The officers of this bureaucratic state, and the intellectuals who operated alongside it or saw it in action, could see what they possessed, and what was possible if all of the incentives in society could be arranged in a particular way. This would lead to today's technocratic conception of the division of work tasks, in which assignments are highly specialized, people behave in mechanical fashion in mental and physical labor, and the complexity of machines and the advantage of the machine to its wielder increased by leaps and bounds. The computer, whose origins were in the thinking machines that were a theoretical exercise, elucidated to those who could see its potential what was possible with human thought, and at the same time the computer encouraged a splitting of thought that aided the severance of mankind from its own sense experience. It is not surprising that the computer became an obsession of imperial science, and the computer was at the forefront of everything neoliberal planners needed for society in the 21st century. It is from the work of operations research that we develop many of our conceits about which labors are valuable, so far as the productive labors are concerned. The value of the predatory, deceptive, and ruling arts would change. The ruling ideas, from the middle of the 20th century on, would be developed in secret, while the masses were given an whole alternate world-system that compiled as many brazen lies as it was possible for men to produce. The true state of science, technology, art, and philosophy, would be available only to a limited group who were in the know, and these people would create lockouts in the whole society to restrict access to this knowledge. This was not enough, as the masses retained their wits and would hold dearly to their knowledge of science, such as they possessed it. It was also not possible to reverse the demands of technocratic society, where the working masses had to be brought into alignment with technology, and all people were to be ruled by machines held by an interest of controllers. Nothing about the past century of human history would be possible unless it were known that the machine, or the system, held this power to invade private life, and make complete the enclosure of the world. This enclosure would not simply be an economic or material one. In pursuing this goal, a long run goal of philosophy and religion would be accomplished. An ideal, handed down from on high, would be imposed on the whole of the world, and the world as we knew it would no longer be, and could no longer be. It is here where the question of spiritual authority, which was contended at the formal dawn of modernity in an open ideological struggle, would be finally decided, and with it the division of labor in society could be arrested, and the people would be assigned like interchangeable cogs to whatever task was demanded. There may be in theory wide mobility of labor, but all possibilities of what someone could do would be calculated and controlled, and nothing new would be permitted except by the will of society's planners. In practice, broad groups in labor would be assigned a limited set of faculties, and when the native talents of humanity resent such a desultory assignment, the planners of society would reduce the brain, mind, and soul of those selected for subordination, so that the machine could continue. This did not have to happen for any material reason. It would be conceivable that stupid people could continue to live and function, even if they were just being tolerated. The problem with this is that the political theory and thinking in such a society did not allow a markedly inferior class dignity or security, and it would not be possible in such a short time frame to change everyone's thinking to allow this. Further, any social order that would have prevented this, or at least mitigated it so that intercine struggle did not ravage the whole world, would have required philosophical and spiritual developments that went against the entire arc that led to technocratic society, and the political thought that was appropriate to such an environment. The only thing that would have truly changed this, and it is still not out of the question, is a spiritual revolution. This would mean the effective end of modernity and the start of something new, and with it the dominant trends of thought. Capitalism, socialism, fascism, anarchism, and the various conceits that have been so virulent would become relics of the past, all of them misguided understandings that belied a deeper meaning. The ideological society of technology, and the belief in historical progress, could not admit into its future the concept that these things could ever end. The only way such concepts were understood would be to lump in any opposition to technocratic society as reactionary, or some sort of regression that perverted history's planned progression in the minds of the world's masters. The actual reactionaries, who harkened back to a time before modernity, would in short order not just embrace modernity, but would become the vanguard of modernity's death cult and push forward the eugenic creed where past ideologies could not. Today's neoreactionaries indulge in every modern fad and conceit possible, mashing together technocratic language to create a pseudo-narrative that is completely detached from anything real or anything political leaders believe. It is the purest fool ideology imaginable, and it started with Nietzsche's stupid pissant whining. That diatribe is for another time.

It is at this point in history that the author writes this, where the transformation from ideological spiritual authority and the spiritual authority of the old-fashioned state will give way to a purely eugenic society, which cares not for any law or reason and has decided a long time ago to annihilate anything that opposes it. The new spiritual authority to come has never been adequately described, and perhaps it cannot be. I cannot purport to give a full description of what this is, but it is helpful to investigate the history of spiritual authority, as opposed to theories of knowledge or education or material incentives. This spiritual authority has been the chief driver of higher concerns in humanity, and despite the insistence of rulers that the workers and peasants lack any genuine spirit or mind, it is spiritual authority that all men, fools included, respond to or reject. There is no other way for society to proceed beyond the crudest and most miserable existence.

It did not take much for primitive man to see that his situation was not at all desirable. Endemic violence, a culture of hunting and predation, an uncertain future, and nearly everything in the world that he could see suggested a grim existence. The one benefit of this lifestyle is that there wasn't much stopping him from living what life he could. Nothing like today's work schedule existed, and the men of the band were usually tasked with hunting and sport and tasks that would have made sense for a free man to do. His free time would be spent contemplating the stars, the trees, the fire, and those around him, and with no one to tell him he can't do this, primitive man could if he so desired work out for himself what any of this was for. The obsessive thinking that characterizes modern man was not the norm, and would not be the norm for much of human history. It still is not the norm, but the invasion of private life has forced decent men and women to comply with an alien and insane world-system. There are, as you might expect, those who were inclined to obsessive thinking, and who had a penchant for paranoia. They may have sensed the world in a way that did not comport to standard social functioning in that environ, and when this was seen, such people would either recognize others like them, or would be recognized by elders who knew what this was. This pulling aside of people for specialized roles like medicine man or wise sage was not the orderly institutional practice that historical idealists like to portray it as, where technocratic pedagogy is superimposed on people who had no buy-in with such an idea. The role of men and women who specialized in certain kinds of learning was not consistent, but because there was a niche that could not be filled easily by any man or woman, traditions would be passed from elder to student. The idea of the trusted medicine man is entirely a trope invented by technocrats who wanted to grant to the medical doctor and the scientific dictator a legitimacy in nature that never existed. Free men and women long resented cultic practices and would have viewed the shaman or medicine man with suspicion. If a free man wanted to speak with the gods, he was quite capable of doing business with them directly. The role of the witch or mystic filled a niche that was beneath the dignity of a fighting man or a sturdy woman, and this has been recognized throughout history. Spiritual thinking as an institution or specialized practice does not start at the apex of the world, but among the dregs of society who are convinced, or manage to insinuate through some cunning and effort, that their defects could be compensated for with some special knowledge. Ordinary people, either because they didn't have the time or interest or weren't initiated into a long story of knowledge that was particular to these specialists, could benefit from the knowledge. There was also a way to make use of old men and women whose prime was over, and a place for these people to feel they are useful and secure.

No one likes to be a burden, and the primitive society was no place for beggars. The good fortune of primitive society is that, in most cases, begging was not necessary, and the prestige of generosity is documented in anthropology. This generosity was not done out of some sense of social obligation or because a manager dictated it, but because good manners and culture of the time suggested that sharing was a virtue in such a society. A man facing bad times could become good in another time, and with the conditions of such a society, there was no way to compensate for social and economic failure except the will of another to recognize the situation. A simple calculus is that the man who is needing one day may find his way without you the next, and you may be in the same situation. Sharing within a band makes sense simply because the cohesion of the unit was premised on a primitive solidarity. If primitive bands practiced the moral philosophy of free trade, they would disintegrate rapidly. Even today, experiments in radical, ideological capitalism fail spectacularly every time they have been tried. This makes sense if you think about capitalism as an arrangement for five minutes, and those who read their Adam Smith would understand the regulatory role of the state and education in the entire arrangement. Adam Smith's plan does not work unless there is a state to ensure the honesty of trades, the soundness of contracts, the punishment of transgressors, and a political sense that these decisions are in the end made by human beings and not ideas floating mindlessly. The perversion of neoliberal anarchism, to say nothing of the insane stupidity of Reagan and Thatcher, would not function unless it cannibalized something that was established by better people. The primitive holy man is a beggar in his society. The productive labor is done by the ordinary men and women of the tribe. Holy men, for various reasons, do not join in these tasks. They could, and many spiritual leaders and visionaries would work along with everyone else. So far as his special religious role is concerned, though, it is not valued in economic or material terms at all. It should be clear that in primitive society, nothing like the technocratic dickering and dealing over value would take place. Trade as a concept in primitive society was the exception rather than the rule. The band, to be a cohesive unit, could not afford extensive value systems that could not be enforced by any consistent law. This is not to say that there was no exchange within tribes or that people were socially and politically equal. It is rather that trade and exchange within a band would have been an ad hoc arrangement, and these people were motivated to stay together by honor, duty, love, affinity for each other, mutual security, and concerns that could not be disrupted over the trivial problem of exchange. If a tribe has to destroy itself over grain distribution, that's a really stupid way to end an otherwise beneficial relationship. It does happen, but usually tribes fighting over material goods have long-standing rivalries. The material struggle only becomes the final straw, when the relations between tribes are strained; or the band of adventurers was premised on flimsy pretexts to begin with, and once the material benefit of the partnership was exhausted, it was better to part ways and act as if it didn't happen. What remains of these material struggles is not some hoard of whatever small surplus primitive man could acquire. When there is struggle and tension between people, forgiveness is not easy, and people will remember wrongs committed against them. People will remember wrongs committed against them which had nothing to do with a material motive, and everything to do with the stupid and mean things other humans decided to do that day, whether out of individual whim or out of collective pressure to play some social game. The value of social belonging and security would be most beneficial, so long as the material means to secure it were available.

There is already a motive to promote spiritual thinking because it would serve in obvious ways the needs of security and sustenance, but this in of itself is not enough. If the point of life is life itself, this would be a futile existence. We must ask deeper questions. Why are we doing this? How do we determine what is good and what is bad How are we to think about what we think? A basic awareness of the world, and then an awareness of basic political thinking, begs someone to think more, and to seek answers in places that are not immediately available. We can see what is in front of us, and we recognize political society without too much difficulty in the broad strokes. One large spiritual question to ask is why there is a universe at all, and if it has any purpose or direction. Another is to ask questions about ourselves and what we exactly are. To answer this question, we require spiritual authority which is not dependent on any temporal or material authority that we would find. In the extreme, a world without spiritual authority would seem to be a series of disjointed events, about which little could be said except that they happen and some causes and effects can be extrapolated. Even to answer questions of history and to derive meaning from our senses beyond the immediately obvious, we require some philosophy that allows us to make scientific claims and models. It is easy enough to say basic concepts like 2+2=4 without knowing the philosophical reason why. It makes enough sense to us to believe this without any knowledge of set theory, or a formal definition of numeracy. We can learn numbers and the letters of the alphabet, and practice by rote the basic results of single-digit arithmetic, and then we can be taught an algorithm for multiple-digit arithmetic without knowing what an algorithm is or why this works formally. It is enough for us to understand the concept of carrying or borrowing a 1, and a child is capable of figuring out from simple principles why this algorithm works. To properly ground this inquiry, though, we establish a philosophy of science or reason that allows us to integrate these understandings into a wider framework. Even if we have no formal concept of philosophy or science as such, we are implying such a thing exists when we speak of a general way in which the world works, and this would be necessary to speak of philosophy as anything other than words handed down from on high. Philosophy and religion are written by people, even if someone were to claim that the words came from God or Heaven or some revelation. The truth that any philosophy or religion points to, if the writing is concerned with genuine spiritual authority and isn't just brazen lies for lying's sake, is a revelation from the world to whomever expresses the idea of spiritual authority.

Spiritual authority is not just a word or a thought, and it is not just a theory. Spiritual authority presumes there is something real that surpasses both the material and the faculties of reason. Reason, science, and practice only serve as ways to know and act on this authority. The material world is only the foundation for scientific understanding and the conditions we operate in. Neither the material world nor reason alone dictate this spiritual authority, and it is not a synthesis or contradiction out of which nothing truly new is possible. It is not about struggle which is a very worldly and common affair. The interaction between two or more things that forms a system is not about struggle or contradiction, but about relations between definite proposition. The dialectic is just a method by which some basic concepts may be derived, without possessing a ready-made word to describe an understanding the dialectic leads to. The dialectic is not the sole method by which meaning is derived to create a new thing. The concept of sublating or abolishing the old for the new is a crass metaphor. The old never truly dies and the new need not be a singular proposition. The two old things may interface and create a third understanding to describe their relations, with the parts remaining intact. To destroy a thing is to scatter its components to the winds, and whatever features existed in the whole system can no longer remain operative. Perhaps a government falls, but the historical effects of it are a ghost haunting the present. The future is speculated in our imagination, and these speculations guide the present action. The methods we can use to derive understanding are appropriate to us not because they were ordained by a logic imposed from above, but because the methods are appropriate to our faculties. All of these methods point to a truth that leads to belief.

We have two tools that are important. One is faith. We assume, by some deep conviction, that some truth is real, and this is the basis for our further belief. Another is to suppose, for the sake of argument, that something is true, and work backwards to determine if it is so. The former is the argument of religion at its core. The latter is the argument of science, which observes a natural world that we have to presume exists. These things do not stand alone. Faith without any conviction is an empty word. To say you can be blessed by God by faith alone, and to not consider reason or anything to suggest that faith can be shaken, is to believe in a horrific lie that consumes understanding. Someone can chant Jesus, Jesus, Jesus ad nauseum, and forget the meaningful content of Christianity. They may begin to read into the gospels what they would prefer to be true, and these truths can be molded by a foreign agent to change the religion into something else. But there is also a false understanding of Christianity's history and the depth of debates regarding its doctrine. Simplifying doctrine to a few reactionary quips which are uttered without thought is a gross contraction or outright repudiation of what it meant to practice Christianity, in deed, thought, or faith. Christianity could not remain just a book and some words that were unmoored from any meaning. Even if the religion is a lie or a cynical ploy, Christianity existed because it pointed to some truth that was relevant to the adherent, and the material fact of the Church's existence had a definite effect on how Christians behaved, and how those around them would respond. Christianity, like any major religion, is not morally equivalent with another. Religions, and sects within them, are saying and doing very different things. All religions that manifest in the world create a historical impact that the creators of the religion might not intend, and cannot control simply by asserting that the Word, or whatever they argue is the path to the truth, is eternal and overrides what we experience. Religions are always tested against the experience of the adherents. If Christianity had nothing at all to offer to its adherents but threats and lies, it would not have the effects true believers believe it would have. It has long been known that the common people never really had faith in God, or an understanding of Christian theology beyond that which was deemed suitable for them. If ordinary workers or peasants read the damn thing, and then learned of the deep mysteries and esoteric studies in the religion, they would be horrified. Perhaps the common people see something sinister, know they live in a generally sinister world, and trust the devil they know more than the other devils who openly despise the infidel. Perhaps the adherent can see some of what Christianity pointed to and saw it as a good thing, but their faith in God was more about obedience to the social order and a sense of community and ritual. Most attendees of church are only going to investigate a religion so much, and glean from it what they can. When religion was taken seriously, the adherent likely would have some basis of Christianity's theory and philosophy and approach to the world. The adherent can likely figure out why a religion says not to do certain things, and to do other things. They can figure out the general thought-form a religion espouses even if they do not adhere to it, simply by osmosis if the religion is a notable presence or dominant in the society. Even though genuine faith in the religion has always been shaky, Christianity produced very obvious effects and values in society that were taken for granted by many an atheist. A prohibition on murder, an attitude towards mercy that was particular to Christianity and expressed differently in other charitable religions, an approach to life generally, a foundation for law's spiritual authority that did not rest solely on the right of the state to make laws as they please, and all of the characteristics that are common to European civilization would not exist if Christian faith didn't extend far beyond the dedicated fanatics. So did the more pernicious effects of Christian thinking affect European civilization. Christianity itself was born out of beliefs the Romans and Greeks already held, and adpated to their way of life while railing against the institutions of the pagan Empire. The theory of history where nothing changes until thought leaders declare it so leads to a bastardized version of history where Christianity is reinterpreted as a Jewish alien corrupt a pure European thought the Nazis and their ilk wanted to promote, stripped of any of its meanings. In this retelling, Christianity is presented as a series of empty sops, while trained liars exhort believers to continue holding blind faith. This was already present in the modern revolution, and would be advanced within churches that saw the expedience of doing this. A closer look at Christian thought and history suggests that this hypocrisy was a germ built into the religion's beliefs, that had a set time where it would reveal the real version of the religion. Modernity would be Christianity's mask off moment, and it is strange to this author that so many believe the Church has been somehow corrupted. This is because the understanding of Christianity was reduced purely to those sops, empty faith, and disingenuous bastardizations of rationality. The Christian origins of the entire European approach to science and institutions of education is conveniently forgotten, but the modern technocratic priesthood consciously emulated the methods and purposes of the Christian churches. The variants of Christianity presented today offer entirely different interpretations of the religion appropriate to the social caste of the believer, and to understand this requires an honest reckoning with many things before returning to the Word and its new interpretations.

The first principles held are only held so long as they comport with our understanding of this world. This does not mean that they have to stand up to scrutiny by reason, logic, or some standard outside of us. It does not mean that our first principles are arbitrary and created by ourselves for selfish purposes. We cannot help but understand the world we encounter, and all attempts to assert by thought alone that we can change the world are a greater foolishness than any sin I have committed. There are many who hold to this belief that they can control reality with thought experiments, and every single time, this belief leads to a creature that presses instinctively against the world and cannot think of anything but consuming the truth. Many Satanic views of the world rely on this belief, and the science behind them is simple enough. The belief that power creates the sole truth will never stand on its own. It must exploit and cajole other people to legitimize this belief. It cannot simply consume from the material world, as if everyone were a point of light following the cosmic non-aggression principle. It surprises this author that, for all the accusations he faces of childishness and immaturity, the most mature view presented in bourgeois society is this infantile belief in the power of positive thinking, and the demonic death cult that it entails. Any serious inquiry into life and truth correctly views this cult of positive thinking and its various memes as a cancer to be avoided at all costs. No one needs me or some great thinker to come to this conclusion. Ordinary people will, throughout their life, encounter those people who revel in this belief that thought commands reality. Those people claim that they follow the truest interpretation of religious tradition and cite some quote or Bible verse, or whatever flimsy piece of evidence they need to justify their selfish claims. The way these people support their belief is not by any reason or understanding they reach alone. The belief only operates because it can receive repeated confirmation and stimulus, which activates a reward center in the animal brain and reinforces the belief. It is the belief of a drug addict who is convinced he is some great conqueror, living in a controlled delusion. So long as such people can impose violently a tyranny on the decent, they can feed the addiction. Neoliberal society indulges in this, because it desired to consume what wealth the common people held onto by appealing to the ugliest addiction and venality. This indulgence is only possible because there are smarter men and women who know that the ideology is an offensive tool to be imposed violently. The point isn't that the Big Lie is true, but that the Big Lie is as brazen as possible and repeated everywhere. The Big Lie overruns the most basic processes of thought, until all is arrested. All life must die screaming, and that is deliberate and gives those who promote the ideology the desired thrill. The stimulus received, the predator moves on to the next thing they can loot. In this way, neoliberal society sought to plunder not just every material or economic thing, but every thought and whatever soul people possessed. This does not feed the soul of the predator. The predatory ethos encourages a venal soul with little interest in knowledge let alone any sense of beauty. The neoliberal artist revels in disgust, degeneracy, pointlessness, and cheap displays of superiority that grow weaker with every repetition. Nothing better is needed for them, and they seek the maximum thrill for the lowest cost. Why would a neoliberal predator seek to overcome genuine obstacles or discover anything, when destroying society and laughing as the common people are poisoned and ridiculed produces much more thrill for the lowest cost, and does the most to secure the predators' long-term position relative to the lower classes? The only requirement is that the apparatus directing this can maintain cohesion long enough to see depopulation and maximal torture through, and that the apparatus can direct its adherents to think of nothing but that which is immediately in front of them. It is not a surprise that everything in the therapy cult of later neoliberalism imposed this mentality explicitly and violently, while at the same time perfecting the stone wall of rejection and shame that would be erected around anything of value in the world. The entire ethos could only work if a strategy of lockouts and enclosure became absolute and invaded not just every space, but all thought and the spiritual world.

Seeing this outcome does not take a great mind. The advocates of this Satanic ethos claim that it is the only possible world, despite the need to impose it through extensive education, conditioning, and control of the natural world that was not possible until very recently. It has many antecedents, as human society has been rife with brutality and sadism. A disgust towards this ethos of predation is obvious enough that a young child reacts with disgust, not needing to know that what he or she sees from these people is bad, stupid and pointless. Its most extreme expressions provoke a disgust that is difficult to describe. The purveyors of a Satanic ethos like to claim that their hatred is so complex and magnificent, and the demon they are tapping into to perpetuate their rule is indeed a powerful one, but there is one hatred that is greater than any of their fickle emotions. That hatred is that of us towards them, and in particular those who refuse to abide the ethos. For this author and many others, compliance is not a choice. For many people, even people of questionable probity, the fullest expression of the predatory ethos must beg a question - why most people do not even think of this ethos, because they have been able to avoid its worst expressions for most of our lives, and they have things in this world and in their mind that they actually like and find far more worthwhile in any sense of the world. The extreme predatory ethos does not make sense if someone thinks about it at all, and the only way it has ever asserted itself is by overriding the most basic thought process and sense one would possess of the world. It can only work when it is able to declare that human subjects are, now and forever, disconnected from any material world, or any ideas except those that are permitted for them. It entails the abolition of all spiritual authority, not just for the prey but the predator. For the predator to fully adopt this ethos and attain its maximal potential, he or she must believe that there is no truth but him or herself, and then assert that God or something like it conforms to his or her expectations, purely as a just-so story to make the world conform to whatever the will wants. This is stated explicitly in modern Satanism, both in the vulgarizations for mass consumption and, in a more elaborate way, the Satanic belief system and practice that perpetuates itself. No religion would remain stable if it rested spiritual authority purely on "me wantee", but this is exactly the trap we are told we must believe in the predatory spiritual authority. The only thing this can do is turn everything it contacts into some indeterminate grey goo, regressing to a state where matter, God, and all things are unknowable and indescribable. Neoliberal orthodoxy and the ruling death cult revel in telling the masses that they cannot know anything at all, and laugh when the people are beaten into saying the line. Belief is not necessary. It simply must be taken for granted that you are not allowed to refuse the order, and that there is no way a contrary belief can be politically relevant. It implies that politics and the state invades the world entirely. Those who purvey the predatory ethos do not really believe in it for themselves. They know on some level it is bullshit, because they must flip between the Satanic way of life and a way of life that is necessary for basic existence to continue. At the same time, those who make this ethos paramount for society imply that thought alone commands the world, and must act accordingly if they want this ethos to hold power over those who have no reason to indulge in it. Cajoling and trickery only work for so long to herd the common people into accepting this ethos, and they only embrace it passively or after they are conditioned and mesmerized to follow the ethos without a thought passing through their brain. Certain training in the ethos is necessary for someone to channel for anything more than the instinctive, animalistic response the masters of the ethos desire. Those who only know enough of the ethos to issue commands appropriate to their rank in institutions will only be able to utilize it in selected domains, with the implication that those above them practicing the same ethos will have similar power over their enforcers. The chain of command for this ethos relies on unthinking and total obedience, even if the judgement of participants sees that obedience is contrary to their true interests.

At the top, the grand wizard or master is beholden to the institutions, as this entire apparatus is designed to take advantage of long-standing republican sympathies and processes to spread itself. A despotic emperor, in a society where the presumably solidaristic political idea of a republic has no legitimacy, would find his subjects laughing at the idea that the emperor can say up is down. Despotic emperors have to resort to gratuitious humiliations and shaming, make supplicants kowtow, and must also keep in mind that at the end of the day the emperor has to rule over an actual thing rather than an idea. The assumption of decency in people is what the Satanic ethos must take advantage of, where the despotic theory of government is that people are nasty and will disobey at the first opportunity if they sense the ruler is out to kill them. There's nothing stopping a truly capable despot from ruling with an iron fist, but to use the Satanic ethos as a way to rule society under the greatest tyranny, republican forms of government must be turned into a parody. Only in that way can the most abject dictatorship perpetuate itself freely among the human agents. No one has any reason to believe a despot has any idea that works to the benefit of the lower classes, and the ranks beneath the despot are motivated by a drive for advancement in the system rather than a sense of a shared interest.

Needless to say, the crudest models of government one might imagine are wholly inadequate for a complex state and society that must contend with the real world. This alone can drive people to seek spiritual authority to justify the state. But, spiritual authority cannot rest solely on an excuse to prop up the state and the games people play. Inherent to thinking life is a need to systematize all that is sensed, and so from the outset some guide is desired for thinking life to make adequate decisions, even if those decisions are not political or economic. The questions of survival do not take up all of our energy and time, and so we are left with the question of what, if anything, we do with our free time. This is not just a moral or ethical question. To answer this question requires asking questions about our nature, rather than assuming a model of Man or human or life or some other archetype we imagine when we think of ourselves. It requires asking questions about what things are, which is also asking what things do, have done, and will do in the future. It asks questions of the nature of time itself, let alone what time is free, and it asks questions about what is needed for life to sustain itself. It asks questions about society as a whole, and of political consciousness generally. There is no fixed rule in nature that we would have to conduct our affairs between each other through state society or the pretenses of a state. It is possible to imagine a construct in this world that did not rest its legitimacy on a state's legal monopoly on violence, and it is possible to ask questions about what the law even entails. The barest interests of a state do not necessitate that it must devour everything in sight to remain intact. States in principle do this despite claiming that their function is defensive, but the true nature of state society is that the state is aware it must feed itself. This requires a world and productive economy, and so a state's spiritual claim on the world may recognize that it would be better to let the producers have their day, or allow the slaves to be free. It would ask questions of the legitimate role of religion, science, thought, and all of the institutions we build. If we do not adequately understanding what we are and what we do, we cannot answer moral questions in any meaningful way. To claim that morality is a sentiment or incidental to politics is to have no sense of why anyone would accept state society at all. A state might be able to impose violent control by pure intimidation, but this is not a very cost-effective strategy. The obvious problem is that an army with no morale whatsoever will refuse to fight at any level against an army with any sort of morale or orientation towards a goal beyond mere killing. It's very easy to shout and scream about how war is glorious and bloody and violence is the supreme authority, but effective violence has always required something beyond retarded shouting or an abundance of resources poured into it. The society that feeds war needs more than the art of war to guide it. Producers who are told of sacrifice and self-abasement and nothing else see very easily that their future is nothing more than a dull slavery, in which the army they are feeding is a truer enemy than any foreign adversary. Without pressure to pit the producers and slaves against each other, it is very easy for producers to see the state itself as a clear and present danger, and see no reason for its continuation. No amount of ideological chest-thumping can make up for the daily humiliations state society imposes on those who don't fight. If the workers are themselves the base for soldiers, the war consuming the whole society leads to an intercine struggle against those who can't pull their weight, either as fighters or as producers. This has an obvious endgame, where the society returns to Hobbes' original struggle in the state of nature except worse. Workers do not need to see the state as their friend, since that is never actually going to happen if the workers think about the state with any seriousness. The workers instead would need to believe that their society and the project they are engaged in is worth living in at all, let alone suffering and dying for. Even if that belief is little more than a hope for the next fix of opium or some vague promise of an afterlife, the promise of sacrifice to the state is the second-worst pitch if you want to sell society to the workers. The worst pitch of all, as we see today, is that the workers should let a small elite of intellectuals and priests tell them what to think and what they are, and that the workers are too retarded to even be allowed the dignity of air to breathe.

Convincing the workers temporarily that any of this is a good idea requires vast expense and fear to maintain, and the logistical ability to permeate that fear throughout the whole society. The theory of a scientific dictatorship or the untrammeled rule of warriors and proprietors both lead to the same result - a society at war with itself that devours itself from within, sparing little in its path. The workers' genuine stake in any of this is not just their personal economic stake or their immediate relations. The workers, like anyone else, are self-interested, and do not feel an obligation to every other human or to a conceit of society. What is needed is both a sense of security and a sense that free movement is possible, both of which entail the same moral framework. A safe society is a society where people are free in a genuine sense, and a society where slavery of any sort is unheard of. This is the true basic demand of the lower classes historically. They do not want equality, or justice, or coexistence, or happiness, or truth, or some simple signifiers that are told to them as the things they should aspire to. The first demand is that this thing that rules over them must go away. Do not ask them how they will accomplish this, or how such a condition can survive. Do not suggest to them a model where this dream world will exist forever and without any threat to them. The low simply want the rest of these assholes gone, and then they will deal with each other. The question cannot be answered by any political theory or any scientific conceit of a managed society. The only answer that provides the possibility of this for any length of time, even in a microcosm that the worker manages to hold for himself, is a spiritual authority suggesting that something else is possible. It may be possible to brainwash workers to actually believe in the lies they are told, or get them to behave like animals and holler when commanded, but to even do this implies that there is some spiritual authority for workers to look to, which can tell them the news man on the television is right to tell the workers what they're allowed to think.

This need for a greater purpose had been evident when humans gathered in cities with temples, and a method to contain riots and unrest was most necessary to keep the social order from degenerating into open violence of all against all. The early history of religion and the struggles of classes within cities is one of the great questions dividing civilization from an earlier time where the clan, tribe, heroism, and primitive sentiments were presumed to rule. It never was that in the early day, where the old society was reimagined as a time of glorious hunting and the noble savage, but as we will see later, one of the founding myths of the state proper is that the state existed to abolish an old world where men were barbaric, wild, free, and heroic, into a world where states disciplined body and mind, and the division of labor into distinct classes and institutions would be a foregone conclusion. Once accomplished, the goal of the state was to naturalize what had been created, and project back into the past conceits that didn't really exist. Without a historical record from the early ancients that was accessible to all, it was not hard to sell this idea that the classical state was ingrained in humanity in some way, and its rise was preordained. At the same time, the grubbiness of society would be whitewashed to create narratives that suggested the victory of civilized cults over barbaric superstititons. The state and civilization were taken as the path to the good, and barbaric society was taken as a different path to the good, so long as violence was enshrined in both examples. The bad would be increasingly defined as that which opposed the cult of war and the interests of those who ruled the society spiritually and intellectually. This would meant that, increasingly, the workers and slaves would be told that their very existence was bad, and that they should be grateful that the master allows them to be exploited. Earlier spiritual authority before the philosophical state did not make many pretenses about slavery at all. To the Egyptians and Babylonians, slavery simply was, and the idea that the world could be any different was a pure fantasy. Freedom only existed for the noble and the strong, and things that would be grossly self-abasing to classical society were common features of the ancient world. The concept of being released from slavery is not even understood as freedom in a political sense. The Sumerian word for manumission referred not to independence but the return of the slave to their family. The political theory of ancient spiritual authority is that slavery was the default state of Man, and the free were simply more powerful slaves of the gods, and imposed the gods' will on the world. This was usually a state religion that changed with the next king, and the new king would say the new gods conformed to whatever he and the royal family wanted the gods to say today. This was never going to be popular, but the legitimacy of the priests was not derived from the consent of the governed but by fear. The nature of the state and society in this time was that primary loyalty was to the clan or tribe, and it was by policing the clans and patriarchs that the state exerted its rule in the main. The believer was exhorted to sacrifice to the gods at the temple, and the temple and what bureaucracy existed certainly kept records on what the state dispensed and what the state did to discipline its people. A formal theory of law cannot be pinned down, and sentences of collective punishment, arbitrary acts of the state, and things that flagrantly violated classical concepts of justice and law, were completely justifiable in that society. The spiritual authority did not have a concept of the individual's relationship to the gods, other than what the believer did to supplicate him or herself to the cults of the society. It should be imagined not as a state religion, but a collection of mystery cults and secret societies that did whatever they would do, and the state cult was just the most powerful mystery cult. The mystery cult in charge was basically the spiritual representation of the ruling dynasty and its court, and the enforcers of this had every incentive to align with some cult or another. There is no space in this arrangement for anything like a theory of rights or any theory suggesting that someone had any standing without fighting for it. Whatever counted as rights in that time would have been whatever ad hoc arrangements someone could make in that society, with the overall formation of society in their mind. If you had money or some basis of wealth, you could perpetuate yourself, and if you could impress others with some spiritual fad and didn't run afoul of the authorities you might make something of this - and the authorities were only interested in staying in power, with little regard for a consistent law. The law that exists primarily concerns what lawyers today presume the law is really about - collecting taxes, enforcing debts and contracts, and extracting the state's cut of productive enterprises. At this time, monetary economies do not exist in the way they would when standardized coinage became the norm. Precious metal served a function for international trade, and would enter urban society as a proxy for some equivalent of another commodity. For example, the shekel was understood as the equivalent of so much barley, and you could just bring the goods in kind if you really wanted to. Precious metal was more portable and didn't have the problems of spoilage, but there were not standardized ingots. In many cases, the goods to be traded were livestock, and legal punishments often entailed a penalty not in some sum of money, but in a fine paid with livestock, crops, or some mutilation or death of the transgressor. Finance schemes certainly existed, and considerable attention is paid to debt, with jubilees to release much of the bad debt that accumulated over decades. Likely, the jubilees correspond to some revolutionary activity to keep the people from revolting, because even at this time, any political mind understood that the rule of the game was to never, ever do these things out of kindness. Failure to manage these debts and the moral behavior of society is the listed crime of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the aforementioned great game of orgies and lurid practices that lurked in humanity reached its fever pitch in the story, signifying the nature of that great game and its link to the very thing laws were supposedly there to punish. The law in practice can easily be purposed as a tool to advance the very things Sodom and Gomorrah did, when the courts and the law are held by those who have no reason to end the rot, but there is an expectation understood from history that doing this is a really, really bad idea.

It is through spiritual authority that the ideas we hold about the world reckon with the material reality we live in. We require something that will allow us to know what is right, and our own sense will prove inadequate. A society that has been in place for a long time, which is far older than any of us, will somewhere possess knowledge that we lack. The same is true of any individual, no matter how vaunted. Even if someone had a direct connection to the entire process of everyone else in the society, there is a delay in receiving that knowledge, processing it, and for the holder of that knowledge to make sense of what is available. There is also the non-trivial matter of the world outside of society, which is vast. Humans always seek to pry knowledge from the world, for whatever purpose they have in mind. Even if we knew everything there is to know is the accumulated knowledge base of society, there would still be a necessity to confirm that information remains true, to say nothing of that which is outside of society's knowledge. For all the advances in science and all the records that are kept, humanity still knows remarkably little. In many respects, humanity has scarcely advanced from the 19th century, and in others, humanity has regressed. Spiritual knowledge and the content of religion which was once ubiquitous and held meaning has now become an unmentionable, and this knowledge was not entirely superfluous. The knowledge was not replaced by any alternative that was better. For the lower class, spirituality is stripped out of them and they are taught that no spiritual authority is possible. This is the "What the fuck do we know?" meme that became the rage as neoliberalism intensified its psychological assault. The destruction of religion was not about shattering a barrier to understanding, but severing the populace from any history or any comparison. Had there been any teaching of political or moral education, or any indicator of history, or any indicator of philosophy or the origins of reason, this would be different. When philosophy is taught to the minority who are judged "of sound mind", it makes reference to a religious past that did exist, because the concepts in religion and its associated philosophy passed down to the early moderns. Hegel and thus Marx are grappling with a political and spiritual thought that originated in religious civilization, and its encounter with science. It would not be possible to speak of humanism or freedom as concepts without this religious history, because they were particular to a religious view and earlier spiritual authority. To say that "science" or "the science" substitutes for these things is to undermine anything that would allow someone to even understand science, unless a scientific explanation were to account for political, moral, and intellectual thought. That explanation did not exist in the 19th century, but numerous plans to short-circuit such an explanation were the prime want of philosophy. By the 20th century, when enough knowledge had accumulated to answer through science these political and moral questions, in addition to many others, it was most necessary for those who ruled to sever the majority of mankind from any such knowledge. If what was done to us by the eugenists were debated openly, the extent of eugenist atrocities, committed by a distinct minority of mankind and in the most foul conspiratorial manner possible, would have been met with an immediate rebuke. The perpetrators of Nazism would have rightly dragged out, and the people would come to a conclusion that all forms of eugenism must be violently rooted out. The eugenists predicted this would happen, and so they sold their doctrine as exactly that - a total and ruthless purge of "bad people", conducted with the maximum of terror and sold as "justice". To do this, the eugenist must purge "justice", "law", "truth", "reality", and basic concepts of any meaning that is inimical to eugenics. Up must become down, and reality must be defined by thought leaders alone. The circle of philosophical development begun in classical time would be complete, and history would be arrested. The motives for doing this were latent in humanity and the formation of the state. There is one thing above all preventing this from full success. That is that no one has any good reason to truly believe in the program the eugenists advance, and the program has only ever made sense as a philosophy given to the lower classes alone. This was something advanced by the early modern philosophers, who spoke of a slave morality and master-slave dialectic that excluded all other relations. The world, as we know, is far more than masters and slaves, and most of the world, and most of our own behavior, does not concern slavery nor "freedom" in the philosophical, denuded sense. Freedom in reality is whatever escape from human slavery we can find, and the less we have to do with these permanent tyrants, the better.

Spiritual authority can be used for three purposes. The first is to know all of the actual things we encounter, by some system that makes sense to us. We are aware when we do this that the system is for us, and we are supposing there is something real that we are dealing with. This can be things we sense, or we can find spiritual authority in ideas that do not refer directly to a material world. A mythological story, for example, may purport to tell either history or tell us something about an imaginary world. From it, we can derive meaning without interpreting the myth as a literal story. The meanings we derive from interpretation do not change the words of the story, or the content that can be read by most people for the obvious interpretations. Usually a religion does not just say precisely what the meaning is, and this is done for a variety of reasons. The first is that certain explanations can't be spelled out, or meticulously connecting every dot would be laborious. In a time where religions could only copy one book or a small number of books and teach them, there was no way to ensure that every adherent followed the absolute correct interpretation. The second is that many religions and spiritual authorities are necessarily dynamic, because people change and the world around them will change. If a spiritual authority cannot respond to some new situation or incorporate it into the religion in some way, this presents a problem for that authority moving forward. The third is that stating the religion's tenets too explicitly would allow enemies of the religion to learn what they're up against. Every religion maintains an exoteric section, and an esoteric section. The esoteric sectors of a religion are almost invariably larger, and very often mass religions don't require the adherents to even know the core texts. The fourth is that there is a desire in many spiritual authorities to deceive "friends" of the religion about the true nature of the project. If someone were told that Christianity only existed so that a tiny elect of humanity would elevate to Heaven, and the rest of them were consigned to eternal torment and sacrifice, it would not be a very popular religion. If the eugenic intent of the religion were too well known, and it became clear that most adherents were not going to make it in the Kingdom of Heaven, not many people would believe they should be a ritual sacrifice, especially after they were sold the idea that the non-existent Jesus was the last sacrifice. Christianity could claim better than many religions that the theory of the elect did not necessitate the religion to treat others terribly today, whereas in many spiritual authorities, wanton cruelty in this world was either morally neutral, morally positive, or morally obligatory. A certain cruelty is inherent in Christianity, which became a more zealously followed rule as the religion matured. Christianity would turn to justifications for gross inequality under capitalism, and Christians would be among the vanguard calling for the purge of "sinners" who were thrown out of work by their good Christian bosses. All of this is still in line with a purpose of spiritual authority to know the world, even if the knowledge is of the arts of deception and who should be left out of the know. Knowledge is something its holder can limit, to the extent that it is possible. There is no easy way to read the mind or the mannerisms of the body, especially against a determined subject who refuses and resorts to extreme measures to never let knowledge leave. If pressed, a mind can, out of necessity, destroy knowledge it possesses to prevent the truth from being pried out forcibly. This is of little help, and any good torturer will tell you that torture is not a reliable source of knowledge. The preferred interrogation methods are manipulation and deception, if the objective is to obtain knowledge. If the situation has escalated to excessive torture, the torturer usually does not care about the truth and desires something else entirely.

The second purpose, on that note, is to command the world by imposition of will. This is not simply a matter of knowledge, but of putting knowledge to use and possessing a goal in mind. It implies a large knowledge base and a method to recall from it, and this knowledge base is formalized and institutionalized. Simply recalling something you remember would not be sufficient. The legitimacy of the spiritual authority grants that knowledge the status of being truth in the eyes of society, or at least an institution which purports to be useful to society for legitimizing certain knowledge. The institutions that hold knowledge, like the university, are not interested in knowledge for its own sake, but knowledge for this goal of commanding the world. However they see themselves doing it, and for whatever purpose they intend, institutions of spiritual authority always act in this interest. A spiritual authority of any sort will, at the least, acknowledge this use of spiritual authority as a possibility. Spiritual authority must be able to speak of morality and ethics if it is to say anything useful about the world and our place in it. If anyone tries to tell you that they are above morality, or beyond good and evil, they are a retard and should not be listened to.

Moral and ethical considerations are always something people act on, even for the most basic things. Whether morality is an appropriate rationale for a matter being discussed is different. There are many expressions of truth that have no moral quality. It is possible to say, for instance, that a certain religion is a death cult that glorifies torture and sadism and seeks maximum thrill, and this is not a moral statement one way or another. It is entirely possible to suggest that such a religion would be able to perpetuate itself and justify itself, given certain assumptions about the world and humanity, and certain aspirations the believers in that spiritual authority would hold. There is no argument to say torture is objectively evil or bad or wrong, nor that it is good or just. There are, though, consequences to these actions, which will incline certain people to see torture as good and others, typically those subject to torture, as bad. The consequences are never deniable, no matter how much moral persuasion is used. No bully has ever stopped doing what they do out of some sense of decency, and if they ever say they are, it is only because the bully won and shows its mercy, which is more insulting than the initial act. Torture as a practice will have certain real consequences, and a religion which glorifies torture is likely to lead to mass immiseration and a futile existence. Maybe someone considers this good because they desire the world to be exactly that, and see a return to total predation to be natural. These conclusions will imply certain things about where someone is looking for spiritual authority, and the orientation of their actions. Luciferian religions almost universally harken back to a time before time where the light was pure and good, and thus all social progress and development is bad unless it is commanded by not just an imposition of will, but the veneration of torture as "the position of reason". This, if you haven't figured it out, is the dominant ethos taught in institutions today, though to speak of it too plainly will only fall on deaf ears. In one way or another, the Luciferian mindset predominates the culture. It is almost always a trap, but at the higher levels of society, the same conceits about themselves and the past are applied, with greater knowledge of how to manipulate people and change the world. The conceit the ruling class likes to present is that the state and the ruling institutions hold all information and all virtue, and the lower classes are completely devoid of virtue and can be commanded like cattle, exterminated at will with no resistance whatsoever. This is the image that the ruling institutions always impose in their most virulent propaganda. They pair this image of a boot stamping on your face forever with a faux-revolutionary dogma which was always intended to fail, corralling resistance to a place where it will feed back into the ruling institutions. Usually the aim of the faux-revolutionaries is to win a place in said ruling institutions, bargaining in their way with the dominant powers. A true abolition of the old is never actually accomplished. The reasons why can make more sense in the chapter "The Principle of the Satan", but in short, destroying the thing that a revolutionary must capture would be counterproductive, and so even if there is a seeming abolition of the old, elements of the former regime ingratiate themselves with the new government. Every revolution in modernity entailed some or many of the officers of the old order joining the new liberal or socialist government. The fascist coups involved new men, selected on the basis of loyalty to the new program, joining the established order and smashing old expectations deliberately, in pursuit of a program that appeared to restore order, but was really a regression to this Luciferian light that declared it was the only historical progress.

When spiritual authorities establish an imperative about how to command the world, its core tenets cannot truly be challenged. It may be established in the authority that this command itself is dynamic, but once a spiritual authority makes certain claims about the nature of political power and social influence, it would lose that authority if its claims did not matter. No matter how loose this desire to change the world is, it always exists, and spiritual authorities are always beholden to it. A scientist might claim, time and time again, that science does not answer certain questions, but eventually, if science is to be a true spiritual authority or mean anything, it must either formally subordinate itself to another authority and cannot be agnostic, or it must eventually come into contact with the consequences of its practice. If science recognizes no limit to the command of the world, then morally, the will of the holder of knowledge becomes law; or worse, "Oceania has no law". In such a world, science would for most people cease to be science as we would have it, and a dual system would be taught where deliberately inferior spiritual authorities are created to entrap the losers in a world of lies.

The third purpose of spiritual authority is to present a master science or master theory, which is its claims about the true nature of existence, which are usually but not always hidden from view and not immediately obvious. In short, it must make claims to prove itself, through its own claims. This may be an esoteric mystery that is learned by careful study of core concepts, or it may present proof in the world as evidence. Both of these sources are tricky and not necessarily good. It is possible to take from the real world the flimsiest evidence, point to it and incredulously say "see?", jumping to conclusions because a certain aspect of the real world is prioritized over another. Eugenics, and biopolitics generally, does this gratuitously, with the intent of bifurcating spiritual authority and telling a different version to those selected to live, which is esoteric, and those selected to die, which is promulgated everywhere. Many political ideologies choose some germ which limits their utility to particular classes and interests, and do this deliberately. Religion encourages rituals and drags the devoted adherents into a mystery cult and practices. At the core of many spiritual authorities is not knowledge, but practices that are the true purpose of the spiritual authority's existence. A sex cult could present some spiritual authority ultimately because those who purvey it just want an excuse for lots of fucking, and for the great leader to have an imperial harem. It is sad to say, but the ugly truth of spiritual authority is that it is often advanced for causes which are stupid and petty if we think about them at all. Much of what we have done in humanity has been done not for any true cause, but because a few brigands and charlatans were able to convince everyone else that the orgies of elites were some special wisdom. Some poor fools thought themselves wise and drove themselves to castration, self-abasement, and death simply because they chased after this orgy, which had really been what the cults of power and many religions cared about. It is one reason religions often obsessed over marriage and sexual self-denial. Usually, though, there is some attempt to at least try to do something worthwhile with the religion. If the religion really is nothing but a sex cult, then that will likely be shown in the beliefs it espouses and the actions it takes. This function, then, is more to the effect of saying why anyone should follow this, or the reason this authority exists at all. The ultimate purpose is simple. If the world is taken as it appears to us with a naive spiritual authority, there isn't any purpose to existence at all. We wouldn't have any cause to care, and if we were devoid of any such function, we would default to saying "because that is the way it is". The end result is that the most deleterious habits in reality would become self-justifying. This has been exploited to great effect by the eugenic creed, in the ideologies it presents to the losers so that they will be demoralized, and so they will fall in line with a thought-leader preparing to overwrite their beliefs with new ones.

For these functions to be properly fulfilled, the spiritual authority must account, in some way, for past, present, and future - or, for cause and effect. It must be able to root itself in the past and look to the future, while responding to the present moment. It must be able to connect all of these so that coherent thought or some narrative is even possible. In our example way back in the second chapter, we started with the presumption that something exists. Our second presumption, based on our recognition that the world has been revealed to us, is that it is knowable. To say that the world, or any part of the world, is unknowable is to say it doesn't really exist or is some elaborate mind trick, in which case the trick should be bypassed completely and seen for what it is. To believe the world is knowable is an article of faith, but it is an easy article of faith to accept. Further beliefs about the world will ultimately rest on faith about what we see. We may be able to conjure a spiritual authority which claims the truth of the world is in ideas, and the material world is a temporary annoyance. We dismissed this claim earlier as a dodge, but it could be construed that the "real world" is the world of ideas, and concrete reality ultimately does not have any relevance. A court of law and the institution of the state does not care about what is materially happening, beyond that which it must tolerate. There is a presumption that some sort of fairness should exist, so that brazen falsehoods are not maintained in front of everyone's eyes. What is meant by "justice" is itself a funny thing, because to the ruling interest, justice serves the ruling interest and its associates, and was never a consideration for the lower classes in any real sense. It is just to lie to the workers, and there is a long precedent of doing this. Saying you have built a "worker's republic" does not change this, for reasons that may be apparent to those who study history and what the workers' republics were. It was in line with the spiritual authority of those who held republics and interpreted justice as they saw it, for their purposes. There may have been some sense that certain lines should not be crossed, or that healthy conditions for labor would allow the thing laying the golden eggs to reproduce itself and lay more golden eggs. Intellectuals, soldiers, lawyers, and so on do not produce anything really useful, and soak up much of a nation's wealth deliberately so that their enemies do not receive much at all, and so the conditions of deprivation motivate workers to compete and tear each other to shreds. For some reason, this arrangement is presumed to produce more things rather than less, but the other reason to do this is because the motives of the workers would tell them to not play ball with any of this in the first place. No one asked the workers if a republic was a good idea, and the idea that workers actually were involved in these constructs seemed like some sort of joke. Workers might have played along out of some sense that this is all they're going to get, but not once has a worker ever seriously expected government to give them much. Even when governments could do very easy things that would make everyone better off, at no cost to their legitimacy or power base, governments and republics in particular are dominated by a miserly attitude towards any worker. Even when workers are understood to need something more than a bare minimum, governments are hesitant to allow this, due to a rule that very happy workers will get ideas that they don't need their masters telling them what to do and what to think. On the contrary, every republic has operated on the principle that the bare minimum for a worker must always be threatened, or conditioned on compliance to a number of obligations that have nothing to do with work or any cooperative agreement. Despotisms don't even bother with the idea that workers have any say at all, but there are cases of despotic governments doing more for their people than republics, simply because the republican interest in miserliness is a team-building exercise. There is a strong pressure in republics to never be the one breaking ranks, which is informed by history and fear of another Caesar. Despotic governments often just beat down the workers. By default, most modern governments are either operating on republican principles of organization, even when effectively ruled by some dictatorship, or are beholden to such governments which effectively own a monarchy or some despot who was put up. Standard operating procedure usually means some larger body of people form an elite, and those elites will in some form or another hold the same interests a republican government would, whether they accept the current despot or make themselves available to sell out to another government.

A crass person will claim one of two things. The first is that spiritual authority is meaningless, and there is only temporal authority and base desires. The second is that spiritual authority and ideology are one and the same, and that they can wear new ideologies at will to create their own reality. This is incorrect and misunderstands the purpose of authority in general, and such people are invariably at the whim of anyone who is aware of what is meant by this. Often such people will look to superficial signifiers, shriek about anything with a hypocritical sense of justice, and are led by the nose by any thought leader pushing the right button. These people are not the true leaders. Those who adopt hypocrisy itself as a spiritual authority, in the way hardline eugenists do, are in truth invoking a different spiritual authority than any they claim. If someone advances the eugenic creed without being in that upper strata that is for sure selected to live and has the wealth, they are cuckolds and should hang their head in shame forever. Those who ignore spiritual authority, or act shamelessly or with disregard for anything spiritual authority does, set themselves up for failure. This applies to the honest but naive as much as it does for the crass and venal. Very often, honest men and women want to do the right thing, and believe to some extent that they are, when it was safe to do so. They might tell themselves it is right to keep their head down, or they shouldn't try to fight against something when they can't win. A desire for self-preservation can make honest people do things that weakens their sense of spiritual authority, or makes them temporarily drop their guard when encountering something they know to be wrong. It is difficult for the decent and basically good to go against a malevolent spiritual authority, especially when that spiritual authority's exoteric expression is that it is friendly.

A spiritual authority, then, usually seeks to be a constant. Its core assertions cannot be questioned, and any part of it which may be questioned can only be done in limited ways, and never without pushback. It does not deal with moving things or basic material things, but ideas that are held as permanent or essential. If change is described, spiritual authority only permits it in certain prescribed manners. Therefore, it is common for spiritual authorities to claim motion is referent only to change over time, or "motion is contradictory", to line up with whatever the spiritual authority says these things must be. The basic kernel tends to be very small, such that it can be adopted by a human with room to spare for everything else a human would want to do. It expands into a whole system, whether that expansion takes place in the compilation of texts or in the mind of whomever adopts it. This is not identical to the "world-system" we create for ourselves, which includes memory, empirical knowledge, all of the faculties available to us, and an overall sense of the world. Spiritual authority only speaks of a small part of that, and spiritual authorities are external to us. We refer to the holy texts, or some reference book, or some library that is presumed to have this authority to tell us about what a system says is happening. If we don't believe in the authoritative system, we do so at our own peril, or we operate with incomplete knowledge of what we are really saying. Usually, systems of spiritual authority are very well established by someone who spent a lot of time working out the finer details, or they are built gradually off the basis of others' work. The ordinary person looking for spiritual authority tends to seek out these established systems, and then only modifies them in a few ways, as is permitted by the spiritual authority. Spiritual authorities can allow for a degree of personalization. In Christianity, the relationship with God is a personal one. This is in parallel to a philosophical state's emphasis on the individual, that had long been established in law and was now made into a divine principle. Any religion, though, has a number of tenets that are absolutely necessary to call yourself a follower in any way, even if this obedience is only out of social obligation. There may be variants of a religion, cults within the dominant cult, offshoots, and thinkers who contemplate the meaning of it all, but if too much of the original authority is lost, a new spiritual authority must be considered, either from the old or from parts assembled in other spiritual authorities. No spiritual authority is created by men ex nihilo. The most ancient spiritual authority comes from our native sense and thought about the world, and we would have to do this in some way to think at all. Even if there is no language and only the dimmest sense, as it would be in animals, the constitution of thinking life requires it to regard anything it senses as real for its purposes, and must fit it into some sense native to it. The spiritual authority of an animal is not much, and so it is far easier to move on from that as man becomes a savage contemplating their existence, and then forms relations and can chat with another human about these things for the first time. Even well into the development of language, how people construed spiritual authority, and how they expressed themselves in word and in writing, changed considerably during the classical period. Very little in the way of written treatises comes down to us before the Bronze Age collapse, compared to the considerable production of philosophy, history, science as something we would recognize, and art seen afterwards.

Spiritual authorities, even scientific ones, say more about an ideal world where thought and reason are the primary understanding, rather than material ones. Science is presented in modern spiritual authority as something held over the world, as if the scientist were invoking some ritual to command and appropriate natural processes. This is what science, like any spiritual authority, would do. At no point is a spiritual authority purely concerned with knowledge for its own sake. It cannot be so, because to some extent, spiritual authorities cannot remain intact if they do not reckon with the reasons why people would adopt them. It may be possible to invent a nihilistic view of politics and society, but few people would carry it along unless they were desperate, and nihilism does not travel far except in our time, for reasons that are not difficult to see. It should be clear that for most of human existence, the lower and working classes have effectively maintained a fatalistic view of the entire human project and the societies they live in. It would be difficult to think of the world any other way if one were a worker. Spurts of hope have been crushed so many times, and if there is a drive for deep knowledge, it is quashed because the worker cannot challenge a spiritual authority which declares that workers aren't capable of "real thought". The proprietors have their version of this where bourgeois conceits replace intelligence. The intellectuals simply have an advantage of wealth and specialization in this spiritual authority, and decided time and time again that the workers lacked this ability. The intellectuals often seek to essentialize their faculties, and Eugenics is just one of the most virulent expressions of the intellectuals' program and by far the most aggressive creed ever pronounced. The worker has a strong rebellious streak when he or she must fight the ruling ideas, not because the worker necessarily believes they are smarter, but because the spiritual authority does not regard the worker as anything. The prospects of a beggar or the lowest grades of the proletariat are even worse, for they not only face the scorn of all other classes, but a long-standing hatred of the very idea that they exist. There are, as this author proves, poor philosophers who make their own harangues, however garbled, into a special spiritual authority. In every case, spiritual authority seeks to make itself unbreakable. It often is a going concern and should be permanent, but this is not a hard rule in the way it is for the martial state to proclaim its permanence. Spiritual authority does not do this out of a lust for power or dominance, but because if the spiritual authority were corruptible, it would not be worth much for any purpose. This is why idealism tends to be the dominant view of the world, even among those who claim their theories are wholly materialist. A genuine materialist view would be concerned only with what is true in the world of sense information, and would not assert boldly grand scientific dogmas, or encourage men to make bloviating tracts about their totally awesome theory that will work this time, we promise. The materialist approach to knowledge is often a slow grind, and a necessary one. Philosophies of science will often encourage the scientist to make leaps into the unknown with a hypothesis. This was how science would advance during the 19th century in a fashion that was somewhat chaotic. At that time, there was considerable literacy and there were men of humble origins who adopted a fascination with science. This was not done out of prestige, and many times the men taking this interest were not rich or particularly intelligent. Even as the scientific dictatorship of the 20th century took form and began crushing all sense of democracy, people of humble origin took an interest in science and history, despite lacking any privileged position or "right to speak" on the matter. This was something that was quite common in America, and even now, that sense of curiosity is part of the country's traditions and expectations. It has been bastardized and reworded so that most people are herded towards the eugenic creed, or towards complete bullshit, but there is enough interest in seeking a genuine spiritual authority that all of these false answers provided to us are unsatisfying. Many people around the world have some familiarity with this broad base of people who want spiritual authority not just from a pedagogue or priest or ruler, but for themselves. There is a need in people, more than ever, to know what they're living in. It is not just a question of idle curiosity, but a recognition that science, technology, and the intellectual pursuits play a far greater role in the 20th and 21st century than they did in the past. Even the duller of the workers, who are habituated to keep their head down and not show any intellect, often take an interest in this. No one has ever been fond of fools, and no one seeks to defend stupidity as a virtue.

The eugenists, who claim to be the smartest people ever and the only virtuous ones, are among the stupidest humanity has ever produced, and only they could promote the kind of forced retardation they impose on themselves, and then violently impose on everyone else. They have the gall to call us retards, but they are retarded. They are retarded. The problem eugenism posed to us illustrates all of the ways spiritual authority can be abused and turn into something horribly wrong. In the minds of the eugenists though, everything they believe about society and politics tells them to do this, and to not care if they destroy themselves in the process. The war against the many overtakes everything else, and within the higher echelons of the eugenic creed, intercine war for position defines them. This is expected from people who blood themselves with the most lurid sacrifices and brag that they force people to make a deal with the devil to make it in their world. The secret societies of Harvard and Yale know that routine and obligate anyone to take part if they want a career in high society. It's all fun and games for them to rape and torture, and they cannot conceive of it being any other way. That they are all inbred shits who wouldn't be able to lead anything without the willing support of scientists, who themselves indulge in their own depravity, doesn't matter. Spiritual authority does not have to be true to win. It only needs to win, if it can, by any means necessary. Once it wins, spiritual authority creates "reality", or at least claims that it has the best possible understanding and that its institutions are better than anything the plebs will make. Even a relatively honest spiritual authority will be wary of interlopers. New ideas are not necessarily right ideas, and usually a new spiritual authority will be an insurgency from the malcontents. It is just unforunate that humanity drew the most terrible spiritual authority possible, when concepts of science and nature and technology advanced to make real their dreams. The rise of technology itself is often blamed as the culprit, and that is exactly what virulent creeds like eugenics want to claim - that their rule was ordained by technology and some impulse in the universe, and that nothing else was possible. It was the development of a particular sense of spiritual authority that made this world possible, and this did not happen without a struggle. The eugenists did not have the spiritual monopoly they claimed, but they have since installing themselves destroyed historical understanding and context, and forbade anyone from suggesting that anything else was truly possible. Ultimately the enemy of the eugenic creed was not some other ideology like communism or socialism. Socialism as a theory had no problem with eugenics, and at various branch points, socialists aided and abetted the rise of eugenics, or at best looked the other way. Only out of necessity did the Bolsheviks fight eugenics, because a eugenic state was set loose to rape and enslave them.

Because spiritual authority is typically idealist, it often will make its arguments by rationality. Arguments that a a religion operates on faith alone are not true beliefs in the spiritual authority of the religion. It is necessary for a religion to invoke articles of faith, and religions often use deliberate contradiction in their exoteric beliefs as a test to see if adherents get the joke. When the actual authority of the religion is invoked, there are no more games with contradiction, and religions will reveal what they really are. Usually, the behavior of the adherents and their hypocrisies are a sign of what is really believed in the temples or churches. This behavior is not the sign of an unfaithful believer in of itself, nor is it a rejection of spiritual authority to be a bad follower of the religion. Piety and ethics are not requirements to respect a spiritual authority. Someone can be a very lousy follower of Christianity but still accept its spiritual authority, and because Christian values permeate much of European civilization even today, Christian ideas still hold spiritual authority even among so-called atheists. Deliberate repudiation of Christianity from former believers is surprisingly difficult. Very often, bourgeois society encourages dilettantes to pick up a mishmash of religious views that feel good, but these people usually show they do not really understand what a foreign religion says, and lapse into Christian understandings. The newer spiritual authority forming in the past century and a half proclaims an opposition to Christianity, in favor of either "science" or some Satanic nonsense typically. Usually, though, the "skeptic" just believes an incoherent jumble of vaguely Christian understandings, mangled by today's multimedia propaganda blitz into some parodic form. These people rarely have it in them to even understand the Christian position they are railing against, except that they think religion is lame and for people with sexual hangups. They often have no understanding of what the religion became during the neoliberal period, or the conflicts within congregations and in the wider Christian ideology and philosophy. They usually don't comprehend that most of the philosophical takes they espouse, all halfheartedly and without much understanding, are descended from a primarily Christian view of the world, sometimes with vague knowledge of Jewish culture and practices and sometimes with a bowdlerized form of Greek and Roman philosophy. Since the latter two were inherent in the construction of Christianity as a meaningful force in the world, the people who make stupid talking points about Christianity either don't know what they are saying, or are deliberately disingenuous. A Luciferian element of the Christian religion, where Christ is basically Prometheus, had always been latent, and this would be a seed for the transformation of spiritual authority currently encouraged. This Luciferian element was isolated and emphasized in the occult practices that prevailed in the British Empire, and that is where much of the past century's spiritual discourse comes from. The rest is considerable social engineering and public relations, where "skeptics" just repeat a dogma thoughtlessly, either because they think it makes them smart or because they are signaling obedience to the new spiritual authority. In any case, such people are never really honest and don't care about anything coming out of their mouth. It is worthwhile to note that in the broad strokes, Christian morality and concepts of law are taken for granted, and are more or less the default moral stance of the general public. Even non-Christians have been made to abide by Christian customs in countries where Christianity is or was dominant, and Christianity's practices influence global affairs and spelled the end of many old religious practices in their original form. Few religions would hope to be able to launch a holy war against the Christians or infidels in general and expect to get far, and that is a legacy of Christianity's pre-eminence. A world where Christianity really was on the back heel would be a far different place, in a way that would be evident. There would not be insinuations about Christians being sort of wrong or mistaken, but menacing culture wars and an exodus from the pews altogether, as Christianity reverted to being a minority mystery cult with a core of dedicated followers. This is because part of Christianity's spiritual authority is that it was going to make everyone get with the program by threats, social shame, and influence over institutions like the law.

It would be very difficult to avoid Christianity when courts make you swear to the Christian God every time you take an oath, and this is in practice what oaths are understood to mean even when a cursory attempt is made to swear on a different religion. This was only really permissible with either the understanding that "all religions sort of believe the same thing, so you're still kosher, and we'll give a special exemption to the Jews because historical reasons", or "you are swearing on a distinctly inferior religion that we are tolerating as acceptable". To this day, atheism as a genuine position places someone in a difficult situation with trust and oaths, but this is not particularly relevant as there are few genuinely committed atheists. Genuine atheism would lead to serious questions about spiritual authority, and whether the atheist would regard any law of the present institutions as valid. Typically, atheism of the Marxist type takes on pseudo-Christian or pseudo-Jewish characteristics due to the construction of Marxist thinking, so much that for certain purposes, communism could be counted as "belief in God" for people who took that seriously. Genuine atheism would not be afforded that dignity, if someone truly rejected the spiritual authority of any god in principle, rather than merely believing that God didn't exist. To do so, as we will see, implies certain beliefs about the legitimacy of states and the cult of power, unless the atheist can invoke a spiritual authority permitting those things without reference to a god or Heaven. This would not be easy because religious language infuses so much of what people do and how they even see themselves. Genuine atheists, who are few in number, will over time exhibit very different views about themselves, and many of them lapse into some vague mishmash of religious superstition, go mad, embrace nihilism, or turn around to become very religious once something speaks to them. To really commit to atheism as a position - and pissant "New Atheists" only worship eugenics which is not an atheist position at all - implies rethinking in a profound way spiritual authority, if it is to be a respectable position. I don't purport to do that, as I have my own views on this matter, but unless you are really going to defend atheism in the genuine sense, I don't want to hear about your argument that God isn't real or the stupid arguments that say God doesn't exist because of The Science. I will say here that if there is a god or gods, it has nothing to do with any religion thus far practiced by mankind, and it is highly unlikely humans will ever have any meaningful connection with such an entity. Humans really are looking to the heavens and seeing there what they either want to see or need to see when they speak of gods, and while they make useful metaphors for understanding human society and politics, religion proper almost always entails more than "faith alone" or the centrality of any god. Neoliberal America's attitude towards God would be grossly offensive to Christians a century ago if it were taken at face value, but the value of a pseudo-God for the group selected to die would make sense to the true believers who know what this always was. The existence or non-existence of gods does not change that religions purport to find spiritual authority from some source, and because religions were the first way in which humans built serious formal knowledge systems and the political consciousness of their time, religion would usually have to adhere to some truth to remain relevant. Religion would also create its special myths and techniques for controlling people, as this was the primary purpose of the institution rather than enlightenment; but the inner circle would not be able to rule through religion without some truthful knowledge of the world, and why their religion works towards that end. A religion that just said "God is awesome" or "Satan stronk" would be nothing more than a gigantic pile of shit.

Philosophy and science reproduce this in modernity, with the knowledge that they were once upon a time rooted in a priesthood and religious practices. Science has almost nakedly adopted the posture of a priesthood, and today's university originated as an institution to train a priesthood and train rulers, rather than the advancement of knowledge and truth. Everything about the university has less to do with promoting truth than it does with maintaining its authority to speak, and deciding who is allowed to have an opinion. It could not perpetuate itself any other way. The books and libraries of the university could be reproduced and distributed electrionically; before widespread electronic, computerized communication, it would not have been difficult to distribute libraries to every city and encourage the reproduction and distribution of knowledge. This was so self-evident that, to an extent, state schools encouraged this reproduction and initiative of parents and students, in order to meet the minimum of learning that was desired. During the 20th century, state schools realized that the people were getting too intelligent and capable. To reduce the possibility of rebellion, instruction would inject false understandings deliberately to retard development. The first and most obvious was reading comprehension. Phonics, or any useful method of instruction in reading, was replaced with rote exercises and beatings. Any child who fell behind was permanently and forever "retarded", and their failure was proof of their assigned rank forevermore. In this way, schools could choose who would be allowed to advance. In practice, the university and the school utilized favoritism, so that selected races and interests would promote regardless of their knowledge, while the disfavored would struggle just for a spot. The struggle was expected to exhaust any resilience in the student, and if he or she was fully processed, they would take a place at the lowest rungs of the educated class and told this is all there would be for them. This, of course, was ridiculous, but it was maintained because the institution understood its purpose. Ordinary people would defy these dictates out of necessity, but it was in the interests of those who ruled to maintain a chokehold on social advancement. Employers, who had during the 20th century formed an oligarchic interest where firms communicated with each other, were among the ways people would be selected to live or selected to die. There could be no middle ground in the long term.

Science in the older sense originally suggested a method that nearly anyone could adopt, and that was cheap to reproduce. The practice of science was more often than not something that occurred outside of the university or any academy, but was instead conducted by specialists in a trade, or by particular figures whose work was more occult than scientific. The proliferation of the scientific method was never really democratic, but entailed the general population engaging with science in a way similar to those who ruled. At that time, the number of dedicated scientists was few, and any source of new science was seen as valuable for the projects of that time. It was when the potential of new technology was seen that it became necessary to curtail knowledge of science. Accurate science would have made clear to even the dullest that conditions of deprivation were not materially necessary nor desirable. A dull commoner with some scientific knowledge could fashion weapons out of this technology to reverse the imbalance of power between them and those who fielded armies. This is still the case today. Gasoline could be used to start fires, and every technological implement can be used to disrupt control mechanisms that another would build. As technology meant more, it was necessary to sever from the general public a meaningful understanding of science. One truth that assisted this is that scientific knowledge was too vast for a single man of meager means to appropriate for himself, even if he were aware of the method and could detect which knowledge was bullshit, and which could be verified with his own senses and reason. A new spiritual authority had to rise to displace science, but a return to religion in the older sense was not possible. Religion, too, had taken off its mask and shown what it always was, and had nothing to offer most of its adherents except threats. It was most necessary to ensure that the general public had no spiritual authority to call their own, and that an alien authority would be created and injected into their lives. Eugenics was one authority pointing to that future, first by advancing pseudoscience from on high and telling the people they were infinitely retarded, and then suggesting some inchoate drive in the world that compelled the victory of the eugenic creed over all others. It is that authority which has been forming, and is already adopted by the vanguard who push along what has been happening. The rest of the people are left with nothing at all, and told this is all there can be. Derisive laughter is the default stance towards the idea that anything can exist outside of this. The spiritual authority of the scientists is only permitted if the scientists say whatever Galton and his cronies say, and in this way, science as a useful discipline is only practiced so far as it is necessary for the maintenance of the new order.

It is through spiritual authority that formal systems of knowledge are established, and then communicated. We can conduct this by instinct or by best-guesses, but even this implies that we adopt some consistent method to know what we know. Spiritual authority then consists of a few things:

-Core articles of faith, which are necessary for any further investigation.
-Storage of knowledge in some medium, which includes the core articles of faith. This can be nothing more than human memory, but without anything to store what is known, the authority can only say its core articles of faith and go nowhere.
-Methods by which knowledge can be understood and assimilated into a bank of such knowledge. New methods are only permitted with considerable consternation, and if they conform to expectations extant in prior knowledge.
-Claims to some real domain from which the authority can be projected, just like any other authority. Spiritual authority sets itself apart from temporal authority, and must be seen as something above it. Spiritual authority would pass from regime to regime, and suggests that it would be applicable to anyone who can think. If a spiritual authority limited itself to a particular race or clique, it would need to justify that claim to all and set apart the valid from the invalid. This is often the way spiritual authorities propagate themselves. Assigning a particular class or group status and placing them in the domain grants to the authority a voice and record that is seen as legitimate over any other voice or record.
-A general modus operandi and orientation towards certain objectives. That is to say, there is a purpose to why this is done and why belief is relevant. Saying the truth just to say it does not mean anything.
-Spiritual authority implies the existence of both temporal authority and the authority of all who can act in the environment. It recognizes both the rulers and the ruled as separate entities, and recognizes the extent to which rulers command the ruled. It recognizes the necessity of both to exist on its own. No spiritual authority exists without being a parasite on the other types. At no point is either authority truly eliminated. The rulers are tasked with ruling over themselves and each other. Even for a solitary human, there is a conflict between temporal authority that they would want or that they must adopt out of fear, and their basic wants and activities.
-Spiritual authority demands its own wants and activities that conflict with the prior authorities, and always seeks to present itself as superior to other authorities, including other spiritual authorities they are in contact with. Spiritual authorities are mutually exclusive with each other in the end, even if they recognize co-existence as a possibility. While people may adopt multiple institutions or guides for spiritual authority, the authorities will eventually need to be reconciled by the adherent in their mind to arrive at something usable, and directly contradictory spiritual authorities will be in conflict.
-Spiritual authorities tend to be going concerns. The faithful adherents would like to see them perpetuated less for the sake of individual adherents, but for the authority's sake itself. Spiritual authority is presented as organizing systems, defending nature or society or something valued, creating prosperity in its own right rather than by the labor of those who believe in it or are subjugated by it. The justifications may vary but generally there are a few justifications given for the orientation of the adherents. These justifications need not be honest or the true motives of those who believe in the authority. Belief in the continuation of an authority need not be absolute, for members of the institution can see for themselves the need to change their core beliefs, or desire such a change for their own motives, or adopt a new authority in secret with the intent of abolishing an institution no longer necessary for it.

Institutions, whether they are states, rites of education, concerns over some economic sector, or social units like the family, are almost invariably presented as spiritual authorities or in line with some such authority, rather than their temporal claims to property or violence or the claim that they generated the labor and did the work to make them exist. Nearly every claim people do make in society is made because someone believes they are right, or that their claims to property are legitimated not by force or desire but by some right that ought to be regarded as legitimate. It is possible for a spiritual authority to double down on temporal or personal claims, by claiming that the right of violence for property-holders is either legitimate in certain boundaries, or that it is life's prime want and to deny it flies in the face of common sense or in the face of deeply held convictions. Usually, though, the conquerors present some cause for fighting. It does not need to be just, and certainly isn't to the conquered, but to rape and pillage for the sake of doing so suggests the obvious outcome that another such conqueror will do the same, and that the members of society would have every reason to reject such rule and will fight bitterly against it. Many times, though, spiritual authorities present themselves as neutral or above temporal concerns, and make some claim, however dubious, that they are effective mediators between temporal or personal factions. The gain for officers with very temporal or personal concerns is often obvious, but by imposing the idea that their extraction of the national product is legitimate or preferable to another such authority, dissent is mollified. Unlike temporal or personal authorities, some attempt at universal legitimacy is made, as to do otherwise would open questions of a spiritual authority's failure if confronted by others like it. A spiritual authority can limit its purview to something appropriate to its knowledge base and the expertise of its members, but in doing so it usually declares some spiritual authority that allows it to remain in that area of expertise, even if it is a vague one. A large authority might delegate functions to subordinate departments, but always has some sense of where those departments fit in an overall scheme of knowledge.

This spiritual authority is granted to instituitons which are very temporal in purpose. An army often align with or subordinates itself to some spiritual authority, even when recognizing that rule is legitimized by armies and the tax they extract by the sword or at gunpoint. By itself, temporal authority only has threats, and this is the chief instrument of states. Because threats and lies are very expedient, spiritual authorities often invoke them, sometimes with a veneer to say they are something else, but in other cases the threat and the lie is much more present, because the right to threaten is made explicit and a guarantee is made that threats will be followed through with more than brute force. To accomplish their mission, spiritual authorities will take a certain portion of material product and require an enforcement arm to maintain themselves, even if enforcement is to be as pacifistic as possible. Spiritual authorities often present themselves as friendlier than temporal authorities, but in actuality, spiritual authorities go above and beyond the cruelty of a small-minded despot or manager. Their objectives, if they set their mind to doing so, are far more insidious than something that would occur to a man by instinct or crude reasoning alone. Woe to anyone who believes knowledge will set them free! It has never been the case that science, technology, reason, intellectualism, art, or anything vaunted by spiritual authorities has existed for liberation. It is quite the opposite - the intellectuals throughout history have been far more predatory than other classes, often working alongside armies because the army and exploitation were the obvious path for the intellectual to perpetuate themselves. Modernity suggested an alliance between science and industry, but this alliance was of a particular sort, and could have gone in many different directions, had there been concerted effort to do so. It turned out, as we will see, that the tendency of humanity was that the spiritual authority of science aligned most with the temporal authority of capital and the drive towards exploitation and competition. The rise of eugenics was not ordained by any natural force or suggested as the only possible outcome, but it happened because there were antecedents that at first were not questioned. When the eugenists decided they would no longer tolerate anything in their path, those who would act against them would be systematically destroyed and humiliated. That has been the program at work for the past century, starting in earnest with the first world war and continuing to the present. This meant that eugenics would, by its own admission, begin a new religion, a new cult, and new practices. Unlike past spiritual authorities, which reckoned with reality and had a desire for political truth at some level, the eugenists revelled in blood and deception, and could make mystifications endlessly due to a chokehold on the economic forces of society. Why this happened is something that should be explained to see why our lives became this, and why we had to suffer so much for so little; and there was truly nothing at all gained from the entire eugenics project, except torture and misery for their own sake. The crusade of eugenics was primarily spiritual rather than driven by material necessity or contests for temporal control. Its partisans operated across the world, always seeking to control and cajole the conflict between states, nations, races, and interests, and insisting that no one can challenge the holy shibboleths of the eugenic creed. It did not win totally this fight until near the end of the 20th century, but nothing in humanity ever stood explicitly against the creed that was allowed to stand on its own, with opposition to the eugenic creed being its primary objective. To go against the creed was to go against something that had been engineered and favored by a vast conspiracy, the only conspiracy more foul to the lies that brought about civilization in the first place.

The economic ingredients available to a spiritual authority were described in the past chapter. Generally, the spiritual authorities presented themselves as scholars possessing formal knowledge, and their chief opponent would be the untouchables or any suffering class. The spiritual authorities either enabled everything of the warriors and mercantile interests, or were offered as a check against one group and a way to collaborate across the interests of society. Temporal authority typically recognized property, which the intellectuals of the state wrote laws to protect in one way or another. This usually meant that states would remain beholden to slavery, in one form or another. Chattel slavery would be displaced with serfdom and the enclosure of farmland, and eventually this enclosure forces farmers to either die or turn to the cities if they wished to live. When these peasants came to the cities seeking work, it was understood to everyone that they were entering into a relationship that was effectively a slave system. The peasant was subjected to laws and institutions which policed their movement, obligated them to a capitalist during their time of service and obligated them generally to offer to both the capitalist and the state submission. The workers had no rights to speak of, and could not bargain the terms of their contract in any serious way. There were no advocates for the workers, since they were "free" and formally there was no law regarding their status. The workers were shown workhouses and the fate of beggars if they refused to comply, which allowed the capitalists and the bourgeois generally to impose harsher conditions. The workers would be driven into greater and greater poverty, told this is "freedom", and encouraged to fight among each other for position. The small charity that was once permitted by churches and neighbors would be revoked. The church's revocation was easy, since they always held that the poor were leeches in their doctrines. The punishment of neighbors and fellow workers helping each other out would become both a social obligation of the free and a law. Failure to comply with dictates to cast out a disobedient worker meant punishment, up to and including collective punishment. Associations of the workers were outlawed, in clear violation of any concept that the workers possessed any rights the liberals spoke of. Workers who transgressed certain lines would be publicly humiliated or executed, with no regard for precedents that prevented cruel and unusual punishment. This would not be enough, for the numbers of workers were too great, and the workers had every reason to not go along with this. Police forces were established to impose the general fear in urban spaces in a way that hadn't been done before, but this too was insufficient. The workers could never win their struggles, and were almost always alone. The bourgeois, to a man and woman, could not conceive of a world where the workers actually had a say in their affairs. All spiritual authorities the bourgeois followed suggested that the workers should be grateful that they live at all, and that torture was in some way or another justified or glorified. This was replicated in the dominant religion, and every other religion a worker could turn to. Only out of necessity and expedience was there any relaxation of punishment against the worker. This was done almost entirely because a class of technical workers would be required to staff a growing bureaucratic state, and setting certain of the workers against each other was amenable to the long-term project of nations. Every movement that spoke of liberating workers at all always chose winners and losers, and in practice favored only certain workers to rise. The workers would rise only so far, then they would be told they were beholden to the institutions to protect what little they had. All that would be necessary would be to impose the threat that these workers had nowhere else to go, and what they had could be taken away arbitrarily with a word from the masters of society. The better-off workers would, only after a couple of generation of habituation to accept this, be given "champions" that allowed them some tie to bourgeois society, and these advocates never offered much. The advocates would claim credit for victories the workers won out of a dire struggle for survival, and then claim that "victories" which deepened their submission to bourgeois institutions were something to treasure.

As this insinuated itself starting in the middle of the 19th century, steady work among the favored classes would ensue to construct a spiritual and temporal authority which would never have to give a single thing to workers ever again. When done, all promises of class mobility would cease, and the final sorting of the population would begin. Some were selected to live, and others, who were most of humanity, were selected to die. Those selected to die would either become de facto slaves, or would simply be liquidated in the open. The thrill of torture would become the chief value during the period where depopulation finished what was implied in the liberal revolution. All others would become inadmissible. Such is the true nature of the so-called "enlightenment", inspired in part by methods used by Asiatic despotism to suppress rebellion, like a caste system and many methods of education which were intended to stunt development and make students kowtow - literally - to enforce discipline. The worst of all worlds would be tested at the site of a grand social experiment. That experiment, as you probably know, is the country of America, and specifically the United States. At the time of this writing, no country is more thoroughly propagandized and controlled, with more of its population incarcerated. No other country built a slave system as elaborate as the United States, and no other country insinuated its university system to occupy the role that it does here, at the forefront of the imperial project and oriented towards eugenics.

To properly understand why this happened requires understanding the alternative spiritual authorities offered, usually with disingenuous intent, and their temporal and personal basis. A vulgar narrative presents what happened as the result of inevitable natural or material forces, where nothing else could have happened. Everything about eugenics and depopulation has been a deliberate choice, imposed in spite of any stated objective a state would advertise to its people. Many who are made to carry along the dictates of eugenics do so knowing they are cannibalizing any base that would improve their own position in the structure. Some of these people simply do not understand in full that they are advancing eugenics, but most are aware of what side of the war they are on and do so because they like living, and have seen the consequences of picking the wrong side. If humans are presumed to be crass or venal actors primarily, devoid of morality or ethics, then no understanding of what happened is possible. This has been one of the driving principles behind half-baked "theory" which believed it could arrest and predict history, where men were not moral creatures. Men did not need to be morally "good" to be driven by morality. It was not accepted in the false theories that humanity has been, in the main, evil or at least "bad". To accept that was seen as an admission that evil will triumph, and therefore admitting the truth is unacceptable. This understanding of human evil, though, was not always available, because it was able to disguise itself in a way that appeared "good", or at least neutral, or the evil was seen as a foregone conclusion and to oppose it was "retarded". The entire practice of capitalism or free trade is nonsensical if economic behavior were not seen as primarily moral behavior, however much self-interest is considered the obvious motivator. Self-interests are still moral interests, and it is not unusual to expect human beings to wish life rather than death, sacrifice, torture, or most things we recognize as bad. While these stupid pseudo-scientific theories of economics would be advanced, the smart manipulators were setting in place a moral philosophy and order that did not experience the difficulties of free trade and the prerogatives of its participants. Eugenics, and many decisions made by a capitalist, were not forced by necessity or by competition, but by deliberate choice or by collusion of the participants. Collusion would set the rules the bourgeois applied to each other, the ways in which they could fleece the workers, and the ways in which they could bargain with the commanding heights of power and influence. At the apex, desirable interests and groups would be found and approached, and certain of these interests were indispensible for maintaining a high elite which lacked anything substantive of their own. What remained of the old aristocracy would be displaced by a new aristocracy of the greatest capitalists, and officers of those capitalists who would be the new knights and court officials. Those at the apex of the system could see clearly the necessity of vigorous action. The struggle between labor and capital was not one initiated by labor, but by sectors of capital who saw what they could possess and how they would create its conditions. Those people would be aided by men who considered intellectually and spiritually what humanity could be, if the right incentives were presented. The richest of the rich were not motivated by a crass need for profit or a lust to own everything for its own sake. The rich, like anyone else, were motivated by things any other man would be, and their position freed them from fear of competition or serious defeat. Those at the commanding heights did not face a struggle for existence. They would, by the middle of the 20th century, win and impose the terms of victory. "Defeat" after this point did not entail their destruction, but merely a setback or a change in their relationship with close allies. Actors who face total defeat could not behave in the way the principal actors of the 20th century would, and would have made some rash move that undermined everything that was built.

In all of this, one important reality must be kept in mind. Democracy, or any mass politics involving the people, entailed that those people all possess spiritual authority to decide for themselves what is true and false, and did not surrender this to any institution out of fear. Institutions in any democratic society can only be said to possess true spiritual authority if they can prove themselves to people who have every reason to distrust any large institution. Individual workers and members of the bourgeoisie alike saw the encroachment of bureaucracies and institutions of science as a menace. The objective of the democratic forces had always been for the workers and those outside of the institutions to maintain their hold on truth, for themselves individually and collectively. The objective, then, was for education and learning to remain in their own class, and for workers and those outside of the ruling institutions to maintain their own institutions. This tendency would be played against those who were outside of the ruling interests. Bourgeois fascination with fads and get-rich-quick schemes would be accelerated, and they would be told that workers or some inferior race was holding them back. When these people were to conduct their own education, they would have a mind to keep out workers and races they considered inferior, and every identity and marker of behavior would be played up. This was obviously contrary to the aims of the bourgeoisie who were to be dispossessed. To mollify them, largesse would be giving from the commanding heights to incentivize certain behaviors, and elevate those of the bourgeois whose predominant attitude was self-abasement and supplication. Those people would first gain position in the society the ruling institutions imposed, and then those people would be sent out to "jump in front" of any attempt within their own class to formulate a counter-position. This strategy would be deployed first in the Open Society, and then globally when communication networks brought together people far away. The opening of the internet, and suitable control mechanisms to intimidate anyone who spoke too plainly, would be a testing ground for this strategy. Influencers today manipulate the remnants of the dispossessed bourgeoisie so easily that it has become a running gag. For the workers, the use of stochastic terror and fear, seeded in primary school and by influencers promoting drug culture and competition to climb into the failing bourgeoisie, would demoralize anyone who believed anything else was possible. The workers would then be sent to attack each other in gangs, and the primary purpose of working class employment has been nothing more than liquidation of their own class, with occasionally retribution against the dispossessed of the petty bourgeois who were in reality selected to die. The critique of capitalism would be repurposed entirely to encourage this intercine war. For all intents and purposes, capitalism as a meaningful enterprise ceased at the conclusion of the second world war. Monopoly capitalists formed an oligarchy that was completely freed from competition, and would reconstruct the world in accord with a plan that suited them. Grand institutions of the ruling class would plan in great detail what life would be in the world to come, and this was somehow sold as "freedom". In many ways, the socialists won what they actually wanted. A technocratic polity had suspended meaningful expression of democracy, which everyone who mattered agreed was for the best when all was said and done. Anyone who protested too much obviously wasn't right in the head, and since the dispossessed were visibly at odds with the manner of living suggested by the new vanguard, it was easy to sell the idea of political insanity as a way to control dissent. The spiritual authority of new institutions had to be constructed, but this spiritual authority was premised not on any truth. It was instead premised on lies and an appeal to greed that could impose itself forcibly. Empires create their own reality, as they like to say.

The tendency of spiritual authority to create its own reality is inherent in the concept. What starts as a way to reckon with the material world can only do so through communication of ideas and their interpretation by people. The media used will only express ideas, and primarily concerns our ideas of the world rather than its base level existence. We create theories and models which have some explanatory power, and how we understand them personally is not of great concern most of the time. So far as spiritual authority has invested itself in the peoples' understanding of the ideas, it has only been interested in ensuring pedagogy imprints the correct thinking process, or suggesting a limited number of ways the subject can arrive at the correct answer. In modern times, the interest in examining how others think was almost entirely about restricting the range of permissible thought for subordinated classes. The idea that such an investigation would apply at all to the most favored classes would offend every sensibility of those who see themselves above any charge of political insanity, and certainly above charges of being retarded. Even if such people cared about long-term damage to the people they subordinate, no spiritual authority can ever criticize itself too harshly. The university, for obvious reasons, will not allow a sustained critique of itself to hold any real legitimacy. Any such critique would always be a sop sold to the lower classes, and always dodges any central question. If the truth is acknowledged, all that remains is an assertion of force to legitimate the institution. Since those selected to die will soon no longer be a concern, all that is needed is to lock them away and ensure that they suffer if they ever poke their head out. The loyalty of the subordinated class is unnecessary. The ruling ideas could just as easily let the slaves live in their own world, and this has been suggested time and again as the correct answer to make the slaves love their slavery. It never works, because the truth of slavery always rests on a lie, and the lie is usually not believable or intended to be believed. Attempts to sanitize slavery only serve to make its imposition more galling and exploitative. Never can the ruling institutions suggest something that would be inimical to their rule, unless it was time to move to a new spiritual authority. This usually means those doing so move laterally over, as if the ideas they held before are in the past. Those who suffered for their former rulers are not so quick to forget or accept that anything has changed. This was exploited heavily in the transition from liberal capitalism to technocratic rule. For many in society, the idea that anything at all changed was not to be suggested, and anyone who pointed out the consolidation of interests in a few institutions was told to keep their head down and shut up, with gratuitous threats for those who persisted. We are told to believe in capitalism, despite the capitalist veneer of the institutions being obviously ruinous. Nothing about neoliberal capitalism is intended to function. The economic plan espoused by the neoliberal ideologues is only something that would be done to plunder an already-existing economic base and liquidate people as quickly as possible. Then this liquidation is sold as "freedom".

To remedy this problem, spiritual authorities usually include in their methods a way to test what is a true teaching or true practice, and some fidelity to intellectual integrity. At the very least, the institution must be able to defend itself intellectually against foreign ideas. There is usually a need to allow the faithful to test the claims of the authority against something outside of it, whether that is another idea or material reality. At no point can a spiritual authority submit to material reality. Philosophies of science ultimately rest on the legitimacy of beliefs rather than subordination to a material world. The naturalist wants this spiritual authority to accurately reflect the world they interface with, and so they admit the possibility that a tenet considered standard could be wrong. At no point does the naturalist give up a core claim of naturalism, or what can be proven with the scientific method. There is in the world of scientists multiple approaches, and science is often practiced by members of a particular faith, who keep religious matters in a different domain from questions of science. Scientists will disagree with each other on the proper purview of science or a particular theory, and many times will betray their political or religious convictions, or their membership in organizations that are hostile to the general public. There are many scientists who do nothing but the eugenic creed. What they conduct may be perfectly valid science by the rules set out by the authority, but their actions are always directed towards their true aims. Perfectly valid science can still be "bad science", because the objective of science is not to arrive at a final truth, but to present a model and theory that is useful for the spiritual authority's three purposes. Bad science has the problem that someone who is knowledgeable about the methods of science can disprove it, or create a better theory. At no point do scientists submit to the world in search of the truth, at the expense of themselves and the institution. That would undermine everything they hoped to accomplish, even if the answer they arrived at were true.

Without spiritual authority, temporal authority would have little to go on except the means by which it can perpetuate itself. In describing the affairs of a war machine and the war cult, it is helpful to keep in mind that throughout all endeavors of war, there is always a spiritual authority seeking to commandeer it. In describing the war machine and its associated cult, I hope to describe the incentives war and miltiarization as a practice create in society, both for those who aspire to lead it intellectually, for the productive work that is required to feed the war machine, and for those who have no place in society and are among those who usually suffer at the hands of war, in one way or another.