Simple Ideas, Robust Evidence, Part 16: How Relative Scarcity and Relative Abundance Have Shaped Human Societies

This is perhaps the greatest lesson that I learned from my studies of the human journey, and what absolute abundance portends.

When I began studying the history of life on Earth in earnest, beginning around 2006, what I found striking were the many energy events, from the first life through the first photosynthesizers to the first complex cells. Life found ways to get more energy. From the Cambrian Explosion onward, various animals had their golden ages, when there was little competition and those fortunate species dominated, for a time. It was good to be a trilobite in the Cambrian, just as it was good to be a fish in the Devonian. On land, amphibians thrived in the Carboniferous while sharks prospered in the ocean. The ancestors of mammals dominated in the Permian but made way for dinosaurs in the Triassic. It was good to be a dinosaur until that bolide event, and then it was the mammals’ turn. The Eocene was a golden age of life on Earth, as alligators lived in Greenland, before the cooling began to our current ice age.

In the Miocene, elephants and apes migrated to Eurasia from Africa, and the elephant family was the most successful mammal ever before the human line drove most of them to extinction. The elephant-family extinction in the Americas, soon after humans arrived, may have been the most spectacular predation-extinction ever.

Bonobos lived in isolation south of the Congo River for a million years or more, did not have gorilla competition, and became amazingly peaceful when compared to their chimp cousins. They could afford to be, in their relative abundance. The biological compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity is the root of all violence.

As humans conquered Earth, while driving all of our fellow human species and the easy meat to extinction, there was the short-lived golden age of the hunter-gatherer. But once the easy energy was gone, it became fierce territoriality once again, like with chimps, and the life of hunter-gatherers became a grim affair. Perhaps a quarter of all hunter-gatherer infants were killed by their parents, as they could not afford to feed them, and about a quarter of all men died violently, as humanity reached its Malthusian limit.

In this interglacial interval, which was fully established about 12,000 years ago, in areas where the megafauna had been hunted to extinction or nearly so, people, largely women, began experimenting with domesticating plants, and the next economic phase of the human journey began, which I call an Epoch, and each Epoch of the human journey was always based on humanity’s energy practices, from megafauna and fire to crops and fossil fuels.

The pattern that I noticed was that each energy breakthrough led to a brief golden age of the early exploitation of a new energy source. The sources were soon depleted, competing species and competing humans soon ended those golden ages, and then it was back to the brink of survival. This pattern is likely billions of years old.

But another pattern was discernable in the human journey. In each Epoch, humans consumed multiple times more energy than the previous Epoch, even an order of magnitude more, and that meant more humans, but it also meant higher standards of living, and humans could afford to be more humane. The daily privations, barbarities, and horrors of life in the agrarian Epoch are hard for comfortable members of industrial societies to imagine. The thrones of agrarian empires were slaked in blood, as sons killed fathers and brothers slaughtered brothers to sit in those coveted seats, and rarely for very long. Long reigns and deaths from natural causes were unusual for agrarian-Epoch emperors.

The Industrial Revolution, which was based on exploiting fossil fuels, created a radical break from all that came before, and one of its side effects was the biggest event in the human journey so far: the end of childhood death. Before the Industrial Revolution began, half of all children died before adulthood, in a trend that goes back to gorillas. In industrial societies today, almost none die. It had nothing to do with medical interventions, but the improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and hygiene that industrialization enabled.

But as with all previous Epochs, humanity has recklessly exploited the new energy sources. The USA reached Peak Oil in 1970 and our standard of living has declined ever since. The world reached Peak Oil in 2006, as the Malthusian trap looms once again. The USA is a declining empire, although it is impolite to mention in the USA that the USA even is an empire, for one of the many elephants in the room in my society.

The damage wrought by scarcity on humanity is prodigious, including brain damage from childhood adversity. The relative abundance of the golden ages have been great boons to humanity, and scarcity has been humanity’s scourge.

The technologies to usher in a permanent Epoch of absolute abundance for all humans are older than I am, but have been sequestered from public awareness and use by global elites in history’s greatest cover-up, which is conjoined with the ET cover-up.

My life’s work has been about bringing abundant and harmlessly produced energy to all of humanity, which will be the biggest event in the human journey, by far. My Substack effort is my latest experiment in that effort, and I know who I am looking for.