More often than I care to admit, I’m randomly struck by the absurd realization that human beings are simply civilized variants of chimpanzees. I’ll be sitting at an outdoor restaurant eating with my family, talking about things, and watching water fountain jets set to popular music, when a couple of women will walk by holding stiff-sided shopping bags. Then a thought will appear in my head, unabetted and unwanted: that shaved primate just bought a new pair of designer jeans. I’ll look around for a moment, as if expecting to see someone else who happens to have had the same thought at the same moment. I fear that one day, I’ll make eye contact with a wide-eyed guy nodding and mouthing the words, We’re all just less hairy hominids, man. Thankfully, that has yet to happen.

Then, a waiter will walk past, carrying a basket of freshly baked bread, and set it down in the middle of a neighboring table. I’ll continue to watch for a few more moments as every pair of eyes at the table dart to the bread, just for a moment. You can see the primate impulse flash across the faces of a few of them—that desire to grab, to get, to gorge—but none of them, at least this time, give into it. They’ve learned to suppress their simpler urges, which is no surprise. They are at a restaurant. We rightly kick out all of the people who haven’t learned to push down these lesser impulses out of our civilized-great-ape game—or at least a functioning society does.

Eventually, though, my wayward attention will finally return to my table, and the feeling will pass. I’ll reach the offramp from my bout of species derealization and tune in to a story about what happened at school today or a discussion about a trip that we’re all looking forward to. It’ll all be gone just as quickly as it came on, and I’ll be left simply enjoying an afternoon and a lettuce-wrapped burger—with my primate kids and my primate wife.

People don’t like to be reduced to animals—to be subsumed into a category of creature that makes them eerily aware of just how close of a cousin they are to chimpanzees. I’ve never really understood the hang-up, though. The comparison doesn’t bother me at all, largely because I think it’s a much better strategy to be aware of one’s lesser nature than to be in denial of it. One approach allows lets you shape it—to civilize it. The other makes you an unwitting passenger in a vehicle driven by processes that you don’t quite understand.

The most unsettling attribute that human beings share with chimps—that most people don’t like to consider to exist within themselves—is the rudimentary drive for primate dominance. It takes on its most sophisticated form in humans when we endeavor to earn status through demonstrable competence or participate in productive generosity. However, sometimes, even amongst humans, it can devolve into a raw desire for power and dominance—as we’ve seen with the most recent iterations of group identity-politics. Therefore, like our hairy cousins, it’s not a question of whether this drive for conquest will manifest so much as it is when, how, and to what degree it will be successful. The desire to conquer has always been present in our species. I fear though, that at least some people are getting nearer to perfecting it.

 

THE WILL TO CONQUER:

In modernity, we like to pretend that we’ve somehow evolved past our primitive, warlike nature. However, despite the anti-war manic levels of moral grandstanding that take place on college campuses and social media alike, humans are just as fractious and combative as we’ve always been. We intuitively arrange ourselves in groups, and if one group has something another group wants or needs, it’s game on. Worse yet is when one group perceives another as an existential threat.

The tactics have changed over the millennia—mutated to fit advances in technology and contoured to everchanging global power dynamics—but the desire to get, to grab, and to gorge seems to be built into the hardware, regardless of how much lipstick we put on it. To some degree, this is the unavoidable byproduct of cultural diversity at scale. Until the day we’ve all been united into a globalist technocratic dystopia, the ingroup-outgroup dynamics will be among the prime drivers of human behavior. Take, for instance, the following.

Imagine that you’re a chieftain of some desert tribe. Congratulations: You made it, kid! I knew you could do it. If you don’t like the word chief—you’re in charge—you can change it. You can call yourself Grand Poobah for all I care. Picture that there’s a big problem though. Your tribe is running out of water, and the only known water source within a two-week walk is in a nearby oasis, but it’s already spoken for. You’ve already sent an envoy to gain access to the water supply, but they were chased off by angry unfamiliar men with sticks. You managed to get a meeting with their Chief and you tried to negotiate—maybe you offered him a camel or a wife or something of equal value—but he said no deal. Your people really need water. What do you do?

If you’re anything like most of the leaders of primitive hunter-gatherer societies, you gather up your fighting men and outfit them with the sharpest sticks and pokiest things—or a club or two made from the finest femurs of some big-ass animal—and attack the camp in the dead of night.

Once you’ve killed enough of those who resist your attempts at water-well dominance, there’ll come a moment when the remaining people will throw down their weapons. Now you’re left with another decision. What do you do? Do you kill everyone?

Probably not. You’re the smartest knuckle-dragger in your wandering tribe, after all—waste not want not. At a minimum, you’d want to keep the women so as to increase your tribe’s gene pool. The kids have been coming out dumber and dumber lately, and they’re starting to get that inbred look about them—those widespread eyes and that Habsburg jaw. So you’ll keep the women, at least.

Likewise, the kids could prove to be useful. They’re small for now, but they can still reduce the per-capita workload of the tribe by distributing tasks a bit. They can carry water and milk goats and…hell, I don’t know…check everybody’s slippers in the morning for those creepy-ass camel spiders? Either way, you’ll keep the kids, too.

What about the men, though? That’s where you, oh Great Poobah, hit the rub of the matter. If you tried to integrate the men into the tribe, then they would get a share of all the tribe’s resources. In the not-so-distant future, you’d have to compete with them for things like status and mates, which will likewise restrict access to these things for your kin—which is a surefire way not to stay Poobah for long. Even today’s half-wit social-media influencers know that you don’t alienate your core fanbase. How about taking them for slaves?

You know that some conquerors do this, but historically, men haven’t done so well as slaves—not without huge amounts of overwatch and micromanagement. They get butthurt about being conquered and losing their wives and children and are, therefore, always trying to lead an uprising or unite the clans or some other form of what today’s neo-feminist lackeys would refer to as toxic masculinity behavior.

 

So, as Chief Grand Poobah, new ruler of this here watering hole and the first of your name, you run the cost-benefit analysis and decide against the enslavement option—convinced as you are that at least one of those bastards looks like he has the makings of a camel-riding William Wallace. So, instead, you elect to adopt the same strategy that’s been used by the Israelites, Ottomans, Vikings, Mongols, Comanche, and so many other conquerors in the past—you put all the fighting-aged men to the sword and enslave the women and children afterward.

 

THE ART OF CONQUEST

Like other aspects of human behavior, the art of conquest evolved over time. New weapons provided new advantages and tribal skirmishes grew to proper battles and then to all-out wars—long and drawn out for years at a time. Along the way, however, some conquerors—of the kind that still have cities named after them—realized that brute force wasn’t the only effective way to defeat an enemy. As it turns out, there are much more effective ways to conquer a foe.

Many people would say that it’s the use of tools that sets human beings apart from the remainder of the animal kingdom. However, lots of creatures (primate or otherwise) regularly build and use tools. While spears and swords and even trebuchets are incredibly advanced tools, I would argue that it’s actually humans’ capacity to think in if/then sequences that has led to us shooting rockets into space while chimps have been kept firmly on the ground—minus Enos and Ham, of course.

The first time a commander thought, “If my enemy is divided, they will be easier to conquer,” I imagine it was a game changer. The first time that this divide and conquer strategy was extended off the battlefield though was likely even more revolutionary. The basic integration of human sociology with military tactics rearranges maps at an alarming rate, but it was those few conquerors who understood human psychology that shook the known world. One such man was the Byzantine Emperor Basil II.

After defeating the Bulgarian army in the Battle of Kleidion, Basil II ordered that all the surviving enemy soldiers be rounded up. He could have killed them, but, like you, he thought waste not want not. Instead, he set his men to work, blinding ninety-nine out of every one hundred men. We don’t know what method they used to undertake such a feat, whether it was blades or hot irons, but we do know two things. He left a single eye untouched in one out of every hundred men so that he could lead the others back in what was surely a brutal and grueling march home, and it must have taken them a very long time. There were fifteen thousand men in all.

Basil didn’t want to kill the remaining fighting force of the Bulgars for a couple of reasons. In addition to the always-present potential to make martyrs, it would have been a waste of resources. He didn’t need them for labor, but he did need them to send a message. By returning home not only defeated but deformed and dependent—having limited practical utility with their ruined eyes—the men of Bulgaria served as an incessant reminder of the cruelty of an enemy that was sweeping through their countryside. They were an effective agent of demoralization.

Within four years, the last of the Bulgarian strongholds would fall. Many of them would yield without a fight. When you divide an enemy, they’ll fight each other. If you can demoralize them, they’ll defeat themselves. Psychological warfare isn’t attacking your enemy’s mind. Psyche is a word that means spirit or soul. If you can become adept at breaking an enemy’s spirit, you can learn to topple giants without much need for military force. To dispirit someone is to demoralize a person or group of people. A much more archaic meaning of the word, however, is to morally corrupt them.

 

HOW TO TOPPLE A GIANT:

When your enemy is the greatest military force in the history of the world, you would have to be a suicidal fool to attack them with force. Instead, you would have to get exceedingly crafty to weaken a nation of that size and status. So, if you were no longer content to be relegated to the lowly level of National Poobah, how would you do it?

You’d probably want to start eroding their foundation as soon as possible—those things can take a while to chip away. Religious customs, belief structure, and cultural institutions (e.g., marriage, family, etc.) would need a good deal of attention early on, but wearing them down would be essential. People are so much more pliable without a pesky coherent worldview often afforded by an established religion that’s a couple of thousand years in the making.

Then, you could move on to the more secular stuff—history, virtue, national identity, etc. You wouldn’t want to eradicate these things, not exactly, as attempting to do so would show your hand too early. You wouldn’t want a giant to cotton on to you while it was still strong enough to fight back. Instead, you’d want to confuse people and redefine terms and morals. The historical events still happened—too many records to say otherwise—but they sure as shit didn’t happen like you were told. The good people in the story? They were actually the bad guys, and since these people are related to those people—I don’t care if it was six or seven generations ago—these people are bad by association.

You know what would really get ‘em? If you could somehow convince them, especially the smart ones with letters after their names, that not only is morality relative, but so is truth! Let that climb through their educational system for a while, and it will tear down the hallowed halls of what were once the world’s most prestigious institutions of learning. More importantly, you’ll be able to turn those places into worldview license plate factories where you can just stamp whatever beliefs you want into the soft heads of late adolescents that are away from home for the first time.

 

Set the oven and let that bake for a generation or two, but where would you go from there, oh Global-Aspirations-Poobah? If divide and conquer worked for Caesar, it’ll work for you. You would need to insist that the correct way for all the citizens to view each other is through the lens of maximal differences and competitive levels of victimhood rather than the stabilizing focus on commonalities and a shared national identity. Then, you would pit the old ones against the young ones. The white versus the blacks. I bet, if you really tried, you’d even be able to turn the women against the men and the men against the women rather than working together as they have throughout most of the history of the human species.

Then, when they’re all fighting amongst themselves, you could really make some “progress” toppling all of the remaining archetypes. One after the other, they’d have to go. The divine mother? Gone. The divine father? Goodbye. Masculinity? Nope. Femininity? Not anymore. Childhood? Everything’s got to go—everything must be pried up and pushed over, and, while they’re still smoldering, you can get to work replacing the defaced, dethroned, and defiled archetypes with your own inversions—the hideous perversions pedestaled atop stolen plinths. Merit becomes equity. Individualism becomes collectivism. Hedonism. Pride. Lust. Envy. Gluttony. Elevate it all.

How many generations do you think it would take you to do it? Two—maybe three, tops? Some would resist, probably the men. It’s always the men, oh, mighty Globalist Poobah. They’re always the rub, but—what if you could keep them pacified? What if you could give them Soma-like substances to make them compliant? What if you could keep their eyes glued to all manner of screens, effectively blinding them? Then, even if they become aware, they won’t have the capacity to care. Unless—

Unless you only manage to blind most of them. Unless you’ve missed a handful of them—even one percent. Haven’t you learned anything, you silly Poobah? Even conquerors from a thousand years ago knew that just one man in a hundred was enough to guide the others back. I’m reminded of a quote often attributed to Heraclitus discussing a battle, and make no mistake, gentlemen, we are at war. “Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there. Eighty are just targets. Nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one—one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.”

It’s time to bring the others back.