Civilized man wants more than enough to survive

[samiaseo222]

Empires are notorious wasters. They do not cherish or nurture. The Romans stripped the Mediterranean of much of its woodland and its wildlife and certainly contributed to the advance of the desert in North Africa. The American trail blazer seems to have had no respect for the land he was conquering whatsoever other than as a piece of real estate.

The British Isles were stripped of forests to build ships of the Imperial fleet. Neither Japan's military empire nor later its commercial empire has shown any concern for the husbandary of the natural resources of the Far East. The economic policies of the mini-empires of Indonesia and Brazil is indistinguishable from pillage. Imperialists are fanatical hunters too and spend a considerable part of their time and energy exterminating as much of the local fauna as they can.

Wild animals as well do not belong to "civilization", unless they are stuffed, put in zoos, tamed and ordered. Imperialists like to give names to everything new they find and are meticulous about job function email list identifying what they see. Colonial imperialism in the previous two centuries was a time of codifying and labelling nature. The European hunter in the tropics was not infreqeuntly a keen insect collector or classifier of the grammar of native languages. The imperial world is the collector's world: from butterflies and beetles to stamps and coins, from hunting trophies to native artifacts.

He wants more than just the "daily round". That is precisely what distinguishes him from the savage. He has the imagination and the will to conquer. In an empire's beginning was that ambition, that ambition to conquer and grow. Ambition is the "great man's madness". Without ambition there would be no history. Ambition is the word we give to a dream of power coupled with the will to bring the dream to earth, to make day dreams hard reality, imposing one's will on others.