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The Amnesia of Empire: How Disconnection Breeds Conquest.
History is often told as a story of progress. Of civilization advancing, expanding, and improving the world as it goes.
But beneath that story lies a much more unsettling truth: those who conquer and colonize do so not because they are stronger or more intelligent, but because they are willing to commit acts that others cannot even imagine. Their victory is not born of superiority, but of moral bankruptcy.
Those who are colonized rarely anticipate the depths of cruelty that will be used against them. Not because they are naïve or weak, but because their worldview does not include the idea that human beings could be intentionally capable of limitless violation—of land, body, spirit, and memory.
Most societies are not organized around such assumptions.
They are built around relationship—with family, land, ancestors, and community. When violence arrives that has no regard for those bonds, it feels incomprehensible. By the time its nature becomes clear, it is often too late to resist.
This is one of the great tragedies of conquest: the people most vulnerable to it are often the most relational, the most community-centered, the most rooted. They assume a shared moral understanding that their attackers have already abandoned.
In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller names what may be the deepest root of this phenomenon. He describes what he calls the two primary sins of Western civilization: amnesia and anesthesia.
Amnesia is the forgetting of who we are—where we come from, who our ancestors were, and how deeply we belong to the natural world.
Anesthesia is the numbing of feeling—the shutting down of grief, empathy, awe, and reverence.
Together, these conditions create the psychological soil from which empire grows.
When a society forgets its ancestors, it no longer feels accountable to them. When it numbs its ability to feel sorrow, it becomes capable of inflicting harm without reflection. When grief is suppressed rather than honored, it does not disappear, it mutates. It becomes rage, domination, extraction, and conquest. Violence becomes not only possible, but justified.
Colonial empires do not merely conquer territory; they erase memory.
The first acts of domination are almost always the same: dismantling spiritual traditions, outlawing languages, severing people from land, destroying communal rituals, and replacing relational ways of being with hierarchies of power. This is not accidental. It is essential. A people who remember who they are, who stay connected to land and ancestry, are far harder to control.
Empire requires disconnection.
It requires people who can look at forests and see only lumber, at rivers and see shipping routes, at human bodies and see labor. It requires a worldview where the Earth is an object, people are interchangeable, and suffering is abstract. It requires emotional numbness. Anesthesia.
And this didn’t begin with overseas colonization. The pattern started at home. Long before empires expanded outward, they practiced domination internally. The same systems that later enslaved and subjugated others began by severing their own people from the land, community, ritual, and embodied knowing. Enclosures, religious persecution, the criminalization of indigenous European spiritual practices, the breaking of community bonds—these were rehearsals. Colonialism was not exported until it had been perfected at home.
Once disconnection became normalized, expansion was inevitable.
What makes this cycle especially devastating is that those who carried it out often believed they were doing good.
Words like civilization, progress, and salvation were used to justify unimaginable harm. Entire populations are erased not through hatred alone, but through dehumanization. When people are no longer seen as fully human, when they are reduced to resources, obstacles, or problems to be solved—cruelty becomes bureaucratic and easy to organize, easy to excuse.
Yet, beneath all of this lies something deeply human: unexpressed grief.
Weller reminds us that grief is not a weakness or a disorder. It is a sign of connection. We grieve because we have loved. A culture that refuses to grieve must also suppress its humanity. Over time, this suppression hardens into numbness, and numbness eventually requires an act of violence to feel anything at all.
What we witness today—ongoing wars, environmental destruction, systemic inequality, generational trauma—is not proof that humans are inherently evil. Instead, it is evidence of unresolved grief on a civilizational scale. A wound that has never been named cannot heal. It festers. A sorrow that is silenced becomes rage turned outward.
And yet, colonized peoples have often held onto what empire tried to erase: memory, ritual, reverence for the land, and communal identity. These are not weaknesses. They are sources of resilience. They are why cultures survive even after centuries of attempted erasure. Songs are still sung. Stories are still told. Ancestors continue to speak through blood and bone.
The tragedy is not only what was done, but what was lost in the doing—the possibility of a world organized around reciprocity rather than domination.
Perhaps the great work of our time is not conquest or control, but remembrance.
Remembering how to grieve. Remembering how to belong. Remembering that the Earth is not an object to be used but a living system of which we are a part. Remembering that to feel sorrow for suffering is not weakness, but evidence of an intact soul.
Until we face the amnesia and anesthesia that have shaped modern empire, we will continue to mistake numbness for strength and domination for progress. But healing begins the moment we allow ourselves to feel again—to mourn what has been lost, to honor what survived, and to choose connection over conquest.
Because only those who can feel sorrow can truly choose not to inflict it.
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