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Energy and the Human Journey: Where We Have Been; Where We Can Go


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Hi:

As I have written plenty, I cannot overemphasize the learning experience that my ride with Dennis was, especially the four-year stint that ended in the spring of 1990.  Without that radicalizing experience, I would not have embarked on my studies and writings since then, and even if I had, it would have been a stunted effort, hampered by my experience and naïveté.  Without those real-world experiences, I would likely not have much worth saying.  

While I had my real-world anthropology lessons during my ride with Dennis, and to a lesser degree, Brian, my questions regarding why our approaches, or those of our fellow travelers, never came close to working were partially answered by the findings of anthropology, particularly in my lifetime.  What I found particularly fascinating were the evolutionary roots of human sociality, and digesting studies on the subject provided a great deal of illumination for why our approaches never had a chance, even leaving aside the organized suppression.  

Social animals are social because sociality enhances individual survival, plain and simple, and it always hinges on the energy issue.  I know of no exceptions.  How social animals adapt their sociality to changing energetics is the focus of a great deal of scientific and scholarly effort, and extends to today’s industrial civilization.  

Simians marginalized prosimians wherever they coexisted, as simians ruled the day, with sociality dominant, while prosimians were nocturnal loners, only coming together to procreate.  Simian societies are all marked by dominance hierarchies, in a pattern that continues to today’s humanity.  Studying simian sociality led to the term “Machiavellian intelligence” being used to describe the use that they put their intelligence toward, which reached its pre-human apotheosis in chimpanzees.  Frans de Waal, after a career spent studying chimps, bonobos, and other simians, considers chimp social intelligence to be equivalent to human social intelligence, which is quite a statement.  Humans are better at toolmaking and other “sophisticated” acts, but de Waal challenges any human to successfully navigate the chimps’ social environment.  There are no random acts in chimp societies, but every social act is designed with an outcome in mind.  As de Waal studied a captive chimp colony in his home nation of the Netherlands, he turned to Machiavelli’s writings to help understand what he was seeing, and he introduced the term “Machiavellian intelligence” to primatology.  

This will take a few posts to cover, which will come over the coming week.

Best,

Wade

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Hi:

In the studies for my big essay, many aspects of biology were amazing, from the earliest life to how life became complex to the parade of life forms in the eon of complex life, and one of the most fascinating (and sometimes disgusting) was the incredible array of ways to reproduce, from the earliest bacteria onward.  The invention of sexual reproduction was a watershed event in evolution, and its variations are also mind-boggling.  Mushrooms have literally thousands of sexes, some fish change their gender, some organisms can choose to reproduce sexually or asexually, and gender roles can become very pronounced.  The bottom line is that successful reproduction ensures the survival of the species, which is a biological imperative.

Mammals heavily invest in their offspring, particularly females, which often led to very different roles for males and females.  Primate dimorphism is thought to be a result of sexual selection and male competition for mating privileges.  The biggest, strongest, and best-fighting males would get the greatest mating privileges, as the females would choose them, and bigger, stronger males were more likely to survive predation.  This dynamic persists all the way to humans.

Just this past weekend, a subject that I have wondered about for years had an article in Scientific American devoted to it, on paternity.  In my previous post, I mentioned de Waal’s comment on chimp social intelligence, and I’ll have a lot to write in my essay update on chimp behavior and social organization.  But for all of a chimp’s undeniable intelligence, perhaps in second place on Earth next to humans (although I doubt it), chimps do not understand that when they have sex, they are creating offspring.  While mothers will always recognize their offspring, fathers don’t.  

The last common ancestor of chimps and humans almost certainly resembled a chimp.  The human branch dramatically changed, and one of the most fascinating and contentious subjects in all of biology is what happened and when on the march to becoming human.  Chimps pass the mirror test, which is likely a sign of sentience, at least to some degree.  When males of the human line understood paternity, it was likely the catalyst for dramatic changes in human sociality, and likely led to the nuclear family.  Just when that happened is one of the more compelling questions in anthropology.  Behaviorally modern humans surely understood, and just how far back paternity was recognized will be explored and debated longer than I will be alive.  

Best,

Wade

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Hi:

In evolutionary studies, a common question is whether an observed common feature among disparate organisms came from descent or convergence.  The same question arises with features of human societies, in many ways, from religions to languages to agriculture to civilizations.  Many aspects of human societies are thought to have been shared by the Founder Group that left Africa.

What studies of chimps and other social animals have shown is that outside pressure enhances a society’s internal cohesion, and nothing enhances the internal cohesion of human societies more than warfare, as societies battle for survival.  The roots of religion are in warfare.  In chimp societies, males constantly vie for power, and they kill each other regularly.  After the alpha male, Luit, was given his fatal wounds by his rivals, in an attack in which they tore off his testicles, he remained inseparable from his killers.  Luit readily acknowledged their dominance even as he died from his wounds.  Even to their deaths, chimps will still band together, as they never know when they will need to cooperate to fight off a neighboring society.  The work of Frans de Waal and other primate researchers often makes people uneasy, as their work shows the deep evolutionary roots of many human traits, not all of which are noble.  

Somewhere along the line from chimp to human, the human line learned to fashion complex tools, master fire, hunt large game, cook, and other skills that are the sole province of big-brained humanity.  Somewhere along the line, the human line learned about paternity, which likely helped lead to the nuclear family.  

In all behaviorally modern human societies from the beginning, the Golden Rule was the social ideal (it is far from a Christian invention), but it was only reserved for members of the society, AKA the in-group.  Anybody outside of the society was fair game.  We still see that today in human societies.  Perhaps one in a hundred Americans knows or cares about the millions of children that our society has murdered in the past generation.  Only masters such as Jesus stressed that all of humanity is one.  That diagram of de Waal’s reflects a standard anthropological understanding today, in that all people look out for Number One, first, and when their survival needs are met, then their concern expands to their immediate family and kin, and only then might they look out for the interests of those beyond that small circle.  People will eat their children if they need to.

As I studied anthropology over the years, I was so ready for its findings, as I had already learned their most pointed findings in the crucible of my adventures.  When my own mother campaigned against me and my own father threatened to feed me to the wolves (and I have not seen him since), the son that they had raised to be a Golden Boy, whom they attacked when he acted at his most golden, I had long since stopped taking it very personally.  I had already learned my journey’s most important lesson: personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity.  I resisted that lesson every step of the way, until I had it beaten into my head in no uncertain terms.  I see people resist and deny that lesson all the time.  They have yet to learn, their egos may never let them, and they will likely never play on the high road, where those lessons can be learned in a most forceful way.  

Best,

Wade

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Hi:

The issue of consciousness is key for understanding sociality.  The role of consciousness in physical reality is a central controversy in physics.  In today’s materialist evolutionary studies, consciousness is given an ancillary role, as an epiphenomenon of brain activity.  As I wrote some months ago, plants have nervous systems, make behavioral reactions to their environments, and their roots seem to be where the nerve impulses lead to and are “processed.”  Who is to say that plants do not have consciousness, with the roots acting like brains do in animals?  

Chimps have very calculating social lives, and arguably the leading chimp researcher after Jane Goodall put chimp social intelligence on par with humanity’s, but if they have no understanding of paternity, then they just have sex because they like to, driven by their biological impulses.  Would you call that instinct?  Where does that come from?  And after food and safety, sex is the predominant concern of chimps, with males constantly vying for mating privileges.  So, while chimps are highly calculating in how they vie for power, they may have no conception of why they do it, as they are driven by an irrational urge to do something that feels good, but is nature’s way of ensuring the continuance of the species.  Materialists will say that there is little role for consciousness or even a plan in such dynamics, as species that played the energy and reproduction game the best survived, at least for a time, while those who played it less effectively went extinct.

I saw something very similar during my free energy days and years of study afterward.  I watched people be suicidally stupid, but they would act as if they were being clever.  I puzzled over that for a year or so before asking Dennis about it, and his reply was that people develop a grace in what they do, and even if they commit suicidally stupid acts, they can do it with style.  In chimp and primate studies, one question is how rational chimp and human acts are, and in Primates and Philosophers, it was readily acknowledged that people are far less rational than we like to admit.  People often make emotional decisions and come up with rationales later, as post hoc justifications for irrational decisions.  

In my initial days of study, as I encountered Uncles Noam, Ed, and Howard, their work was so at variance with mainstream thought that I sought out opposing viewpoints, to see how their work held up.  What struck me was how irrational their critics were, and those critics were often leading voices amongst the USA’s intelligentsia.  Noam and company also took it relatively easy on writers who did little more than justify elite privilege and the USA’s imperial behavior, and Uncle Ed wrote that those writers were incapable of understanding how irrational their work was.  

As I went public with my first site in 1996, I had my email address on my site and took on all comers until 2002.  I began seeing the same things that Noam and company wrote about, in that my critics often seemed incapable of rational thought.  At first, I thought that they were just being dishonest, and I definitely encountered plenty of that, but it took many years before the truth of what Ed and friends wrote about finally sank in with me: my critics were incapable of being rational.  The dynamic seems to be this: when facts and logic conflict with deeply cherished beliefs, which people adopted because they help them survive, then goodbye facts and logic.  People will justify eating their own children to satisfy their hunger.  With humanity, emotions rule, not rationality.  There can be a certain “logic” to their actions, however, and what seems to serve their immediate self-interest is “rational” in their eyes, even if it is ultimately suicidal.  

As one pal replied to my query, do not confuse conscious dishonesty with honest unconsciousness.  How do you tell the difference?  

I also see this in science, such as that cadre of Australian scientists who doggedly try to explain the megafauna extinctions as a result of climate change, as they “coincidentally” absolve humanity.  I grew tired of their “evidence” and arguments long ago, but they keep churning out the scientific papers like it comes out of a factory.  Or, those scientists who sold their souls to the hydrocarbon lobby and challenge the Global Warming data.

Brian O had played the Paul Revere of Free Energy for five years when we traded notes.  Brian gave me a litany of the denial and fear reactions that he received to the idea of free energy, from the world’s leading academics, scientists, and “progressives,” and he finished up with openly wondering if humanity was a sentient species.  

These issues are key ones for understanding human sociality, and I think that it is most helpful to go back to the roots of sociality: it is all about survival.  Sociality is adaptive and reactive, not proactive.  It is similar to Bucky Fuller’s observation about politics: it is all about shuffling the deck of scarcity in favor of who does the shuffling.  Retail politics is useless for Epochal change, and so is sociality.  This is why mass movement efforts to manifest free energy do not have a prayer and never have.  This is something that took me nearly twenty years and five different mass movement efforts to finally understand.  I am not a quick learner.  :)  

Not all is lost, but the usual methods of “activism” have always been firmly trapped within their Epochs, as creatures of them.  No Epochal Event ever happened through some kind of social movement.  The great social changes came as a result of tapping those new energy sources, not a cause of them.  Confusing cause and effect has led to a great deal of ineffectual campaigning on the free energy front.  If human sociality is recognized for what it is, and realizing that it is useless for Epochal change, then an effort might have a prayer.  I have a lot more to write on this subject, but it is off to work.

Best,

Wade

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Hi:

Briefly, before I run off to work, sociality is an adaptive behavior designed to aid survival.  The human line’s sociality goes back to at least monkeys, and many human traits are very evident in monkeys, but ape sociality, and particularly chimps and bonobos, is another order of magnitude in sophistication, and Frans de Waal stated that chimp social intelligence is equivalent to humanity’s.  Chimp societies are brutal and murderous, and killing infants is common, which is typical in primates.

However, one primate species famously overcame it, and how they did it is an early sign of free energy’s transformative potential.  Apes and monkeys cannot swim, and with the growing and shrinking rainforest in equatorial Africa in this ice age, one region saw gorillas leave, as they are the masters of the rainforest and cannot live outside it.  The Congo River formed and isolated the chimps from those emigrated gorillas (or the gorillas died off as their habitat disappeared and they were unable to adapt), and those chimps, in their isolation for perhaps two million years, had their food supply double, with their gorilla competition gone.  With that new economy, with a doubled food supply, the chimps that became bonobos radically reengineered their societies, so much so that they are a new species.  

There is no record of infanticide among the bonobos, or any violent deaths.  If a male even remotely appears to threaten an infant, the entire community will come down on him, and hard.  Bonobos settle everything with sex, and life is one big orgy.  If two societies of captive chimps are mixed, it would be a battle to the death, to establish dominance.  If two societies of captive bonobos are mixed, it becomes one big orgy, and the females lead the festivities.  

Something similar happened with humans.  Hunter-gatherer societies are the human journey’s most violent, but where the big game was hunted to extinction and the climate conducive to it, women domesticated plants, agriculture began, and those early horticultural societies saw women’s status rise to the degree to where men left their natal societies to mate, which was a first in the human/ape line, going back at least as far as gorillas.  That broke up the male gangs that had dominated human societies to that time, and those horticultural societies became preindustrial humanity’s most peaceful.  

As the energy surplus of agriculture became large enough to use for political purposes, however, men rose to dominance again, and the rise of civilization led to the decline in women’s status, as they became mere broodmares of agrarian economies, and their status did not rise again until industrialization.  

My point is that the changes in social organization of bonobos and horticultural and industrial societies were made possible by an increase in the available energy.  Without the energy increase, the rest could not have happened.  When I see New Agers and social activists argue for some new kind of thinking and social organization to emerge because we “wake up” or come up with something clever, they are ignorant of how sociality works and the history of their species.  Again, I learned these lessons the hard way during my adventures, and only many years later, after deep study, could I truly understand why our efforts were doomed.  I already had a very good idea why, back in the 1980s, but those many years of study made it clear in ways that my years of activism never could.  

Best,

Wade

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Hi Chris:

You are bringing up big issues, which are key for what I am doing, and I kind of came at the issue backwards, one might say.  When I was 16, when I first got my energy dreams, free energy was not remotely on my radar.  Even when free energy was on my radar, when I became Dennis’s partner, the epochal significance of what we were pursuing was also beyond our imagination.  While we saw a radical transformation of American society, and I was thinking in environmental and global terms almost immediately, if I think about those changes that I see coming today with free energy, how many of those did I see in 1987?  The end of air pollution, for sure, and an economic boon to humanity, but I doubt that many others on that list I thought much about in 1987.  Most were really not on my horizon of awareness back then.  I had a lot to learn.  Even when I look at my visions essay from 2001 or so, and what free energy can mean, I was still falling far short of an epochal perspective.  It was not until encountering Bucky that I began to really do that, and my current epochal framework really did not begin to fall into place until 2010, although my “big picture” part of our DOE proposal in 2009 showed that I was thinking pretty epochally before encountering Niele’s book.

So, while my current epochal framework was a long time in coming, even back in Seattle I could see that customers whose “skin in the game” was waiting for the world’s best heating system being put on their homes for free, or employees and business associates who could only see getting rich or keeping their jobs, were not going to be much help for what we were doing.  Dennis’s “the people really care” was a naïve, idealist fantasy, and over the past 30 years, I have watched Dennis go from the people really care to “almost nobody cares, but I am still looking,” to “my allies hurt me more than my enemies did,” to “I am ready to God to call me home, after my dark journey on Earth.”

I could put a thread up on Avalon, titled something like, “What happened when I tried to interest my social circle in free energy.”  I would begin it with my own experiences, and quite a few Avalonians could chime in with their own, and almost invariably, they will be stories of reactions of denial, fear, attacks, and ostracism.  I always caution free energy newcomers against going out and proselytizing to their social circles, but they almost always do, and the best of them eventually come back to me with their tales of woe.  At best, they might get a Level 4 reaction, of, “Let me know when you can deliver free energy to my home.”  The only way that my conversations with former CFOs did not go that way was because they were worldly and I was not talking about some site or YouTube clip that I stumbled into, but my own experiences and those of my close colleagues.  They were also Level 8s, too, not recruits for my choir efforts.  In fact, if they had expressed some “do something” interest, I would have tried to dissuade them.  I was not trying to send them into the meat grinder.  

But why all of the denial, fear, etc.?  That is where I was naïve and slow to learn, although not as slow as Dennis was.  In one way, learning the truth about the human level of integrity is not fun, but on the other, it can be extremely liberating and instructive, not asking people to act differently from how they are, not how we might fantasize them to be.  So, I learned early on that people’s horizons of awareness rarely extended past their immediate self-interest, but it was not until many years later that I really understood why, and you are on the trail of it with Dunbar’s number, of people being a little nicer to their social circles, etc.  The vast majority of people are not even potty-trained, ethically.  Everybody outside of their social circles is fair game, and Jesus’s “love the enemy” ideal is completely off of their radar.  Almost nobody on Earth today is fit for choir duties, and that is not a judgment, but just understanding the numbers.  

When people hear about free energy, even among the stupidest of humanity, it soon becomes evident that it means the end of the world as they know it, and they react in fear.  That it also means a potential heaven on Earth never registers with them.  They are unwilling and unable to think that far.  Denial is also a fear reaction, as a way of staying unconscious, and if you are the person bringing them that “good news,” then you are going to be a problem that they have to solve, and one way is to eliminate you from their social circle.  The more “benign” reactions are variations of, “I don’t want to hear it anymore,” but can range to, “I don’t want to have anything more to do with you,” to attempting to scuttle your relationship with others in your social circle.  I have heard many tales of ostracism, including having careers wrecked.

Again, it took me many years to finally understand what was happening.  I got both barrels of it via my own experiences, and when my parents attacked me, it no longer even hurt anymore, as I had long since learned that particular lesson.  But understanding the reasons for why people were that way was a long time in coming.  Yes indeed, free energy is an infinitely bigger issue than trying to influence your social circle, and when you understand the magnitude of it, and understand why people are social, then the folly of chatting up your social circles begins to become evident.  

I have stated it plenty before: humanity is not going to suddenly become enlightened with if/when free energy is finally unveiled, but it will have epochal significance, and human activities such as warfare, environmental destruction, and the like will no longer make sense.  I firmly believe that humanity is not stupid enough to continue with such ultimately suicidal behaviors when they no longer make economic sense (that immediate self-interest issue), but they will not begin to understand until free energy is a daily reality, which is normal.  No coming epoch was comprehensible to people until it arrived, and only then did humanity create a different social organization.  The great social changes never came out of nowhere, via some enlightenment event, but were adaptations to a new economic reality, and that has always been an energy issue, at its root.  In ways, I am trying to do something unprecedented in the human journey: imagining the next epoch before it arrives, as a way to help it arrive.  Not many are going to be able to help with that, but I only need one-in-a-million.

I have a lot more to write about this, but it is time to start my busy day.  

Best,

Wade

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Hi:

I am going to give some examples of sociality in the Epochs, and how it was always economically conditioned.  I call the first Epoch of the human journey the time from the first stone tools and when the human line’s brain began growing dramatically to the appearance of behaviorally modern humans.  That Epoch is my invention, and arguments could be made to move its beginning to the chimp/human split, or it could be moved up to the appearance of Homo erectus, or the first evidence of man the hunter driving species to extinction a million years ago.  I defined the epoch as the transition from our relatively small-brained ancestors to behaviorally modern humans.  That entire timeframe is one of fierce controversy, new evidence being continually adduced, and new hypotheses, some of which are relatively radical.

In Epoch Zero, if you will, we also see how a doubling of the food supply led to a radical social reengineering that led to bonobos.  Human dimorphism likely reflects dynamics that continued throughout the path to humanity, with males vying for mates and survival.  That male penchant to become the alpha is deeply ingrained in humanity until this day.  Until about 500 thousand years ago, there is little evidence of hunting sophistication, but that began to change with the Middle Stone Age, when stone-tipped spears began to appear, and at about 400 thousand years ago, there is evidence of professional butchering of kills, which became a practice that continued all the way to the Domestication Revolution.  While there were some brief Golden Ages of the Hunter-Gatherer, as humans intruded into fresh biomes that had not seen humans before, particularly in Australia and the Americas, those hundreds of thousands of years were chiefly characterized by a struggle for existence, of getting enough food to feed the bands, especially with the pronounced ice age impacts on the climate.  

There was rarely much energy surplus, and if a man tried to become the “big man” of his band, it threatened the band’s survival, as it could not afford to have any kind of hierarchy.  Hunter-gatherer social organization was largely designed to keep men in their place, so that no man ever became too big for his britches.  When a man brought home a kill, there was no bragging, no “this kill is mine,” and the like.  His role was to humbly bring the meat to the band and let others perform the butchery.  Professional butcher marks go back to 400,000 years.  If a man ever tried to dominate the band, he would be coerced back into line, through shaming and threats.  If he proved recalcitrant, the last resort was to banish him from the band, which virtually guaranteed a swift end to his life, or execution.  If execution was the verdict, it was arranged for a close relative to perform it, so that there would not be acts of reprisal.  The book Moral Origins particularly covers this territory.

During the Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer, when meat was plentiful, the strict enforcement of the social order relaxed, as life was relatively easy.  Human territoriality, which goes back to monkeys and likely far earlier, also relaxed, as moving on to fresh hunting grounds was easily done.  It was only as the easy meat disappeared that human territoriality reasserted itself, with its concomitant increase in violence, and when times really got hard, the band itself would disintegrate, as it was everybody for themselves, and in hard winters, the Inuit would even eat their own children.  With humanity’s “flexible” conscience, the parents justified the cannibalism with the idea that they could have more children when times got better.  

In each instance that I am citing in this post, human sociality adapted to the economic situation: easy-going when times were good, to draconian and scarcely imaginable to modern humanity when times were bad, which was always about the available food, which meant caloric energy.  

I am going to run through all of the Epochs in this series of posts, and show how human sociality adapted to each one.  

Best,

Wade

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Hi:

In the late Second Epoch, any man who strayed into a neighboring territory was usually killed on sight, as the assumption was that he was there to steal a woman, and any woman who did that straying delivered herself for stealing.  

In the Second Epoch, communities never increased past Dunbar’s number, as the land could not support it.  Homo sapiens killed off all of the world’s easy meat and drove all other human species to extinction.  Only animals that lived on remote islands survived the onslaught of Second Epoch humans, such as the last mammoths, the bird sanctuary of New Zealand, the semi-continent of Madagascar, etc.  When humans finally arrived at those places, they quickly killed off the easy meat.

In Australia, the fleet-footed kangaroo could not be hunted to extinction, after the surviving ones learned wariness of humans, so that culture relied on big game hunting until the British arrival more than 40,000 years later.  Australia’s aboriginal societies were all patrilocal and mutually hostile, and that is likely why they never developed agriculture.  

However, in a few places on Earth, perhaps as few as two, but perhaps as many as nine, when the easy meat was rendered extinct and the climate was conducive to it, plants were domesticated, almost certainly by women, as an adjunct to their gathering duties.  While agriculture in China and Peru may not have been pristine, influenced by the Fertile Crescent and Mesoamerica, the civilizations that arose there were pristine.  Civilizations are energy-concentrating and problem-solving devices, and agriculture led to civilization.  But before civilization arose, the domestication of plants allowed for unprecedented population density (other than those short-lived mammoth villages), and great social changes came with it.

For one thing, people became sedentary for the first time (again, other than those mammoth villages), and women’s status rose so much by their invention of agriculture that many of those societies became matrilocal, which broke up the male gangs, and those became the human journey’s most peaceful preindustrial societies.  That Neolithic bliss did not last too long, however.  Relatively gentle horticulture gave way to more intensive agriculture, which could wrest more caloric energy from the land, and the pattern was that cleared lands could produce crops, and the forests could provide fuel and building materials.  Crops and forests fueled Third Epoch societies, but they were rarely sustainable, and no civilization ever was.  All early civilizations collapsed as they ran out of food and wood, often leaving behind a human-created desert.  

Many changes attended the Third Epoch that domestication enabled, and I’ll survey them in the coming post or two.  

Best,

Wade

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Hi:

Before I get to the Third Epoch and its impacts on human sociality, a brief recap is in order.  No organism likes being coerced.  One of the USA’s great myths is that it invented freedom.  Freedom is every organism’s ideal state.  But survival on Earth meant that the ideal was rarely achieved, with each organism pitted against the others in a battle for survival.  There is only so much energy to go around, limited by how much sunlight hits Earth.

To skip to near the end of the evolutionary journey that led to humans, chimp societies are male-dominated and exceedingly violent.  A female chimp in the wild largely lives in isolation, partly so that her infant is not murdered by a male rival for her “affections.”  But in captivity, female chimps band together against aggressive males, and the glimmerings of a sisterhood that came to fruition in bonobos can be seen.  In chimp societies, the female/male ratio is about two-to-one, and in bonobos, it is one-to-one, with the difference being male chimps that died violently.  Imagine a human society in which half of the men die violently as they vie for women and territory.

To skip ahead to Second Epoch humans, violent males dominated those societies, and a woman’s fate was usually subject to male caprice.  She was always vulnerable to being kidnapped from her society by a neighboring one and essentially being enslaved.  In her own society, rape was a constant threat, as part of the array of behaviors in which men enforced their dominance.  Second Epoch societies are the human journey’s most violent, with about a third of all men dying violently (but, at least, it is less than the violent death percentage of chimps!  :) )  Slaughtering one’s neighbors and taking their women and territory was nearly an “ideal” of those cultures.  The Myth of the Peaceful Savage is just that: a myth.

In those societies where women domesticated plants and they became matrilocal, the male gangs were broken up, rape became a crime, and those were humanity’s most peaceful preindustrial societies.  But that Neolithic bliss did not last long; domestication led to civilization and a decline in women’s status, as they became the broodmares of agrarian societies.

Sedentary societies were radically different from nomadic ones.  Only a local and stable energy source allowed for sedentism.  Early horticulture gave birth to the village (and a preview was those short-live mammoth villages).  The various Neolithic expansions on Earth (and Bantu expansion) displaced hunter-gatherer societies in favor of farmers, and female hunter-gatherers mated with the farmers, which drove male hunter-gatherers from the gene pool.

With sedentism came possessions and a level of energy surplus that was new in the human journey.  Before long, men began their climb to dominance once again, as the energy surplus was used for political purposes.  One term for those new dominants is “big men.”  With sedentism, people built homes, accumulated possessions, and instead of slaughtering one’s neighbors, they could be turned into possessions, and slavery began.  Slavery became a hallowed institution all the way to the Fourth Epoch, when industrialization made brute human labor economically obsolete.  

Pretty much wherever agriculture appeared, civilization came a couple thousand years later, and is thought to be a problem-solving device.  There are two primary theories on civilization formation: conflict and progress.  Civilizations brought benefits that agrarian life could not provide, and was why for the entirety of agrarian civilizations, city populations were sustained by a constant influx of peasants from the hinterland.  Cities were death traps, all the way to the 20th century.  Moving to the city was a gamble for peasants, but one that many readily wagered their lives on.  City life could be better than life on the farm, if an enterprising peasant could “make it.”  Part of that disparity was that cities conquered their hinterlands and set the terms of exchange, so that cities enriched themselves at the expense of the rural peasantry, and that is where the “conflict” theories arise from, as epitomized by Marx’s work.  With the rise of cities came new kinds of humans: professionals and the elite.  Only with the energy-concentrating abilities of cities could professionals and the elite arise, and they have been with humanity ever since.  The reality was that agrarian civilizations did not produce enough energy surplus to support more than a tiny professional class and elite, on the order of 10-to-20% of the population.  At late as 1870, 70% of America’s workforce lived on farms.

Many dramatic social changes came with the Third Epoch, but none of them would have happened without the local and stable energy supply that agriculture produced.  There is a lot more to say about the Third Epoch and changes in human sociality, but time for work.  

Best,

Wade

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Before I get to the social effects of civilization, Jane Goodall has watched chimps make “waterfall displays” many times, and others have noted chimp ritual behavior.  Those behaviors appear to reflect the roots of religion.  

With the rise of DNA testing, many controversies have been largely settled.  Negritos, the San, Australian aborigines, and others are relict populations of the original behaviorally modern humans.  Those African languages with their click consonants (parodied in The Gods Must Be Crazy) are what human language sounded like 60,000 years ago.  Those relict populations became isolated, with Australians and Negritos being pockets of isolated humans from the original migration from Africa.  The San stayed behind.  While agrarian and industrial peoples took all the good land, those relict populations kept hunting and gathering on marginal or isolated lands.  

They all had similar religious rituals, of singing and dancing.  Australian societies numbered 500 or so, beyond Dunbar’s number that Chris mentions, and while grooming in chimps and gossip in humans was the social glue of Dunbar’s number societies, the hunter-gatherer religion helped hold together larger societies, and particularly to prevail in warfare against their neighbors.  

I know that materialism is a false faith, but anthropologists generally think that those early religious rituals were just social inventions, bereft of deeper meaning or any connection with the unseen.  I doubt it.  All of today’s organized religions are, to one degree or another, distortions of valid teachings, usually turned into a means of social control and lining the priesthood’s pockets.  The hunter-gatherer religion also became a utilitarian practice, with men using it to prevail over their prey or neighboring societies.  But that did not mean that there were not valid roots to their religious practices, no matter how corrupt they became in a world of scarcity and fear.  The Australian dream time is one of those practices that likely had valid roots.  It looks like the temple preceded the city.  The hunter-gatherer religions lasted all the way to the first cities, when professional priesthoods wiped them out.  

Orthodox agrarian religions have fought against the “ecstatic” throwback sects to this day (Shakers and Pentecostals are two extant examples), and the spectacle of the modern rock concert is a throwback to the original religion.  My wife and I visited an A Course in Miracles cult in 1994, and ecstatic religion was in full display, in one of the most bizarre manifestations that I ever saw, and I thought I saw it all in my Southern California days.  Christian pews, with penitents on their knees, were designed to keep them from dancing.  

The priesthood was one of the first urban professions, and they soon entered into a Faustian deal with early elites by conferring divine status to them, which can be seen in the Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance.  Elites really had no purpose in early civilization, merely being the “winners” who came up with ways to garner a disproportionate share of the economic surplus that civilization produced, living in their palaces.  It was only later that elite-justifying ideologies were concocted, giving elites a civic function.  

The appearance of professions and elites is the universal and enduring feature of civilizations to this day, even as organized religion has steadily lost its sway in the Fourth Epoch.  From the beginning of civilization, monumental architecture erected to the elite, as a form of “display,” appeared in all civilizations, as a human universal.  Most of the “wonders of the world” were elite aggrandizing monuments, beginning with the ziggurats of Sumer and pyramids of Egypt.  Wherever civilization appeared, so did elites with their aggrandizing monumental architecture, and human sociality profoundly changed.  

In cities, humanity was no longer organized along kin lines, but along professional lines.  People who did not know each other did not kill each other on sight, which was a far cry from the late Second Epoch.  There is much more to come.  

Best,

Wade

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One thing that my big essay makes clear, but I might be a little more explicit on when I update it, is that the differences within humanity’s Epochs were trivial compared to the differences between them.  The First Epoch had stone tools and fire, social organization was the nomadic band, and was likely not much different from chimp social organization.  The Second Epoch had behaviorally modern humans, a highly sophisticated toolkit, fully developed language, and they easily conquered Earth while driving all of Earth’s easy meat and competing humans to extinction.  Humanity’s population increased by a factor of a thousand during the Second Epoch.

The Third Epoch had domestic plants and animals and sedentary populations, which usually led to civilization.  All agrarian societies were similar, in ways that were radically different from hunter-gatherer societies.  Population densities went up by a factor of hundreds.  When the Spanish mercenaries stumbled into Mesoamerican civilizations, they were very familiar to them, with crops, peasants, soldiers, professionals, cities, and elites, accompanied by organized religion and monumental architecture.  They quickly figured it out and conquered the Western Hemisphere in the human journey’s greatest demographic catastrophe.

Anthropologists often study pristine instances of Epochal Events, to understand what drove them.  People became behaviorally modern in Africa, which happened only once.  Domestication happened in only two places pristinely, with certainty, civilizations arose pristinely in only four places, and industrialization happened pristinely only once.  Because behavioral modernity and industrialization happened pristinely only once, there is nothing to compare them to, but domestication and the advent of civilization pristinely happened more than once.  They were all basically similar, with the differences being minor.  They were all similar because of something like evolutionary convergence, as independent solutions were developed for the same problems.

Human social organization between the Second and Third Epochs was radically different.  Each Epoch began with a Golden Age of exploiting a new energy source, and the benefits were so obvious that the New Epochs spread like wildfire, at least while the new energy sources could sustain them.  Once fire was controlled, no human society ever lost it.  Once agriculture was invented, no societies willingly went back to hunting and gathering.  They couldn’t, unless they had a 99+% die off in their populations.  Similarly, no industrial nation is going to willingly give up industrialization and have everybody move back to farms.  That will only happen if the energy that sustained industrialization runs out, and again, there will have to be a huge die-off of humanity in order to deindustrialize.  Many scholars and pundits think that a 90+% die off of humanity will have to happen when fossil fuels run out.  

The first pristine instance of civilization is also the most studied, in what became Sumer.  Just last night, I was reading one of my Sumer books, to prepare for this post.  Sumer became the first literate civilization, and the writings that have been discovered were almost entirely elite accounting and propaganda.  Portions of The Epic of Gilgamesh were reproduced in the Old Testament, which itself is largely a collection of political fairy tales that some modern peoples still think is the literal truth, just as some fringe scholars take Sumerian writings literally and argue for an inhabited planet that orbits Earth every few thousand years.

The first civilization soon gave rise to the first empire, and while killing one’s neighbors on sight characterized the late Second Epoch, the early Third Epoch, as nation-states began warring as the easy energy ran out, would have been brutal almost beyond imagining for today’s Fourth Epoch humans.  The first written laws come from those Sumerian times, and they are notable for their barbarity and commerce (much of it regulating slave treatment and marriage), as the earliest laws were largely enforced by executions or fines.  A later law is the one that people are more familiar with, and where “eye for an eye” came from.  Social organization in early civilization was nothing to marvel over.  In the human journey’s greatest empire, its most popular entertainment was watching people being forced to murder each other.  

One common misconception of the Domestication Revolution is that humans immediately became smaller and sicklier with domestication.  The initial events were wildly successful and people were healthier and more prosperous than ever, which is why those practices spread so dramatically during that relatively brief period of Neolithic bliss.  Populations exploded during the early days of the Domestication Revolution, with the world population increasing from 5 million people 10,000 years ago to nearly 200 million when Jesus was alive, to hit one billion around 1800 CE, when industrialization was just beginning.  That population explosion could have only happened because of agriculture.  The history of the Fertile Crescent is one of early horticulture powering settlements, and deforestation and soil degradation leading to abandonment and migration, to start over, and more intensive methods were invented, such as plow agriculture.  People eventually did become smaller and sicklier than their hunter-gatherer ancestors, but only after the easy energy ran out and there were a hundred times as many people.  They could not go back, similar to how complex life could never go back and start over after the Cambrian Explosion.  I believe that every civilization had legends of when times were blissful, with the Garden of Eden tale being merely one of them, and they may have been dimly recalling the Super-predator and Neolithic expansions, with their attendant brief Golden Ages, until the easy energy of the new methods of extraction ran out.  I have witnessed it happen in my lifetime, when the Golden Age of American Capitalism ended when Peak Oil happened.  I was born and raised in the Golden Age of Industrialization, and those days are long gone.  

Social organization changed radically with the Epochs, and much more of that is coming, including some very likely changes in the Fifth Epoch.  

Best,

Wade

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So, what all did the local, stable, and relatively abundant energy supply of plant domestication make possible?  Briefly, the horticultural phase led to:

  • Energy surpluses that allowed for relatively permanent settlements and homes;
  • Societies larger than Dunbar’s number;
  • Possessions in excess of what a person could carry;
  • A change from patrilocal to matrilocal societies, which made them immensely more peaceful;
  • Specialized skills;
  • Political uses of the surplus energy;
  • Forced servitude;
  • Usually, the villages had to relocate after exhausting the local resources of fertile soils and firewood.

When peaceful villages rose to become civilizations, it led to:

As polities rose and competed over the increasingly scarce resources of agrarian civilizations, namely arable land and forests, these dynamics arose:

While there were variations of those dynamics, they really were minor and generally dependent on the material realities that those societies faced.  Agrarian civilizations had far more in common than differences.  Aboriginal Australians remained at the hunter-gatherer political economy for more than 40,000 years, primarily because they could not drive the fleet-footed kangaroo to extinction.  The New Guinean Highlands never developed cities, and Jared Diamond has theorized that it was because of the nature of their crops, which did not provide the kind of energy surplus and protein that could lead to civilization.  Some civilizations relied more on animal domestication than others, which was largely dependent on the candidates for domestication (primarily large herd animals in which humans replaced the social dominants).

All humans are behaviorally modern, and our differences are all trifling, from relict populations to industrialized humans, and the reasons for one society getting “stuck” at its level of “development” likely had nothing to do with innate human capacities.  The social changes were always dependent on economic ones, which, as always, rested on the level of energy surplus.  Societies with high energy surpluses could readily address their problems, while those with thin and declining ones became increasingly unable to solve them.

That summary above applies, to one degree or another, to all of humanity’s pristine civilizations, and all early civilizations eventually collapsed, leaving behind the ruins of monumental architecture, whether they were hewn stones or the eroded remnants of earthen “mounds” and ziggurats.  The Fertile Crescent has seen rising and falling civilizations for several thousand years, and much of it is a desert today.  The first city, established on the shore near the Persian Gulf, is today buried under silt more than a hundred miles inland.  All of Sumer’s cities met that fate, as did many cities in the Fertile Crescent and along the Mediterranean’s periphery.  

Best,

Wade

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No civilizations have ever been sustainable, as their energy practices never were.  Civilization may ultimately prove ephemeral.  Some dynamics of collapse are worth noting.  Quite often, people in the hinterland could see quite plainly that the practices were unsustainable, such as plowing, deforestation, overgrazing, irrigation, and the like, but the demands of urban populations, directed by their elites, overruled the farmers and others in the hinterlands who clearly saw the trends and tried to ameliorate them.  Conservation efforts were always too little and too late.  Writings have survived in which the damage was all too clear to astute observers, some of whom had a historical sense of the damage, such as when Romans marveled when told that the thick forests that only existed in Germany at the time once existed close to Rome.  But they were voices in the wilderness, and short-term energy acquisition practices took precedence over any long-term view of sustainability.  

All early civilizations went on a one-way road to collapse, as they burned through their energy supplies while their EROI declined, as well as the surplus energy produced.  Droughts were often the death knell, but the energy practices were unsustainable to begin with, riding a thin energy surplus that was always subject to disruption, and weather changes often provided the shock that led to collapse.  In a word, those civilizations were not resilient enough to withstand the vagaries of climate, and some of the effects were human-caused.  In recent historical times, it was recorded how intruding Europeans quickly turned fertile lands into semi-deserts.  The same undoubtedly happened with early civilizations.  The earliest permanent settlements were usually abandoned after some centuries or millennia, and local deforestation and the resulting aridity surely contributed.

Human sociality has a lot to do with those short-sighted stampedes to oblivion.  Humans are herd animals and have always been easily stampeded over the cliff by the social managers.  I have watched people embrace certain death rather than question their social conditioning.  It was not until many years after watching those reactions, stupefied, that people would act that way, choosing certain doom over potential salvation, that I began to understand the roots of such behaviors, and they are deeply entwined in biology and the human journey.  

But for all of those unsustainable rides to oblivion, the increasing energy surplus of the Epochs led to more humane behaviors.  While Fourth Epoch humans often can scarcely believe the barbarities of Third Epoch societies, at least they did not kill their neighbors on sight and steal their women.  In the Fourth Epoch, chattel slavery gave way to wage slavery, which is more genteel.  The USA is about the only Fourth Epoch nation that still has a death penalty, as we are easily the most inhumane nation on Earth, although the egocentric fiction is that the USA is the light of the world.  All empires have always harbored such delusions, but the fiction in the USA is that we are not even an empire, although it is being increasingly admitted in moments of candor.  

Best,

Wade

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I have been meaning to make this post for a little while.  There have been papers in recent years about the toxic effects of the fluorine ion, and how it induces programmed cell death.  When I read that, it took me back to the first fluoride book that I ever read, titled Fluoride and the Aging Factor.  When I make my essay update, Nick Lane’s latest book will be prominent.  It also deals with programmed cell death and aging.  Lane’s hypothesis is that when free radical production reaches a certain threshold, it induces programmed cell death.  Those cells that are highly specialized and can’t easily reproduce, such as muscle and nerve cells, die off from programmed cell death and fewer such cells are left to perform the body’s tasks, which leads to stress on the remaining ones and eventually leads to organism failure, also known as death.  The cells that easily reproduce, however, can go the other way with programmed cell death and overproduce, and then the organism gets cancer and other diseases, also leading to death.

The fluorine ion is like sand in the gears of many cellular processes, and when a cell’s processes are damaged enough, programmed cell death occurs.  So, purposely introducing a highly toxic industrial waste into the water supply and calling it medicine is not only insane, but the alleged health benefits likely don’t exist at all.  At best, fluoridation is an incredibly blunt instrument that does far more damage than any good, if any good at all.

This is a prelude to discussing a scientific paper recently published on the health effects of vaccination, on two populations of home-schooled children: those who were vaccinated and those who weren’t.  I guess to aspire to scientific credibility, it began with the dubious statement of how many lives have been saved by vaccination, but let’s assume for a moment that it is true (and as you know, I have my doubts).  The paper then goes on to show the stark differences in health conditions between the two populations.  Unvaccinated children were several times more likely to get chicken pox, rubella or pertussis (harmless childhood diseases that appear to be key immune system development events), but vaccinated children were several times more likely to get pneumonia, inner ear infections, and autism spectrum disorders, and they were 20-30 times more likely to have allergies.

Those findings align with what I have read about vaccinations for many years.  Vaccinations are a violent insult to the body, which consequently damages the immune system, leading to immune system failures, which often manifest as chronic conditions such as infections, allergies, and neurological conditions, and later in life, diseases such as cancer.  What an incredibly blunt instrument that likely does far more harm than good.  But, as with fluoridation, it is a financial windfall for various vested interests.  I have even seen vaccination named as part of a “vertical integration” strategy, as it ensures unhealthy children who will then use medical racket services for their entire lives.  The current orthodox paradigms for understanding disease are likely woefully deficient.  As Seth once said, modern “medicine” causes as much disease as it “cures.”  

Best,

Wade

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Hi:

The Third Epoch lasted about ten thousand years before the Fourth Epoch began, it was made possible by the domestication of plants and animals, and humans were domesticated, too.  Humans took an active hand in evolution by selective breeding of plants and animals.  The first part of Darwin’s Origin of Species focused on the changes that humans created with domestication.  The Epochs all went through their arcs of “development,” but the new energy sources made those arcs possible.  Because aboriginal Australians could never hunt kangaroos to extinction, although there were many candidates for plant domestication, Australians never domesticated them and stayed in the Second Epoch until the invasion of the initial Fourth Epoch people.  

The Third Epoch had its phases, and different parts of the world went through them at different times, and as with Australian aborigines, places such as the New Guinea highlands stayed “stuck” at the village level.  But whenever agrarian cultures were amenable to it, civilization appeared after a few thousand years of domestication.  Many features of Third Epoch societies simply were not possible in Second Epoch societies, such as metallurgy, literacy, professions, elites, cities, and the like.  A Second Epoch human could not imagine what a Third Epoch society would look like.  

The rise of Europe has been a matter of scholarly debate for centuries, but first and foremost, Europe rode an energy wave.  The Medieval Warm Period, after centuries of recovery from the Roman devastation, began the trajectory to the High Middle Ages, and waterpower became widespread for the first time in the human journey.  Harnessed waterpower performed the work of millions of people in Europe.  The reintroduction of the ancient Greek teachings also spurred intellectual growth in Europe.  Far too often, the technological advances of the time were used for warfare, and in the calamitous 1300s, when the Medieval Warm Period gave way to the Little Ice Age, Europe became a hell on Earth.  However, in the late 1300s, in Italy’s city-states, the Renaissance began and the humanism that those Greek teachings began flowered, and the rise of science was not far behind.  

The grip of the religious monopoly was challenged, partly though the printing press and expansion of literacy, and as Northern Europe began battling against the religious hegemony of the Catholic Church, it also began to conquer the world, as it accomplished the feat of turning the world’s ocean into a low-energy transportation lane.  Technological advances to capture more energy were the keys to European dominance.   One isolated and relatively backwards island people came a little late to the commerce and conquest game.  Their rise was constrained by deforestation, just as with other Third Epoch civilizations, but a confluence of circumstances led them to embrace coal energy.  In the early 1700s, English inventors not only found a way to smelt metal with coal, but they began to build coal-powered machines, and the Fourth Epoch thus began.  We still live in that Epoch.  

As with the previous Epochs, an English peasant in 1500 could not have imagined what the Fourth Epoch looked like.  And as with the Third Epoch, the Fourth Epoch has had its phases, but they were all dependent on the level of energy use.  While the Third Epoch was powered by wood and food, the Fourth Epoch was powered by fossil fuel energy, and with unprecedented use of wind and water power in the transition.  After a century and a half of the rise of coal, the technical ability to exploit a new fossil fuel, oil, arrived, and soon afterward, the technical prowess to transmit that energy generated by fossil fuels via electricity arrived.  

While literacy and mathematics were Third Epoch achievements, as well as the beginnings of what could be called a scientific approach, it flowered in the Fourth Epoch.  The energy surplus of industrialization allowed, for the first time in the human journey, the majority of the population to be relieved of subsistence duties.  More than anything else, that led to the advances of the Fourth Epoch, and the social transformations were radical.  Slavery had been a hallowed institution for all of recorded history, and as machines began replacing people, slave labor no longer made economic sense, and only then was it seen as a barbaric institution.   Similarly, with the rise of civilization, women’s status universally declined from that brief period of horticultural bliss, and only when machines began replacing people, and the strong backs of peasants were no longer needed, were women relieved of their broodmare status.  

The Fourth Epoch is very young, only three centuries old, so we still see many transition effects, particularly since more than 80% of humanity still lives in the Third Epoch, with Fourth Epoch technologies, ideologies, and practices trickling in.  There simply is not enough fossil fuel for all of humanity to industrialize, and we are quickly running out of the Fourth Epoch’s fuel sources.  The Third Epoch saw all early civilizations collapse as they ran out of energy.  The collapse of Fourth Epoch civilizations would be horrific to behold, even species-threatening, but we are dancing on the edge of that today.

Just in my lifetime, I have witnessed women enjoy professional opportunities denied them only a couple of generations ago.  Racism is under siege.  Because of the agrarian roots of the USA, and North America’s low population compared to the Old World, we still have the Bible Belt and other holdovers from the Third Epoch, but as with racism, those practices are under siege, and we see cultural battles between the Epochs happening today.  The practices of the former Epochs always lost, in the end, based on those lower energy levels as they were.  The practices of one Epoch often made no sense anymore in the succeeding Epoch.  

Even though the Fourth Epoch is only three centuries old and still having its transition pains, the energy source to power the Fifth Epoch is already here.  As with the other Epochs, the Fifth Epoch is currently unimaginable to Fourth Epoch peoples, with very few exceptions.  For the first time in the human journey, some of us can see what the new Epoch’s arrival will mean, and the economic, political, social, and cognitive changes will be so dramatic that they will end the world as we know it.  

Best,

Wade

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