Territorialization and Deterritorialization: Why Inhuman Systems Are Hijacking Politics | 9/30/26

0:00This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manager account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pasquies, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See PayPal.com slash protection terms. All human institutions, customs, traditions, and ways of being originate to serve the needs of specific peoples. The collective experience, struggles, and beliefs of a tribe create a pattern of being or a code that organically rises to meet their specific challenges and perpetuate their way of life. These institutions and systems are territorialized, meaning that they are deeply embedded in the specific cultural context of the tribe and serve its unique needs. The seafaring civilization centers cultural values of exploration and trade.

1:04The agricultural civilization centers consistent rhythms of sewing and reaping. The conquering society centers martial prowess and honor. Every system emerges with the concrete goals and well-being of a particular people as it's in. Territorialization is critical because it ties the goals and operations of a system to the needs of the people who are embodying a way of life. The idea of metrics, which evaluate the efficiency of any given system, are foreign to a territorialized institution. Systems don't exist for their own sake, but are only valuable in so far as they serve the ends of the tribe. Those ends are determined by the specific way that people live their lives and the tell us to which their culture is oriented. There's a hard limit to how and for what purpose a system can operate. The limit is the day-to-day continuance of a particular flesh and blood people. Systems which are properly territorialized will be governed by the particular

2:06folkways of the people they serve. Trade may be governed by the market, but marriage is governed by the power of the tribal patriarchs. Worship is governed by the priesthood. Warfare is governed by the aristocrats and the power of the state is wielded by the king. Each of these domains has its own sacred place in the order, but importantly, they also draw their power in very different ways. An outsider might be confused by the purpose of each system, finding its origins perplexing or its operations inefficient, but no one needs to explain the purpose of the systems to the tribes that gave birth to them. This is the way things are, a natural outgrowth from the traditions of the people and the challenges they face. The territorialized code arose from the people and serves the people. No one else needs to understand or validate it. In traditional societies, the entire system is designed to maintain the tribe as it is, to achieve homeostasis. The tribe doesn't produce less than it needs or more than it needs.

3:06Marriage to outsiders is rare and generally considered taboo. The warrior class draws only from people who are inside the tribe and doesn't elevate foreign troops. Religion, culture, and tradition are exclusive to the people of the tribe and are generally impenetrable to those who attempt to adopt them from the outside. The purpose of the territorialized code is the maintenance of the tribe as it exists. It doesn't have to have its own agenda or logic. The code and the people are one. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen, snacks, a stapler, the new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manager account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and paskeys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See PayPal.com slash protection terms. One of the easily observable patterns of history is that successful organisms seek to expand.

4:11And this is just as true of the biological humans who carry the code as it is for the code itself. As the tribe becomes successful, it needs more territory and resources to expand its population, but the need for expansion is not just material. It's also spiritual to expand the tribe must acquire territory and resources by conquest, whether it be military, diplomatic, cultural, or economic glory, status, and wealth call to the ambitious members who recognize the opportunity for greatness as the civilization breaks out of homeostasis. The code may provide barriers to this expansion, attempting to limit the production of wealth, the acquisition of territory, and the influx of outsiders that will inevitably change the tribe it was created to maintain. But there's no denying that the great civilizations remembered by history are the ones that slip the bonds of the code and are overcome by the desire for greatness. Is mere existence enough or is the point of life to do more than maintain that which you were born to? Like the uncontacted tribes of the Amazon,

5:14a people might exist in the same way for thousands of years if they maintain stasis, but is that truly the desirable end? Either way, that's not a question civilizations ever really ask themselves, or a one which they make a definitive decision on. If greatness calls men follow, some to their doom and some to their glory, but the call is one of nature and not one that is chosen through deliberations. As the society expands, it finds that the code is no longer sufficient. Those systems arose from the specific circumstances, challenges, and beliefs of the tribe. Conquest means that the tribe now has to face very different challenges, but it also must learn to incorporate the population living in the territory it now controls. Some conquer, exterminate the conquered, some enslave them, some make them subjects, and a few even integrate them into the whole. With the exception of extermination, these methods require that the systems the tribe initially developed for itself must be adapted to govern or assimilate the new additions to the population. Homeostasis has been broken, and a very different process is underway.

6:17To scale up their civilizational systems, the conquering tribe must alter their nature, so they're not exclusively rooted in the way of being of the original population. The process of deterritorialization begins. Territorialized systems come with natural limitations that check their power. Different powers and functions in society exist within the context of the social institutions or classes that gave birth to them, and they create specific spheres of social influence for those institutions or classes. The social spheres that govern the function of the systems operate in very different ways. The priest, aristocrat, merchant, and farmer all have very different ways of life, attitudes, and approaches to social organization. The spheres of influence they operate reflect this natural diversity. This means that the spheres of power create natural checks and balances for each other, not only because they are gellously guarding their own power, but because the nature of the organization itself is particular to each sphere.

7:19Priests would be terrible at running the army because they don't understand how those systems operate. Warriors would be bad at running the church for the same reason. The particularity of these territorialized systems does not scale when it's time to adapt them to entirely foreign peoples. Suddenly the army, church, market, and state that grew slowly and organically from a particular people all must simultaneously be thrust upon an alien people for whom it was not designed. The lack of interchangeability in the territorialized system is now a liability because the time and effort necessary to slowly expand the organic nature of the social spheres just doesn't exist. If the social systems of the conquerors are to scale, they must break these systems out of the social constraints that once bound them. They must be deterioralized. In the modern, liberal order, the most universalizable medium for civilizational expansion has proven to be economic exchange.

8:19As I explained in my previous book, the total state, how liberal democracies become tyrannies, what is often called classical liberalism attempted to remove existential questions of identity, territorialized in the good of specific people, and instead created a minimum universal morality or code which could enable economic exchange. By maximizing the amount of cooperation possible between civilizations, liberalism reaped vast economic benefits, but those benefits came at a cost. The scale required by this new system could only be achieved by creating mass bureaucratic organizations designed to create homogenous operations across all participants. By ensuring machine-like precision from human organizations, the liberal order was able to maximize the efficiency of the system, but in the process, it also had to transform the individual human and the code they once lived under. Modernity is defined by the process of deteriorating functions of human civilizations that once existed in sacred or traditional spaces and re-territorializing them in the marketplace.

9:26The elevation of a ruler was once a function of a hereditary or aristocratic selection. In a mass democracy, it becomes a contest over who can raise and spend the most money while selling the candidate like a product. Finding a young person a spouse was traditionally a duty performed by families and churches. Now most romantic partnerships are selected as a product on a paid dating app. Music, literature, and art were previously created by those receiving support from sacred spheres like the church or aristocratic patrons. Now it's made at scale to be sold on Amazon or streamed on Netflix. Modern churches often function more like corporations where the pastor provides a TED talk that can be streamed on your smartphone than a place of sacred worship. The phenomenon can be seen most clearly in the way that the function of the family has been broken down and re-territorialized piece by piece into the marketplace. The mother is one of, if not the, key role on which a civilization is built, but her job is not easy to quantify in an economic sense.

10:30Traditionally, mothers cared for children and maintained the household, but they were so much more involved. Mothers were responsible for being the primary educators of their children. The constant presence of mothers in their neighborhoods during the day allowed them to know everyone and enforce a community standard of behavior. This de facto neighborhood watch allowed for a high-trust society where children could roam without fear because an adult was always close, watching out for threats and correcting bad behavior. The homemaker didn't just stay at home watching television, she organized social functions, community meetings, church functions and cultural events. A mother volunteered at the local thrift store that funds the Mutual Aid Society, Randivocation Bible School, and helped to make sure her neighbor who was overwhelmed by several children had an extra hand when things got tough. None of these duties show up directly in GDP numbers or economic spreadsheets, but they served in valuable function in society. Most importantly, those tasks are performed with a human and caring touch that can't be replaced by market forces.

11:33Moving those critical roles into the market creates a larger labor pool, lowers wages, increases economic activity and financializes every aspect so it can be taxed. The mother now works a job so she can pay several other people to do the work of raising her children. Previously it was one woman laboring outside the market providing education, supervision, counseling, nutrition and security. Now an entire team of employees provides the same service at a much lower quality and at a much higher price, but every interaction is now financialized, quantifiable and taxable. This de-territorialization of motherhood doesn't just boost gross domestic product, it helps the overcoat to scale by further separating the individual from a collective way of life. A mother carries with her a whole set of expectations surrounding the rearing of her children. She doesn't just want her son to be a functional widget in a broader society, she cares about his specific well-being. Her daughter's not just an employee or a student but a precious vessel that carries the identity of her people into the future.

12:36A mother will insist on a moral education based on specific religious beliefs, will expect a particular quality of food to be provided and will be discerning about who her child spends time with. The particularity associated with the direct motherly care creates friction for a system seeking to maximize cooperation because it insists that too much of the social process remain heavily territorialized. The attempt to create a scalable fact similarly of the family is the natural process of expanding the overcoat and it's also a feature of most totalitarian governments. This doesn't need to occur via some form of market capitalism, communist countries prize their ability to turn children against their parents as did some fascist regimes. This is not solely the consequence of any economic or government system, it's the inevitable result of scaling over codes. And while the project can provide basics like supervision, education and nutrition, it does so at great cost. Humans are not the same, some need more structure in education, some need less, some need constant challenges while others require constant affirmation.

13:42The more homogenous the process becomes, the further it can scale, but the worse the quality becomes for each individual. The family constructed by the overcoat also lacks very important qualities which were previously provided by the mother. Obviously the mother provides real love and compassion that simply cannot be delivered by any employee leaving the child lacking a real primal sense of belonging and well-being. But the shortcomings manifest well beyond this dynamic, food, clothing and shelter are basic needs, but the mother was providing a whole host of intangible social goods that don't get translated into the market during detail. Yes, the mother now hires someone to watch and make food for their child, but who watches the streets and learns every car so they know if a stranger is stopping to pick up one of the neighborhood kids? Who plans vacation Bible school or organizes the bake sale to raise money for the family that had their house burned down? Who has the time to volunteer at the Koanis Club or arrange the community mixer where young people meet potential spouses?

14:42The answer is no one does these things. They fall away and everyone in the community becomes poor in a way that they can't measure. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security and paskeys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See PayPal.com slash protection terms. Every interaction also becomes less human. The mother had only the welfare of her own children to manage directly. The system must care for a wide variety of children at scale. Instead of the care being tailored to the needs of the individual child, the children must be shaped into something that the system can handle. Employees may be perfectly nice to the child, but they can only provide supervision. Hugging the child as a reward for good behavior would create the liability.

15:45The teacher might be allowed to provide discipline when the student behaves badly, but they must follow strict guidelines. They can never reduce or increase the severity of the punishment due to their personal knowledge of the individual child. The decision is designed to serve and protect the system, not the individual humans who live under its operation. The overcode stops serving people and people begin to serve the overcode. As we discussed previously, territorialization acts as a limiting factor that ties the system, the code, to the specific people it's supposed to serve. The logic of the system might encourage it to sacrifice the well-being of the people for its own sake, but the grounding of the code in a particular culture prevents that logic from being taken to its conclusion. The homeostasis provided by territorialization protects the tribe, but it also limits the scaling of the code. Once those limitations have been removed by de-territorialization so that the system can scale, there's nothing stopping the overcode from sacrificing the people it wants served in order to achieve its own goals.

16:46The philosopher Nick Land is largely responsible for popularizing the term accelerationism in relation to this process. Traditional societies once acted as a limiting factor against de-territorialization, but the destruction of these human limitations has created a closed, self-exciting feedback loop, as an illustration consider the function of an air conditioner. The process of heating a home is simple and once it's begun, the air conditioner wants to continue that process indefinitely. If the system is allowed to continue to do what it was designed to do, it will increase the temperature in the home from a frosty 30 degrees to a comfortable 60 degrees to a sweltering 90 degrees before killing the family inside at 140 degrees. The key factor that allows the air conditioner to work for the sake of the humans inside the home is the thermostat. The thermostat interrupts the heating process by providing negative feedback and switching off the system once the home reaches the optimum temperature for humans. The system itself does not care about the humans and would cook them alive while doing its job without any negative feedback.

17:50It's the thermostat that territorializes the process, allowing it to operate freely until it reaches the limits of what's good for the family inside. Without that negative feedback, the process will kill the people it was designed to serve. The code was originally designed to serve a particular people, but it was de-territorialized so that it could expand along with the civilization. First, the code was altered in small ways, but as it became the overcode to govern a wide variety of peoples, those restrictions fell away entirely. By moving the sacred into the realm of the market, the overcode was able to create a vast network of people it could govern, but in the process it had to homogenize those peoples, stripping them of individuality and making them less human. The negative feedback that once limited the overcode to a specific people has been eliminated and now the system operates only in its own interests. This closed loop only experiences positive feedback, creating a runaway cycle that accelerates with each turn. Many people think of intelligence as a purely human trait, something produced by a brain serving the needs and desires of a person who possesses it, but land's definition is far broader.

18:56For land intelligence exists in an organism, system or process that continuously corrects for feedback to produce an outcome that's different from that which would otherwise naturally occur. When the word cybernetics is used, it conjures images of science fiction robots, but that's not its original meaning. Cybernetics is the science of studying control and communication in both animals and machines. It's the investigation of feedback loops and how they allow both machines and biological organisms to self-regulate, correct for errors and reach goals. As a man and a boat travels down the river, he is constantly making small adjustments with the rudder to keep the boat from crashing into the shore. The sailors responding to feedback and is constantly learning how to better pilot his vessel. This is a cybernetic process in action and for land, any entity, be it man, machine or system engaged in this process is gaining intelligence. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler?

19:58The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security and pasquies, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See PayPal.com slash protection terms. This conception of intelligence allows us to understand the behavior of non-human systems that seem to take on lives of their own. We all have seen this phenomenon before as we watch a bureaucratic organization sacrifice the well-being of the people who work for it and the people who is supposed to serve to increase its own size and power. The problem is one of incentives. Everyone who is being served by the public school system knows that an increase in managers and administrators doesn't benefit children in the classroom in the same way an increase in teachers would. Even most of the people working inside the school system know this. But since the 1950s, the number of principals and administrative staff in public schools has grown by 10 times the number of new teachers.

20:58The structure of the bureaucratic organization itself creates a feedback loop which trains the entity to grow its base of managers even if every individual involved believes that the increase in teachers would be more beneficial. The organization has taken on a life and a logic all its own. The organization no longer serves the people, the people are simply fodder for the goals of the organization itself. This dynamic served as the central theme of the total state where I explained why our government works in a radically different way than is described in the Constitution or in popular education. That phenomenon is not restricted to governments. It's simply an example of a process that's altering every aspect of our society. For where we look, self-interested systems are tearing apart and rearranging human social structures to create an increasingly inhuman society which can serve their needs. Almost none of this is intentionally sinister, simply inhuman systems following their internal logic to its rational conclusion.

21:58The greatest inefficiency in systems that were originally designed to serve humans is the humans themselves. The more machine-like you can make humans the less drag they create in the system and if you can remove them, well, all the better. The majority of this work will be dedicated to discussing the role that hyperagents created by the process of detaritalization and re-territalization will play in our political future. Whether it be bureaucracies, markets, or artificial intelligence, modern society is producing non-human entities that have their own sets of goals and are accumulating enough intelligence in the land and sense to pursue those goals. The aims may be benevolent, nefarious, or indifferent, but they are inhuman by definition. It's clear that these hyperagents are already driving a large amount of human behavior and if they come to dominate our political life, we need to understand what a truly post-human politics might look like. Thanks for watching, guys. This is the second in my series on post-human politics. I wrote the first one almost a year ago at this point, sorry about the delay.

23:06Got a little distracted, but I'm back in the pocket writing on this issue and I'll have more episodes coming out. So if you missed the first one, go back in the catalog, check that out. It's called codes and over codes and it'll give you more context for this piece as well. If you liked the video, please go ahead and click like and don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you haven't done that yet. Click the bell notifications, everything so you know when I put out some content. If you want to get these broadcasts as podcasts and you just subscribe to the Orrin McIntyre show on your favorite podcast platform and when you do leave a rating or review, it really helps with the algorithm magic. If you want to follow me on Twitter or Gab or Substack or Instagram, if you want to watch these videos on Rumble or Odyssey, the links to do that are down below in the description. My last book, The Total State is of course available on Amazon and you can read all of my columns and watch all of my shows over at the place. Thanks for watching and as always, I'll talk to you next time.