As dark as your take may be, it's not quite there. Civilization is an evolutionary trap: once created, it isolates humans from the risks and responsibilities of the natural environment that spawned us. We do everything possible to increase that isolation from an anthropocentric perspective: more efficient farming and mining, streamlined economics, externalized costs to resources, harvesting profits from instabilities, etc. There's no leader trying to establish humanity's carrying capacity for its own place in the universe, so fanatical competition is the rule, and bullying substitutes for leadership. It's always a one-way trip from barbarism to TPS reports, then collapse. Education is based on competing for seats on the bus, not questioning human generosity. Whenever education drifts from maximum competitive consumption, its progeny are devoured.