Imagining the Fifth Epoch Is Not Easy
The Assumptions of Scarcity Are Insidious
I have been imagining what I came to call the Fifth Epoch since I became Dennis Lee’s partner in 1987. I have seen almost nothing but denial, fear, and objections to the idea of a Fifth Epoch ever since. Almost nobody is willing or capable of even imagining the Fifth Epoch. I began calling it an addiction to scarcity. I eventually realized that all of today’s dominant ideologies are founded on the assumption of scarcity, and that the inability to imagine a coming Epoch is normal. As Bill Fairchild astutely commented recently, organized religions often indoctrinate people into the idea of the scarcity of life itself, as a way to scare and control them.
Scarcity is an insidious assumption that colors nearly all human ideology and conversations, and even so-called visionary works are full of it. I have been watching an hour a night of TV with my wife for several years, in this golden age of television, which is actively competing with the silver screen. No longer is TV at the intellectual level of Gilligan’s Island. TV shows are largely for adults now, not sixth-graders, and they are increasingly cinematic. We are in the midst of watching Star Trek Discovery, after watching Picard. The first Star Trek coincided with my father’s stint at NASA, and I was allowed, for the first time in my life, to stay up to 9 PM, in order to watch it. I have been a Trekkie ever since.
But as I began imagining the Fifth Epoch, and encountering visits to it such as this (oh, to be there for a day and take notes!), I developed a critical eye toward such visionary shows, and how far they fell short of the Fifth Epoch. With my scientific and technical background, it kind of ruins the experience, as Star Trek is full of technical nonsense. It is jarring to me to see Fifth-Epoch technology but the shows still depict a world of scarcity, with command structures, battles over resources, and the like. I have to suspend many critical observations in order to enjoy the shows.
I recently received a challenge to my Fifth Epoch visioning which fell far short of understanding what the Fifth Epoch means. That is typical, and I get it all the time. The people that I seek encounter my work and don’t come up for air for years. When they do that, then my vision of the Fifth Epoch makes immensely more sense. My latest essay is another attempt to help shorten that learning curve.
I wrote about the “free energy” debate in the 1940s, after the USA nuked Japan, before the dangers and infeasibilities of fission energy were known. There were objections, such as boredom. Oh, what puny conceptions. Horizons of the human potential currently unimaginable will be pursued. All of the objections and fears that I have ever seen to free energy and the Fifth Epoch were projections of scarcity and fear onto a situation of abundance and love. They can’t see it when they filter everything through the prism of scarcity and fear. As I have often stated, the arrival of the Fifth Epoch means the end of the world as we know it, nobody will miss it, and it is not easy to see from here. I seek those who can.