On the global political stage imperialism is the invasion, import and promotion of an authority regime, its culture, its religious ideals and its economic policy of exploitation. It is a cultural authority of collective greed imposed by an armed legislation. With sufficient power available the intruding group crushes any resistance and then rapes the region by whatever instruments it has at its disposal. Expendable indigenous plant or animal species are disposed of, the land restocked and the resources manipulated to enable the removal of profits. The residues of archeology and recorded history indicate such a continuous sequence of imperialist cycles that it must be seriously assumed to be somehow an intrinsic evolutionary phenomenon. Whilst the smaller anthropological groups of family, clan, tribe and the various factional alliegences of gangs and sects and kingdoms, have always been able to exert an influence upon their immediate surroundings, it is the broader and more general ideologies of religion, nationalism and political perspective that have proved to be effective in creating group influences of global scope. After successfully promoting an ideology to the extent of gaining authority over one or more geographical regions, and acquiring much skill and experience in directing resources for their personal benefit in the process, the profit-motivated control group will become imperialists. They will expand their activities into wherever resistence can be overcome and for as far as their communication lines can be sustained. The process which imperialism exemplifies occurs in many guises. There is a sense in which even gardening for example, is a form of imperialism, in that the original inhabitants are deemed to be weeds, are forcibly removed and a foreign ecosystem introduced.

It is of course a process of intrinsic instability only able to be sustained while there is an absence of any significant alternative opposing ideology. Eventually, because the self-serving structure of the imperialist hierarchy has little or no altruistic empathy with any groups at all, even within their own original geographic origins, opposing groups of diverse motivations coalesce to form a network of resistance. This is what will eventually cause the disintegration of the imperialist expansion. There have probably always been altruistic and existentially aware individuals and small groups, who have attempted to compensate for the gross inequities of unconstrained imperialism, but these scattered awarenesses would seem to be forever consigned to peripheral activities. The seemingly intractable dilemma of such groups is the devising of a strategy to expand their sphere of influence and allegiance without providing an opportunity for the egotistic-greed elements of society to infiltrate their organization and use it just as another means of self-promotion and aggrandizement. Given the fact that such groups rarely promote their altruism aggressively they seem destined to be consigned to being substantially impotent. Since the reality of a pragmatic aggressive altruism seems an unlikely prospect in the very near future, the cycles of imperialistic ideologies are destined to continue for some time yet.