively permanent, and all the individual will of the fool will not change this one iota. There can be no real redemption. Perhaps a fool can keep their head down and manage to "fake it until you make it", but they will always face the threat of being exposed as a fool. There is no secret more shameful than the act and being of a fool. Someone can be a murderer, a pervert, a saint, a liar, and do things we consider horrible for social stability, but the crime of being a fool stands alone. It has long been a practice of humanity to establish some age where a child makes contact with society, and for us, that experience is primary school and preschool. It is at this stage where today's technocratic state evaluates the eugenic qualities of each offspring, and if you know these institutions, they have a quota and incentive to mark so many children as defective, and look jealously for any sign of defect. Once started, the institution must, to save itself, enforce this judgement forevermore, and it will never back down. If a fool is more successful than some other fool, he will still be a fool. Even if you win the special olympics, you're still retarded. That rule is absolute, and the idea of redemption or equality in this regard would violate the entire purpose of educational institutions. This is not a particular problem of eugenic society, but it is something humans have done almost instinctively. This is the true act in Darwin's theory of natural selection that creates the divergence of species in nature. It is not a passive result of environmental conditions, but competition for resources in a niche, that turns close relatives against each other. If we imagined a passive where some mass of a given life-form were a collective living in some space with a fixed amount of resources, the strategy of selection would not proceed in the way Darwin described, where Malthus is imported into the kingdom of nature.[1]

Those who imagine the origin of social distinction resembling this model would know the full implication of science is to control this process at all of its levels, and so those with a mind to engineer society would have formed a whole scheme to sort the people. None of this process was accidental or limited to a small purview that could isolated from the rest of society. If someone is suggesting any social relation, they fit that in a whole framework of what they see the world as, and only operate within that framework. Changing the framework of what society is in the mind is a different process from the mechanism that sorts people into this or that class, and if there were some organic division of humanity into groups that occured within a local struggle or interaction, there would be a third party seeking to command the two groups and take from the struggle what they would like. The third party imagines itself the master of the situation, and would only reveal themselves to the other two parties to the extent that they desire. The other two groups are aware of this third party and its influence on both of them, and if not blinded by the struggle between them, both groups would see the risk of mutual destruction or the third party gaining benefit while the struggling groups gain nothing. This mechanism passes down to the lowest level of division between social agents, until there are those social agents which are isolated, alone, politically and philosophically worthless to the structure. Those at the very bottom become the fools, regardless of any native talents or demerits of the fool. Nothing about this process is meritocratic. It is not the strongest or most virtuous who survive, but those who possess traits most suitable for survival and reproduction in their environment. If every life form is perceived as a social agent in this economic struggle in nature, there is always the third party which stands to benefit. Even if the third party is not aware of this, or only has a faint sense that this is the case, the third party who is not embroiled in eternal struggle gains the most advantage. This can be the case even if the third party is far inferior in standing to the contending parties, and the strategy of the third party is to keep his head down while the other two are busy attacking each other. In that scenario, though, the contending two are aware of a weaker third party, and those at high levels of competition understand that their competition can never allow an opening for opportunisitc weaklings to establish a stronger position. The thing the two parties are contending, more than anything else, are the subordinated groups who are not directly involved in the struggle. Involving the weaker third parties in a political struggle of elites or a middle classes is never desired, and only permitted so long as the third party is in an abject position from the outset. Even the promises given to the third party are so paper thin that they are scarcely believed, and workers and the desperate join the struggles of the dominant groups not out of any genuine cooperation with the rulers, but because the workers and desperate are employed or in a position where their survival depends on recognition of the dominant struggle. The worker would, given a choice, avoid this struggle for as long as possible and find whatever means available to live independently of it. The worker knows on some level that a middle or ruling class has no serious intent of allowing the worker to join them. At best, the worker or third party is allowed to join only on the condition that he abandons his prior affiliation and connections, and becomes as much as possible an exemplar of one of the contending groups, loyal to the ideology, ethos, and practices of the contending groups and turning viciously on the workers or subordinated group that was abandoned. This is the open strategy of both revolutionary and reactionary or conservative groups. The revolutionary groups tell tales of freedom, hopes, prosperity, progress, or something that sounds vaguely good, but is never explained with full knowledge of political history to the initiates. The conservative and reactionary groups revel in venality and all the vice of mankind, celebrating it. The Right may adopt the phraseology of revolutionary and democratic movements and can if necessary adopt practices of mass politics, or practices that imitate mass politics but are consciously contrary to the idea of mass politics. The promises of revolutionary groups do not need to be entirely cynical, because revolutions and new governments can view the subordinated groups as a recruitment ground, on the provision that the recruited are to adopt an entirely alien view of the world and know what this really is. There is nothing preventing a revolutionary group from implementing things that would improve the whole lot of mankind, nor would a conservative necessarily need to maximize the venality inherent to their cause. There are those who emphasize the self-interest of social and political actors to an extreme, while denying to these people any coherent world-view that would allow them to challenge the dominant struggle and the intended results.

At the top, the struggle between social factions is hardly about life or death or survival. Those with the means to contest politics at high levels usually secured their survival, and the individuals in these groups will not destroy themselves for their cause because their true cause entails individual survival. Collective survival and survival of the movement requires people to continue the practice, and so any sacrifice or self-abasement can only be an option if the sacrificed do this act as a way to perpetuate their memory and spirit after death, or some sick masochistic impulse is taught to them by education which tells them self-abasement is somehow good or pleasureable or virtuous. The sacrifice of the useless is not so much a sacrifice, but a game of backstabbing and intrigue where someone has to be the fool, regardless of their virtues. Proud and capable men and women will be told they are as retarded as I am, or as retarded as whatever fool was isolated in childhood and made the exemplar of human failure. If sacrifice cannot be justified on moral, spiritual, or practical grounds, the only way to keep the sacrifice going is to emphasize the humiliation of the fool and teach that the backstabbing, intrigues, and humiliations are in of themselves the entire point of the struggle for life. If there is to be some objective other than worst of all worlds out of the struggle for life, it implies morality and ethics and spiritual growth which would drain resources from the ethos of struggle for struggle's sake, and the results of that would not be predictable or in line with an ethos that would be imposed on the world and the people in it. For those who struggle, the world is presented as fallen and beyond hope, as if by some force the struggle were compelled, and those who rule are totally in the right and never did anything to instigate it. These conclusions are implicit in the social behavior of humans from an early stage, and were active in the animal kingdom without any formulation of a theory or education. On some level, the behaviors of any animal are acting with these assumptions implied, if not understood and acted upon. No animal acts purely by instinct with flawless conditioned responses, and the instinct is never reducible to a command followed with an algorithmic response. A human with symbolic language would have developed a model of how the world works, which informs everything they do. Even if this model is not in mind during daily activities, the mind will fragment its behavior into what are effectively subroutines, and we will always consider how those subroutines fit into an overall scheme. We train ourselves to adopt different roles depending on the situation, and act differently with a wife than we would at work, which is different from special occasions like a party or religious ceremony. The games people play are the relevant economic behavior. What materially results, and the starting conditions on the board, are only conditions in which the game is played. It is entirely possible to participants in life to refuse to play any game laid out for them, and this possibility is something the rulers and participants in society are always aware of. It is possible for humans to decide the game is so loathsome that they will kill themselves rather than endure the company of these assholes.

It is not for some historian or scientist to decide the game that every participant is playing. Rational self-interest, the center of game theory, has to assume there is a singular overall game, and that all participants must engage in it. The reality is that the games humans play with each other are between individual agents, and only extend so far as they can be imposed. Most of the world is dead. Therefore, the objective of all participants, though it is never stated, is to somehow escape the game entirely, and play a game of their choice, in conditions where they obtain those things that they need and where they can develop as they wish. Most people cannot do this, and become habituated to playing a game that was imposed on them. To leave the game is to face a world with hostile threats who will not let you do this. No argument of kindness or decency will convince someone who insists you have to play, as anyone exposed to human society will determine. The only resolution to this, then, is to either imagine a world where all social actors and all potential threats resolve this game and live in harmony, or to wall yourself off from that which will threaten you, contenting yourself with a level of security based on your knowledge of the world. The typical outcome is somewhere between these two approaches, where people seek to get along but must hold their ground. In any game of limited information, which politics and society is, holding secrets and ascertaining useful knowledge and wisdom is always a concern, even for a primitive mind without any formal system to assist them.

Every class or division in society has some sort of institution of practice binding it. The aforementioned association of males and females, their marriages, families, offspring, and so on are documented in the most primitive of societies in great detail. The family is noted as an institution nearly everywhere, with elaborate words and systems to describe blood relations and marriage relations in that society. The taboo on incest is nearly universal, and what is meant by incest is understood by the tribe, which means different societies set a different boundrary for consanguinity. The professions available to early society already show differentiation in tasks, ability, social prestige, and in all professions, establishing authority overrides the listed tasks of a member. Simply put, the promotion of social class hierarchy has little to do with what someone does being essentially necessary, but the ability of some social class to make themselves politically indispensible. Warriors and priests are, from a productive view, utterly useless or malignant to society, offering little more than emotional support in the latter or a security service or mafia connection for the former. Historically, it is the warriors who asserted by force the formation of social classes, first enshrining themselves as strongmen and choosing their favorites. Those with political savvy but who weren't great fighters, or who were smart enough to see that the strong men formed a very useful shield, could become priests. A function of intelligence and intrigue can be found in the earliest societies, and politics is always a game of conspiracies. Simply knowing the art of gossip or a woman's betrayal of her lover are useful assets, and it has long been established that aristocracies create for themselves harems. Aristocracies, whether they of warriors or priests, love to encourage the sexual mating game and intercine struggle, and always sought to make a mockery of the lower classes' expectations in that regard. Flagrant disregard for the working class men, ritual humiliations of them, games in which the women ostenibly belonging to a lower class man would gladly cheat on them for a stronger man, social expectations of the warriors' and priests' right to demand this humiliations as a token of submission, obligations of patriarchy that were never really taken seriously and could be cancelled by the good old boys' network, the proliferation of prostitution and the flesh trade, are just the most obvious and visible games played. A practice of attacking young boys and girls to bring them into the game, to seed the intercine struggle and ensure that no one can trust a partner, and the promotion of venal men and women, are there to be seen. The practice of the imperial harem has very early origins, and the idea that rulers wouldn't do this is seen as some sort of joke. Different classes throw in the face of the subordinated every distinction, marking the freedom of those who rule to violate every decency and law that was presumed to exist. Religion gives all of these practices a veneer of spiritual legitimacy. Sometimes the priests half-heartedly promise to teach some moral values, but marriage as an institution could only survive as much as it did because of its practicality. The state and priesthood had little interest in defending the institution for the commoners, and marriage as an institution was historically the domain of the middle and upper classes, existing largely for inheritance purposes. It has long been expected that a man expecting loyalty from a woman is a fool, and a woman thinking she could avoid paying her tax to the great game was just hoping it would be true. The commoners themselves, when push comes to shove, have little interest in marriage or relationships beyond the most basic fact of reproduction, and only by spiritual nagging from elders is the concept of romantic love or things like it a going concern. Whatever love or friendship might have existed between man and woman is quickly replaced by social values and expectations, and it is a taboo to transgress them too openly. Homosexuality is promoted as an identity to tar noncompliant and weak men, who after sufficient rejection are given the alternative of unnatural relations as their only outlet. The practices of homosexuality among the men for their own sake do not conform to any of the social taboos, but are relations of desperation, often from men looking for an answer in all of the wrong places. Homosexuality corresponds to a number of maladies and addictions, almost always grossly perverse pathologies, but the healthiest of them simply acknowledge that it is a vice, that they will never be with a woman and that a woman will never offer them what they want. In modern times, ideology insists this state of affairs must be natural and not at all what it was, despite many homosexual men having no reason to pretend what they do is something other than what it is. Many homosexuals will say to anyone who will listen what they think and feel, but because homosexuality is an identity of political retardation, this is always overridden, and there is no significant interest in changing them or understanding them. Nearly all treatment of the gay identity or anything like it is an attempt to accelerate lurid rituals among the perverts, who were already marked for elimination in the mating game and rejection in social advancement.

I mention this sexual game repeatedly because, in the final analysis, nothing about the sexual game is necessary. All of the struggle and despair over such a worthless game produces, in the end, the same number of children or less as the natural proclivities of women choosing who they would mate. It would be easier if the women just selected who they wanted from a list of men, and in all practical terms, this is what actually happens. Any man who struggles like Sisyphus over this stupid game has already lost, and should stop wasting his time. The ritual rejections are there purely to beat this reality into the heads of men who refuse to get it, until they eventually do and resort to the outlets permitted to him, none of which are satisfactory. The sexual game is used specifically as a lever to push those who can be swayed by it to social divisions which make no sense, and it is offered as a reward for meritorious behavior in accord with the values of that society. Whether the reward actually lines up with what anyone gets is not relevant, since anyone who believes women or men care about merit has not figured out this game. All that matters is the impression someone makes, and in the present eugenic society, first impressions - and especially the first impression of those experts tasked with weeding out undesirables - are pushed as the only possible impressions. No amount of effort of men to present themselves will change the decision once that impression is set, and once a man is established as a failure, all other participants in the game are made aware of this and will deny him access. A similar game can be played with the women, and women compete for status among each other to reach higher stages of the game, where they can hold more prestige and status in that world. A connection between success in this ruinous game and economic and material success is always implied, despite the nature of this game being wholly corrosive and counterproductive. If there were an interest in selective breeding for useful qualities, such a game would be seen as so ruinous that it would be in the interest of society to abolish it, and establish clear rituals for assigning mates. If this were done though, the sentiments of those who rule would be clear, and most people in the society would be reduced to cattle, with many of the men effectively sterile for life. It is not naturally this way, but a choice of participants in the game. The reality of the situation is that one person is basically interchangeable with another, and no one really cares about the other except for their reproductive function and the meager expectations one can still hold for a partner, if someone bothers to stay with a partner at all. It's a grim and lizardlike attitude, and it is a degeneration beneath the sentiments of animals. It takes considerable doing to degrade man's instinct beneath the dignity of the better exemplars of the animal kingdom, but those who began this lurid ritual aren't going to content themselves with sinking to the level of reptiles or the most debauched examples in the animal kingdom. Thinking men and women, who delight in perversion, can always make it worse. These expectations about mating are never individual choices, but are always informed by the society which polices behavior. Intensifying the pressure to conform will affect the rules of the game. There is then the countervailing force, which senses that this horrific game and celebration of betrayal is odious and obviously not in the interest of most single participants. The concept that someone can perpetuate a game or scam precedes the material conditions in the creation of social classes. None of these relations just-so happened. The behavior of animals before they became men was still deliberate behavior, albeit carried out with far less knowledge of the participants about what they were there to do. It is possible for humans, even today, to remain unaware of the game and revert to naive views about love and sex. It is a disgrace that so many lies are told about sex, which is really such a simple thing. For all the emphasis placed on sex, even in this author's naive years, it was easy to notice glaring failures in the supposed wisdom of "sexperts". The author has to ask why this wisdom is so treasured, while basic things that would be obviously good for all participants become mysteries. Stimulating the genitals and minimizing the bullshit involved in the entire process is not terribly complicated, and could be learned by someone in their 20s from scratch, if they weren't psychologically crippled by the general fear that surrounds the act and the intense stigma eugenic society places on every minor distinction, and the insane values of the eugenic creed. That would be too decent, but there is great advantage in creating bullshit to weed out people who fail a political test. The entire testing regime and passwords to enter the game are nothing more than a rigamarole so that selected families and their buddies reap a reward and venality reigns supreme. Certain people will never accept such a basic conclusion even when the dots are connected for them, because their faith in the creed and the glory of predation is total. Those ideologues and true believers impose a general fear that makes decent men and women comply with clearly insane expectations about social behavior. It is not possible for the decent to summon the general fear that the venal thrive in, unless the decent are willing to summon force to confront obvious lies, and refuse to allow venal behavior to be enabled and perpetuated. All that the venal require is institutions that coddle and enshrine predation, and actively seek to suppress any shred of decency or integrity in people. That advance is the great discovery of late modernity, and that is why eugenics insisted that every institution would manage people by destroying them and destroying any standard of comparison, or at least making standards of comparison verboten. That is, as we will see time and time again, the conditions of Eugenics that Francis Galton desired and what he got.

The division of labor into various tasks does not immediately serve some utility in the functioning of the body. The body is versatile and necessarily must be so. Overspecialization of the body's functions would in the end cripple basic social and political functioning. Society demands a baseline level of functioning to be considered valid. Those beneath this level receive scorn and contempt which pushes them further down, until a distinct group forms on the basis of doing something different. The thing done differently does not need to serve any economic utility or material need. A stutter, a wrong look, or simply being chosen as a sacrifice, assigns to someone a lower status. There need not be any rhyme or reason to explain why some were slaves and some were masters. It could very well be decided by lottery who lives and who dies. Our expectations is that any such lottery would be rigged, for all the reasons people deceive each other about the nature of their social arrangements. That has been the case with lotteries in the past which had some political implication, almost always the lotteries with a bad result for the unlucky draw. Pure dumb luck and circumstance may conspire to select one man to become rich, and only after the fact is this fortune justified as destiny. What someone does with their circumstances will say much about their future, for all events and crises are fleeting. Those who are markedly above the baseline level of social functioning are immediately suspect, because their existence presents an inequality of ability that is a clear and present danger. This danger is almost never acted upon, because those who can manuever into a position of superior social and political skill will strike the stupid masses long before the masses realize collectively what is to be done. This did not have to happen. The intelligent blame the stupid for aggression, even though the intelligent and capable have initiated predation in almost every confrontation, picking a time and place to strike. When the intelligent fail, it is because of rivalries among their own kind, which makes blaming the stupid curious if anyone thought about it for five minutes. Somehow, the stupidest of all are blamed for things they were distant from, simply because they are there and make a convenient pressure release valve. None of this separation of classes or groups is justified or a thing that would be resisted out of a sense that nothing can change. Social relations change all of the time, and new elites can rise. Class mobility is not the Sisyphean task it is portrayed as, but class mobility is made impossible because the holders of ruling institutions choose not to allow new men. It is not some impotence of the stupid that prevents class mobility, nor do the plans of the rulers succeed in selecting who lives and who dies with perfect results. The plans of the rulers face a great difficulty in deciding who to kill and who to elevate, as the rulers do not possess perfect information on their subjects. Today's rulers like to make the impression that they are the ultimate Big Brother, knowing all of your secrets and keeping records you will never know. These records, due to the nature of eugenic society, are almost entirely negative accounts designed to destroy someone. Any positive qualities are recorded only for those who are selected to enter the ruling institutions or who prove themselves to be especially important. Even in today's technocratic society, where an eye for talent would seem very helpful, the rulers and their institutions of control show little interest in the positive talents, and they show no interest whatsoever in cultivating talent beyond a bare minimum. Only the predatory talents are encouraged to grow, and these talents are handed out only by a pedagogy carried out in secret, or by the overwhelming presence of today's eugenic death cult and all of the lurid abuses heaped upon the commoners. If there were a project to track with any consideration positive attributes of those who pass through educational institutions, it would face many obvious difficulties when adjudicating genuine merit. It is far easier to lie or "fake it until you make it", such that the venal take advantage and rise easily, while the studious worker is a fool to be disposed of at the first opportunity. All incentives in any political society suggest that hard work is universally scorned, no matter what lies or ideology are presented to encourage the level of genuine work needed for society's maintenance. Knowing this, anyone with a mind towards genuine work will know not to give his or her labor too freely or generously, and there is a great incentive for any capable person to hide their talents. The end result is that nepotism and schmoozing are valued qualities. Since the present society consciously avoids any product that would threaten the status quo, and goes out of its way to destroy people, intellects, knowledge, or anything that would violate the eugenic creed, this has produced in our time the visible rot of humanity. In the past, it was possible to pretend that this rot was an exceptional case, and that in some dim way a better world was possible. The dominant ethos of eugenics violently asserts that only the worst of all worlds is possible, and anything that would suggest even a stalling of the creed's advance into the world is to be attacked with all might.

Despite this sorry condition, the realities of the world mitigate all plans of humans to make the world as abominable as possible. The world being what it is, and human thought being what it is, the world has done a reasonable job of keeping humans from doing their worst. Their idealistic and misguided plans are shown to be folly if they think the good life if something that will come if everyone believes the right things. The predatory are mitigated by the intensive energy and effort required to maintain their lifestyle. The desire for self-preservation and security, and a natural disgust towards the entire predatory arrangement in nearly every human, has mitigated the worst effects of human genius. Up until recently, the human experience has changed remarkably little, and formal education concerned the old classics and little else. There were a few key subjects that would be consistently emphasized, and revisions to thinking on mathematics and language were either introduced haphazardly, or education had yet to decay to the point where it stunted organic thought, and so a reasonably intelligent person could pick up new concepts as they developed and were disseminated. The lower classes were not so stupid or illiterate as the would-be technocrats love to claim. The attitude of the lower classes towards learning was not that stupidity was desirable, as a technocrat must believe, but that the aristocratic attitudes towards learning and education were so alien that it was better for the common peasant or serf to ignore the pedagogues. The lower class would adopt that which makes sense, and those who took an interest in reading had to become autodidacts or pick up independently what aristocratic pedagogues refused to teach. Almost everything the lower class learns, up to today, is completely in spite of the educational pedagogy of aristocrats and philosophers. Every ideology serves to retard the native intellect and connection to reality that most humans possess. Even those who are remarkably stupid, who would be called idiots or retarded in our time, could pick up on knowledge if permitted. The punishment of the retarded was almost entirely because fools, having been brutalized and living in what is to them an eternal hell, had no incentive to look intelligent. All the small displays of intelligence would do is heighten humiliations until the retard is put in their place - abject humiliation, persisting as a living abortion for the rest of society to mock. The intelligence of anyone with brain damage or who "looked retarded" was quite irrelevant. Once retarded, always retarded. The explicit punishments of the retard were a sign to everyone else that those who step outside of their assigned social role would be beaten back. If the lower classes developed intellect, they had no incentive to tell that to aristocrats and their educated supplicants, who openly held hostile intent to anyone outside of their political clubs. For all of their talk, technocrats, philosophers, capitalists, aristocrats, kings, and nobles have little regard for actual knowledge, as they prefer the appearance of knowledge and a sense of smug superiority every single time. Superficiality wins in political struggles, and all educational institutions as mentioned serve political ends. The development of knowledge was always suspect if it appeared in the wrong place or the wrong class, but it was literally impossible to make people too stupid without a social machine to enforce it. In primitive society, the degradations of settled society would be so onerous that to enforce them would have destroyed any cohesive social unit. Only the runts of humanity would face such humiliations, and even here, any functional human would have had utility. Bands and tribes did not have a ready supply of fresh babies to grow into adults, and sustaining large families on the move was difficult. The ritual sacrifice and cruelty of primitive life did not stem from economic or political necessity, but from the taboo and the thrill of those who saw an ugly child and instinctively killed it, with the preference being maximal torture of the damned to set a precedent of what happens to enemies of the species. In those times, any kindness to the retarded was only temporary, but the predators could only push so far. If sufficiently pushed, desperate people will run away, preferring whatever solitude they could find to the presence of demonic apes. This usually did not end well, but the damned knew that other people were a worse threat than death, and the greatest threat to a solitary reject was to be captured or tortured by another band of sadistic, demonic humans.

Social class did not arise out of necessity, as if it were the price of civilization. It was necessary that social distinction existed to mark who would hold authority. It was necessary that some would be wealthy and some would be poor. It was necessary that specializations would be marked due to any human possessing a limited capacity. Social class, however, was a more or less fixed assignment of a person's value and quality, that had to be recognized by that society to be meaningful. Social distinctions and a hierarchy of who is stronger than whom is not a class as such, but it is well known who is smarter, who is richer, who is stronger, who is capable at certain things, and so on, and these things are not irrelevant to political and economic life. Typically, the stronger will have leverage to gain class position. Social class sets in when these distinctions are settled at the level of society and the state, or what amounts to the state. In primitive, nomadic society, classes as such could not exist. It is not because these societies were premised on a solidaristic politics that was taken for granted, but because all mechanisms to enforce social class would be ruinous to the enterprise of a hunter-gatherer band. The ritual sacrifices, however they were justified and glorified, were understood to be a thing best avoided. Only the depraved would consider such practices so routine that they were necessary for the world to proceed. Even when the sacrifices were accepted as a ritual, as they usually were, they would have to be a limited activity, and sacrifice was not a pleasant or honorable experience. The presentation of an honorable sacrifice might be made in some perverse ritual, but anyone with an ounce of sense would see that a perfectly healthy young girl or boy suffering the torment was being wasted for some idiotic fetish. The same is true of the needless destruction of an elder, or throwing away a cripple or weakling who has made every effort to make him or herself useful. These things provoke enough sickness that a primitive sentiment would overcome a predatory ethos, if only because doing this would be expedient. It is also not hard to see that if sacrifice and cruelty were the only way of life, there would not be a single shred of society. This tension is constant in the formation of social class distinctions, regardless of technology or material conditions or any reason why the class distinctions would exist. Once a class forms, it will hold institutions and expectations that it must defend. Even the class of free men, who lack any other distinction other than not bearing the mark of slavery or being regarded as property, has something to hold on to. Their freedom in a genuine sense, and the small piece of the world they can keep for themselves, is something that could taken away if there was a political will to enslave the free. Struggles to avoid predation persist throughout human society, and those who glorify predation will face limits on what they accomplish. The predatory classes, to some extent, recognize that in order to continue their vampiric behavior, the cattle must be fed and allowed some mobility.

Enclosed and humiliated humans will in the long term cease to be effective as slaves. No one wishes to acknowledge this too plainly, but a wise master has understood that intelligent slaves are easier to control than stupid slaves. Intelligent slaves are more likely to remain acutely aware of the risk of rebellion, and are more likely to value carrots which are not material values. Intelligent slaves will fight more for privileges, even if they are empty. No amount of intellect or wisdom will drive a slave to freedom as a value inherent to his existence. An intelligent slave is likely aware that slave systems do not end by any initiative of the slave. An intelligent slave is likely to recognize that the harder he or she works, the worse his conditions will be, and intense efforts to fight for freedom are likely to end badly. Rebellious slaves will rebel not because of wisdom or intellect granting them a virtue to do so. Stupid slaves, due to the predation within the slave system, can see without difficulty that their situation is not desirable, and the stupid slaves face far greater humiliations than intelligent slaves. Intelligent slaves usually discover that operating rackets and facilitating the slave system is a better strategy. If a master is incapable of imposing slavery, or the opportunity to strike out on their own is available, slaves can rebel, but this decision is not an intellectual one granted by the genius of the slave. Slave and peasant rebellions tend to be led not by conceits of intelligence but by those who lead the other slaves and retain qualities appropriate to a fighter. The path to rebellion for the slave is not wisdom, but a willingness to fight and enough cunning to know when they can strike. The slave's preferred method to resist domination is not to appeal to justice and reason, but to show a willingness to make life difficult for the masters if certain lines are transgressed. Rebellion in slavery often has little to do with abolishing the institution. Very often, slaves seek escape because it is possible and the situation they are in has been increasingly untenable. Slaves are not uniformly motivated by freedom as a legal or political concept, and very often the slave is acutely aware that freedom in a genuine sense is a precious commodity. The freeborn and noble have long taken for granted what they stole from the world, thinking it was natural or won by some infantile right of conquest. Middle and ruling class infantilism has a long history, and so long as those classes are able to maintain that infantile mentality, a considerable segment of the comfortable classes revel in making the claim of freedom as baseless as possible. When all of these tensions within slavery are settled, there is a way in which the institution functions as a local level. Slaves become habituated to their station, and one way to mitigate slavery is for the slaves to adopt fixed routines. Slaves are not excited to do a variety of new things for their master, unless they're using the strategy of supplication to gain some advantage and recognize the master's need for versatility. Slaves are always aware, as today's neoliberal worker is, that to gain anything at all in that arrangement, the master must have a need to accept giving more carrots, and a need to avoid too much use of the stick.

The condition of freedom, and thus of a social class distinction above the norm, is that people have the space and security and means to pursue it. There is no other way to believe a class exists, even in spirit. Slavery should not be seen as an exception to the norm of freedom. It is freedom that is the exception - someone is not free unless they are able to pursue their lives with a reasonable degree of independence and social belonging. Freedom in a political sense entails an implication of rights and dignity afforded to a man or woman of standing, and that someone possesses standing in the society they belong to. If no one and nothing is there to punish someone for transgressions, or impose an alien condition on them, they are free.[2] If the world were to be imagined as this clockwork, as it must be in the mind of someone viewing the the whole world to figure out what system is in place, then everyone is a slave to some mechanisms that are at first indescribable. We would have to establish with certainty that no threat looms over us if we wanted to be free, or we would have to maintain a false confidence that nothing is going to stop us. Many people, from fools to kings, lie to themselves or at least convince others to accept a fiction that there is no threat. Paranoia and a lifetime of deception and rejection often leads the individual to see threats that are not evident to any scientific view, but the expert mystifier invents pseudoscience to ignore clear and present threats, and tells the damned they are not allowed to respond to that threat unless granted permission. The true default state is neither freedom nor slavery, because it was premised on an assumption we made for ourselves. In our true state, the question of freedom or slavery is entirely moot. We live because that is what we do, and we have a number of elaborate stories to tell ourselves the society is something we can live in and relate to. We often pretend that we belong to a society that has, in secret, rejected us a long time ago. Even when we know of the secret rejection and the clubs we are not allowed in, the supposedly free have no choice but to cope and pretend that they're still in. Maybe we can retain some friendships and relations, so that we have more security than someone who is totally alien and preyed upon openly. The threat of retaliation can keep the peace, and it is the goal of any ruling class to prohibit entirely the idea that the subordinated are permitted to do anything but suffer. It is not even a question of obedience or utility. The suffering of the oppressed is the point, and is at heart the value those who rule treasure. Only out of necessity do the rulers of society value material goods or useful products. The ideal of rule is to imagine that all material things are irrelevant, and ideas directly command slaves as if the master were moving an appendage. Distance, substance, meaning, truth, purpose, and so on are irrelevant to the philosophy of rule in its core expression. For the rulers to abide anything other than the impulse to command implies that they respond to a spiritual authority, morality, and ethics that is not immediately evident.

The question of how people are free to act, and the obligations they owe, defines social class more than anything else. It is not about describing some utility or function, but who possesses freedom in certain spheres and slavery in others. Not one class in class society escapes entirely the condition of freedom or slavery. The rulers are obligated to fend off rivals within their group, and obligated to maintain their rule by force. As mentioned before, all of the true forms of government are despotic, and comraderie among the class is not a foregone conclusion or the result of mere consciousness. Struggles between classes are not what they seem at first. There are elements in every class that see a grand scheme by which society is organized, and cross over class lines to maintain this grand scheme. Rulers long make alliance with organized crime, the trade of flesh and drugs, the rituals of prostitution, and the lowest classes who can fulfill functions that decent men and women will refuse to do even under pain of torture and death.

Among the professions the scum of humanity take is to be torturers themselves, and militaries throughout history hired out the gruesome task of torture to specialists. Often the specialists can rise from classes and groups that have no other function of note to the ruling class, or whose other functions are to be humiliated or a machine to inflict suffering on the other classes in an indirect way. When it comes to the torture machine, class collaboration is easy and the lowest scum and slaves can gab with aristocrats and philosophers who all agree on the central cause of torture for torture's sake. For many reasons, the torturer must adopt a spiritual commitment to torture to be most effective at this job. The torturer may put on a mask to pretend he or she isn't a monster, and may in their private affairs hold to a moral code and the highest standard of probity. The torturer cannot in any genuine sense identify with their prey, and the torturer - in line with the contradictions of state society - often utilizes the concept that the torturer and the tortured have some special connection, a kind of pedagogy that resembles the rites of education. In this education of being tortured, the conclusion of the rites of torture is the total vivisection of the tortured. Torture stands alone as a value of humanity, and it is impossible to imagine the human project without torture. The quality of skilled, deliberate torture has an unmistakable quality. Those who have seen it will respond instinctively and never have an answer to it. Those who possess the skill and secrets of the torture religion never forget that they do possess this, and this grants them an air of legitimacy that transcends anything else. All that would be needed for the cult of torture to claim the whole of the world would be to arrest any impulse of decency that would defend against it, and any concept that would inimical to the unlimited freedom of the torturer. This, as you might have guessed, is the true meaning of the dictum "freedom is slavery". To accept the freedom of the torturer and exploiter is to accept the slavery of the tortured. It also works the other way. The torturer owes a debt to his or her gods and the practice of torture, and the torturer will never be anything but a torturer after the act is done. The committed torturer, who knows there is no line that he or she will not transgress, will not be able to say with a straight face that this was ever anything else, and their life outside of torture is a side job. The torturer is obligated to the profession and the consequences thereof. Torture has a way of perpetuating its consequences beyond the intent of the torturer, and even a skilled torturer may find a victim they cannot break. The tortured may hold on to a belief, however dim, that they will die before they are broken. Even if the tortured faces the prospect of torture for the rest of his life, they know in their heart that death will come eventually, and holds on to the hope that the final death makes all that was extracted meaningless. Even if the tortured breaks and is returned to life shattered and humiliated, and even if the tortured senses the misery in his body and can't keep their thoughts straight, death will come one way or another. If nothing else, the tortured holds on to the purest and true nihilism as salvation. Even if the tortured becomes the torturer, or commits many foul and shameful acts, true nihilism and hatred of mankind for its crimes is a liberation greater than any other. Whatever filth the tortured lives in and however life is resented, death heals all if someone truly belives life and the world is cursed. I must say here, and will say again later in the book, that life is not suffering, and the world is not this at all. Torture and suffering are purely in the domain of human thought, and the entire cult of torture, like every other human cult, is an imposition on the world. It may be in political society that the results of torture are forever and inesapable, but humanity and society is not the world and never will be. If all that mankind hopes for is release from the eternal torture, and the society truly becomes the living Hell, then eventually it will end. It may take the destruction of all that exists to see that day, and the tortured may have no proof that this will actually happened, but the faith in total death saves all no matter what. The faith in the futility of human conceit is easier still. However effective torture may be and however religious the observance of punishment after torture, at the end of the ritual, the nihilist can retreat into fantasy or simply cease caring. This response is expected, and is often the purpose of state-sanctioned torture in childhood once it has been decided that child is now and forever retarded. The retreat into fantasy and a death cult has definite consequences, and certain material consequences for the rest of the world. The nihilist retreating into pure fantasy and delusion will in the long run become an abject slave who can be programmed to act towards any disgusting cause. But it is possible for the few who retain some semblance of attachment to the world to take whatever steps possible to avoid playing this role. The tortured might writhe in agony for the rest of their life, living to be publicly humiliated, and the broken who do not submit to these humiliations willfully will be attacked and shamed to set an example to the rest of mankind, so that torture may be glorified and legitimized. At some point though, the torture runs out of fuel, or ability to enforce its dictates. It may be nothing more than a faint stirring or hope against the whole world. There are only two things which attain the final outcome desired from the use of torture to rebuild someone. The first is a faith in the cult of war and torture itself, and this is the expectation of dystopias. The second is to proclaim the victory of God and eternal wisdom over the material world entirely. It is the victory of torture remaking people, or at least the presumption that torture can do this, that makes the warrior and the priest realized more than anything else. If not for this, warriors are reduced to extermination or maiming, which is not effective against a determined resistance. If not for this, priests are reduced to begging people to please believe what the priest is saying, and for the priest this will place him or her in an abject position indeed.

From the warrior and priest alliance's point of view, the purpose of every productive venture is to inflict this suffering, so that their classes may continue. The managerial and security functions of the classes are secondary to this need to defend the tool that a state or a cult can utilize to affect human psychology. The productive ventures come to be valued in terms that are appreciated by the warriors, the proprietors, and the priests, rather than the producers or slaves. No man of simple production had a single word to say about the values society attached to goods. The producer was expected to provide labor, and if paid in money or some token that allowed a producer to command the labor of others, that money was only valuable because there was a state and law to insist that money meant something. There may be an informal arrangement where it becomes commonly accepted that gold ingots or some commodity is valuable in its own right, but this is only the case because at the end there is a state and law which honors this valuation. The state's valuations, and thus the values it suggests to society every day, are entirely the values of those who fight, lord, and tell you what you're supposed to think. If the producers want any say in this, they will have to fight or preach in their own right, and when they do this, they are temporarily abandoning the role of producer. This is a transgression in a rigid class society for all the reasons you would expect, and so it is not tolerated by states in principle. Only an implication is made that states are beholden to the support of their common citizens in some spiritual sense, because the threat of rebellion is always materially possible. Spiritually, though, the conceit of the state does not die easily, and simple faith in the state persists even when the state's ability to project force is lax, or when the state is held by incompetent officers. This spiritual authority must be discussed at a later time.

It is still the case that humans live in an environment and can only act so much in any amount of time, whatever their psychological motives for dividing labor. Humans are tool-users forming a symbiotic relationship with their tools and their possessions. This is not an illusion or fetish, but it is what humans do with their technology. The formation of familiar trades and commercial interests around them is something known to students of history. This leads to fairly long periods of stability and habits that form around material processes. There is an expectation of where farmers, miners, craftsmen, pimps, and every other trade stand in the social order, with merits and demerits assigned as a way to incentivize certain behaviors. There is always a moral or ethical component assumed in class society for the classes to make legal sense. The existence of a proprietor or banker class presumes that money possesses some legitimacy that requires us to honor it. The social relation in of itself isn't useful because it exists. The social relation is valued for some quality, and must work towards some objective the manager of labor had in mind. These utilities are not freely exchangeable or reducible to some common substance that can be infinitely subdivided. Every time utility is abstracted in this way, it is necessarily reducing the complexity of game decisions to some basic principle, like pleasure or pain, or control or fear. The utilitarian moral philosophy, for those who haven't figured it out yet, is a celebration of torture. Torture is what pleases the class that formulated this moral philsophy, and they desired to emphasize torture above all other forms of pleasure. Vain and fleeting joys are offered as explanations to those who are not informed, as a way to distract from the central focus of the utilitarians, which was justifying torture, the drug trade, and all the things that the British Empire's stewards really cared about. There were those in the Empire who protested this, because it is obviously stupid if you think about it for five minutes. The most brazenly disgusting moral philosophy and ethics did not assert itself in modernity because it just so happened to be correct, but because it was able to impose violently this ethos, against the better judgement of all involved in the project. A certain sort of person who had always been present in humanity would latch on to these explanations eagerly, because they justified something they always jumped to in their own thought process. All that was necessary was to organize and amplify this urge to torture, so it could take form and become a god to be channeled, this time with scientific knowledge of how it can be done, and how the human cattle are affected by this torture and the aura and god it projects into the minds of people.

In all of this, people are acting and reacting in the situation they are in, and the struggle is not between classes, but between people who see the classes as useful institutions and platforms. All participants who can have a serious influence on this through independent action are aware of the classes in society and the interests at work. Taking class struggle at face value is a gross misunderstanding of the nature of this struggle, and this is a common mistake of those without genuine political consciousness. The classes and institutions refer to some basis for their existence. This need not be a basis in wealth or property, but a basis in what they do and their typical actions. Imperatives are never fixed for a given class. It is entirely possible for a capitalist to decide willfully to manipulate the situation so that the imperatives are no longer operative, or can be manipulated by a dominant party to control the lower orders. In any meaningful sense, profitability ceased to be a concern. Monopolies have no such incentive. Rent extraction is the primary purpose of the monetary scheme since the 20th century. The capitalist arrangement is concerned with draining the wealth that had been clawed away in previous decades, and economic contraction is not just forcibly imposed but desirable. The worse the state of the economy, the stronger the hand of those who rule it. All punishment from economic decline is directed towards the appropriate losers, and the losers are selected meticulously and tracked by human resources, education, and all considerations of a eugenic project. Starvation and debt are valuable for conditioning people to comply with institutions that viciously attack the public, and those who are amenable to absolute predatory rule know what side they are on. The predatory and venal have rallied to the banner of the current program, marching in lockstep and knowing that they have burned all bridges. The predatory middle class, who in the final analysis are little better than the residuum they are destroying, do what they do for almost animalistic reasons. They have been trained to act this way, and if they do think for a moment, they realize that they backed themselves into an unwinnable scenario. They exist entirely at the mercy of oligarchs and intellectuals who form a clique at the top of technocratic society, and everything this middle class and their associated capitals do is a futile attempt to agitate for a better position at the ruling class table. The deeper their commitment to the institutions that they pretend to rail against, the more abject their submission to the true ruling powers, but an impulse ingrained into them has nowhere else to go. They won't work, and the conditions of the monopolists don't allow them to engage in enterprises that would challenge the status quo or break the end of history. If this did happen, they know that their various atrocities, which they hooted and hollered for since 1980, would come to light, and should their pressure against the residuum ever relent, it would be far easier to tear to shreds this middle class of yuppies and opportunists. The yuppies have, due to their own intransigence, rotted their brains and indulged in every vice and depravity put in front of them, trained like the dogs they are. Intellectually, they stunted themselves in a way that even abject retards and the insane did not. I have tried to explain to these people why this keeps happening, but any train of thought inimical to their sense of "me wantee" is neutralized and they revert to their core programming. Even when their lives are destroyed and they have nothing more to gain from this, they resort to jabbering like the most craven retards if they have to confront everything they did and everything they are. The true elite and their associated intellectuals do not possess any such doubt about their actions. They may rise and fall, and they may suffer. They may be insane and spend their days talking to space aliens or whatever Luciferian nonsense they bought into. They may laugh at the hilarity of this grand joke, knowing that they always had the bunkers safe. The true elite, pulled aside from an early age or coming from established wealth and netwroks, do not struggle like anyone else. They do not.

This emergence of social classes historically was not a fait accompli, and for a long time, social class must exist alongside families and individuals. It must exist while contending with existing centers of wealth, social networks that did not form out of any deliberate plan or ideology, and a vague sense that class society is complete bullshit from the outset. It is not difficult to see that a long run plan of state society and ruling classes has been the invasion of the family and private life. This began by co-opting the family, which is where patriarchal norms became the expectation. The rationale for this is not any utility in doing so, or because it would facilitate growth or control of the people. The rearing of children could only be effective in small units where the parents can form sustained relationships with the children, and so the common idea of children being grown in vats or processed through an assembly line will not produce useful results. Lately, the usual suspects have advertised their plans to grow large numbers of human slaves in vats, with the glossy cover that this is totally normal and not at all slavery. This will not produce the results desired, and it almost certainly isn't the plan unless the ruling class is much dumber than the author believes. The failures of state schooling and state nurseries have been well documented, and the plan to submit children to even more bureaucratic wrangling would accelerate the degradation of the youth. Those paying attention to the cohort entering school after 2001 know that this overbearing neoliberal bureaucracy can only function as a death cult, and the terror inflicted on American children has visibly promoted illiteracy - which was the intent announced in the 1990s, encouraged by the millennials who knew what side of the war they were on.

Ultimately the division of labor had to exist around interests which weren't inexorable trends, or material forces which just-so happened. The social relations of employment are not things devoid of context, which can be isolated and applied universally. We can only reduce the real relationships between humans and their things to a few essential elements to make our model of history and the present easier to understand. The objective of the employer and employee in wage labor is not an ulterior motive of producing for society, or a motive for profit that is neutral to people, or that the worker is there to make things. It is not for the capitalist's pleasure or because the capitalist has some ulterior obligation. It is not just to say that the relationship of wage labor itself must be perpetuated as an instituion, or that wage labor is somehow morally sound. The worker and the capitalist are not there to conform to social roles valued in a model. The valuation of people in a model is not what societies actually value in their subjects and active participants. There is a great pretense that life in the working world is "just business", and that the capitalist is under some obligation of neutrality towards each of his workers. This is the exact opposite of the reality. The capitalist will in the end choose his employees based on his sentiments as much as he can. The capitalist hires his immediate underlings on the basis of loyalty, and that loyalty ultimately derives from the capitalist's trust of his subordinates. The more successful of the feudal lords emphasized the personal relationship between lord and subject, and feudalism was understood to be a transactional relationship. The capitalist at heart has always understood that his position is not a repudiation of feudal values, but a continuation of them. The capitalist would like his knights to be true believers and his serfs to be hated and despised, lest all of the subordinates forget what this was really about. The likes and dislikes of a capitalist, or any other type of manager, do not need to conform to any fixed model or ulterior motive. The same has been shown in socialist managed economies. There is no way to prevent any institutional arrangement of labor into a game where the buddy system, schmoozing, displays of friendship, secret handshakes and understandings, and so on are the real interest of the participants. Capitalits and workers down the line have in the end chosen their friends, family, fellow drug users, members of the club, and whomever else fit these specifications which had nothing to do with an objective, ulterior motive. The world where the capitalist or manager abolishes all sentiment was a joke from the outset. The managers of eugenics, among their own kind, are extremely sentimental. They are obsessed with signifiers of intelligence and status, and emphasize who is allowed in secret orgies and rites. A lump of sentimental horseflesh is the difference between selected to live and being selected to die. The pseudo-scientific or pseudo-moral excuses for this sentiment are created later, and Galton's eugenics reveled in open hypocrisy. The entire point, as we will see later in this book, was to abolish all standards of comparison and all concept of the law's consistency, when it came to any key eugenic tenet. This would have a corrosive effect on the very idea of the law or any institution. The same tendency can be found in any arrangement of society, but all other arrangements of society were cognizant on some level that this tendency produced undesirable effects. The eugenic creed is the violent assertion that this way of life is the only possible one, and anything honest or productive would not just be unseemly or devalued. The entire point of the eugenic creed is to sum up the honest and forthright in one word, which will be used by a eugenic college to subordinate all who are not in the club: "retarded".

What happens with the division of labor into professions and work task is a splitting of the intellect. At first this splitting is only carried out so far as it is effective for organizing work tasks. It didn't matter what specialization a serf or slave performed, except to those tasked with managing the work tasks and driving, and certain specializations which were difficult to reproduce, like educated slaves as teachers. The educated slaves and freedmen would, in many societies, operate the machinery of empire. Capable freedmen would staff the bureaucracies of Rome. Many of the specializations of work tasks would proceed as if by some process behind the backs of the proprietors. The reasons why these specializations appeared, and why certain labors were valued more than others, were not a surprise to those who managed labor or who were the actual producers. A manager who was not wise might have presumed that he couldn't know why the workers segregated each other, and it had to be assumed that all things being equal, one man was not essentially different from another man. Those who think about the matter for any length of time would have known that the division of labor among the workers follows principles. These principles could be divined, but they did not conform to a crude mathematical valuation, and so for a capitalist, the only tool he had in ample supply - his money - did not conform to the qualities the capitalist would want out of a workforce. Thus begins the modern invasion of scientific management into private life, first in the management of the workplaces, and then in the management of the whole society. These two processes in modernity began in tandem, and they were inherent in the very idea of the free trade logic. General commodity production, where most people purchased their goods at a supermarket and wage slavery was normal and a general expectation of urban society, necessitated the expansion of city governments, and then national bureaucracies and the bureaucratic state as we know it.

[1] The author recommends reading Charles Darwin's actual work on evolution and the history of Man, and the genuine arguments that followed from it and its contemporary critics. Darwin himself was not fond of those who made spurious philosophical claims, as it would undermine the full development of a useful theory. This was not because Darwin disagreed with those philosophical claims, because like anyone of his class and time, he believed in imperialism and the Empire's inevitable victory over humanity, and he being where he was placed him with the most fervent believers and the vanguard of the world to come. It is highly unlikely that Darwin is unaware of the implication I made in this paragraph, as it was an article of faith in the English upper class and those infected with the ideology and culture spread by families and propaganda. Francis Galton's eugenics would institutionalize things that were at the heart of the British Empire and culture, make it a global movement, and begin the rallying cry to attack anything that would possibly act against the core impulse I have described. It is the claim of the eugenists that this is the default and natural instinct of mankind eternally and that there is nothing else. Hatred of fools is the human tradition for sure, but it is the judgement of who and what is foolish, and the centralization of that judgement in Galton's institutions, that made Eugenics different from past and present practices of selective breeding or social shaming.

[2] "Proles and animals are free" is the default state, but in the world of Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four, this statement meant nothing. The Ingsoc Party was free in the political and real sense, and yet, by their ruling ethos, every individual was a slave to the collective, and the proles in practice are preyed upon with all the viciousness expected from the hunt and the game. The construction of that dystopia contains in it many self-evident flaws, and Nineteen-Eighty-Four is intended as an intelligence test to see if the youth of the present society understood what had been created after the second world war. If you took the statements of Orwell at face value and believed Winston was sympathetic, or that the Party somehow was protecting the proles, you failed the intelligence test, or you passed it if your interpretation was orthodox to your social grouping and eventual position in the technocratic society. Only the fools believed that Winston was somehow in the right, or identified with Winston, and this is why the book most of all serves as a description of British Eugenics and its pretenses. Evidence of this is made clear throughout the book, but "eugenics" is explicitly not mentioned, because Orwell wants the reader to believe, in one way or another, that the victory of Eugenics really is inevitable, even if they see past the obvious errors in Ingsoc's philosophy, the impossibility of such an arrangement remaining in place, and the reality of Ingsoc's imperatives suggesting that their attitude towards the proles would be openly genocidal. Orwell plays with the sentiments of certain readers by implying that it is the proles' fault, in some perverse way, that the world turned into that, and that Fabian eugenics and so-called liberal democracy was supposed to be the only way out. The fools who believed Orwell was there to help them were among the most useful idiots a regime like Ingsoc could hope for, when considering their actual motives and what they would do with untrammeled power. Winston's spiritual rot is no different from the Party's rot.