The scientific revolution enabled a much more systematic and effective way of increasing knowledge about the world.
This enabled an acceleration of technological progress, which finally triggered the industrial revolution, which can be seen as marking the beginning of system C.
The use of fossil fuels in steam engines represented a very effective means of using energy for large scale industrial processes. Centralization and optimization of industrial processes enabled the rapid increase in the production of various goods. This made economic growth rise consistently above 1% in the industrialized world.
Capitalism, and rival of pseudo-communism were the dominant economic systems of system C which leveraged centralized industrial processes relatively effectively.
Eventually, pseudo-communism failed to prevail against capitalism, because it was less efficient. This lack of efficiency came from a strong reliance on centralized economic structures, which is even more emphasized in pseudo-communism than in capitalism. Nevertheless, the reliance of centralization is also the reason why capitalism is replaced by the largely decentralized digital abundance economy in system D.
In system C the large geopolitical actors are modern nation states with their centralized restructuring of society to fulfil the requirements of a centralized industrial economy. Stagnant religious and philosophical ideologies increasingly lost out against science and industrialization as ordering forces for society.
Advances in industrial agriculture enables an increasing percentage of the population to become workers, or even scientists. Also, significant advances in health allowed the overall population to soar to unprecedented levels. Together with the systematic and centralized application of the scientific method, this caused a huge increase and improvement of scientific knowledge and technology.
Towards the end of system C, the digital computer and global information networks were developed, though they failed to unleash their full revolutionary potential in system C, because its economy was stuck in the paradigms of a centralized industrial economy.
Alternative names for system C
- Industrial age
- Capitalist age
- Centralist age