A Short Course in Comprehensive Thinking – Part 24 – Economic Systems

They have always been rooted in scarcity, and none of today’s will survive the arrival of abundance.

I have long written that the dominant ideologies are all erected on an assumption of scarcity. Of the three main population-management ideologies in the USA – nationalism, capitalism, and organized religion– I was fortunate to have only been subjected to a few years of Sunday school as a child. The nationalism part I did not really escape from, and I suppose that nearly going into the Air Force had something to do with it, but that bug did not bite me as hard as it did with Dennis Lee or Brian O’Leary.

When we had our first free-energy show in the building where the Boston Tea Party was planned, I did not think of it much in terms of Dennis’s fervent nationalism. Two years later, any notions of American nationalism had been beaten out of me. I was saved from going down the materialism/rationalism/scientism path by my first paranormal experiences at age 16, but I got the full Kool-Aid experience with my capitalist indoctrination in business school, which that voice in my head led me to. I left college a thoroughly indoctrinated and naïve capitalist, but I became a financial cop, to keep capitalism honest. It took several years for me to realize that we were cops on the take, and I got my baptism-by-fire in the real world of capitalism in those years. What we encountered during our free-energy adventures was capitalism on steroids.

In my awakened state, I studied everything, and economic history became one of my subjects, which led in part to my Epochal framework of the human journey. One aspect of it that I have studied more in the past generation was the rise of trading in the human journey. With the tools that scientists have today, such as mass spectrometers, they can tell where stone tools came from, and going back millions of years, they can tell that many tools had been transported quite a distance from their rocks of origin, such as obsidian and flint. Today, scientists think that long-distance trading began about 150,000 years ago, and it increased with behavioral modernity.

The first bronze was made with arsenic, but its great toxicity was certainly behind the move to tin, which was not as toxic. But tin was relatively scarce, and the trading of tin in the Fertile Crescent was an important part of Bronze Age trade networks. The first fortunes were likely made by trading. Trading is not much of a “value add” of a profession, and middle men became rich by setting the terms of exchange. It could be a high-risk endeavor, as pirates and brigands could steal the merchandise, and it was a high risk-reward endeavor that only the most talented or ruthless could profit from.

All civilizations were made possible by being situated on low-energy transportation lanes, almost always bodies of water, which reduced the energetic costs of transportation by about 99%. Europe’s conquest of Earth was made possible by turning Earth’s ocean into one big low-energy transportation lane. Once Europe achieved that feat, conquering the world was relatively easy. The Bronze Age collapse around the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean ruined the tin-trading networks and led directly to the Iron Age, as iron ore was relatively plentiful and did not need another scarce metal for an alloy. The technical issue of smelting iron was achieving higher temperatures, which necessitated blast furnaces.

Economic systems always developed from their energetic foundations. Industrialization was made possible by the low-energy transportation lane that England used to plunder North America and the abundant and easily exploited coal deposits of Great Britain (and watermills). Without those energy windfalls, the Industrialization Revolution would not have happened.

But there was no science of energy at the time, and the rise of capitalism coincided with the conquest of the world, as exemplified by the East India companies. It was all predicated on that easy energy, and the rise of the exchange game was more of a parasitic side-effect. I have written that I think that Europe’s conquest of Earth led to the rise of global elites, the kind who repeatedly wiped out our efforts. Capitalism is based on greed, which is rooted in scarcity. When my partner was offered one billion dollars by the CIA to fold our operation, before they stopped playing nicely, it was to protect all of the global rackets, not just the energy racket.

To make any economic system into an object of worship is really no different from the other dominant ideologies: they are a means of social control, and especially how people think. As I have written, all rackets indoctrinate people into self-serving in-group beliefs, and nearly all people will embrace them to their deaths, even when such allegiance leads to certain death. I had to repeatedly see it to believe it.

There is nothing magic about any of today’s economic systems, as they are all rooted in scarcity and all politics is about who gets the benefit of the scarce resources. With the arrival of abundance on the back of free energy, none of today’s economic systems will survive and nobody will miss them, even the global elite, as this world will end. The idea of economic exchange will become meaningless, as it only makes sense in a world of scarcity.