Imperialist Decay: The Sane and the Insane

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“People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it’s served up.” (George R. R. Martin). Life is not just a single journey, as commonly known. Life is made of multifarious little journeys, both physical and emotional, defining who we are, were and will be. Meaning might lack, but we never give up on our supposed goal, because we are persistent humanoids. Charlie Marlow’s journey in Heart of Darkness had been summarized in the last couple of sentences, surprisingly. Marlow encumbered himself with a journey of self-discovery and truth seeking; the truth about the superficially ornamented culture he belonged to. The imperialist culture, as glorious and ringing as it might seem, is trapped between two extremely conflicting worlds, which actually govern the actions of its descendants. Sanity and insanity are those two worlds, which are separated by the extremely thin, fragile string of imperialism. Imperialists sent to civilize the black savages arrive with a sane – white man – mindset, but end up as one of the insane savages. “The old doctor felt my pulse, evidently thinking of something else the while. 'Good, good for there,' he mumbled, and then with a certain eagerness asked me whether I would let him measure my head.” Deterioration of the human brain of a sane, white man to an insane savage was a common symptom among those who decided to join the noble cause, those who decided to live their life on an extremely thin thread.

Imperialism is the deterioration of a properly functioning, sane brain. That ever-thin thread of imperialism, separating sanity from insanity is, unfortunately, not strong enough to hold its imperialists, thus letting them all fall into an abyss of savageness. Marlow, being a white man...

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...ror!” (Conrad, page 99). At that moment – the moment of death – Kurtz realized everything that imperialism prevented him from seeing; he realized the “evil” of the noble cause, the lack of meaning in everything that he had committed, and the insanity that dominated him for a very long time, blinding him from the ultimate “reality” which was not something ideal of a “sane” imperialist.

The thread of life, or rather death, is easily breakable. The thread of imperialism is, too. Imperialists go with all of their hearts holding onto one thing; the noble cause. However, they change from the pretentious, sane white men, into the savage men with a dark-complexion. Imperialism destroys people, and destroys cultures with the vague motive of spreading knowledge and support to the poor savages, when they end up becoming just like them, or probably worse.

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