From mass slaughter to ecological collapse

We should take a step back and view the history of the 20th century not as a contest between political ideologies but as the natural outcome of the effects of the Industrial Revolution on Europe, its colonies, and its adversaries. The massive, 31 year-long slaughter that stretched from 1914-1945 came out of the inability of the world's leadership to manage the extraordinary power the Industrial Revolution had unleashed in enabling mankind to mine the earth's fertile core without having to pay any dividend for generations. So as the 20th century was an object lesson in violence, the 21st century will become an object lesson in natural catastrophe. None of the daughters of the Industrial Revolution – liberal democratic capitalism, communism, fascism – had any sense of how to manage the problem of working the fertile core beyond sustainable levels. All the daughter ideologies were born of the excess the Industrial Revolution enabled. It was that excess that engendered a new sort of class warfare with a new arena of reward and punishment – the resource curse. The first and most insidious objective of the resource curse is to define the human condition as fundamentally rapacious and self-serving. In a resource cursed world, threats and war and pestilence and hunger and disease are the baseline conditions of humanity. None of the religions has come close to recognizing and framing and addressing and solving the challenges the Industrial Revolution and the attendant resource curse has loosed on mankind. The ultra-Orthodox response is trivial and pathetic and completely misses the point. The ultra-Orthodox define the problem in as narrow a focus as possible whereas the ancient teachings address the matter is as broad a focus as possible. That narrow focus affirms the first objective of the resource curse. It views the world as essentially threatening and it views humanity as basically aggressive. The ultra-Orthodox have fascistic affinities because they, like the fascists, do not place much stock in civil society and its core value: mutual aid.