My Energy Journey – Part 15
The Fifth Epoch and a world of abundance
I have been imagining what I call the Fifth Epoch since 1987, when I became Dennis Lee’s partner. I probably wrote something about it in my first site in 1996, but my 2002 version was my first involved one that I can recall. I did another version in 2014, another last year, and some of my essays recap some of it. I wrote a story a couple of years ago, on what the first century of the Fifth Epoch can look like. This post, in keeping with the theme of recent posts, will emphasize the energetic aspects of it.
To make it very clear, the technologies to usher in the Fifth Epoch are on the planet and are older than I am. If people play on the high road long enough and survive the experience, they learn that. In this area, the so-called “conspiracy theories” are largely true. None of us expected to learn what we did. I am risking my life to publicly write about these subjects, but I have been very calculating about what I do, to keep the risk low. So far, they don’t kill writers like me, and the organized suppression has become less violent over the years. If the people that I seek heed my cautions, they should be fine, and the biggest risk does not come from the global elite and their minions, but people’s social circles. People cannot rush out and tell their social circles about free energy and the Fifth Epoch. If they do, they receive denial, fear, and ostracism in return, and the best that they can get is a lazy acceptance. I have watched people’s relationships and careers end when they tried to proselytize to their social circles on this issue. This is all part of the conundrum. Only when free energy is delivered into people’s lives will 99.9% of humanity begin to understand, and that is normal. Until then, they will not be able to even imagine it.
But if an effort like mine succeeds, then what? That is the subject of this post, and unlike what I have done before, this series of posts is intended to show how the outcomes in the Fifth Epoch that I foresee are not really very imaginative, but just the easily predictable outcomes if humanity had access to abundant and harmlessly produced energy (and antigravity and a few other sequestered technologies). In my Substack posts, I have written about what ends in the Fifth Epoch: cities, money and exchange professions, poverty, crime, violence, and war, nations, politicians, and races, elites, drudgery, disease, fear, careers, mining Earth and environmental devastation, rackets and how they end, dogmatic ideologies, corporations, capitalism, and corruption.
And I have also written about what begins: spacefaring, the rise of truth, the rise of love, cooperation in all things, peace as humanity has never known, radical changes in family structures, pursuing the human potential, health as humanity has never known, extraterrestrial and interdimensional contact, heaven on Earth.
Here goes on why those are easily foreseen outcomes.
The end of poverty: I have written at length on the Industrial Revolution and how it was all about energy-driven machines. I effortlessly perform feats that were unimaginable only a few centuries ago, as I ride my energy-powered machines. The average American is richer than Earth’s richest human of three centuries ago. Louis the XIV not only had to watch nearly his entire family die, but he rarely got as far away from home as I get on a typical day of hiking. Louis was not unusual for those times. Peter the Great also got to watch nearly his entire family die. It was normal for the times, even for the most powerful people in Europe, as it conquered the world. Of Peter’s 15 children, two lived to be older than 20. Similarly, in the Fifth Epoch, the average person will be richer than Bill Gates and Elon Musk. Poverty will be permanently abolished, globally. That is probably the easiest outcome to foresee.
The end of drudgery: While the Industrial Revolution ended slavery and similar exploitations of people, what is coming is scarcely believable to today’s humanity. Artificial intelligence (“AI”) is in its infancy. In a world of abundance, AI-driven robots will perform all manual labor that humans formerly did. Nobody on Earth will live a life of drudgery, and the primary design principle of all technologies will be safety and harmlessness, which will be easily achieved.
The end of childhood adversity: Robert Sapolsky wrote about what happens when children are raised in adversity: swollen amygdalas and shrunken prefrontal cortexes. That can be called brain damage, but an evolutionist could say that the child’s brain was only adapting to live a lifetime in scarcity and fear. They had to be ready for quick violence and emotional outbursts, in which they lashed out at others, in order to survive. In the Fifth Epoch, nobody will have to adapt in that way any longer, as no child will be raised in adversity.
The end of violence: Azar Gat is right, in that surviving and reproducing in a world of scarcity is the root of all violence. The Fifth Epoch means the end of scarcity, so the motivation for violence will also end. We will no longer see gangs, in their many manifestations, playing their violent games on Earth. It simply will no longer make any sense, and societies will not tolerate it. The recalcitrant will be given a “time out” in healing environments, until they finally understand. I foresee perhaps a generation of peacekeeping grandmothers, until nobody needs to be reminded any longer. Some may never be fit to live in the Fifth Epoch, but they will be a tiny minority of humanity, and easily dealt with. I don’t see that it will be a big problem. We have already seen a steep decline in violence, going back to chimps, and each Epoch of the human journey was proportionately less violent than the preceding one, as humanity’s energy surplus increased. Warfare is only violence on a large scale, and it will also make no sense.
The end of nations: Nations are territorial constructs, oriented around ethnic groups and survival, as each nation exploits its resources, and energy resources above all. Nations are really only ape territoriality, writ large. Nations will quickly make no sense, as races and ethnicities quickly fade, as geographical isolation ends. There will be one human culture. Politicians will be one of many social roles that will no longer make any sense, and all politicians today are “stooges” of economic interests, as Bucky Fuller noted.
The end of elites: Elites are societal parasites that have been with us since the first civilizations, and they have always been economic elites above all else, as they have always engaged in conspicuous consumption as a mark of their status. Just as slavery ended in the Fourth Epoch, elites will vanish in the Fifth Epoch, and the global elite know this very well, which is the primary reason why they have sequestered free energy and related technologies from public awareness and use. While a trillion dollars may seem like a pretty penny, it is pocket change for the game that they are playing. Celebrity culture will no longer make any sense. In the long course of the human journey, elites will just be a blip, like many other social roles. People will no longer seek status.
The end of competition: As Gat stated, members of a species can cooperate, compete, or get into conflict. Conflict and competition will no longer make any sense, in a world of abundance. All games and sports, in which there are winners and losers, will no longer make any sense.
The end of rackets: All large industries and professions on Earth are rackets. All rackets will end in the Fifth Epoch, as they will no longer make any sense.
The end of cities: Cities are the hallmark of civilization, with the low-energy transportation lanes that feed them, with their elite-aggrandizing architecture, with their energy efficiency on a per-capita basis, with their ease of social interaction. But all of that only makes sense in a world of scarcity. In the Fifth Epoch, anybody will easily travel the world in minutes, can communicate with anybody instantly, in ways that will be very close to being in their physical presence, there will not be elites, and energy scarcity will no longer shape any aspects of any human society, including cities. Cities as we know them will simply no longer make any sense. There may still be something like cities, but they will be nothing that like we see today, with people living cheek-by-jowl. They will be works of art and places to gather socially, like going to a restaurant or the movies. But people will not have to live in them, living in today’s cities will seem like living in caves, and nobody will want to do it. All of today’s cities will remediated back to nature.
The end of environmental devastation: The first thing to go in the Fifth Epoch will be combustion, especially of organic matter, such as wood, oil, coal, and gas. Global Warming will be stopped in its tracks, as a side effect. If humanity wants carbon-dioxide levels to be at preindustrial levels, it will as easy as setting a thermostat. Edward O. Wilson proposed that half of Earth should be given back to nature. In the Fifth Epoch, virtually all of it will be. Humans will no longer have to rely on Earth’s ecosystems for their sustenance. Indoor farms that can feed humanity can be any place in the solar system. Mining Earth, for any reason, will be seen as stupid and suicidal. The world’s ecosystems will be regenerated in ways that are scarcely imaginable today. Humanity will help heal the damage that it has inflicted on Earth for millions of years.
The end of diseases: As I have written plenty, infectious disease was conquered as a side effect of the Industrial Revolution, with improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and hygiene. Today, we have an infectious-disease racket, which is just one arm of the medical racket. While childhood death was eliminated by the Industrial Revolution, Westerners have diets of processed food and die of the degenerative diseases that arise from their terrible health habits, aided and abetted by Big Food and Big Pharma (and the vendors of other addictive substances), in a vertically integrated degenerative-disease racket. In the Fifth Epoch, everybody will live to be at least 100, and they will be healthy the entire way, with almost no medical interventions.
The end of addictions: All addictions are temporary ways to escape misery by feeling good, but in the long run they make people feel worse. When nobody is miserable, nobody is going to seek to escape misery. I foresee a concerted global effort in the early years of the Fifth Epoch to end all addictions. It will be a healing process, not a coercive one.
The rise of truth, love, and sentience: In the Fifth Epoch, deceiving others for personal gain will make no sense. We have huge propaganda and indoctrination systems designed to deceive people into becoming easily exploited, even to their deaths, and the masses line up for it. The dominant ideologies are all based on scarcity and fear, to create exploitable in-group cohesion, and they will no longer make any sense in the Fifth Epoch. As Fuller noted, children are born geniuses, and our societies beat it out of them, to turn them into cogs in the societal machines. That will end. Truth will finally matter, not endless deceptions, especially self-deceptions. Science in the Fifth Epoch will only bear a faint resemblance to today’s version of it. Love is the power of Creation, and people will begin to truly learn that. Abundance and love will reign, not scarcity and fear. Humanity will finally become a truly sentient species.
The pursuit of our human potential: While there may be some short-term hedonism in the early Fifth Epoch (wear all the gold chains that you want), the allure of that will be short-lived, and people will soon seek to explore their potential. What people pursue today will largely become meaningless, as it is based on survival and temporarily sating their addictions. The horizons of the human potential have barely been glimpsed, and that exploration will be humanity’s primary focus in the Fifth Epoch (like moving to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs). Enlightenment formerly reserved for spiritual masters such as Jesus and Buddha will become the typical awareness. I have seen it called the “Christing of the race,” and many different names have been given to what is coming (Paradise Restored, Heaven on Earth, the end of the Kali Yuga, a New Age, etc.).
These are some of the easily foreseen outcomes of a world in which energy is abundant and harmlessly produced. Those visions largely only take current trends to their logical conclusions. I really don’t see my visions of the Fifth Epoch as all that imaginative, but just an outcome of understanding how our world really works and how it can change if the constraints of scarcity were removed.
My next post will be on how to get there.