/lit/ - Literature

>From the beginning the human machine presented two aspects: one negative, coercive, and too often destructive; the other positive, life-promoting, constructive. Yet the second factors could not readily function unless the first were in some degree present. Though a primitive form of the military machine almost certainly came before the labor machine, it was the latter that achieved an incomparable perfection of performance, not alone in quantity of work done, but in the quality and complexity of its organized structures.

>The difficulty was to turn a random collection of human beings, detached from their family and community and their familiar occupations, each with a will or at least a memory of his own, into a mechanized group that could be manipulated at command. The secret of mechanical control was to have a single mind with a well-defined aim at the head of the organization, and a method of passing messages through a series of intermediate functionaries until they reached the smallest unit. Exact reproduction of the message and absolute compliance were both essential.

>This grand problem may well have been first worked out in quasi-military organizations in which a relatively small body of hunters, roughly disciplined to obey their leader, were addressed to the task of controlling a much larger body of unorganized peasants. At all events, the type of mechanism created never operated without a reserve of coercive force behind the word of command; and both the method and the structure have been passed on, almost without change, to all military organizations, as we now know them. Through the army, in fact, the standard model of the megamachine was transmitted from culture to culture.

>Action at a distance, through scribes and swift messengers, was one of the identifying marks of the new megamachine; and if the scribes formed the favored profession it was because this machine could not be effectively used without their constant service, to encode or decode the royal messages. "The scribe, he directeth every work that is in this land," an Egyptian New Kingdom composition tells us. In effect, they probably played a part not too dissimilar to that of the political commissars introduced into the Soviet Russian army. They made possible the constant 'report to political headquarters' essential for a centralized organization.

>If one single invention was necessary to make this larger mechanism operative for constructive tasks as well as for coercion, it was probably the invention of writing.

there will probably be a lot of 40k art ahead.