With foresight, careful planning and skillful manipulation of forces and
trends the cultivatable portions of the planetary land mass might have
been turned into a garden of unending plenty dotted with marvelous city
centers of light and learning.
In order to achieve such results it would have been necessary for the
human family to coordinate its efforts around an agreed division of
labor, share the goods and services produced and move from one level of
affluence to a level of abundance.
Instead of joint efforts to achieve abundance and security, the most
prosperous and most highly developed centers of western civilization
consolidated their authority in sovereign states, surrounded by
forbidding frontiers, armed them with the most destructive agencies that
human imagination and ingenuity could devise, schooled the citizens of
each nation in the suicidal formula: "might makes right; every nation
for itself and woe betide the laggard and the loser."
The logical ideology of such a formula was egomania, suspicion, fear and
hatred. Its outcome was a competitive life and death struggle for wealth
and power, with the nation or a bloc of nations as the units of
competition. The struggle at its highest level involved occasional local
wars and periodical general wars like those of 1914-18 and 1936-45.
Before the great revolution such struggles were waged chiefly with
weapons wielded by human muscle power, supplemented with whatever animal
power was available.
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