The Desire to Conquer Is Actually Submission to Being Conquered
The desire to conquer is, in fact, obedience and being conquered.
I. Men’s desire to conquer is, in fact, obedience and being conquered.
In social relationships and careers, what is conquered is not people’s hearts, but symbols.
In relationships between men and women, what is conquered is not women, but symbols. Objectifying women means objectifying yourself even more.
These are disciplinary symbols and KPIs imposed by external systems, society, and the big Other.
Obeying the big Other’s values, obeying Cthulhu’s demands.
To conquer, to seek externally, is to be a beggar before the world.
II. Obedience, Cowardice, Cruelty
Obedience frees you from freedom, thought, and subjectivity (Fromm’s *Escape from Freedom*). It frees you from looking Cthulhu in the face. From facing yourself, breaking down, and growing. The more you conquer, the more you lack: a vicious cycle.
The essence of conquest is defeating your fellow humans in a tournament, outrunning them when a bear is chasing you. To make enemies of your fellow humans is to make an enemy of the human essence. It inevitably means opposing humanism and severing your connection with humanity. Engels: an age in which everyone is the enemy of everyone else.
Conquest comes at a price: obedience and sacrifice.
The process of conquest continually confirms and reinforces fantasies that swing between inferiority and superiority, along with psychological self-manipulation—a vicious cycle of self-attack, self-destruction, and fantasies of deliverance.
Cruel to yourself, cruel to others.
Countless East Asian boys are trained to obey the prescribed path of bringing honor to their families, slaying monsters, and leveling up, sacrificing themselves and objectifying others.
Given the depth of obedience, alienation, and right-wing leanings among the petty and very small bourgeoisie, a turn toward Nazism like those in Germany, Japan, and Italy in the 1930s would be entirely unsurprising.
III. Non-Contention, Attunement, Naturalness, Unfolding
Disobedience in Marxism is liberation (Fromm’s *On Disobedience*). Daoist non-contention is precisely disobedience: following one’s innate nature and the natural course of things, realizing the unity of humanity and nature, and shedding contrived and willful interference (*Zhuangzi*, “The Great and Venerable Teacher”: “How can I know that what I call heavenly is not human? Or that what I call human is not heavenly? Moreover, only when there are true persons can there be true knowledge. What is a true person? The true persons of old did not resist scarcity, did not glory in success, and did not scheme over affairs. Being this way, they felt no regret when they erred and no self-satisfaction when they were right.”). Daoist surrender is a lucid surrender to fate, whereas uncomprehending obedience is alienation.
Helping others flourish is what counts as accomplishment in the world, and what wins people’s hearts. Only those who fulfill themselves have the capacity to help others fulfill themselves. A person’s capacity to love themselves sets the upper limit of their capacity to love others and the world. Being a tough man means the radiance and resilience of character, rather than cruelty toward oneself and others.
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p.s. Many women believe that awakening and becoming the heroine of their own lives mean learning from men: making money and conquering. In fact, this is moving from one form of objectification to another. At its core, it still means identifying with the logic of the men they despise, rather than true awakening.