Editing Genius The Transgression/Chapter Three:Systems and Foundations (section)

===History:===
The Fellowship for Manifest Direction originated in the industrial age as an answer to Lemuria's superior organizational abilities. The Peerage's response was to appoint a council of "directors" able to mobilize the other foundations. (The Fellowship for Manifest Direction was, in fact, originally just a fellowship, not a foundation. They never bothered to change the name.) This organization quickly manifested some of the worst traits of 19th century Lemuria, becoming exclusionary, racist, intolerant, and paranoid. Reforms shortly before the Great War stripped the fellowship of many of those elements, replacing them, though, with something many in the Peerage considered even worse: a taste for the fruits of industry.

Throughout the 20th century, the Directors represented the excesses and triumphs of industrial civilization. They were ruthless capitalists, gifted entrepreneurs, and super-science economists, shaking the monetary foundations of the world with their transactions. Their ruthlessness was matched only by their usefulness to the Peerage: the Directors provided drive, focus, and political expertise. It was the Overlords' ability to organize the Peerage that led to Lemuria's downfall.

Without an enemy to fight, though, the Directors lost their focus during much of the latter half of the 20th century. They became decadent and sluggish, interested only in maintaining their own power. Old boy's networks and secret economic societies popped up, devoid of accountability or long-range ambition, apparently dedicated only to maintaining the status quo. In recent years this has begun to change, fast: the "smoke-filled room" has given way to loose groups of independent organizers and peripatetic contractors, as the Directors, like everyone in the Peerage, adapts to a smaller, more mobile world. This generation gap has produced tension in the Fellowship for Manifest Direction, as older members fail or refuse to adapt to the new changes in direction and philosophy. New Directors are truly new creatures: fast, mobile, stripped-down, not bound to the ponderous lairs and laboratories that kept their predecessors stationary. Their motto is "A Phone and a Gun," because that's all they need. Their beholden aren't waiting around in the Volcano Fortress; they're an Instant Message away from showing up armed and ready to go. Their destructive wrath isn't measured in mountain-sized ray guns, but instead whatever they can find, transformed with ruthless, elegant efficiency into instruments of death and destruction. This new breed terrifies the old guard, and tensions are growing worse as the years pass and the elders cling to power in a changing world.