God, Gold and Steel: Conquest is in the Blood of Man

As a history major, I love reading about great men who start empires. Going into the great unknown and despite experiencing major trials and tribulations and ending up on the other side victorious.  A true hero's journey. 

There were none more exemplary than the conquistadors of Spain, grizzled ex soldiers like Cortes and Pizzaro, who arrived in Latin America and extinguished the massive Aztec and Incan empires that spanned the continent, and established Spanish dominion for several hundred years. A massive landmass that ran from modern day Mexico all the way down to Argentina & Chile. 

Before the modern, industrialized & somewhat civilized world, this is what ambitious men did to gain wealth and power. Traveling, Fighting, killing and conquering. This did not change for hundreds, if not thousands of years in human history. 

This was the driving factor of all the great men in history, Alexander the Great of Macedonia, Julius Caesar, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror from Normandy, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Babur of the Mughal Empire in India, Robert Clive of the East Indian Company among others. True adventurers and conquerors.

This was the norm at least until the 20th century, where our men’s drive was channeled toward building business empires. This is true progress. Thank God that riding around and cutting off heads and taking other people's land and goods is not the norm anymore. 

Now you can take your urge to conquer and use the global market forces to build a product and provide a service to solve a problem for many people at the same time. You can build big businesses and accumulate massive wealth while serving others. 

But these feelings, the urge for conquest, still exist in all of us men to this day. I remember a quote from the excellent show Yellowstone. 

“Man is migratory by instinct. What you are feeling is a hunger for new land. Smoldering in your DNA. It’s the reason our species survived when countless others failed. That tingling is a sensation of your destiny.”

Modern day life and comforts dull these senses but they are always there. You can’t remove it. And I believe this explains the growing number of listless and lost young men in society now. Their impulses to conquer dampened.  Angry, impotent and unhappy. They know their lives should be better but they have no clear mission or direction. No clear place to channel these urges. 

I think if we want to turn things around again in America or the world in general, we have to acknowledge man’s need to conquer something and then to unleash these urges and channel them into productive avenues. Whether it’s personal fitness, self improvement or learning. Become an entrepreneur, go build something. 

Young men need a mission so they can become controlled monsters!  So conquer your mind, your emotions, and your environment to build your own empire.