The transitions to the First, Second, and Third Epochs all happened before recorded history, so determining what happened has been the province of scientists, as they study fossils, artifacts, DNA, and the like. The transition to the Fourth Epoch, however, is exceedingly well documented. One reason why I have stated that nobody ever saw the next Epoch coming is that the Industrial Revolution was about a century old before anybody realized that it was a revolution. Today is the first time in the human journey when people could see the next Epoch coming, although it is only a relative handful today. I am trying to change that.
That Medieval Industrial Revolution was part of Europe’s trajectory to industrialization, as was the Scientific Revolution, which was dependent on the printing press. The first modern economy was Dutch, which inspired English efforts. The Dutch burned quickly depleted peat to fuel their modernization, but the English had access to vast coal deposits, and that was the key to the Industrial Revolution.
Economists have argued that coal had nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution, when it had everything to do with it. It would be like arguing that the sailing ship had nothing to do with Europe’s conquest of Earth. In 1860, what became the United Kingdom consumed 30 times as much energy as it did in 1560, and nearly all of it was coal energy. There is nothing remotely as dramatic in the human journey, energy-wise, as that change.
The Industrial Revolution was all about energy-driven machines, and England had a century’s head start on everybody else. That was how a tiny island nation created the first global empire. England did not need to conquer people around the world in order to industrialize, but did it because it could. Queen Victoria has been credibly described as history’s greatest mass murderer, for what she presided over in India, but Western scholars just can’t see it, blinded by their ideological conditioning.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the Malthusian trap prevailed, in that any energy breakthroughs mainly just meant more mouths to feed. Even though England had a population explosion with industrialization, the productivity of energy-driven machines was an order of magnitude more than the population increase, which led to skyrocketing standards of living, of the kind not remotely seen on Earth before.
The primary upshot of industrialization was the biggest event in the human journey so far: the end of childhood death. The end of childhood death was essential to what is called the demographic transition. Although medical propagandists gave Western medical interventions credit for conquering childhood death, they had nothing to do with it. Childhood death was eliminated as a side-effect of the Industrial Revolution, with improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and hygiene. Going all the way back to gorillas, half of all offspring died before adulthood. In today’s industrial societies, less than 1% do. There is no more important change in the human journey than that. One side-effect of that change was that women no longer needed to bear several children so that two might survive. The effect of that change cannot be overstated. Maternal death also declined from 10% to about zero. Those changes liberated women more than anything else.
Another outcome of industrialization was that with energy-driven machines, brute human labor became devalued, which led to the end of slavery, which had been a hallowed institution from the very beginning of recorded history. Slavery, other than “bride capture,” was infeasible in the Second Epoch with nomadic societies, became normal in the Third, and became seen as evil in the Fourth. The end of slavery had nothing to do with a sudden bout of conscience, but because slavery became economically obsolete. Feeding machines instead of humans with energy was far more economically efficient, and machines could perform feats that were far beyond human capability.
The early days of industrialization were understandably brutal, but so much wealth was generated by industrialization that working conditions greatly improved along with standards of living. Another major change happened with industrialization. Before industrialization, the only way to riches was to steal it from others. With industrialization, wealth could be self-generated at unbelievable levels, although elites still skimmed off their disproportionate share. Elites went through an Epochal transition, too. We encountered global elites and barely survived the experience, and I have read many writings about elites in my days of study, although global elites hide in the shadows, so the documentation is thin. My sense is that elites could only begin thinking in global terms with Europe’s conquest of Earth. Also, commercial elites largely supplanted political elites with that conquest and industrialization.
Those global elites are very real, which we discovered the hard way, but almost nobody on Earth has a productive view of the issue. The so-called left denies that those elites exist, while the “right” obsessively focuses on them, even though they do not know who they are. That schism may seem disjointed, but what left and right have in common are thinking like victims and turning elites into an out-group. Those elites cannot be fought, exposed, punished, and the like. They can only be made obsolete, and only the arrival of the Fifth Epoch will do that. The effort I have in mind can only be mounted by those with love in their hearts, as creators create with love. That is why this is the hardest nut on Earth to crack and why all attempts have failed so far, in our world of scarcity and fear. I am trying something different.