Empire is an archetype that breeds by establishing monoculture. It layers on top of what is already there, and smothers what makes you different—like a pillow across your face—forcing you to gasp for the few molecules of oxygen it lets you have.
Introduction
Over the past sixth months, I have been developing a thesis that explains the origins of the problems we face in the world at scale.
I was introduced to the idea of empire at North Star Campout, where @aiden_wachter gave a talk on his perspective on wtf is wrong with our world today. Basically, he made the case that empire is the (living) archetype responsible for all the fucking gunk that comes with capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, etc. It’s the blatant disregard for peoples sovereignity. It’s the way elon musk says most people are NPCs. It’s a pattern that once you take note of, you’ll find it everywhere—both big and small.
Chapter 1: The destruction of diversity
So what the hell is this thing called “empire”?
Empire is an archetype that seeks to conquer, and it does so through homogenization. Here’s how it goes: every archetype wants to expand its influence. Animals have sex to spread their genes. Humans share ideas in hopes that those ideas will spread to others. Empire finds things outside its grasp, and forces them to conform—stripping away their diversity.
When empire colonizes a new environment, it manipulates people into rejecting their culture, and in turn converting to the empire’s culture. Some examples:
- Colonialism invades a culture to extract its wealth, until all that remains is a husk of its former glory. The diversity of a culture becomes commodified, as its roots are severed and its core is transformed into an offshoot of the monoculture.
- E.g. the American Indian boarding schools, whose objective was to “civilize” or assimilate Native American children into Anglo-American culture. In the process, it forced them to give up their ancestral languages, traditions, and diversity.
- Consumerism promises comfort in exchange for your diversity. It provides a frictionless experience that convinces people to give up their old ways. We can observe this through clothing—all across the world, people have given up traditional garments for t-shirts.
- Empiricism asserts that truth can only be found via measurable changes in the material world. There is only one way to find truth, and it is in the scientific method. Even if alternative, immeasurable methods arrive at the same conclusion—or even enhance said conclusion—their “subjective” nature leads to a rejection of their validity.
- Capitalism convinces people that the purpose of life is to generate profit. I.e., effort is only valuable if it generates more value than what’s been put in. This has homogenized the scope of livelihoods—if you don’t “contribute” to the profit machine, then you are selfishly refusing to contribute to the community, and should be exiled as a result.
- The insurance industry simplifies people’s complex experiences into a flowchart.
- Monotheism presents the idea of “one true god”. In this, it lambasts alternative descriptions of god by labeling them as heresy. Although religion is an extremely effective scaffolding that helps people connect with their spirituality, it tricks them into believing that other forms of scaffolding lead to different ends.
- Patriarchy assumes its role as the arbiter of validity. It rejects contributions that do not fall within the lanes it has designated. By convincing the world that traditionally masculine traits are the source of good, and traditionally feminine traits are the source of bad (which is consistently reinforced by the english language), the patriarchy maintains control over those with different, but equally valid approaches to what is good.
- Concrete destroys our joints. By destroying our joints, it destroys our mobility. It makes us depend on cushioned shoes and mechanical forms of transportation. It pushes us into sedentary lifestyles, which further degrades our mobility. (Sidenote: it also somethers the existing ecosystem, which is a whole thing.)
- Cancel culture has streamlined ethics into absolute statements. It polices people’s belief systems through moral purity tests. Certain lines of questioning have become taboo, because they are associated with the worst of the worst. In other words, it has reduced people’s ability to hold two “opposing” statements in their mind at the same time.
It gets interesting (and scary) when you combine these mechanisms together. For example, the capitalist view is reinforced by the empirical view. Let’s say your contributions to the world are spiritual in nature. Because those contributions are immeasurable in shared quantitites, they are there therefore “not deserving” of compensation. Combinations like this weave an incredibly complex web that makes it harder and harder to break free of. Resistance gets smothered, because movements are not able to build up enough momentum without being absorbed into the web. Holes get patched instantly, stronger than they were before, and the entropy is provided through their continued assimilation. So: in that sense, empire relies on infinite growth to maintain its strength.
Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead. – Joyce Messier, Ultraliberal, Disco Elysium
Chapter 2: Waging increasingly advanced warfare
The throughline mechanic you’ll find in each of these examples is that: by assimilating someone into its monoculture—it turns that someone into an agent—who then perpetuates monoculture. An easy example is a missionary: a well-intentioned person who’s spirituality has been hijacked. In their desire to “spread the good word”, they smother the same words uttered by others, forcing them to conform to the language of the Bible. Monoculture.
Over decades, centuries, millennia—Empire has become increasingly sophisticated at turning people into agents. In the middle ages, feudalism gave lords the power to smother the commonfolk through crude, physical abuse. Under the guise of providing the working class with “protection”, they robbed the people of the abundance they produced. In turn, the people became drones: serving a single purpose, with no way out to escape the system. Their own labor, necessary to survival, gave elites the means to subject them even further
But as drones became husks—malnourished and infected by the Black Plague—things began to turn around. No longer able to produce abundance, Empire’s grip weakened, and new structures of society took its place.
It is here where we see the rise of the merchant class. As the late medieval period gave way to the Renaissance, an explosion in diversity allowed the people to reclaim their power from Empire. City states like Venice, Genoa, and Florence became the new centers of power. Commerce birthed new wealth, which became accessible by a greater proportion of people. The exchange of not just goods, but ideas, led to an explosion in diversity. It funded mathematics, philosophy, and art, which in turn became highly respected professions. And though status/birth gave one the means to generate ideas, what mattered most were the ideas themselves. The reason we look back with fondness on the Renaissance is because it championed diversity. It encouraged the sexual reproduction of ideas. And in that, it enabled us to spread our own, personal DNA.
Mistakenly, we thought this meant we won. Because, as we’ll see, Empire learned how to use these new tools (the arts & sciences), and establish its grip once more. It did so through institution; rather than suppress diversity through crude domestic violence, (like it has done all throughout history), it learned that it could disguise itself by enforcing the rules of reproduction. Gradually, as the origins of art became centralized through schools, it constricted the types of ideas that could be circulated. For instance: art that did not display mastery over technique was considered sub-par. Styles that challenged artistic norms (like Impressionism, which was considered “unfinished” and “sloppy”) became coated in controversy. More to the point—cultural norms converted people into agents, which suppressed sexual reproduction, in favor of asexual reproduction.
This presents a major technological step in Empire’s ability to wage war on diversity. By embracing the ideas of the Renaissance and twisting them (e.g. high creative attainment → the concept of perfection), it enabled monarchs to take control of commerce, and ultimately gave way to the Exploration Age—the age of expansion through colonialism.
Chapter 3: The comforts of civilization
It turns out that the new tools Empire gained from the Rennaisance were extremely effective at producing monoculture. By importing resources to generate technology, it could overpower distant lands to feed itself by extract even more resources. Moreover, it could retain control over those lands by exporting culture; presenting the sickly sweat nectar of “civility” (and opium) to dull a people’s wit, severing their connection to their own, diverse ancestry.
These new tactics of warfare allowed Empire to access the deeper regions of our humanity, in order to spread its influence. See, Mazlow’s hierachy of needs states that, at the very least, “we don’t want to be hungry, thirsty, exhausted, freezing, overheating, sick, or in pain.” Empire figured out that by providing people with the comforts of the world, it could convince people to give up their ancestral roots. It hijacked people’s agency—to act and be diverse—by capitalizing on their physiological needs.
R.F. Kuang’s “Babel, or the Necessity of Violence” illustrates this dynamic through the very compelling story of Robin Swift: a boy extracted from China, who’s given the opportunity to study at the prestigious school of Oxford. In a racist world at the height of colonialism, it would have been impossible for Robin to access the comforts of a clean bed, good food, and a stable routine—much less a sense of belonging + purpose, by contributing his skills to society. But in order to access these comforts, he has to integrate into the monoculture. He has to give up his language, learn his manners, and turn a blind eye to the oppressed people of the world—including his own people. In doing so, Robin becomes an agent of the British Empire, with his skills used to perpetuate its influence. =
Just like Robin, each of us is faced with an impossible dilemma. How are we to give up the joys of consumerism? Porcelain toilets, books, music distribution, and all the tools of artistic expression are ultimately produced through the means of extraction. And the sense of purpose we get from honing our skills to create allows us to find our place in the world. But by engaging with civilization, we contribute to a machine that provides only a single life path: to generate profit.
In the establishment of global (western) civilzation, we are presented with no alternative. For if we as individuals refuse to generate profit, the community will leave us behind without the means to feed, clothe, and house ourselves. You cannot leave the Empire, because there is nothing outside it to sustain yourself. It has subsumed all, and as such, acts of absolute resistance are futile. You have no option but to be its agent—because if you do not contribute, you will die.
Chapter 4: The colonization of the nervous system
The picture this paints is bleak, but interestingly enough, that picture itself is an agent of Empire. Can you figure out why?
Just as peasants were held in place by “knights in shining armor”, we today are held in place by nihilism: a highly sophisticated tool that has colonized the deepest part of our psyche: the nervous system.
You’ve probably heard people talk about how the greatest resource at your disposal is your attention. In 2025, each-and-every one of us are intimately familiar with the way in which our attention can be hijacked. Gamification and frictionless UI grip your dopaminergic system with the promise of novelty. The screen sucks you in for hours at a time while your body rots lifelessly in bed. And most pertinently, it conditions you to follow rote patterns.
The analogy of the toboganning hill Picture in your head a fresh hill of snow. You sit in a sled at the top—and as you slide down, you can lean this way and that. You can choose where to go! But the next time you go down, you’ll find that the path you made. It’s not very deep, so you can still control your sled—but each time you go down that path, the groove gets more-and-more defined. And before you know it, the path will have become so rigid that it takes an x-games maneuver to forge a new path.
Big tech wants you to predictable. It wants to turn you into a flow chart: if it can simplify you, it can condition you.
The thing to take note of here is that this conditioning happens over many, many microinteractions. conditions you by loading you up with baggage. It makes you jaded—assuming the worst in every past interaction that resembles the one in front of you now. And—as we all know—it is most effective when it is able to take advantage of our emotions.
As people use specific vernacular to illustrate their point, those words get used repeatedly and become synonymous with an agenda, rather than the underlying idea it represents.
This has the effect of making certain language taboo, and therefore robs people of the ability to actually talk about the idea itself. The very idea is boiled down and loses all meaning.
What we are seeing here is the same archetypical pattern of Empire, which homogenizes and kills off diversity. What better way to stop the exchange and evolution of ideas than to block them from being talked about, at all?
What I find most impressive is how pervasive, and equally undiagnosed this issue has become. The very people who champion either free speech or diversity shut it down, the instant it peeks its head. And as such, we become agents that perpetuate monoculture—even as if stares us in the face from the other side.
Chapter 5: Policing language = policing ideas
“This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.” R.F. Kuang, Babel
Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal? R.F. Kuang, Babel
Embrace diverse language - we’re all talking about the same thing, we’re just speaking in different languages. The closer we can come to realize that, the closer we can come to the ideal prisoners dilemma — work together, at every step of the way
Chapter 6: Unsuppressing spirituality; i.e. The Unconscious
The picture this paints is pretty fucking bleak. It seems like there’s no way out—which is the very reason we are collectively consumed by anxiety and depression: products of nihilism.
In 2025, we find ourselves at what I consider to be the furthest reaches of what Empire is able to subsume.
It enters an environment, takes advantage of its loving/welcoming nature, then strips the environment of any and all diversity. By destroying diversity,
It hijacked people’s sense of good and bad through the idea of morality.
Capitalism hijacks people’s sense of practicality through the idea of empiricism, and it is here where we find ourselves today.
Chapter 7: The breaking point; Maximum entropy in a closed system
But we have reached a point in society where empire doesn’t have much further to go. It has conquered our nervous systems; where can it go next?
Something needs to reset; The arrival of 3I/ATLAS
But at every step of the way, resistance has grown.
The thing about violence, see, is that the Empire has a lot more to lose than we do. Violence disrupts the extractive economy. You wreak havoc on one supply line, and there’s a dip in prices across the Atlantic. Their entire system of trade is high-strung and vulnerable to shocks because they’ve made it thus, because the rapacious greed of capitalism is punishing. It’s why slave revolts succeed. They can’t fire on their own source of labour – it’d be like killing their own golden geese.
‘But if the system is so fragile, why do we so easily accept the colonial situation? Why do we think it’s inevitable? Why doesn’t Man Friday ever get himself a rifle, or slit Robinson Crusoe’s neck in the night? The problem is that we’re always living like we’ve lost. We’re all living like you. We see their guns, their silver-work, and their ships, and we think it’s already over for us. We don’t stop to consider how even the playing field actually might be. And we never consider what things would look like if we took the gun. R.F. Kuang — Babel, or the Necessity of Violence
Afterward: The prisoner’s dilemma
I would like to highlight something very important. Though the situation we find ourselves seems bleak, this is an incredible time to be optimistic. We are not only witnessing the unraveling of empire, but have the opportunity to contribute to its downfall, and build a better world.
The purpose of this essay is not to scare you, but to equip you with knowledge. Yes, there is a mountain ahead of us. But the hardest thing any of us can do is to simply turn and face it. You might find that by doing the hard thing and looking it in the eye—you’ve already fought half the battle.