What we forgot when we called ourselves civilized
The largest contiguous empire in human history was built by people we call barbarians.
Twenty-four million square kilometers. More land than Rome, more than Britain at its peak, more than any empire before or since. Built in a single generation by a man who started with nothing, no army, no wealth, no political connections. Just a mother who dug roots to keep him alive and a wife who told him to stop following and start leading.
I listened to Jack Weatherford on the Lex Fridman podcast recently, discussing Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. Weatherford has spent decades studying the Mongols, and his work challenges everything I thought I knew about “progress.”
Here’s what’s bothering me: The Mongols operated on principles we consider progressive today. Powerful women in leadership, genuine religious tolerance, ruthless meritocracy. Then we spent centuries dismantling those principles in the name of civilization.
What if the barbarians had it figured out?
Women Built the Empire
This isn’t revisionist history or modern projection. Women weren’t incidental to Mongol success. They were structural.
Hö’elün, Temüjin’s mother, kept her family alive through sheer will when they were abandoned by their tribe. She “pulled her hat down over her head, took her black stick and ran up and down the banks of the river digging out roots to feed the gullet of her brood.” No waiting for rescue. Action.
Börte, his wife, didn’t just support him. She redirected his life. When Temüjin was subordinate to his blood brother Jamukha, she told him directly: “He lords it over you too much. He orders you around too much. You need to be free.” That counsel changed history. Without it, there’s no Genghis Khan.
After his death, his daughters and daughters-in-law ruled vast territories. Not as regents waiting for sons to come of age, as rulers in their own right. Weatherford wrote an entire book on this: The Secret History of the Mongol Queens.
The largest empire ever made space for women that our “advanced” civilization later closed off.
Why?
The Mongol system was decentralized, merit-based, and tribal. If you could do the job, you did the job. Western “progress” brought nation-states, codified law, religious institutions, primogeniture, clerical celibacy, military service as the price of citizenship. Each of these centralized power in ways that excluded women by design.
We institutionalized. They never did. Their “primitive” structure was actually more open.
Modern politics has become an elite ruling class playing musical chairs. The Mongol model was living with, as, and of the people. Somehow that’s the version we call barbaric.
Tolerance That Actually Tolerated
The Mongols had no state religion to protect. They didn’t care what you believed (Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, shamanist) as long as you were loyal and productive.
This wasn’t philosophical enlightenment. It was pragmatism. Conquered peoples who could keep their gods were easier to govern than those forced to convert. The Mongols understood that religious coercion breeds resentment, and resentment breeds rebellion.
But here’s what strikes me: their tolerance was actual tolerance. Indifference to belief, focus on contribution.
Modern Western “tolerance” is something else entirely. It demands affirmation. You must not only accept, you must celebrate. And if you don’t affirm me, I won’t just disagree with you. I’ll work to make you less of a citizen. I’ll remove you from polite society. I’ll destroy your livelihood if I can.
That’s not tolerance. That’s ideological conformity wearing tolerance as a mask.
The Mongol version: Believe what you want. Be loyal. Be productive. We don’t care about your inner life, we care about your contribution.
The modern version: Your inner life is exactly what we care about. Affirm the right things or face consequences.
One of these is tolerance. One is coercion dressed in progressive language.
The State Religion Problem
There’s a reason Mongol tolerance worked that we can’t easily replicate: they had no sacred center to protect.
Western civilization built itself around Christianity as an organizing principle. Not just as belief, but as the framework for law, morality, social structure, and meaning. When you have a sacred center, tolerance means decentering something foundational.
The Mongols faced no such tension. They could afford indifference because nothing was threatened by other beliefs coexisting.
In the United States today, Christianity is being decentered. Whether you think that’s good or bad, the destabilization is real. The people who organized their lives around that center feel it slipping. The people pushing the decentering feel the resistance. Neither side can afford Mongol-style indifference because the stakes feel existential.
Maybe genuine tolerance requires having nothing sacred to protect. Or maybe it requires everything being equally sacred, which amounts to the same thing.
Either way, we’re not there. And pretending we are makes the conflict worse.
Brutality and Clarity
I can’t write about the Mongols without addressing this: they were devastating in conquest.
Entire cities massacred. Terror used strategically. Jamukha, Temüjin’s blood brother turned rival, captured the rhetoric perfectly: “Jump to the smoke hole in the top of the ger… kill them all. Kill the men and the women and the children.”
This wasn’t incidental. It was policy. Resist, and annihilation follows. Surrender, and you’re absorbed peacefully.
The brutality is indefensible by modern ethics. I’m not defending it.
But here’s what I can’t shake: within the empire, there was remarkable order, fairness, and meritocracy. The same system that destroyed resisters protected subjects. The same leaders who showed no mercy in conquest showed genuine care for governance.
This wasn’t contradiction. It was clarity. Total loyalty earns total protection. Resistance earns annihilation. Everyone knew exactly where they stood.
Modern Western ethics rejects this duality. We want consistency across all contexts. We want rules that apply the same way to everyone, everywhere, always.
But maybe there’s something to learn from the clarity, even if the methods are off the table.
How many organizations fail because expectations shift constantly? How many relationships corrode because the rules keep changing? How much anxiety comes from never knowing where you stand?
The Mongols were brutal, but no one was confused. There’s a strange comfort in that, knowing the game, even if the stakes are high.
Why We Can’t Go Back
Here’s the uncomfortable question: Could a Mongol-style system work today?
I don’t think so. Not because meritocracy is wrong, but because we’ve lost the capacity for it.
Western culture, especially in the United States, has drifted into participation awards for everyone. We don’t have the intestinal fortitude for true merit-based accountability. You see it now: as the country moves toward merit-based systems in some areas, there’s tremendous pushback from those who benefit from the current credentialed elite structure.
Merit-based accountability means some people fail. Visibly. Definitively. And we’ve built a culture that can’t tolerate visible failure, not because we’re kind, but because we’re afraid it might be us next.
The Mongols promoted based on demonstrated ability, not seniority or connections. That’s countercultural today. Saying it out loud feels almost transgressive.
But I believe it. In my own business, I’ve seen how merit-based thinking makes organizations better. Loyalty and productivity as the entry ticket, not bloodline, credentials, or ideological conformity. Clear expectations. “Giddy up, you’re part of the group.”
That’s not barbarism. That’s clarity.
The Real Question
History rhymes, but we write the next verse.
The Mongols built something remarkable on principles we’ve abandoned. Not because those principles failed (the empire lasted, in various forms, for centuries). We abandoned them because different power structures emerged. The Church, feudal hierarchies, nation-states, each centralized power in new ways, and those ways excluded people the Mongol system included.
The regression wasn’t going backward. It was going somewhere else. Somewhere that served different interests.
So the question isn’t whether we can return to Mongol principles. It’s whether we can learn from them.
Can we create space for merit that our institutions currently close off?
Can we practice tolerance that doesn’t demand affirmation?
Can we establish clarity that doesn’t require brutality?
Can we build organizations where contribution matters more than credentials?
I don’t know. But I suspect the answers are in the silence after we stop pretending our current system is the pinnacle of progress.
The barbarians knew something we’ve forgotten. Maybe it’s time to remember.
What would change if you judged people by contribution instead of credentials? What would you have to give up?