We are repeatedly told that industrialization and capitalism represent the pinnacle of human civilization. Material abundance has never been greater, technology advances by the day, and GDP figures seem to climb forever. But if you lift your eyes from the statistics and look around, at the burned-out office worker, the summer that gets hotter every year, the food bank line that gets longer every month, a different story emerges. The core drivers of the Western development model, endless growth, endless consumption, and endless extraction, are systematically producing burnout, climate collapse, and inequality. This is not a glitch in the system. It is the system working as designed.