litical landscape during the
earlier decades of the century, were coming to represent the principal
form of indigenous political activity in most subject nations.

Since the driving force of colonialism itself was economic exploitation,
it was perhaps inevitable that most movements of liberation assumed a
broadly socialistic ideological cast. Within only a few short years, these
circumstances had created a fertile ground for exploitation by the world's
superpowers. For the Soviet Union, the situation seemed to offer an
opportunity to induce a shift in the existing alignment of nations by
gaining a preponderating influence in what was by now beginning to be
called the "Third World". The response of the West--wherever development
aid failed to retain the loyalties of recipient populations--was to resort
to the encouragement and arming of a wide variety of authoritarian
regimes.

As outside forces manipulated new governments, attention was increasingly
diverted from an objective consideration of developmental needs to
ideological and political struggles that bore little or no relation to
social or economic reality. The results were uniformly devastating.
Economic bankruptcy, gross violations of human rights, the breakdown of
civil administration and the rise of opportunistic elites who saw in the
suffering of their countries only openings for self-enrichment--such was
the heartbreaking fate that engulfed one after another of the new nations
who, only short years before, had begun life with such great promise.

Inspiring these political, social and economic crises was the inexorable
rise and consolidation of a disease of the human soul infinitely more
destructive than any of its specific manifestations. Its triumph marked a
new and ominous stage in the process of social and spiritual degeneration
that Shoghi Effendi had identified. Fathered by nineteenth century
European thought, acquiring enormous influence through the achievements of
American capitalist culture, and endowed by Marxism with the counterfeit
credibility peculiar to that system, materialism emerged full-blown in the
second half of the twentieth century as a kind of universal religion
claiming absolute authority in both the personal and social life of
humankind. Its creed was simplicity itself. Reality--including human
reality and the process by which it evolves--is essentially material in
nature. The goal of human life is, or ought to be, the satisfaction of