If you don't believe there is anything sacred except for you, if you don't believe there is anything capable of thought or consciousness except for you, then it's really easy not only to wipe out people who you regard as savages, but to rape the earth - to regard the earth as dead. And this works very well as an ideology for capitalism, as an ideology that looks at things and sees only the wealth that can be extracted from them, that looks at the Earth and all its diversity and beauty and sees only what can be mined from it, and sold.

Writer Ben Ehrenreich explains how Enlightenment-era ideas of progress and Western civilization collapsed time and space around the bumbling, destructive European ideology of early capitalism, and why those ideas still mis-guide the bumbling, destructive European ideology of late capitalism on a dying planet.

Ben wrote the article After the Storm for The Baffler.