Conquest

Conquest is always threefold: in it is invasion, institution, and amnesia. 

The first one is easy, for it is the word's colloquial definition: it is conqueror sailing to a land, or a man wooing a woman, arriving, and then invading its idiographic space and time. 

The conqueror thus proceeds to institute his own being unto the conquered, staking his claim. It is humanity putting a flag onto the moon, declaring, "I, who have traveled far, have arrived, and this is mine." That, too, is easy. 

What is insidious and truly defines conquest, however, is the third: the erasure of history before arrival. It is the conquered rewriting history of the land, it is the man pounding his loins in an heroic effort to make a woman forget all her former lovers. Both are done in secret, in the dead of night.

It is in this forgetfulness that an identity prior becomes eradicated and the new one stretched back into whatever nebulous thing history was, forging in its very inception an identity that has always been, and will always be, thus. You are mine; for you have waited, and I have come.

The conquered, hence, like Athena fully-formed springing from Zeus's head, or Aphrodite rising from the waves, succumbs to this injunction. 

As such any civil war, or resentment, is born out of a tension in between this forgotten birthing and a metaphysical memory saying, "No, love, once upon a time, you were you. Remember." The mind, having vestiges of ancient memory no manipulation can erase, then, can choose to say, "Yes. I remember," or "No, this is what I am."

This repository of the lost memory is literature. Being what it is, then, it is the absolute antithesis of mass media.

Conceived of in theological terms, heaven, where we go to meet our maker and join in his being, is absolute forgetfulness of ego. We lose ourselves, after all, when we see God. That is the very definition of God himself: the not-I. Therein lies man's true redemption: having no identity save for his creator.

Hell, on the other hand, is absolute memory: for what is it other than the place for remembrances? 

That is, after all, why tortured souls write the best literature, and why the pulpit is the driest place on earth, simply because the tortured writer does so from a place of memory: the preacher spits from a place of promise.