Mercantile-manufacturing Societies. Following the Iron Age technological revolution and the growth of great cities as hubs, ownership and control of material resources came to depend far more on manufacturing and trading, and agriculture loses its supreme economic importance. This leads to increasing control of the stratification system by wealthy merchant bankers and corporations. Monarchies begin to be replaced by republics and economic class came to determine the allocation of status and power. Moral and natural philosophers replace priests as intellectual propagandists for the new elite and artists provide entertaining distractions for the new urban working classes who are mobile and more politically significant than rural peasants who retain traditional values. In the growing towns nuclear families replace rural extended families.

The Global Industrial Civilisation. In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries steam engines powered by fossil fuels and the cultural expansion of European Imperialism throughout the world, produced a mechanistic global monoculture for which Charles Darwin unwittingly provided the intellectual justification. Machines are utterly unlike organisms where the whole is always more than the sum of its parts and qualitatively different. Only by excluding the maker and tool user in the analysis, can the whole of a machine be seen as no more than the sum of its parts which can be broken down and reassembled. Communal religious values previously taught in the family and churches were replaced by compulsory education run by the state and based on individualistic secular-scientific values. Human beings in the Christian part of the world reared to voluntarily practice the traditional Golden Rule of spiritual egalitarianism regardless of political power or social status were forcibly transformed into soulless egalitarian cogs in social machines.