Book excerpt: The coercive animal exists because our social systems of thought throughout the history of humankind have been unaccountable. Our use of reason and rational thought allowed us to place the idea of reality anywhere one senses it to be. From this ambiguity, we have our history of ideas by decree from ancient philosophy to our modern thinkers. Our religious thought, our rational thought, our governments, and our economic systems, they all operate without accountability. When we learn how ideas work, we understand how we move ideas within our minds to create ideas that may or may not relate to reality. We understand how to categorize our ideas. We discover how people can create intellectual shell games by initiating movement between broadband and narrowband ideas as well as between universal and limited ideas. When we have this knowledge, we expose the coercive animal. Historically, we have defined coercion as the arbitrary will of one person forced onto another. Nevertheless, what are arbitrary and non-arbitrary wills? This book removes the ambiguity by taking the arbitrary out of arbitrary. How we distinguish between the two resides within the pages of this book, The Coercive Animal.