Two Beliefs About the World

One group of people believes humanity can engineer all the problems out of the world. This applies to soft problems, like prejudice about gays or women or blacks or jews, and hard problems like how to plan cities and where to get energy. For them, humanity can "solve" it all. The human plan is the only plan. Another group of people believes there's a natural plan, a natural order, or a divine plan and humanity should follow that divine plan.

Neither group has full access to the truth they believe. That is, the people who think humanity can plan everything can't really make successful plans. The people who believe in a divine order can't know that order.

Both groups, though, are totally sure that the other one is wrong and bad and both groups are exploited by frauds in their midst. For the "humanists", it's a particular set of oligarchs that scams them, and uses a troupe of puppet politicians to protect their interests, and cloaks their activity with rhetoric about gays and transexuals and trees.

The natural order group is massively fragmented, because it is the older model of scamming, so there's a bunch of different religious sects. Also that group has lost all control of public institutions and big national institutions like the banking system and the government, so it has no central voice or political leverage.

The "we can engineer" everything crowd will be the group that wrecks the planet if they don't obliterate their civilization first, ironically enough. It's 100% guaranteed. I don't even think it will happen as a result of direct malice, it will just be like an accidental discharge of a huge gun that's pointed at everyone.

The "engineer" crowd's vision is based on a future utopia, like Atlantis or the "New Jerusalem"--a totally planned totally fabricated society/world. It's the prison amusement park. Since they require complete control of everything, they will infect even nature with their schemes and destroy systems they can't ever really understand.

I think the "back to eden" approach is a good way to rebuild after the destruction of the Enlightenment civilization. The good thing about the "low tech" advanced civilization is it could retain aspects of the group striving of the Enlightenment civilization, but without all the drawbacks of technology.