Colonization

Two things are taken, and neither of them is land. Will is the faculty that chooses, and sublation means it is absorbed into a will that is not its own, so a colonized nation no longer decides for itself even where it appears to be acting. Animus is the bonding energy that holds a group together and connects it across distance and time, carried in its rites, objects, land and culture, so taking the animus means redirecting the energy that made the nation a nation at all. Nation here does not mean state. It means layered and overlapping societies gathered for community, cooperation and sharing, existing across borders and generations, which is why colonization can happen without a border being crossed. The Inca empire's imposition on the nations it conquered came with three laws: do not lie, do not steal, do not be lazy. Each one presupposes an owner. Lying is only possible against whoever defines reality, stealing against whoever claims ownership, laziness against whoever defines work, so accepting the laws was accepting sublation and the colonization of the will was built into them from the start. The definition carries no scale limit, which matters. Migratory endo-ideals produce the colonization of negative image groups both inside and outside their original endogroup, and the same word covers the call centre worker fighting for one extra second between calls to escape the colonization of their thoughts and voices.

Colonization usually names the settlement, administration and economic extraction of one territory by another power, and the historical literature is largely organized around land, resources and demographics. Postcolonial writers moved part of the analysis inward. Frantz Fanon described what colonial rule does to the self of the colonized, Edward Said traced how the colonized are constructed as an object of knowledge, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o argued for the mind as the real site of the contest. Marsh's definition is closer to that inward strand but more compact and deliberately scale-free. Nothing in it refers to territory, settlement or race. Because it names only the operation, will and animus taken by another, it applies without adjustment to an empire, an endogroup absorbing a smaller one and a job that scripts a person's speech.