Life in the Fifth Epoch - The End of Money and Exchange Professions

Money and Economic Exchange Will Become Meaningless Concepts

I have quite a few posts to make on what will become obsolete in the Fifth Epoch.   I have done this before.  All Epochs had their innovations, and practices of prior Epochs no longer made sense, usually economic sense, so were discarded.  For instance, slavery was infeasible (other than “bride capture”) in the Second Epoch, became a hallowed institution in the Third, and was abolished and seen as evil in the Fourth.  The end of slavery had nothing to do with a bout of conscience, but industrialization devalued human labor and slavery no longer made economic sense. 

In my opinion, economists have far overblown the importance of trade.  Much of the “trade” that they lauded, especially during Europe’s conquest of the world, was a form of slavery, of forcing captive populations to labor for the conquering society, and then sell them the goods that the captive populations may have produced the raw materials for, at greatly unfair terms of exchange, which bled the subject society dry.  The most notorious instance of that was the UK’s rape of India, which shortened nearly two billion lives.  Queen Victoria has credibly been described as history’s greatest mass murderer. 

The economists’ idea of trade is based on the idea of comparative advantage, in which one society has an advantage in producing something, and another society has an advantage in producing something else, and if they trade with each other, they become mutually richer.  The idea has merit, but in the Fifth Epoch, the idea will become meaningless, as all human needs globally will be met with a minimum of human effort.  The idea of horded possessions will become meaningless, as everybody has what they need.  Megalomaniacs who want to become the emperor of Mars (or the universe) will not find anybody willing to become their subjects, and they will be unable to compel their allegiance.  Such ambitions in today’s world are rooted in scarcity and a deep fear of a loss of control (largely rooted in a fear of death).  All such aspirations will become pointless in the Fifth Epoch. 

I understand how difficult that is to imagine for many people, but nobody ever imagined the next Epoch before it arrived, until now.  The Industrial Revolution was about a century old before anybody realized that it was a revolution. 

As Bucky Fuller said, when abundance reigns, people will be primarily concerned with self-realization, not survival.  The economic games that dominate human affairs today will become pointless.  The good news is that this idea does exist in mainstream discussions, and it is called a post-scarcity economy.  As I have written plenty, the arrival of the Fifth Epoch means the end of the world as we know it.  Early on, money will become meaningless, and all exchange-related professions and institutions will vanish, such as accountants, banks, virtually all attorneys, cashiers, tax collectors, etc., etc.  Those professions and institutions made a kind of sense in a world of scarcity (although vastly overblown, as they serviced the rackets), but make no sense at all in a world of abundance.  Nobody is going to miss them.