Yet at the same time we used our knowledge and technology for life, we weaponized it and used it for death and destruction.
By the close of the second millennium, just 200 years after the human population had crossed one billion people, we had weaponized our technology, destroyed civilizations and ecosystems, mapped and divided up our earth into nations and cities and plots of land. It was an old story and an old playbook, repeated with ever more powerful tools and technologies.
We killed over 100 million people through War alone, and afflicted the globe with pollution, diseases, and poverty that caused billions of human beings and trillions of sentient beings to suffer.
We committed genocides and willfully attempted to destroy entire populations. We set up intentional global systems of exploitation, injustice, and oppression. We sabotaged our neighbors, built ever higher walls, and carelessly lobbed bombs over them. In our darker moments, we became resentful, murderous, and genocidal. We accelerated our religious and political and tribal warfare. We built reform camps. We built concentration camps. We invented nuclear weapons, and then vaporized innocent human beings with them.
We didn’t properly steward the systems we created, and let nuclear radiation leak into the land and the seas. We shipped our toxic waste to impoverished nations, and dumped our nuclear and chemical waste in the waters. We bribed and coerced less powerful tribes to make deals they didn’t understand, accept our waste, and subordinate themselves to our systems.
We developed entire industries of war, pumped out an endless stream of weapons, and armed and corrupted the world to defend and expand our interests. Then we called them terrorists and insurgents and sent our children to war to destroy and be destroyed. We created secret departments specifically for the purpose of infiltrating and corrupting others. We waged world wars, we waged unjust wars, we callously prolonged wars to feed the military-industrial machine and the business owners and politicians who benefitted from it. We subordinated our entire world to the holders of Capital, who corrupted the politicians, destroyed Truth, preyed on the poor, and enslaved our world in an endless stream of debt and consumption.
We built shoddy infrastructure, and turned a blind eye to the corruption that caused it begin crumbling.
By 2020, the earth and all its inhabitants groaned and choked under the oppression of rulers armed with superpowers and all-seeing eyes, chemical pollutants permeating our soil we ate from, the water we drank, the air we breathed.
By 2022, it was apparent that all the rainwater of the earth was poisoned.
And yet many had been lifted out of Poverty. Into what?
Forward to 8.59 The Great Dichotomy
Back to 8.57 The Stunning Boom
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