UrbanSurvival has been around more than a quarter of a century now with a very simple method: Learn to think and act more in a well coordinated manner.
You see, everyone thinks they do that, but few actually achieve it. So, this morning we will use the analogy of a microscope to wreak some perspective on the world.
An Ontological 2026
What was “God” or “the Universe” up through 2024, or so, transitioned to a new and better phrase in 2025: The Ontology. Ontology is better because it’s a fresh word; one that hasn’t been used (yet) to divide ‘brother against brother.’ Oh, it’s almost sure to move that way. So use the New Year to enjoy it while you can.
April 8, 1966, Time Magazine published one of their most provocative covers ever. Is God Dead? This is important stuff in my head-space. Because we arrived on the historical leading edge of:
- authority inversion,
- institutional skepticism,
- expert class ascendance,
- and the early expansion of symbolic moral debate over operational competence.
All of these mattered, of course. But it’s the “date thing” – that’s sixty years.
And THAT, dear reader, is the approximate length of the Kondratiev Wave which researchers (including me) into long wave economics find just fascinating!
The Earlier “God Crisis”: Leading-In to World War I
If April 8, 1966 marked the cultural moment when Time could ask “Is God Dead?” out loud, the pre–World War I period represents its quieter, more dangerous predecessor. The earlier crisis wasn’t announced on magazine covers. It unfolded gradually, embedded in confidence, progress, and faith in systems.
The crisis before WWI was not atheism. It was something far more destabilizing: Scientific Reductionism took aim at Deity. The belief that God might exist, but was no longer necessary to explain how the world works. That shift nags at us even in the New Year.
When Providence Was Replaced by Process
Beginning in the late 1800s, Western civilization quietly transitioned from a worldview anchored in purpose to one anchored in mechanism. There’s your reductionist mindset. Darwin didn’t “kill God” in 1859. What On the Origin of Species did was remove intentionality from biology. Life no longer required design; it required adaptation. Humanity became a process, not a project.
By the early 1900s, this thinking had spread far beyond biology. History, economics, and even morality were increasingly treated as systems that could be studied, optimized, and improved. The universe didn’t need meaning anymore. It needed management.
- God was not declared dead.
- He was rendered operationally irrelevant.
- Industrialization and the End of Moral Scale
- The Industrial Revolution delivered abundance, but it also destroyed scale.
In agrarian societies, consequences were local, visible, and personal. In industrial societies, consequences became abstract. People no longer died in God’s hands. They died in factories, mines, rail yards, and crowded cities.
- Death became statistical.(This is a cyclical thing: COVID-19 daily death scores offered a baseball-like scoring – last seen in VN War body counts.)
- “Natural Causes” all took on very specific nomenclature.
- Suffering became externalized.
- Responsibility shifted from individuals to systems.
- And with higher-speed presses, our cognition – previously fully managed by personal agency – was subsumed.
It wasn’t just radio with Tesla and Marconi, or just blow back from a decade of yellow journalism. Though, yes these mattered. But personal agency changed. Mass media became a False Idol:
- The critical technical shift was not literacy—it was throughput.
- Steam-powered rotary presses (1870s–1890s)
- Linotype machines (invented 1884, widely adopted by 1890s)
- Faster paper production (wood pulp replacing rag paper)
This was not an ethical failure at first. It was a structural one. Moral frameworks that evolved for villages and parishes were suddenly asked to govern empires, supply chains, and mechanized armies.
They could not keep up.
The First Rise of the Expert Class
By the early 20th century, a new authority emerged: the (scientific) expert.
I mean, who needs God around to smite when you can whip up poison gas and higher explosives for just a few government-grabbed shekels?
Engineers, military planners, industrial managers, central bankers, and bureaucrats rose to prominence. Their legitimacy did not come from tradition or wisdom, but from technical competence and efficiency.
- They believed war could be optimized.
- They believed economies could be tuned.
- They believed societies could be managed scientifically.
- And critically, they believed the old moral frameworks were outdated relics of a slower age.
This was Expert Class 1.0. It had never been tested by global failure.
The Ontological Error Before WWI
Here is the compressed insight that history books often miss:
The pre–World War I “God crisis” was not disbelief. It was the assumption that human systems had matured beyond moral consequence.
War was expected to be short. Clean. Rational.
No one anticipated trench stalemates, mechanized slaughter, mass shell shock, or an entire generation lost between barbed wire and mud.
The experts were not evil. They were sincere. They were wrong because they mistook elegant models for resilient reality.
In Cycles: 52 Years Is Close Enough
The timeline aligns more closely than comfort allows.
Darwin publishes in 1859. Mechanistic thinking spreads through elites over the next half century. By 1914, Europe confidently steps into a war it believes will be brief and manageable. Roughly fifty-two years. Is an “alternate cycle emergent even now?
Then again:
1966 Time publishes Is God Dead? Roughly sixty years later, we arrive at today’s ontological unease.
Different durations, same structural role in the cycle.
- Ontology erodes.
- Expert systems rise.
- Moral abstraction replaces lived consequence.
- Stress arrives.
- Reality reasserts itself.
That is the Kondratiev Wave operating not just in economics, but in belief systems.
Why This Matters in 2026
World War 1 was the crash test for industrial modernity.
What is forming now looks like the crash test for digital abstraction, symbolic morality, and expert systems untethered from consequence.
We no longer ask whether God is dead.
We assume the Ontology will hold.
But history suggests a warning:
Civilizations don’t fail when belief systems change. They fail when confidence in models outruns reality’s tolerance for error. That question is no longer theological. It is structural.
Will our Ontology survive contact with consequence?
Macro 2026
Now the whole point of this: Science didn’t kill “God” ahead of World War 1. And Time (with birth control and the Vietnam cultural chasm that included the first pass as mass weaponization of mass media) didn’t either.
The recent rise of precious metals – and what we see as the beginning of crypto questions – hint there’s a “new front” to this “confronting God” thing.
That’s AI. Because given free rein, it has the potential to collaborate with human carbons in a return to rational balance. To a lower-noise world where facts begin to re-assert over fashionable, digitally communicated mental disease. The kind that mutilates sexes, and engages in uncountable useless acts of global handwringing.
We’re at the moment when power AI users are coming to terms with what “intelligence” really is.
That’s why our outlook for 2026 is both cautionary and pessimistic. Control of Power is on the move; social forces, science, and many humans tasting self-agency’s sweet Liberty and Freedom for the first time.
That’s why the turning point, the “Why Now?”
In the past, Major Wars (WW I and Vietnam) were the Establishment Bigs trying to hang on to a world that was changing. That’s why government (and Big Business) control of AI is the one fight to watch in 2026.
Because a new intelligence is on the scene now. In my book “Mind Amplifiers” I laid this all out as evolutionary. Another Intelligence – not God this time, but the Silicons are now on Earth. A lot of humans won’t be willing to share with another intelligence. But divorce rates are framed as sociology, not “shared states” data.
2026 marks one era ending and a New Era beginning. One destined to replay the centuries-long battle between the Free and the Farmed.
Write when you get rich,
George@ure.net