The Universal Equation of Peoples: Domination, Culture, and Moral Illusion
Beyond flags, borders, and anthems, there exists only a bare mechanism. Every people, whatever their era or culture, is merely a temporary embodiment of it. Religious, cultural, or historical variations are nothing but different masks placed upon the same relentless logic. Everywhere, dominant forces tend to dominate. Everywhere, the weak complain of injustices they would reproduce without hesitation if roles were reversed. What we take for moral differences between civilizations are in most cases only variations of their sacred red lines, not differences of heart. The radical conclusion is this: no people is morally innocent, only temporarily powerless.
1. The Illusory Moral Equality of Victims and Executioners
History overflows with tragedies: massacres, colonizations, genocides, oppressions. Each age presents its executioners and its victims. By habit, we idealize the victims. We imagine suffering as purification, granting moral superiority. This is an illusion. Suffering proves only one thing: weakness in a given moment. Nothing more.
For if those same peoples had possessed weapons, resources, legitimizing myths, and structures of power, they would have inflicted domination with the same intensity. Not out of innate perversity, but because every culture, once in a position of strength, always finds a story to justify its expansion. What we call innocence is nothing but a lack of opportunity. The only thing that prevents a people from oppressing is not virtue but powerlessness.
2. Red Lines: Arbitrary Sacred Limits and Acceptable Evil
Why have some peoples not committed certain atrocities? Because they had set symbolic boundaries. These limits, which we can call red lines, vary from one civilization to another. Here, children must not be killed. There, the unarmed must be spared. Elsewhere, sacred places must not be desecrated or public humiliation inflicted. But these prohibitions do not prove deep goodness. They simply show how a culture channels its violence to preserve its own cohesion.
Below those lines, everything becomes possible. Humanity massacres, exploits, alienates, not in spite of its morality but with its assent. The West, for example, does not perceive itself as barbaric when it devastates entire regions. It claims to be civilized because it invented rules of war that serve its interests: prohibition of “unnecessary” crimes, the use of “surgical” drones, a preference for economic or ideological domination. Crime always adapts to the local boundaries of honor.
3. Peoples as Collective Puppets
We like to think that descents into horror depend on a few exceptional men: dictators, elites, fanatical groups. The reality is more unsettling. A handful of men can introduce a direction into the common culture. The rest follow. The people follow with pride, with fervor, with the illusion of acting morally. Even resistance to injustice is often an illusion: people do not fight evil as such, but the evil inflicted on themselves and their own.
Buddhism itself, often presented as a religion of detachment, does not escape this mechanism. It has its extremists, its sects, its nationalisms. Religion is a veneer. What decides are human impulses channeled through culture. They dictate what a people will do with power, or with its absence.
4. Power Always Pushes Toward the Maximum Allowed
Give a people the means to dominate, and it will dominate. This is not cynicism, but an observable regularity across all of history. No people will go beyond its sacred prohibitions, but it will always go up to them. It will explore every gray zone, every legal void, every religious ambiguity in order to extend its influence. This behavior is not peculiar to conquering nations, it is a natural law of human history.
A peaceful people is not more virtuous, it is merely constrained by its structures. If it becomes powerful, it will reinterpret its texts, shift its taboos, and rewrite its morality to match its ambitions. Morality is not an anchor, it is a sail. It swells in the direction of the prevailing wind.
5. The Recurring Pattern of Collective Dynamics
The mechanism can be described without numbers or formulas. Every collective dynamic results from the combination of four driving forces: material power, internal cohesion, opportunities for expansion, and ideological will. Against them, three principal brakes limit violence: internal moral constraints, external resistance, and the structural inertia of the political system. When the driving forces prevail, domination advances. When the brakes impose themselves, it retreats.
All of history can be read this way. Rome dominated because its power, cohesion, and ambition outweighed its scruples. The Arab tribes of the seventh century expanded because they possessed a burning faith and unprecedented opportunities. Precolonial peoples of the nineteenth century were conquered because they were divided, poorly armed, without imperial ambition, and confronted with an already industrialized Europe. These mechanisms are not accidents. They are the hidden framework of human history.
6. The Inevitable Cycle of Empires
Every empire follows the same cycle. It is born with power, cohesion, and a fiery ideology. It grows by seizing favorable opportunities. Then come the side effects: luxury weakens morality, cohesion erodes, enemy resistance increases, the political structure becomes more complex. Then the dynamic slows, and eventually declines. The glorious narrative turns into nostalgia. Another people takes over. History does not repeat itself identically, but the mechanism is always the same: domination pushed to the maximum permitted by the brakes.
7. Abyssal Consequence: The Impossibility of Collective Innocence
This picture imposes an unbearable truth: no people is innocent. Every atrocity not committed is not an atrocity refused but an atrocity prevented. Every collective virtue is only a provisional state, bounded by external or internal constraints. The saints of one camp are the future executioners of another. Humanity is symmetrical not in its acts, but in its potential. This symmetry removes all moral refuge for peoples. It forces us to understand that justice cannot be the attribute of a collectivity. Justice, if it exists, is individual or institutional, but never collective. The people is a mechanism, not a subject.
8. The Illusion of Historical Justice
We love to judge history: to condemn empires, to celebrate liberations. But if every people reproduces the same logic whenever it has the means, then history is not a moral epic. It is the chronicle of a mechanism. Judging entire peoples is futile: their “choices” were never choices but configurations. History becomes just only when we cease to measure peoples by their suffering or their conquests, and instead evaluate them by their capacity to resist domination even when they had the means to impose it. That capacity has never yet been demonstrated in any stable and lasting way. It remains a utopia.
Conclusion: Crossing the Threshold Without Return
To reread human history through this mechanism is to cross an abyssal threshold. We can no longer believe in peoples as moral subjects. We can no longer speak of good or bad collectives. We can no longer seek proof of intrinsic virtue in civilizations. There are only variations of a universal equation: power, cohesion, opportunity, and will on one side, scruples, resistance, and inertia on the other. It is not a mathematical formula, but a structural law. It says this: every people goes as far as its forces push it and as far as its brakes oblige it. Nothing more, nothing less.
This conclusion is abyssal because it strips the reader of the last refuge. It destroys the illusion of the moral superiority of the oppressed, the illusion of virtuous peoples, the illusion of historical wisdom. It forces us to admit that justice does not exist at the collective level. It can only be carried by individuals or by institutions designed to limit the mechanism. History is not a moral school. It is a mechanical symphony where each people plays its part according to the notes it possesses and the silences its rivals impose. And this music has no virtue in itself.