What factors most likely account for the West gaining global ascendancy?

I think the most important factor in Europe's dominant global influence is the deep-seated desire for progress found so strongly in Europe. Other nations had no lack of technological, cultural, and moral progress, but Europeans always seem to be the first on the list when it comes to perfecting guns, making better slaver ships, and trying to find more ways to make themselves money. Maybe it’s not a need for progress, maybe its some kind of genetic desire for laziness, an innate disposition towards anything that makes their life easier. The Incas and the Maya, from what I have seen, had thriving civilizations that did not move towards new ways to avoid doing something themselves, whether by paying someone else to do it or finding a way to make it happen at the push of a button. Whatever this underlying feeling was, it was what drove Western merchants and patriots to other continents. Once there they attempted to westernize the area to make them compatible with the flow of money and ideas. And thus, through force and corruption, the Western way became the worldly way.