Life in the Fifth Epoch - The End of Fear

Who Is Going to Miss It?

I heartily subscribe to evolutionary theory, but it also tells far from the entire story of life on Earth, where we go after we die, etc.  Darwin’s idea of descent with modification is still the one to be reckoned with, but the rise of epigenetics has made room for the resurrection of Lamarck’s ideas of traits acquired in a lifetime that can be inherited.   

In my writings, I explore human traits that have a long history, going back to chimps, monkeys, the first social animals, and even to the beginning of life on Earth.  Many human traits and behaviors have deep evolutionary roots, and hardly any are deeper than fear.  Fear helps keep organisms alive.  Fear triggers behaviors that help organisms fend off threats, such as the fight-or-flight response.  Even plants have defensive responses. 

In Robert Sapolsky’s masterpiece (at least when he did not venture into vaccines and other topics outside of his expertise), he discussed how childhood adversity damages brains for life.  The amygdala is the brain’s fear center, and it is swollen in children who had childhood adversity, as fear was a constant companion.  Also, in children like that, their prefrontal cortexes shrank, which is where rational thinking is rooted.  This is also consistent with the fear response, as the prefrontal cortex kind of shuts down during fear episodes, as the organism prepares to defend itself. 

An evolutionary argument could be that a swollen amygdala and shrunken prefrontal cortex is an appropriate response to a world with constant threats to an organism’s wellbeing and existence.  But who wants to live in fear and have their cognitive abilities impaired?  All human fears ultimately arise from not feeling in control of what happens to our bodies, and death is the ultimate loss of control. 

To revisit Bucky Fuller’s work, when people live in abundance, survival is no longer a daily concern.  If that day comes, fear is going to greatly diminish in humanity.  The evidence is overwhelming that our consciousness can exist separate from our physical bodies and survives death (although “skeptics” will fight it to their deaths, and then they will discover that they are more than ephemeral bags of chemicals).  The materialism of our Epoch is a religion, and it may have served some important purposes, but like organized religion, materialism will not survive into the Fifth Epoch.  So, even the fear of death will diminish to the point where it will be welcomed after lives well-lived, as everybody lives to be at least 100 years old. 

The arrival of the Fifth Epoch means the virtual end of fear, as threats to people’s survival will be very few and far between.  Is anybody going to miss it?  This is also an aspect of what I call the appearance of a new kind of human in the Fifth Epoch.  When humans are raised in abundance and love instead of scarcity and fear, nearly everything about our world will end, and nobody will miss it.