The Forgetting Becomes Total
The transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe (15th-18th centuries) represents not a break from the cycle but its acceleration to unprecedented velocity. Where previous iterations of empire had taken centuries to rise and fall, the modern system would compress the timeline, creating more wealth and destruction in 300 years than all previous civilizations combined.
The enclosure of the commons in England (beginning in the 15th century, accelerating in the 18th) was the prototype. The open fields, the shared pastures, the forests where peasants had hunted and gathered for centuries—these were fenced, privatized, turned into commodities. The peasantry was separated from the land, from their means of subsistence, from the knowledge of how to live without money. They became "free labor"—free to sell their labor power or starve.
This was the original accumulation that Marx described: "written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire." The commons were destroyed not because they were inefficient but because they were unprofitable. A peasant who could feed himself from common land could not be compelled to work in a factory. The forgetting was enforced by violence—the violence of the whip, the gallows, the workhouse.
The ideology that accompanied this transformation was new in its completeness. Previous empires had justified extraction through religion, through divine right, through tradition. Capitalism justified it through "efficiency," "progress," "the market"—impersonal forces that required exploitation as naturally as gravity requires falling. The invisible hand would guide selfishness toward the common good. The rising tide would lift all boats. The poor were poor because they were lazy, or because the market had not yet worked its magic, or because they had not yet learned to be "rational actors."
The forgetting became internalized. It was no longer necessary to force people to forget; they forgot willingly, eagerly, in pursuit of the commodities that promised happiness. The commodity fetish—Marx's term for the way social relations between people appeared as relations between things—made the extraction invisible. The worker did not see the Bangladeshi garment worker who sewed his shirt; he saw only the price tag, the brand, the style. The consumer did not see the oil well, the refinery, the atmospheric carbon; he saw only the full tank, the open road, the freedom of movement.
Colonialism globalized the extraction. Europe, having exhausted its own resources through centuries of deforestation and soil depletion, turned to the Americas, Africa, Asia. The triangle trade—manufactured goods to Africa, slaves to the Americas, sugar and cotton to Europe—created the first global economy, powered by human flesh. An estimated 12.5 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic; millions more died in the capture and transport. The wealth that built the factories of Manchester, the banks of London, the universities of Paris was extracted from the blood and labor of the colonized.
The ideology of colonialism was the ideology of civilization itself, purified and weaponized. The colonized were "savages," "backward," "primitive"—living in the state of nature that European theory had invented to justify its own dominance. They needed to be "civilized," "Christianized," "developed"—taught to forget their own knowledge of sustainable living, their own commons, their own communities, and to adopt the extractive individualism of the West.
The forgetting was exported. Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Asia who had maintained sustainable relationships with their environments for millennia were dispossessed, enslaved, or exterminated. Their knowledge—of fire management, of sustainable hunting, of crop rotation, of community—was dismissed as superstition, replaced by the "scientific" agriculture that would destroy the soil, the "modern" forestry that would clear-cut the forests, the "efficient" fishing that would empty the oceans.
The industrial revolution (1760-1840 in Britain, spreading thereafter) was the acceleration become visible. Fossil fuels—first coal, then oil—provided energy densities previously unimaginable. A single barrel of oil contains the energy equivalent of 4.5 years of human labor. This was surplus on a scale that made the grain stores of ancient empires look like pantry shelves.
The factory system concentrated this energy and this labor in urban centers that grew faster than any cities in history. Manchester's population increased from 25,000 in 1772 to 367,000 in 1851. London became the first city of millions. The air turned black with coal smoke. The rivers turned toxic with industrial waste. The workers—men, women, and children—labored 12, 14, 16 hours a day in conditions that made Roman slavery look humane by comparison.
The response was not revolution (initially) but rationalization. The "dismal science" of economics—Malthus, Ricardo, the utilitarians—provided mathematical proofs that poverty was inevitable, necessary, even beneficial. The poor laws punished the destitute. The workhouses imprisoned them. The ideology of "self-help" blamed them for their own exploitation.
The workers fought back. The Luddites (1811-1816) smashed the machines that were displacing them—not because they hated technology but because they understood that the machines were being used to extract more surplus, to accelerate the forgetting, to destroy the knowledge of craft and replace it with the discipline of the factory. The Chartists (1838-1857) demanded political representation. The trade unions organized. The socialists theorized.
But the cycle adapted. The reforms of the 19th and early 20th centuries—child labor laws, the 10-hour day, the expansion of the franchise, the welfare state—were not defeats for capitalism but its consolidation. By giving just enough to the workers to keep them alive and consuming, the system could continue extracting. The worker became the consumer, buying back the products of his own alienated labor, completing the circuit of commodity production.
The world wars (1914-1918, 1939-1945) were imperial competitions for resources, markets, and territory, fought with industrial efficiency that killed 70-100 million people. The Holocaust was the forgetting become total—the reduction of human beings to units of labor or destruction, processed with bureaucratic precision, rationalized by ideology, enabled by technology.
The post-war period (1945-1973) was the golden age of capitalism, the rising tide that did lift some boats—primarily in the West, primarily for white workers, primarily through the exploitation of the global South and the extraction of fossil fuels that would poison the future. The consumer society was perfected. Every need was commodified. Every desire was manufactured. Every alternative was eliminated.
The forgetting was nearly complete by the late 20th century. Most humans lived in cities, disconnected from the land, dependent on systems they did not understand for food, water, energy, and meaning. The knowledge of how to grow food, build shelter, make clothes, heal sickness—the knowledge that had been universal for most of human history—had become the specialized domain of experts, while the majority knew only how to perform narrow tasks in exchange for money to buy survival.
The ideology of "there is no alternative" (TINA) reigned supreme. Capitalism was not a system but reality itself. The market was not a human creation but a force of nature. Inequality was not a choice but an inevitability. The destruction of the environment was not a crime but a trade-off for progress.
And the acceleration continued. The population grew from 2.5 billion in 1950 to 8 billion by 2023. The economy grew faster, doubling every 20-30 years. The energy consumption grew faster still, 80% of it from fossil fuels. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere grew from 280 parts per million (pre-industrial) to 420 parts per million and rising, driving temperatures that would destabilize the climate for millennia.
The cliff approached. The scientists warned—the Club of Rome in 1972, the IPCC from 1988 onward, thousands of studies, millions of data points. But the system could not stop. The extraction could not slow. The forgetting was too complete.
The 21st century brought the crisis into view. The financial collapse of 2008, caused by the unsustainable extraction of wealth through debt. The climate disasters—hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, floods—increasing in frequency and intensity. The pandemics, emerging from the destruction of wildlife habitat and the globalization of trade. The authoritarian resurgences, as the system failed to deliver on its promises and turned to scapegoats and strongmen.
The cycle had accelerated to the point where the rise and fall might occur within a single human lifetime. The forgetting was so total that even as the collapse became visible, most could not see it, could not name it, could not imagine an alternative. They continued to work, to consume, to vote for politicians who promised more extraction, more growth, more acceleration toward the cliff.
And yet. The memory persisted. In the indigenous communities that had resisted the forgetting. In the permaculture movements that relearned sustainable agriculture. In the degrowth theorists who questioned the ideology of progress. In the climate activists who blocked pipelines and occupied capitals. In the millions who sensed, dimly or clearly, that something was wrong, that the system was unsustainable, that another way was possible.
The choice remained. The cycle had not yet completed its turn. The fall was not yet total. The remembering was still possible, though each day of acceleration made it harder, made the cliff closer, made the crash more certain.
The question was whether the remembering could become structural, institutional, embodied in the physical reality of how humans lived, not just in the minds of a few who read history. Whether the cycle could be broken, not by rejecting all technology, but by limiting speed, by enforcing scale, by making the guardrails physical rather than ideological.
The question was whether humans could remember that they were human, before the forgetting became absolute and the fall became final.