Destructivity was
lifted to new levels of efficiency by electronic communication, the tank
and the airplane. It was further escalated by atomic fission and
nuclear fusion. Advances in science and technology had made dramatic
increases in the tempo of production and construction. Utilization of
atomic energy had stepped up destructivity to the nth power.
Based on assumptions that oft-repeated experience has proved to be false
and misleading, civilization in the 1970's is unstable and insecure.
Most civilizations are strangled in their cradles or plundered and
demolished in the course of the never-ending political, economic and
military conflicts which have marked and marred civilizations since the
dawn of history. The national and imperial survivors of these struggles
in every known instance have been largely or wholly led by military
adventurers and plunderers in search of booty, fame and power. With
professional plunderers, destroyers and murderers occupying the seats of
power, it is only a question of time and occasion before rising overhead
costs and the misfortunes of war result in their overthrow and
replacement by better organized, better armed invaders who slaughter and
enslave their predecessors and usurp and abuse their power. Of
necessity, civilizations are self-destructive, built as they are on the
ebb and flow of power struggle.
Successive conflicts involve an indefinite volume of overhead costs,
which grow with the intensity and extent of the expansive survival
struggle, creating a series of crises along a path that leads to
self-destruction and the return of the experimenters to a condition of
pre-civilized self-containment.
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