Specialization and division of labor, plus power-driven machines increase productivity, income, surplus.  In the countryside goods and services often are scarce.  In the city they are likely to be super-abundant.

Growth of wealth and income provide support for an increase in population.  Hence the population explosions in cities and in centers of developing industry, trade and commerce.  Countries passing through the industrial revolution expanded their populations.  Recently, the population of some countries has doubled each twenty-five years.

Western civilization has been militarized as it was mechanized.  Every tool is a potential weapon.  The truck becomes a tank, the airplane a bomber.  War making, like other aspects of western civilization, was mechanized.  Formerly war had pitted man against man.  Mechanized war pitted machines and their attendants against other machines and their human attachments.  The same mechanical forces that built cities, factories and ships converted these agencies of production into instruments of destruction.  Each country in the civilized West fortified its frontiers, trained officers in special schools, mobilized young men and women for military service, stockpiled weapons, multiplied fire-power, making western civilization an armed camp, with guns pointing in every direction.

Regimentation of city life, of industry and commerce, of war, of education and public health followed one after another as the individual human became more and more a cog in a vast social mechanism.  This regimentation dulled imagination at the same time that it deified greed, with “gimme, gimme;” “more, more;” as its watch words.

At certain points in its development western civilization has lifted itself temporarily above the material forces that hemmed in the life of primitive man.  The Renaissance was one such period.  The Enlightenment was another.  A third was the scientific breakthrough from Darwin and Marx to the research and experiments which split the atom and inaugurated the space age.  These gains were offset by the growing planet-wide chasm between wealth and poverty, the plunder and pollution of man’s natural and social environment and the terrifying growth of destructive power revealed during two prolonged general wars in one generation.

Mechanized war demonstrated its destructivity, physically, socially, psychologically.  Prolonged war accustomed an entire generation of mankind to unnecessary suffering and the deliberate twisting, maiming and destroying which are characteristic features of the war-waging civilized state.

Exposure of an entire generation to wholesale destruction and mass murder as a way of life had two quite divergent effects.  It converted sensitive introverts into pacifists.  It produced millions of trained destroyers and killers, experienced in the science and art of mechanized warfare.  Pacifists opposed, denounced and resisted the warfare state and its progeny.  Masses of trained destroyers and killers, the “new barbarians,” gained experience and improved their qualifications by taking part in conventional warfare and in the innumerable guerrilla adventures and operations that accompanied and followed conventional wars.