WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

This post is in response to Bill Ryan’s post at Avalon. Bill and I go back a ways. Making this series of posts reflects not only thinking about my family, going back a few centuries, but going all the way back to the beginning of life on Earth. My previous post sketched the eon of complex life that led to humans.

Bill specifically asked about hunter-gatherers, and this post will address them. Chimps hunt and forage, but the Wikipedia article attributed the beginning of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to Homo erectus about 1.8 million years ago. I can go with that. Around that time, Homo erectus had invented Acheulian stone tools, may have controlled fire, and began driving African megafauna to extinction as Africa’s apex predator.

There was almost two million more years of evolution before behaviorally modern Homo sapiens appeared on the scene. I recently referred to this article as a good summary on the state of the science of why behaviorally modern humans conquered the world. That conquest happened during the hunter-gatherer phase of the human journey, which I call the Second Epoch. Those are fascinating, if often grim, topics, but what about the lives of hunter-gatherers themselves?

For starters, from gorillas to the Industrial Revolution, only about half of offspring reached adulthood. A generation ago, a famous paper explored hunter-gatherer life expectancy. Here is a good discussion of it. Only 56% of prehistoric hunter-gatherers made it to age 15. Less than one-in-200 made it to age 65. Most of those childhood deaths may have been due to infanticide, as the parents could not afford to feed them. About 25% of men died violently, generally in territorial disputes with neighboring bands. The skeletal evidence is stark. In aboriginal Australia, which was the best “lab” that we had of hunter-gatherer societies before the rise of farming, the skeletal evidence shows that a quarter of the men and a third of the women had healed skull fractures from interpersonal violence (women got it from their “husbands”). That is likely why aboriginal Australians have skulls twice as thick as the rest of humanity’s.

It is true that prehistoric hunter-gatherers did not have much infectious or degenerative disease. Those came with the agrarian Epoch. But the lives of hunter-gatherers were very rough. Nearly everything that we take for granted in modern life did not exist for prehistoric hunter-gatherers. They did not have roofs over their heads, unless they were “lucky” enough to live in a cave. They were always on the move, seeking food. They continually came into violent conflict with neighboring societies, especially after the short-lived golden age of the hunter-gatherer was over. To “trespass” into another band’s territory was to risk death. Those societies often had “no-man’s lands” between them, to reduce the violence. A minor cut could be enough to cause death from infection. Neanderthal skeletons were full of fractures, which came from either interpersonal violence or the hazards of killing large animals without projectile weapons.

The favorite hunter-gatherer war tactic was like what chimps do: the surprise raid. Hunter-gatherers usually did it at night, just before dawn, and they would slaughter the entire sleeping encampment while often sparing the women, who became their “wives.” Stealing women was standard hunter-gatherer practice, so much so that in many hunter-gatherer societies, any strange man was killed on sight, as the usually accurate assumption was that he was there to steal a woman.

One common practice was almost funny. In Arctic societies, which almost entirely relied on hunting, boys were prized and girls were killed by their parents. It got so bad that the boy-girl ratio got as high as two-to-one. Then the society had a shortage of women. The “solution” was a sneak attack on the neighboring society, kill all the men, and take the women. The combined numbers “solved” the problem of the sexual imbalance. Scientists have also argued that it was an inadvertent way to keep the populations within the land’s carrying capacity. What one way to do it.

I have seen a lot of romanticizing of hunter-gatherers, even within my family, and it is a bunch of fantasy. One day in a hunter-gatherer society would convince nearly all modern peoples that they prefer homes, underwear, plumbing, refrigerators, and beds.

Best,

Wade

Wow! What a terrific mini-thesis. I took the liberty to copy it in full to the Avalon thread titled What Supplements Might be Missing from your Health Regimen?, where I'd originally posted the cartoon. I prefaced my copy with this intro:

~~~

I posed the same question to Wade Frazier yesterday, and overnight he impressed me with a long and detailed reply. I found it so very interesting and packed with hard information that I felt I had to copy it here.

~~~

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
But I've never heard what feels like a satisfactory answer to the question. I know life back then was supposed to be nasty, brutish and short — but why was it short?

Was it the average that was short, or the older end of the "age at death" statistic that was short? In other words, did many infants die while at the same time many of the survivors lived to a ripe old age, or did most births live to adulthood, but not to forty years of age ... and questions like that?

Beware that a high rate of infant and childhood deaths sharply lowers the overall average age of death, but is quite different from having most people die in their young adult 20's and 30's years.

Then for a given "fatality rate versus age" curve, we can ask why so many did, or did not, survive a given age range.

When I was a child in a farming community that had not changed much in 200 years, families were often large, with the realization that some infants and children (and birthing mothers and hunter or warrior fathers) wouldn't make it. But for a wee bit of luck a few times, I'd have been one of those casualties, as were some I knew. But we still had our elders, in their 80's and 90's, often more fit and spry than many such elders these days.

[Wade Frazier]

Thanks Bill. Thanks Paul. My post only addressed Bill’s question on prehistoric hunter-gatherers. As I stated, less than one-in-200 made it to age 65. Only half made it to age 15, and when reaching age 15, they could expect less than 20 more years of life.

Coming up will be agrarian peoples, then industrial. Each had their benefits and detriments. Of course, in the Fifth Epoch, when everybody eats fresh, whole food, everybody will live to 100, will be healthy the entire way, and medical interventions will be largely unknown.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

My previous post dealt with the lives of hunter-gatherers before the rise of farming. By about 12,000 years ago, the conquest of Earth by behaviorally modern humans was complete. When that conquest began about 60,000 years ago, there were about ten other human species, the Americas and Australia were full of megafauna, Eurasia was still well populated with megafauna, and even Africa had vastly more megafauna than it does today.

During the next 50,000 years, all other human species went extinct, as well as all of the world’s easy meat. Our ancestors did all of that. In one of the many tawdry episodes in the history of science, academic cottage industries sprang up to deny that Homo sapiens was responsible for that spasm of extinctions that “coincided” with their arrival. Those were ludicrous positions to hold, as well as the idea that pre-farming or pre-civilized peoples were largely peaceful. Those academics tried to turn the bloody history of humanity into something resembling a Disney movie. Those who deny that humans are causing Global Warming are just more of the same, as they all bolster the human collective ego and deny our collective responsibility. The study of paleology makes the connection between carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures obvious. This year might finally silence them, but human denial can be something to behold. I have watched people embrace certain death rather than question their beliefs.

By 12,000 years ago, several trends culminated in the invention of farming. The easy meat was gone, the brief interglacial period had arrived, which made Earth warmer and wetter, and the warmer ocean “exhaled” carbon dioxide, as did lands liberated from ice sheets. Over the next several thousand years, people began to domesticate plants and animals, in several places, independently. That first happened in what is called the Fertile Crescent, which is in today’s Middle East. There were hundreds of times as many people on Earth than before the global conquest began. Those mouths had to be fed somehow.

Keith Otterbein argued that domestication of plants was effectively impossible where megafauna were hunted, as that style of hunting and warfare were conjoined, as the same tools worked for each activity. Only when hunting and warfare declined could people, largely women, experiment with domesticating plants. Otherwise, they were too vulnerable to marauding hunters.

Women likely invented farming as an adjunct to their gathering duties. Many of those early farming societies became matrilocal, which broke up gangs of related males, and those were the most peaceful preindustrial societies, which Otterbein called “Type B” societies.

When people began farming, the hunter-gathering lifestyle was doomed. Farming produced orders of magnitude more food per acre than hunting and gathering did, which allowed people to become sedentary. Some hunter-gatherers were able to become sedentary, at least for a time, such as villages on mammoth migration routes (until they drove the mammoths to extinction), or the Pacific Northwest culture, which relied on migrating salmon. But the rise of farming was when humans widely began their sedentary phase of existence.

Farming began spreading from its centers of origin, and hunter-gatherers did one of three things:

• Adopt farming;
• Get pushed to marginal environments where farming was not feasible;
• Go extinct.

Hunter-gatherers often fought back, but they were greatly outnumbers by farmers. One outcome was that hunter-gather women married the relatively prosperous farmers and hunter-gatherer men largely vanished from humanity’s gene pool.

Scientists have found that most historic groups had population bottlenecks, which has been discovered through DNA testing. About 7,000 years ago, when agriculture began spreading, there was a DNA bottleneck of men, with various violent and peaceful explanations proffered, but what is not disputed is that it arose from patrilineal descent, in which prominent men became overrepresented, as far as their descendants went. Chimps have the same issue, as high-status males father a disproportionate share of offspring (one of the perks of high status).

That situation reflects the relative investment that men and women have in their offspring. Agrarian potentates could play studs to huge harems. Europe has been the site of several recent population replacements, beginning with Neanderthals, who were displaced by Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers, who were displaced by Neolithic farmers, who were displaced by steppe herders. Gore Vidal once said that human history was the little more than the bloody migrations of tribes. When I began seeing the results of those DNA studies, Vidal’s statement began making a lot more sense to me.

Scientists are constantly finding mass burials in Europe of the violently killed during the Neolithic and later, and a cannibalism operation has been discovered. That initially peaceful expansion of farming turned highly violent, especially as population pressures mounted once again.

There was an initial honeymoon for farming, with intact forests and soils, no “pests” yet, and relatively easy farming. But that soon ended, as populations expanded, forests and soils were degraded, “pests” adapted to crops, and there was a forest-to-farm-to-desert dynamic. Then it was back to the brink of survival, but with far larger populations, and farmers shrank in stature compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors. The lives of farmers became drudgery until well into the Industrial Revolution, and even until today.

Europe is far from unique with those population displacements. Virtually every inhabitable spot on Earth has a bloody human past. Some remote islands (and Antarctica) might be exempt from that dynamic, but that is about it.

In four places on Earth where farming was independently developed, around 5,000 years after the invention of farming in each region, humans independently invented civilization. The rise of civilization comes next.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

A good comment by a reader inspired this post. This is a good point in this narrative to address the issue. In 1979, Brian O’Leary was sipping his sherry at Princeton, while smugly agreeing with his colleagues, several of whom had won Nobel Prizes, that any and all accounts of the paranormal were mistaken, fraudulent, etc. That same year, however, Brian had his first paranormal experience, and he realized that his ridiculing colleagues had no idea what they were talking about. That happened five years after I had the same experience while performing the same exercise. We were both ruined as mainstream scientists by those events. We could no longer drink the Kool-Aid of materialism. Materialism is a religion that is erected on a false foundation.

The day that I met Brian, I took him to give a speech on the need for a new science, which would be liberated from materialism and other limitations. In Noam Chomsky’s political-coming-out essay, he wrote that intellectuals had a responsibility to call out the ruling class’s deceptions. Noam argued that Ed Herman’s Propaganda Model was only a special case of the constraints that all intellectuals in capitalist societies are subjected to. Noam is a kind of anarchist, which comes with its own ideological baggage, which I will deal with some in this post.

Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization was a watershed work, published in 1996. When Keeley was an anthropology student in the 1960s, he exhumed skeletons along San Francisco Bay. Many burials were of people who had obviously been killed, but the dogma of the time was that ancient humans were all peaceful. Keeley’s bachelor’s thesis was about how Mesoamerican civilizations in the millennia preceding the Spanish conquest were all peaceful. A generation later, Keeley realized how wrong he was, and how wrong anthropology was in general. When Keeley found obviously defensive Neolithic fortifications in Europe and made a proposal to study them further, he was denied a grant because such an idea flew in the face of the day’s dogma. In his book’s preface, Keeley described his own long journey, to finally accept what his eyes told him (his awakening). All of anthropology had that problem, that dogma was not generally overturned until the 21^st century, but there are still battles in academia over it.

I have read that the general “Rousseauian” stance of anthropology, with its “peaceful savage” dogma, was a reaction to the prodigious violence of the World Wars. There was a yearning for a more peaceful time, so the fantasy was concocted that the human journey was peaceful until the rise of civilization (or farming). Postmodernism was born from the same traumas, and it rejected science altogether, and has led to abominations such as the trans craze, as children are sterilized in the name of ideology and women have their safe spaces invaded by men who call themselves women.

My previous two posts were on the lives of hunter-gatherers and pre-civilized farmers. My posts rely on the state-of-the-art science on those issues. To this day, there are scientists who deny that humans had a violent past or that they drove megafauna to extinction. I see both instances as where ideology trumped reality, but both positions are finally waning, in light of the evidence, or really, just taking off the ideological blinders.

Theories are ideologies, in that they are a set of ideas about the nature of our reality, and theories are ideally tested against the evidence. As Einstein said, every theory dies at the hands of a new fact. Einstein expected that his relativity theories would one day become obsolete, but that the best parts of his theories would survive in the new ones.

I know for a fact that antigravity and free-energy technologies are on the planet and older than I am, but almost no scientist can be engaged on that topic, as they almost always react in denial and fear when the topic is broached. Their most common dismissals are to cite the “laws of physics” to deny free energy’s possibility, and to dismiss evidence of organized suppression as a “conspiracy theory.” As Brian said, there are no “laws” of physics, but just theories. To even use “law” is to invoke religion. When my friend witnessed antigravity technology, the so-called “law of gravity” became something else: an incomplete theory. As Bucky Fuller said, scientists are deeply naïve, in their soft academic berths, sipping their sherry.

I believe in the ideal of science, like I believe in the ideal of a free press, but in the real world, those ideals have never come close to being realized. Ed wrote about the misuse of scientific findings for propaganda purposes, but Ed never wrote about the corruption of the scientific process itself. I tried to introduce Ed to Brian several times, but Ed was not interested.

Noam called himself a kind of anarchist, in which authority always has to justify itself. The Propaganda Model is really a conflict-of-interest model, but Noam seemed oblivious to conflicts of interest in science. I was not too surprised when he advocated that those who refused to submit to COVID vaccination become pariahs. Noam could not seem to fathom the corruption of biomedical science, which even the defenders of science call its flimsiest and most corrupt branch. One of my college roommates was crippled by the COVID vaccine, the other surviving one was likely killed by it, while the other one was killed by his cancer treatment.

Noam has likely blurbed hundreds of books, and two are relevant to this post. One was when he blurbed War, Peace, and Human Nature, which was edited by Douglas Fry, who has been the leading “peacenik” anthropologist for many years. Fry’s work does not fare well in Azar Gat’s work, or in this book, which is the best that I have seen on the subject. Fry was of that school that Keeley was first immersed in: ancient peoples were all peaceful. That school has largely collapsed, with Fry and friends as holdouts.

Noam also blurbed The Dawn of Everything, written by anarchists, one of whom was a disciple of Marshall Sahlins, whose book on hunter-gatherers inspired this post. Sahlins argued in the 1960s that hunter-gatherers were affluent, because most of their days were spent in leisure. I replied to it here. No society in which half of its children died can be called affluent, particularly when maybe half of those deaths were inflicted by the parents, as they could not afford to care for the children. That is not affluence. Sahlins was part of the 1960s ferment, and his book was a kind of counter-culture critique of modern society. For all of the failings of our societies, and they are many, that does not make hunter-gatherers affluent or something to emulate.

I was kind of dismayed when the authors of The Dawn of Everything (the primary author was a pupil of Sahlins) compared the Pacific Northwest (“PNW”) culture, with its slavery, to California’s natives, who didn’t have it, and attributed it to the sensibilities of Californian natives. Slavery only made sense in sedentary populations, and California’s natives never had the thousands of years of reliable salmon runs to base their economy on, to become sedentary like the PNW culture did. Slavery naturally followed from there.

I have studied the Californian natives quite a bit. The Chumash had an acorn economy at times, so that they could be relatively sedentary, but they had times of famine with the usual violence. But when the Spanish encountered them, they were matrilocal (Keith Otterbein’s “Type B” societies) and relatively peaceful.

Gat’s magnum opus I thought was very good in taking on the “killer ape” and “peaceful savage” hypotheses, which have been opposing camps. Humans are not hardwired for peace or war, warfare is also not something that humans only learned with the rise of farming and civilization. Peace and war are outcomes of decisions that humans make (as well as chimps, etc.), depending on their circumstances. Gat stated is as succinctly as I have seen: the biological compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity is the root of all violence. Eliminate scarcity, and we eliminate the root of violence.

Einstein said that our theories can determine what we observe, and it is important to never get too attached to our points of view, especially when they are not built on experience, but what we were taught. I was taught a bunch of bunk while growing up.

I have seen this schism between ideology and reality for most of my life. My Epochal framework is a structural framework to help explain how human societies operated over the human journey and why. In each succeeding Epoch, human energy capture and surplus energy increased, and that made those societies more humane, because they could afford to be. On an individual basis, violence has declined over the Epochs. If I was born 10,000 years ago, my odds of dying violently were maybe 50%, from either my parents or assailants. Today, almost nobody from my social class is ever subjected to violence, even though I live in the most violent industrial nation (1). The human past was prodigiously violent, and our lives are far less so today, because of the benefits of industrial life that rides on the energy of fossil fuels.

In summary, the study of the human past has been hampered by ideological baggage, which is slowly being shed. Laying aside our conditioning to honestly look at today’s world, its past, and potential future, is very hard to do, for everybody. But it is not only the key to my understanding of our world and its past, but also how it can be, and soon, if enough of us can shed that baggage.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

Chimps and orangutans build nests and shelters, and living in caves is millions of years old. Nomads do not build cities and monumental architecture, and the oldest constructed settlement yet found is in today’s Turkey, built nearly 12,000 years ago, with the beginning of agriculture. It had carved rocks, in what has been described as the first temple.

Civilization first appeared in what we call Sumer today, more than 7,000 years ago. It was one of the great watershed moments in the human journey. Many dynamics were set in motion with the beginning of civilization, which included the rise of:

• Cities;
• Professions;
• Elites;
• Monumental architecture;
• Writing;
• Metallurgy and rapid technological advancement.

Cities were only possible on low-energy transportation lanes, almost always bodies of water, as water transportation only needed 1% of the energy that overland transportation did. City-dwellers use less energy per capita than those in the country, which was one big reason for cities.

It did not take long before other effects began to appear, such as the rise of:

• Slavery;
• Epidemic and degenerative diseases;
• Deforestation and environmental devastation;
• Mass warfare, which could be “productive”;
• Empires.

Many of humanity’s greatest blessings and evils came with the rise of civilization. Agrarian civilizations were all built on the energy of forests and crops, but they were never sustainable. They only provided a thin energy surplus that was subjected to the vagaries of the climate, and all early civilizations collapsed. Civilization has never been sustainable, and today’s industrial civilization is burning up its primary energy source a million times as fast as it was created. From the beginning, civilizations conquered each other, and rising and falling empires have characterized civilizations ever since.

All early ruling classes came to power violently, but soon invoked divine status or sanction to bolster their rule. In virtually all agrarian civilizations that I have studied, relatives slaughtered each other to sit on the coveted thrones. What I find striking about the four pristine civilizations was how similar they were. I see that as a kind of convergent evolution, as behaviorally modern humans invented similar solutions in similar environments. Life was relatively good, if one was a professional or elite, but it was generally terrible if one was a slave or a peasant. Slaves and peasants comprised at least 80% of the population of early civilizations, and their lives were rough. Agrarian peasants were smaller and generally unhealthier than their hunter-gatherer ancestors, but there were many times more of them. In “democratic” Athens, slaves outnumbered citizens. Life expectancy in cities was lower than in the hinterland until the 20^th century.

The first written laws that survive attest to the brutality of the times. The death penalty was liberally used and a significant proportion of the laws dealt with the treatment of slaves. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest written stories, and Gilgamesh specifically waged war against the forest. Even then, it was known that deforestation leads to local aridity, and the forest-to-farm-to-desert dynamic is very clear in the Fertile Crescent. A forest ran from Morocco to Afghanistan before the rise of farming and civilization. It is almost entirely gone today, much of it has turned to desert, and ancient cities in the region are buried in the silt of deforestation.

For all of the “advances” of civilization, half of the children still died. Infanticide generally declined, but more succumbed to diseases, and famine was a regular risk in agrarian civilizations. Climate-cooling events at 8.2, 4.2, and 3.2 thousand years ago collapsed societies and civilizations, because of droughts. Droughts spelled the end of many agrarian civilizations.

I briefly mentioned the four population replacements in Europe, beginning with the demise of Neanderthals, in what Gore Vidal called the bloody migrations of tribes. That was a global phenomenon, as invasions and bloody migrations have characterized the human journey from the beginning.

In the agrarian phase of the human journey, which I call the Third Epoch, more people lived to a ripe old age, but being worked to death became common. Instead of one-in-250 hunter-gatherers living to be 65, in ancient Rome, about one-in-10 did.

An agrarian person’s fate could become far better or worse than during the hunter-gatherer phase of the human journey, but the vast majority of people in civilizations lived the brutal and short lives of peasants or slaves.

Next comes the rise of the West and the culture that my ancestors came from.

Best,

Wade

[Bill Ryan]

So fascinating, Wade, your last few posts (since my cartoon ). Thanks!

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

I am going to briefly sketch the fragility and ephemeral nature of civilization. The three greatest food crops on Earth are maize, rice, and wheat. They are all grasses with annual life cycles. Maize is completely dependent on humans to plant it, and maize is so radically changed from its natural progenitor that there was intense controversy about just what maize’s progenitor was, which was only resolved through DNA studies.

Today’s crops are entirely dependent on human intervention, and it took centuries of experimentation to develop those crops. The process of destroying an ecosystem to grow crops is perilous in many ways, and one is the reliance on rainfall. The energy surplus derived from agrarian-era farming was always thin, and if the rains did not come as expected, it meant a failed crop. Too many failed crops and there was famine. Crops could also fail from “pests,” late snowfall and freezes, and soils not fit for crops, among other hazards. A hailstorm could wipe out a wheat crop in minutes. In the early 1300s, Earth began cooling down into the Little Ice Age from the Medieval Warm Period, and for three years straight, constant rains ruined Europe’s crops, which resulted in an epic famine. Globally, the difference between the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age was about one degree Fahrenheit. In comparison, in my lifetime, global temperatures have increased by two degrees Fahrenheit and much more is coming. That is why I state that the biggest risk to humanity in the coming years will be epic crop failures.

Copper is in the same elemental family with gold and silver. Their non-reactivity is why they were found in nuggets and were the first worked metals and the first three discovered elements. The only other metal found in nature is the iron in meteorites, which Stone Age peoples found and used. There was a Copper Age before a Bronze Age, as people learned to make alloys, and tin and copper became the standard components of bronze.

Metal tools were obviously far superior to stone tools, and no culture that ever smelted metal went back to stone. While copper was relatively plentiful, tin wasn’t, and the Bronze Age in today’s Middle East relied on trade networks for tin.

As I wrote, early civilizations always collapsed, for various reasons, but the main one was running out of food, and droughts were always the main reason why. In my previous post, I mentioned global cooling events and their subsequent droughts, at 8.2 and 4.2 thousand years ago. They had dramatic impacts on the Fertile Crescent. The 4.2 event ended Egypt’s Old Kingdom and the Akkadian Empire.

A millennium later, another drought event hit, which collapsed many Bronze Age civilizations. There has been plenty of debate about the causes, but I think that they can be ranked into ultimate and proximate causes, and climate change was likely the ultimate one, as usual. Not only did famine cause chaos, but it also wiped out the trade networks that brought in tin. While iron needs higher temperatures than bronze to melt, and it was technical feat to achieve those temperatures (the invention of blast furnaces), one big advantage that iron had was that it did not needed imported tin. So began the Iron Age. Steel was superior to bronze for weapons, for instance, and iron implements became far more common.

Bronze Age Mediterranean civilizations collapsed with that 3.2 event, and Greece entered its Dark Age while Phoenicians had their day in the Sun after being driven from their homes. When Greece began its rise again after several centuries, it was an Iron Age civilization. I see that rise of Greece as the beginning of the West’s rise.

Several factors have been identified in the rise of the West, and one of which was the influence of the East. Many Chinese inventions made their way to Europe. The Americas did not have anything like the Silk Road that connected the Americas or their coasts, but maize made it to South America, as it was the staple of the Americas in 1492. The innovations of Classic Greece and its descendants are legion. Athens was constantly at war, and its eventual loss to Sparta and Persia ended its reign. A century later, Alexander the Great conquered everything that he could and died in Babylon while planning new wars.

From Sargon to Alexander, that part of the world saw endless rising and falling empires, and each empire conquered whatever it could. Potentates had their attendant harems, few had peaceful reigns and lived to ripe old ages, and they were often killed by their relatives and court officials. That was the standard for thousands of years, and then came Rome.

Initially a republic, Rome prevailed over everybody and conquered the entire Mediterranean periphery, including the Egyptian breadbasket, which fed Rome. Alexander razed Thebes to the ground, Rome did it to Corinth and Carthage, and the survivors (primarily women and children) were all sold into slavery. After conquering the entire Mediterranean, Rome had civil wars, became an empire, and had a couple of centuries of relative peace before it began to unravel. Forcing people to kill each other for entertainment was a sign of the times.

Contemporaries described the environmental devastation of the Athenian and Roman hinterlands, as forests turned to deserts. There are theories of catabolic collapse, the reduced return on investment in energy extraction, the loss of the ability to profitably invest in complexity, and others. They are all different ways of saying that those civilizations ran out of energy. Rome scoured the Mediterranean of wood for its baths. Those were only the later and more intense efforts that wiped out the forest that stretched from Morocco to Afghanistan 10,000 years ago.

Rome conquered Western Europe, clear to Scotland, before its empire began unravelling. Rome and the Han Empire in China contemporaneously ruled over more than half of humanity about two millennia ago.

As Rome collapsed, the empire’s seat moved to Byzantium (Constantinople), where a fragment of the empire continued for several more centuries until Crusaders sacked it.

Rome’s influence on Europe likely cannot be overstated. In the aftermath of the collapse, one Greek invention that Romans adopted – the waterwheel – began to spread in Western Europe. Northwestern Europe was very wet when compared to Mediterranean lands, with the precipitation from the North Atlantic, so waterwheels became the central technology in what has been called the Medieval Industrial Revolution, which happened during the Medieval Warm Period. Europe thereby began its rise to world conquest.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

In my previous post, I mentioned the Medieval Warm Period, which began around 950 CE and lasted for three centuries. It was a time of building cities in Western Europe. The dominant institution in medieval times was the Roman Catholic Church, which owned about a quarter of Europe’s land. The Holy Roman Empire was founded in 800 CE, and it was an attempt to recapture Rome’s glory. Several years earlier, Vikings began their raids, which ranged far and wide. They invaded the British Isles and today’s France, made it all the way to Kiev and even Constantinople. They settled Iceland, Greenland, and even made it to North America. Most of Iceland’s women were Scottish and Irish. Here is where my recent ancestry begins to come into it.

In 2019, a DNA test showed that the stories of Indian blood in my ancestry were a myth. A year later, I was sent another analysis, and I got another one just this past week, below.

My mother had Scandinavian heritage, mainly Norwegian but also a quarter Swedish. My mother’s birth surname was Ford, which was an Americanization of Forde, which means fjord in Norwegian, and the reason for that is obvious, as that DNA traced to fjord country in western Norway. Part of the family lore is that I am descended from an illegitimate son of the king of Norway (there were probably many of them). I can only imagine the brutality that attended the Viking invasions.

Vikings “settled” in northern France (Normandy), from which they launched the conquest of England by William the Conqueror, in 1066. I also have DNA from France, and I have to wonder about my bloody heritage regarding the Vikings and British. I previously noted the several population replacements in Europe, from Neanderthals to steppe herders, and the British Isles had more than its fair share of that, from Picts to Celts to Vikings to Germanic tribes such as the Angles. The British Isles were frequently slaked with blood.

During the Medieval Warm Period, also called the High Middle Ages, Western Europe was deforested and put under the plow. They were the days of feudalism, as peasants worked the lands under local lords. As I noted, the watermill began its rise in Medieval Europe, and who controlled the mills was constantly contested, as they were literally a source of power.

Celts came from central Europe and invaded Ireland before the arrival of the Romans. The Celts on the British Isles, who became Gaels, were a remnant of that original expansion. That more recent DNA test showed, that my heritage was 97% from Norway, Sweden, and the British Isles, with the 3% remainder Germanic. It must have all been bloody.

The High Middle Ages were a time of wars, from the “Reconquest” of the Iberian Peninsula to the Crusades. One side effect was the reintroduction of ancient Greek writings that the Catholic Church had destroyed as “pagan.” That began the rise of humanism in Europe. Also, returning Crusaders brought back Catharism, so the Pope called for a Crusade on France, which killed about a million people. It was a prelude to religious wars in Europe that killed millions of people, the rise of the Inquisition, and other wonders.

One the positive side was the rise of troubadours, who sang of courtly love. Watermills were central to what is called the Medieval Industrial Revolution. In the Domesday Survey of 1086, as William the Conqueror counted his loot, England and Wales were recorded as almost completely deforested, and England turned to coal, with its resultant air pollution, which led to an ineffectual ban on coal in London in 1306.

The Medieval Warm Period ended in the late 1200s, and a preview of what was coming was when three years of rains caused a huge famine in Northern Europe, from 1315 to 1317, in which at least 10% of the population died. A generation after that was the Black Death, which killed up to half of Europe. Europe’s social fabric collapsed. Troubadours were culturally replaced by the Danse Macabre, and an endless series of wars began. England and France were at war for more than a century. There was such a shortage of labor that European wages were high for the next two centuries.

Constantinople never really recovered from the sacking that the Fourth Crusade gave it. The Mongol Hordes killed off perhaps 10% of humanity in the 1200s, and Islam never fully recovered from it. In Northern Italy, in the late 1300s, there was a rise in humanism that became known as the Renaissance. But the triggering event to Europe’s coming conquest of Earth was when Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453. It not only drove scholars to Europe, which hastened the rise of humanism, but it also inspired European attempts to find a new route to Asia’s spice trade.

Portugal was the early leader in the quest for spices, sailing along Africa, which led to the rise of a new era of slavery and a lust for gold. In 1488, Portugal rounded the southern end of Africa, and its inspired Christopher Columbus’s ill-advised attempt to find a short-cut to Asia’s spice trade, and he stumbled into the Americas. The oceangoing sailing ship was history’s greatest energy technology to its time, which was essential in the coming conquest of the world.

I earlier sketched some of the West’s advantages over other peoples. Australia’s aborigines were still hunter-gatherers. In the Americas, they were almost entirely still in their Stone Age, and the only draft animal was the llama in South America. Africa south of the Sahara was hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers, and the Arabs had been slaving in Africa for centuries. The peoples of those continents never stood a chance when Europeans arrived in their ships. Europe’s conquest of Earth is humanity’s greatest demographic catastrophe so far. Even imperial apologist Steven Pinker called the invasion and settlement of the Americas by Europe history’s greatest crime.

The Spanish freebooters who followed Columbus had “unrestrained greed” as their primary quality. But Spanish priests demonstrated some conscience about the affair, led by Bartolomé de Las Casas, although their impact in practice was minimal. The Spanish king’s advisors cautioned that simply importing boatloads of gold and silver would not make Spain any wealthier, and the Spanish crown entered into a string of bankruptcies about a generation after the tremendous plunder of the Americas began rolling in.

The Dutch threw off Spanish rule at the beginning of a series of catastrophic wars, and the Dutch had the first modern economy. The Dutch had a proto-industrial economy that inspired nearby England. By 1650, the Dutch had less than 40% of its workforce in agriculture, which was a first in world history. The Dutch and English attacked Portugal’s spice trade and formed the forerunners of modern corporations. The Dutch and English invaded North America, as did the French, which accelerated the North American genocide that the Spanish began. The greatest genocide in the Americas was inflicted by the Spanish, but they did not really intend to inflict genocide. It was just the outcome of the diseases that they brought with them and working the Indians to death, which led to bringing in African slaves.

The English, however, intended to inflict genocide from the beginning, even cheered on by religious figures such as Cotton Mather, and I will take up my family history again in the next post, and how I ended up being born in Seattle.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

If the theme of these posts is not clear yet, let me be more explicit: my ancestors lived rough lives that I have a hard time imaging. In Brian Fagan’s The Little Ice Age, he wrote about the medieval farming community of Winchester, in southern England.

As I wrote about the human journey, half of all children died before the Industrial Revolution. The end of childhood death is the biggest event in the human journey so far. In Winchester in 1245, for farmworkers who survived childhood, they could expect to die at age 24. Fagan wrote of the stark evidence that came from excavations of medieval cemeteries. The remains showed that spinal deformations were common, from the literally backbreaking labor of plowing, carrying loads, and harvesting. Virtually all adults had arthritis. Fishing professionals almost always had osteoarthritis from the rigors of their lives. Agrarian medieval life was grim, in a never-ending cycle of labor that never quite provided enough proper nutrition. Food shortages were common, and the culture developed ways to avoid famine. And all that was in the “good old days” before the 1300s and the Little Ice Age, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850. I earlier wrote about the famine that began in 1315 and killed at least 10% of the population, and the Black Death came a generation later, which killed up to half of Europe, soon after England and France began a series of wars that lasted more than a century. And that was well before a series of religious wars (1) devastated the region, in France, England, Germany, and the vicinity. For centuries, a city rarely went a generation without one of these: famine, epidemic, warfare.

It is hard to imagine that people from those times would have had enlightened contact with the world’s indigenous peoples as Europe began conquering the world. I will get into some of the details of that conquest soon, but this post will focus on a related trend: the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.

I earlier wrote that the reintroduction of Ancient Greek writings to Europe spurred the rise of humanism, which found its flower in the Renaissance, which began in the late 1300s in northern Italy. The first works of what is called the Scientific Revolution were published in 1543, which were books by Copernicus and Vesalius. Copernicus died before seeing his work’s impact, which demoted Earth from the center of the universe. Vesalius wrote the first book of modern biomedical science, as his work overturned a millennium of Galenic dogma on human anatomy. Copernicus may have been fortunate to have died before his book was published. Vesalius endured such harsh attacks by his peers that he tried to destroy his work.
Several European men (including Brahe and Kepler) furthered Copernicus’s astronomical work, which culminated in Galileo’s house arrest. In order to avoid Church censors, Galileo couched his work in math instead of observation, which has been argued to have sent science awry. Newton had a similar strategy, as the so-called Scientific Revolution was under siege from religious authorities from the beginning, which distorted it. Science became the new religion in many corners, and scientists became the new priesthood. When Brian O’Leary sipped his sherry as his colleagues ridiculed accounts of the paranormal, science had become a cult unto itself. It is still that way. What my friend witnessed turns today’s physics textbooks into doorstops, but few scientists can be engaged on the topic, as they regurgitate their textbooks, oblivious to the irony of their stances.

But the Scientific Revolution directly influenced the Industrial Revolution. Ancient Greeks once again led the way, as they invented the first uses of steam power. It took another two millennia for steam power to rise again, and the first precursor to the modern steam engine was invented by Denis Papin, in consultation with scientists of the day, such as Robert Boyle. Papin made his mark in England, and was banned from France for his Protestant faith. Thomas Savery soon followed in Papin’s wake, which led to Newcomen’s steam engine in 1710. That was the year after Abraham Darby began smelting iron with coke, which is coal with the impurities baked out of it. To me, those were the watershed moments of the Industrial Revolution, as they were the first commercial uses of motive power and the fuel to make the Industrial Revolution’s leading material. In a case of positive feedbacks, Newcomen’s engine was first used to haul water from coal mines, so that miners could dig deeper for coal. Newcomen’s engine was not feasible without that ready supply of coal. The energy of coal made it all possible, which some economists have incredibly denied.

More than anything else, the Industrial Revolution began today’s Epoch of energy-powered machines, which has eliminated most human drudgery in industrialized societies and initiated vast changes in the human journey. Those Winchester farmers could not imagine my life today.

The English had a head start of about a century over their European rivals as England rapidly industrialized. It was no coincidence that England rode the Industrial Revolution into becoming the world’s first global empire, as a tiny and somewhat backward island nation conquered much of the world, and its Western rivals were not far behind. That led to the migration of my direct ancestor from Scotland to Pennsylvania in the 1730s, and that tale comes next.

Best,

Wade

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)

As I wrote about the human journey, half of all children died before the Industrial Revolution. The end of childhood death is the biggest event in the human journey so far. In Winchester in 1245, for farmworkers who survived childhood, they could expect to die at age 24. Fagan wrote of the stark evidence that came from excavations of medieval cemeteries. The remains showed that spinal deformations were common, from the literally backbreaking labor of plowing, carrying loads, and harvesting. Virtually all adults had arthritis. Fishing professionals almost always had osteoarthritis from the rigors of their lives. Agrarian medieval life was grim, in a never-ending cycle of labor that never quite provided enough proper nutrition. Food shortages were common, and the culture developed ways to avoid famine. And all that was in the “good old days” before the 1300s and the Little Ice Age, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850. I earlier wrote about the famine that began in 1315 and killed at least 10% of the population, and the Black Death came a generation later, which killed up to half of Europe, soon after England and France began a series of wars that lasted more than a century. And that was well before a series of religious wars (1) devastated the region, in France, England, Germany, and the vicinity. For centuries, a city rarely went a generation without one of these: famine, epidemic, warfare.

Wade, was this only the case in Europe in the Dark Ages and early Medieval times? Did the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Indians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Incas, Mayans, and Native Americans have the same issues?

[Bruce G Charlton]

I agree that the huge decline in combined intra-uterine, neonatal and childhood mortality; from probably about 2/3 overall (but nearing 100% among the poorest classes), to 1% or less, is a massively important biological fact. All sources of evidence converge on this very high percentage of deaths - not least that, through most of world history, a large majority of women probably had at least six pregnancies, yet total population was stable in most places and most eras - so most were dying, and most of these in childhood (as confirmed by demographic measures of fertility in studies of a wide range of preindustrial societies):

https://charltonteaching.blogspot.co...hange-and.html

This amounts to a near removal of selection pressure due to death, and the takeover by selection pressure based on fertility. I mean that the composition of past societies were shaped by the minority of those who survived conception, birth, childhood - and by the factors that increased survival. The societies with the lowest death rates grew the most.

Whereas now societies are shaped by "who has the most children" (because almost all survive) and what factors lead to high fertility.

Now: the population of societies or sub-populations with the lowest death rates are shrinking, because of sub-fertility (in some places, women are having only about half the minimum replacement level. The most intelligent women in The West have been having only about a quarter of minimum replacement level, for the past century!).

Whereas the nations, societies and groups with the highest fertility are growing very fast despite also having the highest neonatal/ child mortality rates (and often the lowest life expectancies). Because these higher average death rates are, in modern societies, way too low to make a significant difference to population growth.

The differences in population structure between nations as of 2026 are unprecedented - although obscured by the last couple of decades of mass migration. We have some nations (East Asia, Western Europe) where the median average age of the (native) population is into the late forties, and others (in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East) where median age is just late teens!

It's a fascinating subject!

All this has (very likely) had far greater influence than most people acknowledge, and this impact is (probably) ongoing and with more to come:

https://mouseutopia.blogspot.com/

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Bruce:

In what I call the Fifth Epoch, the world will end as we know it. The demographics of such a world will likely be unrecognizable to today’s. I don’t regard visits to future Earths, like Michael Roads’s, to be fictional. I know psychonauts who have taken similar journeys. Scarcity will no longer shape the human journey.

Bucky Fuller said that children are born geniuses, and our societies beat it out of them. I think that horizons of the human potential will be explored that are hard to imagine today. So, I think that current and past trends will become meaningless, and the nuclear family may become quaint. In the Fifth Epoch, everybody will live to be 100, they will be healthy the entire way, with almost no medical interventions. I suspect that the average IQ there would be considered in the genius range today. I doubt that it will become an idiocracy. I don’t know if humanity will then decide that it is better to have one billion people or 20 billion. Because humanity will have almost no ecological footprint, it won’t matter, as far as Earth’s ecosystems go.

Evolution will continue to march onward, but as with human societies since humans became behaviorally modern, its effects will likely be dwarfed by humanity’s technological and social changes.

Thanks for writing.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Bill:

That is a big topic. There was always some kind of variation between various societies, but the basic dynamics of agrarian societies were all the same. Agrarian farming was always brutal. In Eurasia, they often had draft animals, and that muscle power helped. But until the rise of Europe, about all agrarian societies had at least 80% of the population involved in farming, with the thin agricultural surplus. That was really the main constraint.

That is why all agrarian civilizations looked similar. Only so much variation was available within that constraint. The New World’s civilizations did not have domestic animals like Old World civilizations did. On one hand, it meant less draft animals, milk and meat, but on the other, they did not seem to have epidemics like in the Old World, as the pathogens generally came from domestic animals.

But life as a peasant was always hard. Some had it better than others, but all agrarian civilizations had some form of forced servitude, and that usually meant farming and mining. Slaves were worked to death in many Old World cultures, which took on new levels with the transatlantic slave trade.

With the thin agricultural surplus, all agrarian societies were subjected to the vagaries of the weather, and droughts ended many agrarian civilizations around the world.

When the Dutch achieved less than 40% of the workforce involved in farming, that was a first in the human journey, when so few of a society’s members were involved in acquiring food.

With all of its watermills and its Medieval Industrial Revolution, Western Europe in the High Middle Ages was about the wealthiest in the human journey. It energy capture per capita was far higher than China’s, for instance.

All of those cultures that you mentioned had their variations, but the child death toll was always around 50%, they all had their rises and falls, and those falls were always grim affairs, as wars, famine, and disease outbreaks often accompanied the declines of Old World cultures.

There was an early honeymoon with the spread of agriculture, with intact forests, soils, and a lack of pests. The British Isles went from hunter-gatherers to farmers in something like a century or two, as farming was such a winner. But the easy days eventually ended, and it was back to the brink of survival, but with far larger populations. Agrarian farmers became smaller and unhealthier than their hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Medieval Europe was different in ways than other agrarian cultures, but not all that dramatically. The basics were the same in all of them. In some cultures the growing seasons were longer, and some even had multiple crops per year. But Western Europe had fewer droughts. Its mountainous terrain spared it the Mongol Hordes.

So, all agrarian cultures had their ups and downs, but half of the children died, often enough through infanticide, but none of them could be realistically compared to industrial societies. It was a radically different ballgame.

That is why I state that I can barely imagine what their lives were like. More is coming on that soon.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

In a recent post I briefly mentioned the beginning of Europe’s conquest of the world. It was the greatest demographic catastrophe in the human journey so far. The natives of four continents were devastated, often driven to extinction, but the highest death toll was in India, which suffered under the British lash for two centuries, with nearly two billion excess deaths. The first 150 years of the European invasion of the Americas saw a decline in the native population of between 75% and 95%. Proportionally, that is the greatest demographic catastrophe in the human journey, to wipe out a hemisphere like that. The Spanish get more “credit” for the death toll in the Americas, but genocides inflicted by the English and Americans in North America were more intentional.

One aspect of the invasion of North America was that the invaders unwittingly got a glimpse into the Old World’s past, as the Eastern Woodlands had matrilocal societies, which were long gone in Europe. Europe has one matrilocal society today on an isolated island. Matrilocal societies were Keith Otterbein’s “Type B” societies, and they dominated the Eastern Woodlands. Those were the most peaceful preindustrial societies, and an epidemic problem with the early English invasion was “settlers” who ran off and lived with the Indians, who had what the settlers saw as plainly superior societies. The English rulers considered such “abandonment” of the English way to be a capital crime, and such “traitors” were hunted down and killed (like how the USA treated American soldiers who deserted, to live with the natives).

My family name’s origin is shrouded in myth, and I have the French spelling, while others have the English Fraser spelling, and there are many variants. It partly reflects the migrations of that family line. The Scottish and French often allied against the English. When Mary and Elizabeth vied for the English throne, and one was Catholic and one was Protestant, people of the unfavored religion could have a rough ride. I believe that my ancestors moved back and forth between Scotland and France in those times, and that is likely why my name has the French spelling.

The English usually emerged victorious, and it seems that the continual drubbing by the English was partly why my direct ancestor was a member of the pacifist Quaker sect. He moved to Pennsylvania in the 1730s. The Quakers were land-grabbers, too, with the scandalous Walking Treaty, about the time that my ancestor moved to Pennsylvania. Even colonial Pennsylvania paid to have Indian boys killed.

My ancestors soon moved to North Carolina, which is the setting of the TV show Outlander, which is partly about the Fraser Clan. My ancestor moved to Pennsylvania the decade before the Culloden battle, which ended the last Scottish uprising. My grandfather liked telling about how a Fraser was the last man beheaded in England, for his role in that uprising. As another sign of those brutal times, public executions were festive affairs in England, and grandstands were built for them. A stand collapsed at my relative’s beheading, killing several spectators, which amused my relative. The UK did not finally abolish public dismemberment until 1870.

An aunt had a book about my family, which began with that ancestor who migrated from Scotland. I traced my direct ancestors in that book, and they moved to Ohio in 1811, Indiana in 1816, and Kansas in 1879. They basically followed in the wake of the American military as the Indians were dispossessed, and took advantage of all of that cheap land. One ancestor gave thanks to God for that great land that he lived on, seemingly oblivious to the bloody acts that provided him that wonderful land. To this day, not even Grokipedia can admit that George Washington architected the swindle of the natives of their land, as he called them “beasts” who were unworthy of their land. In that light, my ancestor’s obtuseness over how he acquired that land is understandable.

The map of my DNA follows the migrations in that book. My paternal grandmother’s side is where my “redneck” roots are, which can be seen on that map, which touches Appalachia.

History’s most spectacular deforestation was what European “settlers” did to the Eastern Woodlands from the early 1600s to the 1800s. It drove the passenger pigeon to extinction, which flew in the largest flocks ever recorded.

Europe’s conquest also provided a window into what happened to the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean. The Spanish and Portuguese quickly denuded the Atlantic islands as they quickly turned forests to deserts. After the Spanish conquered the Aztecs, a nearby valley with forests and farms was turned into semi-desert within a century. The British did something similar to eastern Australia.

Around the time that my ancestor moved from Scotland to Pennsylvania, two-thirds of London’s children died before age five. In the beginning of what will likely be Noam Chomsky’s final book, he noted that “Nobody is the villain in their own history.” In studying the bloody human past, I never once saw the conquerors and dispossessors voluntarily apologize for their crimes. They were always justified, turned into heroic deeds, etc. The USA never apologized for Vietnam, and even calling what the USA did an “invasion” is beyond the pale to this day. At worst, crimes are called “mistakes.” Even the Nazis did it.

In that light, what my ancestors did was just more of the same, as they marveled at the “providence” of getting nearly free land. My wife has Spanish ancestry that goes back to New Mexico in the 1500s. I have had to hear repeatedly at family gatherings about how the Spanish beat the English to North America, as if it was some great honor and claim to legitimacy. I have seen this a lot by white people in the USA, as they talk about how long they have been here (nearly a century!), as if it bolsters their claim to living here, as they live alongside Indians whose ancestors lived here for over 10,000 years, and who watch whites live on their stolen land, boasting of how long they lived here.

My Frazier ancestors made it to Kansas in 1879, once again mere years after the Indians had been eradicated. I have visited the localities in Kansas where my grandfather was born and raised. I will deal with my grandfather in the next post, but this one will cover his Kansas ancestors. I visited the cemeteries where dozens of them are buried. The plot of the first Fraziers in Kansas tells a stark tale. I am inserting a picture of my grandfather’s last visit to that plot in 1994, in glorious May in Kansas.

The information on that cemetery is here. Cyrus, who died in 1893, was the original family migrant to Kansas, and he came with his sons Francis, Samuel, and Elmer. Elmer was born in Iowa in 1864, so it looks like there was at least one other migration of my ancestors, about a generation after the Indians had been removed, as usual. Elmer walked out of his front door and was surprised by a tornado, which killed him at age 31. Samuel had a son named Elmer, with the identical middle name as his uncle Elmer: Ellsworth, which is also my brother’s middle name. That Elmer was my grandfather’s father. Elmer was the eldest of 11 children, two of whom died as teenagers, while one lived to be 101. Francis was the father of the Cyrus in the family plot who died at age two (in 1879, and he was born in Ohio) as well as Grace, who also died at age two (in 1885, born in Iowa, as there seems to have been family movement back and forth between Iowa and Kansas).

The other cemeteries that I visited in the area had graves of other relatives who died as children and infants, including the identical twin of my grandfather, who died as an infant. Another relative died of an injury suffered while horsing around with his siblings while their parents were gone, and another died at about age five when he ran into a room and fell into a pan of hot water used for plucking chickens. Those were just the ones that I heard about. I am sure that there were others.

That original family cemetery was for Quakers. The tale told by those graves was no anomaly, and a nearby plot was even more memorable to me, as the gravestones of the Doane family told a typical tale of the day. The patriarch was Clayton, and his wife was Lauretta. They were both born in the early 1880s in Kansas, soon after their parents migrated there, Clayton’s from Pennsylvania. Clayton’s father died when he was 17, and at age 23, Clayton married Lauretta, when she was 21. Like my grandparents did, they had six children. As the graves showed, Lauretta gave birth to Inez in 1909. Inez died at age four. A decade after Inez died, Lauretta, at age 39, gave birth to Clayton, Jr., who was the last of her six children. Lauretta died the next day, obviously from birth complications. Clayton, Jr., died in 1945 in Belgium, fighting the Nazis. The other four children of Clayton and Lauretta lived into their 60s and 80s. Clayton the patriarch lived to be 87, outliving his wife by nearly 45 years.

While it was a far cry from the two-thirds of Londoner children who died before age five in the previous century, dying young was very common in those homesteader days on the plains, and it gives a hint of the brutality of the times, which comes next.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

From Substack:

The video of this post is here.

My father’s father was born in Plainville, Kansas, in 1907, 28 years after his great grandfather moved to Kansas, once the Indians were eradicated. I am five generations removed from that “settlement” event. My grandfather went by his middle name of Rees. Rees lived in a sod hut for some years while growing up. His identical twin brother died as an infant. His grandfather Sam had a homestead in the hinterland of Plainville. I am inserting a family photo from that homestead in 1910, as Sam holds up a badger that he killed, with some of his children in the background.

Rees’s family moved to Wallace, Kansas, when he was a child, which is where he met his future wife, Marie, who was born in Ohio. He was best friends with his future wife’s brother, Fred, while growing up, as they were the same age. Fred represented my redneck/hillbilly heritage, as will be seen.

Wallace was established by building Fort Wallace there in about 1865, to fight the Indians. The Indians were quickly eliminated and Fort Wallace closed in 1882. Perhaps Wallace’s greatest claim to fame is that George Custer deserted his post at Fort Wallace in 1867 and was court martialed. His Civil War fame got him lenient treatment, he was back in action in less than a year, and he soon led the slaughter of a peaceful Cheyenne encampment. The Cheyenne were matrilocal, those relatively peaceful “Type B” societies. Those Cheyenne were led by Black Kettle, who was one of history’s most hapless Indians. Black Kettle attempted to make peace with the invading whites from the beginning, and he was first betrayed at the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864. His braves dragged him away, and Black Kettle kept trying to make peace with the whites until that frosty morning four years later, when Custer’s men murdered him and his people.

Several years after that, Custer seems to have tried to launch a presidential campaign by slaughtering more unsuspecting Indians, but he bit off more than he could chew at the Little Bighorn. Incidentally, the 150^th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn was on Thursday.

Rees grew up farming and ranching. He traveled by horseback. When he was a teenager, he ran away to Colorado. He wrote a letter to home, stating that he was fine, but his mother saw the town where the letter was postmarked from, rode to Colorado, and corralled her wayward son. Rees grew up around Marie, who was the daughter of an engineer who died when she was seven, and she moved with her mother to Kansas. Marie became a schoolteacher, and in those days schoolteachers were not supposed to be married. My grandparents got secretly married in the basement of the local church. It was converted into a bed and breakfast. My aunt and I stayed at it when we visited in 2011, and we ate breakfast in the basement where my grandparents were married.

I lived with my grandparents for about six months in total in the 1980s, and it was a blessed time. In the evenings, Rees would tell stories of his life, which is where several of the upcoming stories come from.

When Franklin Roosevelt got polio in 1921, very likely from lead-arsenate poisoning, his mother, among others, advised him to retire from public life. In those days, there was so sympathy for the disabled, who were considered a burden to society. Rees told me the same thing about his community while growing up. The mentally disabled were made the butt of all jokes. Rees grew up with a rifle in his hand, and he said that he and his childhood friends “shot anything that moved.”

My aunt was born in 1929 in Wallace, just when it began to all come apart in the USA. Not only the Great Depression hit, but so did the Dust Bowl. I have been writing about the forest-to-farm-to-desert dynamic in the Old World, but similar to what I wrote in the previous post on the quick environmental devastation that Europe inflicted on the world, Kansas never had much forest to begin with, so it was straight to farm and desert. The Great Plains have lost about half of their topsoil since white people arrived. What took millennia when civilization arose in the Fertile Crescent has largely been accomplished in less than two centuries on the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl was just one more symptom of our catastrophic ways.

The Great Plains had an ecosystem that the Indians managed for thousands of years via annual burning, to make a big pasture for bison. There were forests near the rivers, but the invading white people quickly deforested what little forest there was. One of my neighbors is form North Dakota, and he told me about how the early steam boats up the Missouri River got their fuel by chopping down the trees along the river, and it was not long before they had to begin using coal. That was the same story for New England and England: they only turned to coal when the trees were gone.

In that picture above were the family cattle, where the bison roamed not too long earlier. Indians and bison were quickly replaced with whites and cattle. My grandparents were driven from Kansas by the Dust Bowl, and migrated for years, Grapes of Wrath style. They first ended up in Arkansas, where my second aunt was born in 1934. Then they moved to Wyoming and Idaho. They worked a season in Idaho, and worked for the payoff when the harvest came in. When the harvest came in, the farmer who hired them pocketed all of the money and disappeared.

Then, in late 1935, they heard that there were jobs in the shipyards of Bellingham, Washington, and a whole bunch of my relatives moved to Bellingham. My grandmother was pregnant with my father at the time, and when he was born in early 1936, his mother was so malnourished that he was born with rickets, weighed four pounds, and nearly died. As it was, was stunted throughout childhood until a growth spurt in high school saw him grow to over 5’10”. A Quaker family originally took in my family. If you scroll through those links of my extended family that I presented in the previous post, many died in Washington, as it was a family migration.

My grandmother’s brother, Fred, did the standard Okie Dust Bowl migration like in Grapes of Wrath, and ended up in Bakersfield, California, near where I was raised in Ventura. Oklahoma is where the surviving tribes of Indians were dumped, as it was the most undesirable land that the whites could find, as a kind of semi-desert. Bakersfield was similar to Oklahoma, and as child I played in the tumbleweeds down the street from Fred’s home, while looking out for rattlesnakes.

I saw Fred’s family all the time while growing up, and Fred represented the redneck/hillbilly part of my heritage. Fred had several children (my father’s cousins), and I grew up around their children. For those children, who were my age, not one of them graduated from high school that I can recall, the girls were all pregnant by about age 15, and the boys went to prison or should have. The “ambitious” ones joined the military. I spent a summer with one of those families in Oregon, and I saw very closely how they lived. I was raised kind of redneck myself, and put it behind me as fast as I could after I left home.

Rees’s grandfather, Sam, stayed on the homestead and died in 1939 in the Dust Bowl. Rees told me that it was a grim end for Sam. My father turned 90 this year, the first in my family line to live to 90 since my great grandmother did. Three of my grandparents died at 89, while the fourth died at 77, which is coming soon.

My grandmother marveled that all six of her children lived to be adults (all of them made it into their 80s), and my studies made her awe clear to me. That was about the first generation where all six children could be expected to live, and why that was is coming soon.

Best,

Wade

[Servant Limestone]

Greetings!

I've just posted in my Free Energy Communizer Substack

There are more pictures and links available there for your reference.

What Cats, Anime and Sports Taught Me About What the Choir Might Look Like (Part 1)




Our oldest cat, Junior, died a month ago, around the night of May 25 into the early hours of May 26, age 13. He’s been sick for quite a while so we kind of know that he was on his way to crossing the rainbow bridge, but it was still a sad day. We also have another cat that died a month before that. Another cat almost didn’t make it after she gave birth to two healthy and rowdy kittens a few days before Junior died.

I don’t know if you all believe in “spooky” stuff like this, but I believe I saw Junior walking with his back to me when I was walking up the stairs in an overpass during my commute from work. I just got dropped off by the van that took me from my workplace to the final drop off point. I was walking up the stairs to get to the other side of the road to catch a jeepney when I saw what I believe to be Junior. But as I reached the top of the stairs, I didn’t see any cat or dog but just a woman. It is rather strange. But I would like to think that this is Junior saying goodbye to me. It is interesting because I don’t really consider myself a great owner of cats throughout my life unlike my sister’s family next door, who took care of Junior as best as they could but more importantly, the remaining cats roaming around our family compound. I regret that I am not in any material and physical position to be able to take care of th cats the way that I imagine that I should have. I am glad that my two sisters and two of my nieces are there to take care of our cats by feeding them and giving them medication and somehow, Junior did not hold my excuses against me. That’s what I like to think about this. He probably knows why now that he knows better by passing the rainbow bridge. I really wish I was a better cat owner. Cats have been a consistent presence in our place since the mid-90s. We “adopted” a female cat around that time, giving her food all the time and then she gave birth to three kittens around May 1997, one of which survived up to November 2007. Please don’t be woke and tone police me but I named him “Whitey” because he’s a white cat. His siblings is a white male cat with spots and a black-dominant bicolor cat. And I think you can guess their names from there. “Whitey” in his last years was always with a female cat that we also adapted and gave a name, “Hey” or “Hei”, just to make it more human. I know. Terrible. We are not sure if the father of Hey/Hei’s kittens happens to be Whitey. If that’s the case, then the current batch is like the fifth generation or something.

Physical constraints, notwithstanding, I have an affinity for all kinds of cats. My social media accounts are full of them. I even follow famous “domesticated” caracals like Pumba and Gosha in the Internet. It’s safe to say that it extends to other things. I have a Mofusand cat stuffed toy that I bought last October 2025. These stuffed toys are popular in this part of the world. I bought this one, which is a product with a collaboration with Sanrio, famous for Hello Kitty.

I also bought another cat stuffed toy from another Japanese brand, Amufun (Amuse), which you can see in the Substack link.

I bought them all during a cosplay convention. Honestly, they’re cute but I kind of like my stuffed toys smiling.

Believe it or not, our house is full of stuffed toys to the point that some of them spilled over and had lived in my room for years, so I kind of “adopted” them already, along with these two that I bought. Some of them migrated with my sisters and niece to their condominium in Manila.

My love for cats spilled over to me liking catgirls from Japanese anime. I’ve written in Avalon two years ago about one of those Japanese anime series that features a cat girl called Cat Planet Cuties. I’ve discussed how one of the scenes from Episode 2 of the anime reminded me of Wade’s mentor that worked in the Pentagon and invented a bomb that can destroy all machinery without killing people.

Cat Planet Cuties is all about this catgirl alien from this matriarchal planet called “Catia” that met this human boy in Okinawa, Japan and they met while she was eating some Okinawan food and dancing with a group of elderly Okinawans. She also got the attention of organizations like the CIA involved (of course) that the boy's childhood friend/neighbor (a common anime romantic comedy trope) happens to work for, and such. It does not have a very good story writing and plot, and it’s a rather fringe work in the vast wasteland that is Japanese anime, but that’s not really the point when this hormonal young man first watched it around 2011 when he saw first the well-endowed catgirl character in it and found out about the happy ending where the main character end up with all of the girls. The catgirl, the childhood friend, everyone. Is it a coincidence that I found this work before Wade’s a few months to a year later, which is how I picked up on Wade’s story regarding his mentor inventing a bomb that destroys all machinery but not living people? I don't know but it's interesting.

I discovered that the scene that I'm talking about is on episode 2 around the 18:35 minute. And it's not really a "bomb" anyway but it’s just the catgirl and her cute little robots with their giant "anti-matter" Whack a Mole hammers. They jumped over the tanks firing on them and then destroyed all of the tanks, while leaving the tank crew inside safe and naked, since their anti-matter Whack a Mole hammers only destroyed everything except living matter.

I've discussed this before in this Avalon post roughly two years ago.

It’s interesting because of the timing when I first watched this anime. This was during the phase when I was in the middle of my soul searching and “spiritual journey” via the Internet that started during my college years that led me to discovering Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project around the time that I watched this anime, and finally, Wade himself in 2012.

It’s this anime featuring a catgirl that helped cushion the impact of knowing about Wade’s mentor inventing a bomb that does not kill people. Because the “theoretical concept” was first shown to me by this anime released in 2010 and I’ve watched a year later. So the concept of Wade’s mentor’s bomb and how it may have worked in reality was already demonstrated to me in such an attractive way by a sexy extraterrestrial catgirl who is attracted to a guy who looks like me if I am Japanese. So why would I dismiss the idea of such a concept being real in theory or in practice?

I mention this because of how related this is to what I just discussed on my last post about the shift in the “consciousness-base” being a requirement to get us to the Fifth Epoch.

We already have the technological capability of rendering conventional warfare obsolete a long time ago. But we can’t do it. Because as what Smedley Butler once said, “war is a racket”.

The story of Wade’s mentor inventing that non-killing bomb and its suppression just made my point even clearer.

Before I go to the real meat of this post, I just want to segue briefly to the FIFA World Cup. I made the draft about Junior (but not the Cat Planet Cuties) the day that he died but my writing stopped because I was tired from work, not to mention the emotions upon hearing the news. I was planning to build it up with the Cat Planet Cuties stuff but inspiration did not come back in the next days/weeks until now. Before remembering that I wrote about Junior, I was actually hoping to open this post about FIFA because of the ongoing FIFA World Cup happening in the United States right now (co-hosted by Canada and Mexico). The Philippines is not playing in this World Cup (nor it ever got far in the qualifiers to participate in it) but I’ve been following the U.S. men’s soccer team, led by AC Milan striker Christian Pulisic and Monaco striker Folarin Balogun, with genuine excitement. As of writing, the US team just won Group D by beating Paraguay, 4-1, in Los Angeles, and Australia, 2-0, in Seattle. Yes, LA and Seattle, the two places that played such vital roles in molding Wade Frazier into what he is today. By the time their final group match against Turkey kicked off on June 25, which they lost, they have already clinched first place with Turkey’s loss to Paraguay, 1-0.

My close following on the U.S. men’s soccer team has its relation to my occasional consumption of Major League Soccer when I get to watch football/soccer, despite the fact that most of the national team are composed of players playing elsewhere, especially in Europe. I got a subscription with Apple TV when Messi signed with Inter-Miami three years ago but my close following of MLS matches petered out eventually and I cancelled my subscription a year later. But I remember that the very first soccer match that I watched on TV is the English Premier League. It is likely that it’s this Bolton Wanderers match vs Portsmouth because of all the clues that pointed to it, thanks to the Internet. I’ve read of Ibrahim Ba playing for Bolton in his only season with that club. I remember that unique surname for a 12 year old kid, “Ba”, and the passing sequence between Ibrahim Ba, Per Frandzen or maybe Henrik Pedersen and Stelios Giannakopoulos (whose surnames except for Ba I’ve mispronounced as a kid) that led to Giannakopoulos’ missed shot attempt. They are also wearing their home kit so I realized that it’s likely a Bolton Wanderers’ home game and each Premier League club only play a home or away game with each opponent. So I just realized that I watched my first soccer game on TV on a Sunday morning in my elder brother’s home in Manila. I found a video of the highlights of that match that I probably watched back in January 2004. I don’t know what am I doing sleeping in my elder brother’s home in early January but I could be wrong. The only other possible candidate is their March 6, 2004 away match against Birmingham (where they look like they played in their white kit in an away game) and even then this game is not yet during my summer break so again, I don’t know what am I doing sleeping in my elder brother’s home in Manila on an early March weekend.

Since we’re into it, I might as well talk about the very first NBA game that I’ve watched on TV, which I think I just found. It is this December 12, 2002 game between Dallas Mavericks and the San Antonio Spurs. I remember watching it briefly when I returned home from school. I’ve likely watched a replay of that game already since the live broadcast here in the Philippines is always in the morning (remember the time zone difference). I’ve just checked the play-by-play and that’s how I found it. I remember a timeout called when the score was something like 102-94 or maybe the earlier timeout with the score being 93-82. I cannot remember exactly but it all matches well. 2002 is a pivotal year in terms of my interest in sports. I’ve watched my very first basketball game on TV in this Game 7 Finals game of the Philippine Basketball Association Governor’s Cup. Looking at the highlights from the video, I think this might have been the very first basketball game that I’ve watched in my life, watching it with my father. Looking into the data, it makes sense that I’ve watched this game on a Sunday evening on May 26, 2002 at the tail end of my summer break as I enter sixth grade. I remember the American imports Derrick Brown and Kelvin Price playing. I also remember the dunk by Derrick Brown to seal the game in their team’s favor as well as all of the celebration as they win the title.

But even getting to watch this basketball game wouldn’t be possible without the popularity of the Japanese anime, Slam Dunk, which I watched for the first time in that month and year, May 2002. I can confirm. It ran from May to probably around September/October 2002. So the timeline all fits.

I played my very first basketball game with classmates in the opening of the school year a month later by June 2002. I redeemed myself from a humiliation I’ve experienced during my fourth grade when I got hit in the face by a bounce pass during an inbound on the very first play when I subbed in while my childhood crush was watching and laughing at me. My father was also there watching in embarrassment. My humiliation felt so overwhelming that I never played any basketball after that and I deliberately stayed away from the basketball court throughout my fifth grade. I was too afraid of the ball hitting my face again. I finally got my redemption in this June 2002 game when I played for the very first time without fear for the ball hitting my face, making a steal and then bringing the ball briefly on a fastbreak that led to an assist for the game winning lay up. It was exhilarating. There’s no turning back from that point on.

I followed the practice games of the Philippine national team in Europe where they got clobbered by the European squads in every game. And I watched the national team’s campaign to get the gold medal in the Asian Games in Busan, only to see the heartbreaking three-pointer at the buzzer by South Korea during the semifinals. We also missed four straight free throws at the end of that game so that didn’t help.

Basketball, despite being the country’s most popular sport, always underperform despite expectations and fail to compete well in the highest-level competition due to a lot of external and internal factors and tend to reach its limitations when facing superior Asian competition; either China, South Korea or Japan, depending on the time period.

Finding my draft post about Junior derailed my trail of thought regarding FIFA and tying it to what I really want to talk about, at first. But I think what I really want to mention, which ties in neatly to the cat/catgirl discussion interestingly, is about my recent frustrations with an Internet community that I am a part of since 2011 when a discussion came up regarding sports, particularly when the discussion got to football/soccer for purposes of worldbuilding. This is the same community that helped in my political journey from being a cosmopolitan liberal that the Galactic Republic from Star Wars, among others, helped inculcate to me as a young kid to a “libertarian socialist” after my disillusionment with Obama and the Occupy movement and encountering the works of William Blum and Noam Chomsky, among others, around 2011 and from that to discovering more of the historical Italian communist Left associated with thinkers like Amadeo Bordiga and its contemporary offshoots, particularly those that embraces “communization theory” associated with publications like Theoriste Communiste in France and End Notes in the Anglophone world around late 2023/early 2024, which I briefly discussed in my introductory post in this Substack last year.

Just want to clarify the “Italian communist” part here because this is quite confusing at first for the uninitiated. I am not referring to the mainstream Italian Communist Party (PCI) under Palmiro Togliatti with his “Italian road to socialism” and Enrico Berlinguer that negotiated the “Historic Compromise” with the Christian Democrats unsuccessfully.

More precisely, I am referring to the expelled and marginalized interwar/prewar Left Fraction of the Communist International/Italian Fraction of the Communist Left that established themselves in France and Belgium during the fascist period and whose militants also founded the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt) in Italy in 1943. To be more granular, I am referring furthermore to the Bordiga-led splinter group from PCInt that founded the International Communist Party (ICP) in 1952 and is now represented by at least five separate organizations calling themselves by that same name. In France, the Gauche Communiste de France was founded, which maintained links to PCInt while maintaining its own independence. Despite this particular ideological tendency’s historical concentration in Italy, it is not an exaggeration to say that the largest contingent of (Italian) left communists and its sympathizers today are Americans, thanks to the resurgence of Bordiga’s popularity in online leftist circles in the past few years.

So we are not talking about the PCI. It’s the “PCInt” and its main offshoots, like the multiple organizations calling themselves the International Communist Party (ICP) today, and to a lesser extent, the International Communist Current (ICC) and the International Communist Tendency (ICT). These organizations all trace their origins from the Italian communist left grouping that Amadeo Bordiga, who was the first Secretary-General of the PCI itself, headed in the 1920s. They are considered “left communists” and is confusingly grouped with the German-Dutch dissidents associated with the more anti-Leninist “council communism” tendency because they are all part of the anti-electoral abstentionist wing of the mainstream communist movement outside of the Soviet Union circa 1926 before their total expulsion from the Communist International. So they are not “Trotskyists”, notwithstanding the Stalinist propaganda. Amadeo Bordiga was famously/infamously known for referring to Stalin in 1926 as a “gravedigger of the world revolution” to his face. That’s a man with balls.

Communization, particularly the branch theorized by Gilles Dauve, or Jean Barrot, as well as the thinking of Jacques Maurice Camatte through the French publication Invariance was strongly influenced by the left communist “PCInt-ers” and my deeper study about the historical Italian communist left and the communization “tendency” revealed to me that these communists have the nearest resonance from a political science standpoint to Wade’s wider beliefs about the nature of world capitalism today and as to how to bring the Fifth Epoch. It is probably not a coincidence because these are radical communists from one of the most industrialized parts of Europe, a firmly Fourth Epoch region. I was actually mistaken in thinking that the nearest people to Wade’s framework may have been the “anarcho-pacifists” like Gandhi or Tolstoy as I previously thought dating back to 2015 when I first talked about it in Avalon. Sure, they’re close in the sense of being in alignment with Wade’s beliefs in non-violence. Wade is correct that Marxism’s “Achilles heel” is its belief in revolutionary violence in bringing about social change. That is not a small thing to miss. But while that’s an important alignment, anarchism (not just anarcho-pacifism), in general, has profound limitations that Gilles Dauve discussed in his work, When Insurrections Die.

I also explained this briefly in my introductory post.

To cite an important quote from that phenomenal work once again;

“No less than Marxism, anarchism fetishizes the state and imagines it as being incarnated in a place. Blanqui had already thrown his little armed flock into attacks on city halls or on barracks, but he at least never claimed to base his actions on the proletarian movement, only on a minority that would awaken the people. A century later, the CNT declared the Spanish state to be a phantom relative to the tangible reality of the “social organisations” (i.e. militias, unions). But the existence of the state, its raison d’être, is to paper over the shortcomings of “civil” society by a system of relations, of links, of a concentration of forces, an administrative, police, judicial, and military network which goes “on hold” as a backup in times of crisis, awaiting the moment when a police investigator can go sniffing into the files of the social worker. The revolution has no Bastille, police station or governor’s mansion to “take”: its task is to render harmless or destroy everything from which such places draw their substance.”

It is not only a fetishization of the state but also, as Amadeo Bordiga posited, a fetishization of democracy, based on his seminal work for those in the know, The Democratic Principle, written in 1922. The Democratic Principle is a highly-recommended reading. While we understand the limitations of Bordiga’s worldview here, I think he’s one of those 20th century thinkers that got the most out of the historical materialist tradition.

Going back to Dauve, part of the problem of the Spanish anarchists (if not all anarchists) is their misplaced fixation on authority and hierarchy while accompanied by a fetishization of the state, democracy, decentralization, activism, and “horizontalism”. Anarchists are thoroughly focused on changing the superstructure, not the base, let alone the “consciousness-base” that I’ve discussed in my Byzantium post. Anarchists are correct in opposing the repression that emerged from Soviet Russia on moral grounds but liberals can also point to the same thing and be correct as well.

We cannot bring the Fifth Epoch into being by peacefully marching to Area 51 and raising placards or doing transcendental meditation or the CE5 Initiative in front of the base or by forming a commune prefigurating the Fifth Epoch around it like doing an Occupy Wall Street encampment while hoping that the Global Controllers show us mercy and finally release the suppressed technologies from their underground facilities. Sure, the nonviolent protest on Area 51 may happen sometime in the future. I will support it. But who is going to do it? And why even choose to do so? Why it will even have a chance of happening? We are missing a step here before we even get to that point. And that’s what we are trying to fill.

Petitioning our political leaders or the military-industrial complex to release the suppressed technologies, which is the traditional “disclosure” path, is not the available option here. The Area 51 protest is itself just a form of petition.

Before the “choir” and its following can even think of “strategy” and “action”, it is important to understand the limitations, first. And this is what many of today’s anarchists hate a lot, theory.

One of my goals with this Substack is to be as thorough as I can in communicating the unsettling truth to many self-proclaimed radical left-wingers and communists through the prism of these Marxist or post-Marxist tendencies that they probably have not heard of before or only heard or read about briefly without really knowing what it is about.

Political activism either through electoralism or any mass movement politics will not bring us a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, let alone communism, that is the Fifth Epoch.

ICP-ers and the communizers already understand this without even knowing an inkling about free energy going back to the start of the Cold War, if not earlier. This is without even knowing the astronomical power discrepancies that exist today between those that own the most important “means of production” around, which is free energy itself, vs the rest of us. It’s between an extremely powerful group of likely a few hundred people and their network of roughly 100,000 people vs the rest of humanity. We are living under this dark period of potentially civilization-shattering counterrevolution. The ICP-ers already knew this counterrevolutionary epoch that we are living in 1952 without even really knowing why. They only know what they know about the quick degeneration of the Soviet revolution almost from the time that the Bolshevik Party took control of the former Russian Empire via a destructive civil war and the confirmation of this degeneration with the final defeat of the German proletariat under the Weimar Republic, even before Hitler. They know that the Stalinist counterrevolution cannot be overcome by a Trotskyist political revolution when the rot started even before Stalin took complete control of the USSR, if not even before Lenin died. They know of their fundamental opposition against all warfare, though not necessarily for pacifistic reasons, which meant taking the unpopular position of opposing participation in the supposed “just war” that is the Second World War, which they consider as an “imperialist war” correctly. They know that the fundamental issue starts with the “state capitalist” nature of the USSR and that the Soviet Union and its 20th century offshoots, including ALL of the “Marxist-Leninist” states of today like the People’s Republic of China, has very little to do with orthodox Marxism, let alone Leninism, for all of their imperfections. They know that no nation-state of any existing state ideology, even those that claim to be “Marxist” and/or “Leninist”, will bring about communism, let alone the Fifth Epoch kind of it that we know now. They know that no kind of political activism, mass movement politics, electoralism, trade unionism, “popular fronts” or “united fronts” from above (via political parties), “democratic centralism”, and “prefigurative politics” will make it happen. “Democracy” itself is a bourgeois “social engineering” population management ideology. Amadeo Bordiga calls activism back in 1952, “an illness of the workers’ movement that requires constant treatment". He is not wrong. Bordiga’s insights on this topic, among others, comes very close, which is impressive for its time and circumstance.

(Italian) Left communists, in my opinion, have the nearest resonance to the “neo-Fullerian” ideas of Wade from a political economy lens. In many of the writings of the historical (Italian) communist Left and of the communization tendency, you can easily substitute some of the words and terms that they use like “the party” with Wade’s “choir” almost seamlessly and it all fits.

The vehicle for revolutionary change, which for the ICP-ers (they don’t want to be called “Bordigists”) is the Marxian concept of the “class party”, may have been slightly antiquated but it is still kind of true. They just don’t know how this “class party” may have properly looked or should have looked like given what they don’t know.

We know now in the early 21st century.

Just a quick example. In the words of Bordiga, “In the party, consciousness precedes action, unlike what takes place among the masses and at the level of the individual.”

I would clarify Bordiga’s statement by saying that “In the party (choir), consciousness should precede action, but it must also take place at the level of the individual” but we can all see how he came very close.

The biggest change is because we’ve shifted the place of consciousness from the superstructure into the base, creating the concept of a “consciousness-base”.

I hope to be able to talk about more of the left communist tradition over time and see how many of its writings align closely to our real circumstances and to bridge the gap in the middle, which, for me, is not that much in terms of its quantitative distance, if we go by that sense of measurement, in theory, but still a substantive qualitative gap in its essence.

But referencing the writings from the (Italian) left communist tradition, looking as they are at the moment, is at the very least useful in demystifying a lot of the ingrained beliefs of the radical Left.

This is the “communizer” part of the Free Energy Communizer Substack. The “free energy” part is a little more complicated but we will get into it too and I would love for us to study more of Buckminster Fuller, not because he is a free energy believer, but because his ideas also come the closest from less of a political science angle.

To summarize what I believe within the context of the communization “tradition”, I join “communization theory” in its belief that given our existing technological capabilities today that we can skip building the original stage after a workers’ revolution that is called the dictatorship of the proletariat and start an immediate construction of communism. We can certainly do immediate communization right now through the public use of suppressed technologies once they can finally be allowed to be used for good. However, unlike the communizers, I am sympathetic to the International Communist Party/ies’ belief in Bordiga’s formulation of “organic centralism” since I believe that it matches or mirrors closely to Wade’s concept of the “choir” and its singers, not as a political party, though in a certain point of view, it might as well be, but as a form of an epistemic community. But unlike the ICP-ers, I join Gilles Dauve when he said the following from When Insurrections Die;

….it does not matter who manages production, whether an executive or a council, because what counts is to have production without value. We say: as long as production for value continues, as long as it is separated from the rest of life, as long as humankind does not collectively produce its ways and means of existence, as long as there is an “economy”, any council is bound to lose its power to an executive. This is where we differ both from “councilists” and “Bordigists”, and why we are likely to be called Bordigists by the former, and councilists by the latter.

I am certainly not a “councilist” nor a “Bordigist” myself. And to be honest, if I want to respect the legacy of Marx and Engels, I should probably not even consider myself a “Marxist”. So I am rejecting Marxism. I cannot be part of the mistake of building a Marxist or post-Marxist current or tendency here. But the I respect the hell out of these Fourth Epoch thinkers about how close they are to getting it. And there are profound lessons to be learned from their successes and failures as well as filling in their blindspots. Because they are already there. They are already circling the mountain but there are dark clouds that prevent them from seeing the mountain’s peak, letting alone finding the path/s to the summit. My goal is to offer a lens to help make people see past the dark clouds that they can see by naked eye and to see the summit for themselves. Then the search for the path/s to the summit becomes the easier problem to solve. The lens itself can help in that search.

I see it as a dialectical process. If you believe that you are already in the (radical) Left, and if you want to understand Wade’s work even better, then the intellectual route available for you is that you must embrace Marx(ism) thoroughly first so that you can reject it. I don’t mean “reject” in the sense of throwing Marx away. I mean that you have to take Marx and the best of his tradition (that I believe went through the “Italian” communist left) seriously enough so that you can see both its power and its limits, and then carry what survives into a wider framework that acknowledges the existence of suppressed technologies and of free energy. It’s not a pure rejection. It’s a sublation.

That is what I believe that I am doing. And I would like you to join me in this journey.

The unfortunate reality is that most people only encountered the “Marxism” and thought that they are embracing or rejecting Marxism while those who do encounter Marxism (of the left communists) still found it wanting or reject it because of how soul crushing its theses are.

The left communists are right that the usual doors that were previously available are already closed and that the best course of action is to preserve what can be preserved in this counterrevolutionary period by seeking theoretical clarity, first, as part of the actions needed to be taken. Leftists tend to separate the “theory” from “praxis”. Left communists don’t see any difference.

The thing that they fell short though is to consider thermodynamic clarity and to see that the challenge today is not to build the usual party-building strategy, even if it do meant a complete abstention from what Wade calls, “retail politics”.

There is a way out of this dark period.

I will discuss more of my realizations in part 2 of this post.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

What I always found interesting about Serg’s writings, including his latest, was how they came from a Marxian framework. Serg is better read on Marxian analysis and Marxist thinkers and activists than I will ever be. Long ago, when I took note of my free-energy fellow travelers and how they got there, the roads were diverse. Dennis Lee got there through the business route. I began with the inventor route, to be “guided” into the business path that led me on my odyssey. Brian O’Leary played the Capitol Hill and academic game until he had his paranormal experiences. Mark Comings tinkered in the basement of a lab after his first paranormal experiences. Adam Trombly found his father’s diaries, which described reverse-engineering ET tech. Sparky Sweet came by the technical route in magnetics. Virtually all of us had paranormal experiences that were keys to our journeys, and we all had rough rides at the hands of global elites.

But if anybody thinks for long about the existential risks that humanity faces, it always comes down to the energy issue, of there either not being enough or its harmful uses and ways to generate it. My Epochal framework was intended to help the people I seek see the big picture of the human journey and what the potential of abundant and harmlessly produced and used energy is. For those willing and able to see it, they won’t be able to think about much else, for good reason.

All political stripes are primarily concerned with what I call reshuffling the deck of scarcity. If their fantasies came true, we would still have scarcity, and that is the problem. I have lived through, witnessed, and heard about the many paths to failure for this Epochal task, and they all helped me develop my approach. It is really simple, but almost nobody on Earth is fit for the task, as they will not or cannot relinquish their scarcity-based views, which were drilled into them from the cradle.

While the language may be different in Marxian analysis, the themes are familiar, and people can only see what I call the Fifth Epoch if they give up thinking like victims, start thinking like creators, and creators create with love. But almost nobody on Earth is willing or able to do that. That is the primary problem, not what global elites do, the failings of activism, etc. I have seen mystical explanations that make sense, but I sure haven’t given up.

So, Serg chips away in his own way. We’ll see if he can truly reach anybody with his approach. It is worth trying out. He has my attention.

Best,

Wade