THE MINDSET OF MONOCULTURE
Since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, it has been fairly easy to fall into the mindset of monoculture. The lure of big machines offering us power and control; making our lives easier in some senses, but more complicated in others; has led us into an all-encompassing embrace of the mindset and paradigm that made the modern-day world possible.
For thousands of years, we collectively labored away at a lifestyle that was completely vulnerable to the elements of nature. Months of hard work growing the crops we needed to survive could be wiped out in one fell swoop by an extended drought or an unmanageable pest problem. A simple bacterial infection could lead to death and citywide plagues were a common occurrence.
When the Industrial Revolution rolled around, we began to find that our vulnerability could be reduced through trusting in a paradigm that promised to control the natural world and direct it for our own use. All we had to do was trust that the masters of capital and wealth would continue to find ways to keep us on the path of progress and growth.
While the spoils of that growth have hardly been fairly shared and distributed, the vast majority of us have come to believe wholeheartedly in the industrial-capitalist growth paradigm which has reached every corner of the globe. From downtown Manhattan to the tiniest villages in Malawi, many of us have come to believe that the only viable path forward is through embracing a worldview and lifestyle that originated in Europe and has reached its most powerful manifestations in the United States.
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