Imposter Syndrome

The thing about the Aztecs is they were imposters. It’s a hard life being an imposter, because you know that’s what you are, and you also know that the line between the fraud and the reality has to be defended with the utmost intensity. You’re liable to do unspeakable things to protect that line, even though in the end reality will always win.

The Aztecs were a nomadic people who half-stumbled onto the ruins of the Toltec civilization in what is now southern Mexico. The Toltecs were contemporaries of the Mayans, and had combined the cultural sophistication of the Maya with perhaps the first capacity for grand warfare in the Americas. They built large cities as early as the 600s, and had advanced understanding of engineering and astronomy. It’s not really known what happened to the Toltecs, but there’s evidence of violent destructions in their capital, and scattered settlements of their people in other parts of Mexico after the collapse. By the close of the Twelfth Century, their empire was gone.

When the Aztecs rolled in from the deserts of north Mexico and took up residence in the Toltec cities, they consolidated their power and subjugated the tribes previously under Toltec control. They cloaked themselves in the vestiges of civilization that the Toltec had created, and wrote themselves into the histories to make it seem to their slave clients that they had always been there, had always been in charge. That they were legitimate. The enforced these lies with extreme violence, and forbade even the mention of the Toltec within their empire.

Throughout their reign over southern Mexico, the Aztec were obsessed with their own future destruction. Their aristocracy were decadent from the start, being a hastily built facsimile of greater people. They were chronically paranoid, and while the Aztecs were good at war against their jungle-dwelling neighbors, they were prone to rash political decisions and frequent periods of civic chaos. The religious systems they’d cobbled together from the Toltec and their own nomadic traditions turned into a constantly ringing bell that foretold their doom, and they fought off the end in the only way they knew how — mass slaughter.

Whatever your base understanding of the Aztec’s practice of human sacrifice, the reality was likely worse. This was an extraordinarily violent culture, and their famous pyramids were literally stained from top to bottom with the gore of victims brought in by the thousands for single festivals. And they only got more savage as the end of their empire drew nearer. Hundreds of people were fed to animals in one day. Virgin girls were paraded past smiling nobles before being flayed alive, their skin worn by high priests before they were even dead. Cannibalism was a mainstay.

The Aztecs behaved as a people running out of time even before the first Spaniard set foot in Mexico, and they sprayed their cities with blood in an effort to forestall the end of the charade. Their culture actually began to crack under its own lunacy a century before the Europeans arrived. When a great pyramid in the capital was completed around the year 1400, they conducted 10,000 human sacrifices within a few weeks. More and more revolts had to be put down, and in the outer provinces the perceived legitimacy of the ruling class was already a long-running joke.

When the Spaniards conquered the Aztec Empire in the Sixteenth Century, they did so with the help of dozens of other tribes eager to rip down a regime that had gone completely insane. When the end came, the Aztec ruling elite were destroying more relics of their own pre-history, erecting new monuments to their greatness, and promising new festivals of sacrifice to forestall the apocalypse. Under the reign of Montezuma II, the first ruler to encounter the Europeans, their empire actually expanded further as they laid waste to more tribes to their south while Conquistadors established a foothold on their doorstep. There’s often a run of deluded bloat before the collapse.

But as deluded as they had become, the Aztecs were right about their impending doom — had been right about it for centuries. Because imposters know in their heart that the lies can’t last forever. The longer they lay atop the carcass of what’s no longer really there, the more rot accumulates beneath. And the implosion can happen fast.