WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Now that I have laid the groundwork in the previous posts, I want to discuss human thought and the Epochs. The first brains appeared more than 500 million years ago, in worms, and before both the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions, the dominant reptiles were encephalizing, which means that their brains were growing, proportionally. When mammals inherited the Earth after the dinosaurs were wiped out, they began growing to fill the niches that archosaurs left behind, and reached maximum size 40 million years ago, and stayed that size until humans wiped out Earth's easy meat. But 40 million years ago, no mammals were appreciably encephalized. Cetaceans were the first mammals to encephalize, and they did so around 35 million years ago, as Earth entered the Icehouse Earth phase that we are in today. A leading hypothesis regarding encephalization is that sociality was the trigger for it, as the benefits of being social required more mental horsepower to socially navigate.

Chimps are the most encephalized land animals and considered the smartest, so the rise of the human brain began from a high plateau to begin with. Chimps pass the mirror test, which is considered a threshold for sentience, but several million years of brain growth, from the human-line split from chimps, resulted in behaviorally modern humans about 60,000 years ago, and they quickly conquered Earth, while wiping out all other human species. Michael said that humans became ensouled when we became behaviorally modern. Interesting idea, but not scientifically testable today.

That dramatic brain growth in the human line has few precedents in the fossil record. The growth of lungs as fish left water is comparable, but the brain is a very different organ. We humans have not had our big brains for long, on the evolutionary scale. If we became sentient only 60,000 years ago, we are still getting the hang of it. Michael says that humans and cetaceans are the only ensouled species on Earth, which could be analogous to "sentient." Michael Hyson is one of the world's foremost cetacean experts, and when I went to Hawaii to hang out with him and swim with dolphins, everybody in the Big Island's dolphin community considered dolphins their peers, and they all had experience of dolphins' telepathic abilities, which I also got to experience.

I have had many experiences of human paranormal abilities, and the human story is far larger than mainstream scientists can paint today, but the story that science paints is still an important one. After five years of playing the Paul Revere of FE, and getting nothing but crazed denial and fear from his colleagues, even from the world's leading "visionaries" and "progressives," Brian O began openly wondering if humanity is a sentient species. It is a fair question. I call humanity semi-sentient. The capacity for sentience is there, but it can easily get short-circuited by conditioning and fear. Fear literally shuts down the neocortex, as the fright-or-flight reaction kicks in. All of the crazed reactions to the idea of FE that I have witnessed over the long decades of my journey have been something to behold, and when Brian asked his "Are we a sentient species?" question, I sadly understood.

Hitler once said that the way to make people submit to domination was to threaten them with immediate, violent death. I watched my nation go literally insane after 9/11, in an orgy of flag-waving, as herd instincts took over and Americans lost all semblance of sentience for a time, and we are well on the way to becoming the new Nazi Germany, or Rome, but as it declined and collapsed. Our imperial peak is behind us, as we run out of energy like Rome did.

So, the idea of human sentience, and how to enhance or suppress it, is a highly important subject. Even though we are all UP, each Epoch of the human journey saw highly distinctive forms of social organization, ideology, and technology, and human thought has generally become more complex and sophisticated over the human journey, as we increased our energy surplus with our increasingly sophisticated tools. Each Epoch was shorter than the one before, by about an order of magnitude, and the surplus energy grew each time by more than an order of magnitude. As Michael stated, ensouled species in our situation today wipe themselves out a third of the time, through either environmental destruction of warfare, and the smart money has humanity wiping itself out via World War III, as humanity fights over the fast dwindling oil deposits long before our environmental practices catch up with us. Choose your poison.

How about we choose to become a truly sentient species? That is what my work is all about. Energy and consciousness are the only two things that exist in our universe, and energy and sentience are at the crux of the human dilemma.

Within that framework, I want to discuss the human Epochs, their dominant thought forms, and making FE happen. During first Epoch, Homo sapiens appeared on the evolutionary scene, but the Epoch began around two million years earlier, when Homo erectus appeared on the scene, which was the most radical change in the human line. There is great controversy today over how much of Homo erectus's arrival and development was due to the control of fire. Home erectus definitely controlled fire and made the first stone tools that could be considered the product of craftsmanship, but they did not change for more than a million years. Like the billion years before the rise of complex life has been called the boring billion years, the reign of Homo erectus has been called the boring million years, when not much seemed to be happening on the toolmaking front, which likely also reflected the cognitive front.

Probably less than a million years ago, Homo heidelbergensis appeared on the scene, and by 500,000 years ago, its toolset began becoming more sophisticated. Homo sapiens appeared 200,000 years ago, but it took more than 100,000 years before the toolset improved enough to indicate that Homo sapiens became behaviorally modern, and the greatest feat that they achieved was likely the mastery of language. A split from Homo heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, invented new tool technologies, and there is great debate today over how "sentient" Neanderthals were. As with all of the megafauna extinctions that accompanied the human conquest of Earth (the second Epoch), there is a camp that vociferously denies that Homo sapiens drove Neanderthals to extinction, and that climate change did it, but as with all the other scientist who try to deflect responsibility from their species, their arguments are in the distinct minority, and virtually all scientists who have looked into the issue and were not trying to defend their in-group all admit that the likeliest explanation is that behaviorally modern humans drove all the world's easy meat, and all of their human competitors, to extinction. Humans became the greatest energy windfall opportunist in Earth's history, and they usually depleted an energy resource to exhaustion, and then plundered the next one, which took new levels of cognition, social organization, and technology to exploit.

Australian aborigines, Negritos, and sub-Saharan African hunter-gatherers have given scientists a glimpse into the Second Epoch. They were male dominated (as the human line had been since at least gorillas), exceedingly violent (about a third of all men died violently), and their religious ceremonies were singing and dancing rituals that could last all night, even months, and helped form group cohesion so that the tribe could prevail in warfare against its neighbors. Warfare has been primarily resource-based from the beginning.

Whenever one Epoch met another, the earlier Epoch disappeared, similar to how behaviorally modern humans conquered Earth: they had superior energy practices. In the original Neolithic expansion of agriculture, the hunter-gatherer women mated with farmer men and hunter-gatherer men disappeared from the genome. In the Bantu Expansion in sub-Saharan Africa, thousands of years later, the same dynamic happened, and it also happened in the New World as Mesoamerican farmers expanded into North America. When Spain, at Epochal Level 3.5, invaded Caribbean natives at Epochal Level 3.0, they never stood a chance, and were quickly driven to extinction, as native men disappeared from the gene pool.

When the rapacious Spaniards encountered New World civilizations, the natives also never stood a chance and were swiftly conquered and eradicated, with the Aztecs going first, soon followed by the Incas. The natives were rubes compared to Europeans, and they never really understood the European mind and motivation until it was too late. The European boot was swiftly laid across the entire world's neck, with catastrophic results. For lands similar to Europe's, the invaders annihilated the natives and took their land, and in more tropical environs, the natives were enslaved. England, in Epoch 4.0, easily conquered and enslaved the entire Indian sub-continent, turned a rising people back into peasants, and turned India into one big plantation to supply their British overlords.

In those early agricultural societies, women brought in more calories than the men, and they often became matrilineal, which was a first in the human line in at least ten million years, and like bonobos, they were the most peaceful pre-civilized societies. When England began invading North America, the Eastern Woodlands were dominated by matrilineal horticultural societies, which was something unheard of in Europe, and from the invasion's beginning, an epidemic problem for the invaders was the "settlers" running off and going native, as the attractions of their societies were obvious. But as with the others who encountered Europe in its conquest phase (also called the 500 Year Reich in some corners), the natives were swiftly annihilated by the invaders, as they came to take their land. Hitler modeled his plans for Eastern Europe on what the English and Americans did to North America, and it is only because he targeted white people for annihilation that he became the "monstrous" figure in history. Christopher Columbus, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson were equally monstrous if not more so, little different from Genghis Kahn, when you get down to it, but they are heroic icons in my great nation. What the USA did to Baghdad was not that different from what the Mongols did to it, several centuries ago, and what we did to Fallujah was aptly described by American participants as similar to Hitler's siege of Stalingrad. But we are the light of the world, at least in our egocentric eyes, just like all imperial peoples have always seen themselves, whether they were Sumerians, Romans, or the English.

I will end this series of posts with one on how people thought in each Epoch and how hard it is for a person to move from one Epoch to another, and what the implications are for my effort. We have people living in the Second, Third, and Fourth epochs today, and I live in a polyglot nation that has seen people from Third Epoch cultures, and even some from the Second, live here. My grandfather went from living in a sod hut (soon after the Second Epoch hunter-gatherer natives were eradicated) to watching his son help put men on the Moon, and he saw his grandson try to initiate the Fifth Epoch, but like almost all humans today, he really could not comprehend what I was doing. Heck, my own parents had no idea, and even attacked me for my trouble, even though they raised me to become what did.

Hardly anybody on Earth understands, but that is normal. They cannot even imagine the coming Epoch, and when they get a glimpse of it, they react with denial and fear, and the "smartest" of them develop sophisticated arguments for why FE is impossible, undesirable, or won't be very transformative at all, as they project their Fourth Epochal understanding on the Fifth (projecting scarcity onto a situation of abundance), and fail to understand. They won't begin to understand until the Fifth Epoch arrives, and that is normal. I do not seek choir-members from people stuck in the Fourth Epoch, or Third, but those who can help me help make the Fifth happen, and I know how rare they are. New Age conspiracists think they are hip and understand, but they don't, as they think like victims instead of creators, which is typical (they usually try to tell me how powerful Godzilla is, as if I did not know – he chewed on me and my fellow travelers – and how hopeless my quest is; he is not nearly as powerful as he pretends to be). The end of the Super-Epoch of Scarcity will be nothing like what humanity has ever experienced before, and this kind of world quickly comes into view.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

This will be on the Epochs, the technology, cognition, social organization peculiar to each, and coming soon are the implications for what I am attempting. As noted in my previous post, sociality and encephalization seem related, and sociality in the human line goes way back, even before there were mammals, and sexual reproduction is about a billion years old and was likely a key to favor sociality.

Closer to Homo sapiens, monkeys are highly social animals, have crude forms of politics that are often lethal, they culturally learn via observation and mimicry, and the great apes, especially chimps and orangutans, took it further. The progression of what we call intelligence (largely the ability to solve problems) through that evolutionary path is unmistakable. Chimp infants are ahead of human infants, developmentally, until about age two.

Great apes have all passed the mirror test, and after that split from chimps, the human line learned to walk upright, make relatively sophisticated tools, and about two million years ago, they left Africa and spread across Eurasia while chimps and gorillas stayed in their rainforest homes. Enhanced mobility, tools, and cognition enabled that journey, and the evidence that those "hobbits" may have been habilines or australopiths and that they controlled fire leads to the idea that relatively sophisticated cognition, which we might call human, may have begun more than two million years ago.

We do not see the abstract thought and behavior called art emerge until Homo sapiens began to achieve behavioral modernity less than 100,000 years ago, but there is obviously a rich heritage of thought and behavior that humanity is heir to, which is pretty deeply baked into our DNA and cultures. How much of that heritage was shared with Neanderthals is a lively debate today.

The evidence today strongly suggests that many radiations of animals and even plants were due to marginal species being pushed to the margins and adapting to new environments and thriving, whether it was fish invading land, marginal monkeys leaving the canopy for the ground and becoming apes, or marginal chimps becoming humans. In the early days of the big radiations, life was easy, once the new environments had been mastered, as there was little competition for energy. The adaptive radiations after mass extinctions were also that way. They were the golden ages of many kinds of animals, who suddenly found themselves awash in energy. The human journey has similar golden ages, in the early days of exploiting new energy resources, from killing all the easy meat on continents that did not host primates, much less anything like humans, to "pioneers" "settling" continents that had been the abode of people of earlier Epochs (the same continents where humans easily killed the megafauna is also where those natives swiftly died off when Europeans invaded), to the early days of civilization or exploiting coal or oil. Those golden ages all came to an end, however, as people bred to the land's carrying capacity under that Epochal energy regime and/or the energy ran out. Then it became hard times, warfare escalated, and societies collapsed.

As humans drove the mammoths of Eurasia to extinction, the escalation of violence is evident in the archeological record. While there was new territory to migrate to, full of easy energy, people chose to simply move on, not fight, but as territories shrank, mutual hostility and warfare became the name of the game, and killing men outside of their territories, with no questions asked, was the norm. When the British invaded Australia, they found about 600 societies that were all mutually hostile and warlike, which likely represented humanity on the brink of the Domestication Revolution.

The beings in the First Epoch had increasingly sophisticated toolsets and cognition, and they were able to migrate across Eurasia, marking a very distinct departure from their great ape ancestors. It was still male-dominated, as hunting was the main way to provision themselves past their rainforest and woodland homes, and dimorphic males excelled at it. Females cared for their young and gathered.

Humans of the Second Epoch were behaviorally modern, and at 30,000 years ago, their brains were even 10% larger than today, which likely meant that they had greater raw mental horsepower than humans today, but they had a long ways to go to reach the collective intelligence and skillset that led to civilization. Women were still second-class citizens and even chattel, which was a "tradition" going back ten million years or more. In the late Second Epoch, about a third of all men died violently. They had religion, which was likely a reaction to warfare, to achieve societal cohesion to survive battles with their neighbors, and nobody would have called those days a golden age.

In a few places where large animals had been largely been hunted to extinction, and where plants with energy stores to survive seasons were exploitable, people began to domesticate plants, and the Third Epoch was born. The beginnings of agricultural were peaceful, and a brief golden age for women, before their status declined again. That act led to civilization, and it happened independently at least twice. Civilization meant many radical changes in the human journey, culturally, technologically, and cognitively. And like the hunter-gatherer phase was not really sustainable, and went through an early golden age that became competitive and violent, civilizations did the same thing, as battle over territory began early on, and it was all energy-related, from forests to fertile soils to low-energy transportation lanes, and early civilizations never lasted long, as they wiped out their energy supplies. But people no longer killed strangers on sight, new kinds of social organization appeared (not all for the better, certainly), and literacy is one of the many inventions of that Epoch that are still with us today. I may be writing on a computer, but the basics of how I am writing have not changed for thousands of years. In ways, this is a primitive way to communicate, but we still have not bettered it all that much.

After thousands of years of Fertile Crescent civilization, the rise of what could be called scientific thought began, exemplified by the Classic Greeks, who also wiped out their energy supplies and soon collapsed into a backwater that never really rose again. I doubt that it is much of an exaggeration to say that Greeks began the era of modern thought, which was stamped out in Europe by the religious authorities, but was reintroduced when Christian armies seized Islamic libraries, and the rise of Europe began in earnest.

If you had taken a First Epoch being and dropped him into a Second Epoch society, he would not have even been able to communicate with those beings, and may well have been killed on sight and maybe even eaten. If you had taken a Second Epoch man and dropped him into imperial Rome, that would have been something to behold. If you had taken a Roman centurion living in what became London, and dropped him into today's London, imagine what that would have been like, even if he could speak English after a fashion. In ways it would have been somewhat familiar, but in others so alien as to be beyond his wildest imaginings.

Even the sub-Epochs had radical changes. If you would have taken a New Yorker from 1800 and dropped him into today's Manhattan (or even Manhattan in 1900), he would likely have been nearly as overwhelmed as that Roman centurion would have been.

I am coming to the point of these recent posts soon, probably with my next post.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The European invasion of North America was largely about marginal European peasants getting free and fertile lands, as long as they wrested them from the natives. Peasants from Scotland and Ireland became the Scots-Irish "settlers" that were called rednecks, hillbillies, etc. I have that heritage, as does Dennis, and Mr. Professor came from Scandinavian stock that began flooding the Great Plains and vicinity once the Indians had been eradicated. When I took that road trip two years ago and saw Dennis and others, I was very impressed with how rural the USA still is. It is sparsely populated compared to Eurasia.

My family name can be traced to Scotland in the 1730s, and in the 1800s, my ancestors took advantage of all the free land that was there for the taking, once the Indians were removed. My grandfather lived in a sod hut as a child, and was really little different from a peasant. Dennis grew up as a migrant farmworker, when white people still did that in the USA. Peasants from Latin America do that work today. Dennis was forced into leaving home at age 13, which was not very unusual in that culture. My father was born in the Great Depression, paid for every scrap of clothing that he wore from age six onward, and was paying rent to his father at age 16. At age 16, for the first time in his life, he traveled more than ten miles from where he was born, and saw his first black man, who was passing through town on a train. That was nearly as isolated as any peasant ever was.

Mr. Professor was a year older than my father, grew up on the family farm in North Dakota, and lived that American peasant lifestyle. I have visited his family farm a few times, the last on that road trip, to also visit his grave (and had another one of those extraordinary experiences), and I also took two trips to Kansas, to see my family's roots. There is plenty about that farmer background that made Mr. Professor and Dennis who they were. I have always been charmed by that Midwest farmer honesty, which their simple lives had plenty to do with. It was a different breed from what I experienced with hillbillies, who once tried to get me fired from my job, because I was not from their community.

Organized religion is a Third Epoch institution, and the Bible is a Third Epoch work, and its stories read like fairy tales. My grandfather was raised on religion, with his family being Quakers, but when I lived with him in the early 1980s, he had left all of that behind and admitted the ignorant and unenlightened times that he lived in. The nuclear marriage is also a Second Epoch institution, was largely an economic one, and the vast majority of Second Epoch marriages were arranged, which continued in the Third Epoch. The West left arranged marriages behind when the Industrial Revolution began, but women were still economically dependent on men, and marriage was an economic institution. My grandparents married like most did back then, but they had to get married in secret, in the basement of a church that became a bed and breakfast that I stayed at in my most recent visit to Kansas, because my grandmother was a schoolteacher, and schoolteachers were not supposed to be married in those days. That was less than a century ago, but such a situation would be met with bewilderment in today's USA.

My grandfather lived to see his son help put men on the Moon, and his grandson chase after FE, but my grandparents would not acknowledge my wife's existence until we got married, as we "lived in sin." I was not happy about that, but I also realized that that was more ideological distance than they could travel in a lifetime. I deeply loved my grandparents, but saw how they were stuck in their conditioning, for all they had seen and done in their lifetimes, to begin life in the Third Epoch and have a grandson trying to help make the Fifth happen.

Dennis lived as a migrant farmworker while growing up, and his mother drug him to Sunday fire-and-brimstone sermons when he was a child. Dennis never bought the biblical fairy tales when growing up, even asking the ministers if they really believed what they were saying, but when he had his mystical awakening, it was not long before he became a fanatical Christian. He has shaken the thrones of earthly power many times on his journey, but he will go to his grave as a fanatical Christian. Leaving behind that Third Epoch ideology that he grew up with is too far for him to go in a lifetime, even though his efforts were, IMO, harbingers of the Fifth, and he is the best of the best.

Mr. Professor came from the culture that created paleoconservatives, and he taught accounting and firmly believed in capitalism. But what happened in Ventura woke him up in ways that he never imagined. By the end of his life, he was a Howard Zinn fan and wanted me to teach people how the world really works, and my site is partly about fulfilling his desire for what I might be able to accomplish. My writings are largely written in the hope that what we learned will not go to waste.

Brian and Dennis grew up drinking the red, white, and blue Kool-Aid. It inspired Brian to become an astronaut, but in his last book, he wrote about his codependent relationship with Washington D.C. Dennis nearly killed himself when he realized what a lie his nationalistic indoctrination was, as did my CIA pal Ralph McGehee. Brian eventually woke up, too, but all three of them never really seemed to totally discard their American indoctrination, even after Brian fled the USA in fear of his life, and Dennis was similarly run out of his home nation, The Land of the Free, for trying to save the world.

Those are people whom I had nothing but the greatest love and/or respect for, and I saw how they struggled with their conditioning, even as they pushed the envelope of human civilization. Dennis, Brian, Mr. Professor, and others in my circle knew that FE technology existed, and had some idea of what its ramifications were – the end of the world as we know it – but I saw them all wrestle with their Third and Fourth Epoch conditioning, and they never quite shook it all. And I am going to convince people on the Internet, by mere writings, into thinking in Fifth Epoch terms? Not hardly. Only those with very rare qualities are really going to be those I seek.

The religion of the Fourth Epoch is the rationalist-materialist paradigm. It is arguably a more insidious ideology than the dogmas of organized religion. I know that their foundational tenets are false. I have had many experiences that show me how false they are, but the "smart" have lapped up that ideology as fervently as any peasants banging their Bibles. The greatest physicists knew that there was something very awry with the paradigm that mainstream science operates from all too often, but their words largely fell on deaf ears among their "peers." Organized skepticism is really little different from Dominican Inquisitors, protecting their racket.

The "Left" is trapped within the rationalist-materialist paradigm, and their structuralism is a symptom of their malaise. There is nothing wrong with rational thought, the scientific method, and so on, but they are far from the be-all, end-all, and their ideals have never been achieved in the real world, just as there has never been a free press, a true democracy, an objective history, etc. Conspiracism is kind of a Third Epoch phenomenon, engaged in by the scientifically illiterate and the paranoid. Again, conspiracies certainly exist, and my life's work was targeted by the biggest one on Earth, but to use it as the sole explanatory framework is as unbalanced in the opposite direction as the structuralists are.

The Fifth Epoch will go beyond all of that, and the ideals of Jesus, Gandhi, and other greats can be realized. But it will take an unprecedented act of integrity and sentience, by a relatively small group of people, to get humanity over the hump.

Can people from peasant societies actually leap past the Fourth Epoch and think in Fifth Epoch terms? Those will truly be needles in haystacks, probably more like a few grains of sand on a beach. I am not counting on them, but anybody who has Internet access and can read English is welcome to try.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

OK, back to posts, and then vaccination. To finish on this post, the economic arguments for intellectual commons are good ones, but it is up to each person to decide to contribute. If they want to keep their knowledge and information proprietary or patented, that is OK, too. A truly superior system will not need to coerce anybody to join it.

On this post, that is an interesting analogy to the English commons. If they outlaw giving one's work away, then Stallman's concern is valid. Back to what I stated before, that if people were making software and then giving it away to the world, that can only happen in an affluent society. If they weren't really giving it away, but expecting that others would also give it away and they had what is called "reciprocal altruism," which really is not altruism at all, then that is a different animal. Enclosing the commons was in very real terms a cutting off of the peasants' energy supply, as were the Game Laws. It had the effect of dispossessing peasants and forcing them into the mines and mills of the Industrial Revolution, if they wanted to eat. It actually took away their livelihood and forced them to rent their labor to eat. That was the evil of "primitive accumulation" that Marx was nearly the first economist to point out. Creating an intellectual commons is a different animal, as people already have their livelihoods taken care of (being in that affluent society) and they have not outlawed giving away one's work. I see the similarity between the commons that fed people and the intellectual commons as distant, even only superficially similar. What is interesting is that both happened at the cusp of a new epoch.

The bottom line is that in a world of scarcity, people are going to be reluctant to give away their work. I have never met a truly altruistic inventor. They were all trying to make an income from their invention, and on the FE front, they can really go crazy with greed, delusions of grandeur, etc. I advocate making and giving away FE because it is likely the only strategy that will work, as the avenues of patenting and keeping FE technology proprietary has never come close to working and likely never will. But there will not be any coercing of any inventor to give it away, or stealing it from them. Acts like those lack integrity, and any lack of integrity will doom the effort.

Microsoft rode its proprietary software and monopolistic practices into making Bill Gates the world's richest man. Do I think that is a good thing? No. Do I favor changing the laws to outlaw proprietary software and technology? No. What I envision is that when FE and abundance appear on the world scene, people will eventually realize that hoarding their personal "means of production," whether it is the fruit of the land or the fruit of their labor, physical or mental, will be seen as an obsolete concept when everybody is richer than Gates. The idea of making a profit, of hoarding wealth, of exploiting others, will go the way of slavery and other obsolete ideas and institutions. The rise of the corporation was intimately related to Europe's conquest of the world, and really took off with Industrial Revolution, phase two. It is a Fourth Epoch institution, and will become obsolete in the Fifth Epoch.

This is similar to how I say that cities will become obsolete when FE makes its appearance. Nobody is going to be coerced into not living in cities. People will quickly see that today's cities are like living in caves, compared to what an FE culture will make available. In the early phases, I can still see somebody like Bill Gates vociferously arguing for the paradigm that made him rich, but very soon, he will seem like a whiny three-year-old, and he will grow up. Nobody will even need to tell him, but he will figure it out on his own.

To Freeknowledge's idea of a ten-year copyright, that is fine, but all of this intellectual commons, economic advantages, and non-rival and anti-rival concepts will be seen as primitive gropings toward a world of abundance, when literally everything is free, and free ceases to have any meaning. In this world, there is no money, and nobody pays for anything. Heck, I make it very clear that when FE makes its appearance, money will quickly become obsolete, as will all ideas of economic exchange. They only have meaning in a world of scarcity.

That is why when Freeknowledge asked me to contact Richard Stallman and the Free Software Movement, I decided that it might be worth my time, but Stallman is a worshipper of that Fourth Epoch religion, the rationalist-materialist paradigm, and he is a staunch Level 3. Sigh. I found it highly ironic that somebody advocating what he does is openly hostile to the idea of FE, because he thinks it will take the wind out of his Free Software sails (talk about a scarcity mindset!), according to a leading Free Software figure who tried to interest Stallman in FE, several years after I did.

Freeknowledge may have cleared up any misconceptions that I had about the Free Software Movement with this post. If very few in the Free Software Movement are actually motivated by serving the common good, then I am largely wasting my time trying to attract their attention, as the self-serving are going to be deaf and blind to my goal and approach. If their hearts are not in the right place, first, the rest will not matter.

On this post, again, hobbyists can only be hobbyists with the affluence that an energy surplus affords. And this is getting real close to describing my strategy. I already chased FE, full-time, and fasted because it was cheaper than eating, we were so broke. The world system is so evil and rigged against any alternative energy of consequence that even putting the world's best heating system on people's homes for free was not enough to keep the "consumer protection" gangsters off of Dennis's back. The system has made it so that you can’t make a living chasing FE, so I am asking people to study for and sing in my choir as a hobby, not as something that they are going to try to make money off of. Spending ten years of my life, working for free, and barely surviving the experience, is far beyond the hobbyist level of the game, but those in the choir can do what I ask at a hobby level, if an intense hobby. It could be the critical missing piece for making FE happen.

The similarities between the Free Software Movement and what I am doing can seem tantalizingly close, but in other ways so far, but I will likely write Open Letter 2.0, directed toward some members of the Free Software Movement.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

On a brief chore break, and responding to Avalon posts break, and I think that I need to reiterate my position and how I got there. I won't belabor my preposterous journey and those of my fellow travelers, which would be far more preposterous if I was free to publish more names and dates, and this vignette will begin when I finished the version of my site as it largely stands today, in September 2002.

My site really began attracting attention after 9/11, when many Americans and Westerners were jolted out of their stupors. I also began fielding so many attacks, even personally threatening ones, that I decided that it was not worth it anymore to interact directly with the public, and I generally have not, ever since. But when I took on all comers for several years, I formed many cyber-relationships, and I still have important ones from those innocent days, and one pal was one of Bucky Fuller's pupils, he called me a comprehensivist, and I did not know what he meant. He had me read some of Fuller's work and the light bulb went on, and the paradigm that I had been groping toward for many years finally crystallized. Soon after reading Fuller, I first became aware of the Peak Oilers, as the USA was beating the drums to invade Iraq, and I have to give credit to Richard Heinberg's work for introducing me to that milieu.

I had been on my energy journey since 1974, when my first professional mentor's engine began making waves, and a decade later I got to chase my energy dreams and had my life shattered, as I was radicalized. Soon after I began the deep dive that eventually became my site today, I met Brian O, who was just getting his feet wet in the FE milieu, and he nearly died the next year at the hands of the USA's military, because he poked his nose into the UFO milieu. In 1996, Dennis and Brian were both on the FE warpath, with Dennis barnstorming the USA and Brian beginning his ride as the Paul Revere of FE. Five years later, after Dennis's effort had collapsed (with plenty of Godzilla's help and "help" from Dennis's "allies"), I chauffeured Brian around the Sacramento area, when we were nearly run out of town because we tried to interest California's governor in FE, as Enron and friends were in the midst of raping California. Brian and I traded notes that day, and I heard how his ride as the Paul Revere of FE went. I heard a litany of crazed reactions of denial and fear, coming from the world's leading "progressive" scientists and "visionaries," and Brian ended that part of our conversation with, "Is humanity a sentient species?" I sadly understood, as I had been active in the milieu for fifteen years, on and off, by then, but it was interesting to hear Brian's experiences, playing at the highest levels of Earth's scientific, academic, environmental, political, and "progressive" organizations. It was about then that I formalized in my head what I eventually called Level 3, of pipe-smoking and sherry-drinking "intellectuals," many with Nobel Prizes, who reacted to the idea of FE with denial and fear, as they trotted out the tenets of their Fourth Epoch religion to deny FE's possibility and even importance. It really was crazy.

When I encountered Heinberg's Peak Oil work and he actually mentioned FE, but in a kind of semi-ridiculing way, I thought that maybe I had an opening there, but was I ever wrong. For somebody who actually mentioned FE as a possible solution to running out of hydrocarbons, it was incredible how stuck and in denial he was. I was eager to introduce him to Brian, who asked me to co-found NEM with him a few months later, but Heinberg was worse than a dead end, and he has been beating the Peak Oil drums of doom and austerity ever since. As I always do, before I ever contacted Heinberg, I read his sources, including Catton's Overshoot, Deffeyes's Hubbert's Peak, and Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies, doing my homework, and I would be lying if I said that I not learn important things from those studies. I have been a student of collapsed civilizations ever since, and I have read a great deal of Peak Oiler work since then. That the world is quickly running out of conventional oil is unassailable. The only real controversy is quibbling over exactly when it will all run out, but it will certainly be in this century.

But in the wake of my Fullerian revelation and encountering Heinberg's strange, contradictory positions, I finally was able to articulate what my fellow travelers and I had been encountering for so many years: people were simply addicted to scarcity, and they regarded the idea of abundance with denial or fear, or both. They even became suicidal. They were as addicted to their scarcity-based religion as any fanatical religious, political, or economic fundamentalist was. It was awe-inspiring to witness how dogmatic and stuck they were, and their thinking that their denial and fear was somehow rational.

That aside, however, the Peak Oiler and related works were highly educational, and in some ways, they could be said to have helped inspire my big essay. My original energy essay, which is still largely in the same state as I originally wrote it in about 2001, shows what my thinking was before I encountered Fuller and began the studies that resulted in my big essay more than a decade later.

I learned the concept of EROI from those studies, and the concept of energy surplus and ecosystem and economic resilience. Resilience, in ecosystems or economies, is almost entirely an energy concept. Energy surplus is what allows ecosystems or economies to weather the vagaries of life on Earth. Take a poor nation such as Haiti, which had a 7.0 magnitude earthquake five years ago. Seattle had a 6.8 magnitude quake in 2001, and the only "damage" to my home was one paperback book falling off of a bookcase. Haiti was devastated by the quake, with its shanty towns collapsing, and it is still in the early stages of recovery, five years later. That difference in initial damage and recovery (Seattle recovered in minutes) between Seattle and Haiti was all about the energy surplus, and particularly the "recovery" that Haiti will not be finished with for years, and the scars will last for generations. I experienced quakes all the time in my Southern Californian upbringing, even had my bed jump around the room with me sleeping in it, but our house was never damaged.

I graduated from college during the worst recession in forty years and was soon thrust into the urban hell of Los Angeles. It was so hellish that walking by a dead body on the way to lunch elicited no comment from my colleagues. It was just a day in the life of living in hell, in the cultural capital of history's richest and most powerful nation. People think of LA and California as sunshine, beaches, babes, and movie stars, but I worked in the underbelly of it. I don’t need to visit India or the shanty towns of Latin America to understand what poverty does to people. I already got a bellyful of it before I was 25 years old, after my idyllic baby boomer childhood, and it was partly responsible for even intensifying my dreams to change humanity's energy paradigm.

As the Peak Oilers and scientists have noted, energy surplus is responsible for ecosystem and economic resilience, and peoples that have that surplus are better able to meet challenges and solve problems than ones without it. Those without it are living on the edge or survival, and a tiny blip in an ecosystem or society with a large energy surplus becomes a calamity that can see energy-poor ecosystems and societies collapse. When I hear fat and comfortable Westerners say that FE would really not mean that much to the world's people, not only are they scientifically illiterate (or their egocentrism has blinded them), but they are like those sherry-sippers that Brian O once worked with. With the vast energy surplus that FE would afford, humanity's problems would become far smaller than today and would be easily addressed. The sherry-sippers quite frankly don't care – they got theirs – and are no use for what I am attempting.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade

[Servant Limestone]

Hi again:

It's been a while since I haven't posted. Looks like the current stage of grounding myself is going to take some time as well as digesting the information of the first half of the essay, which I have to be honest, I am not really doing since I am too distracted by other things so far, or at least I am letting myself be distracted. But I just have to be patient like a true Jedi. Hahaha.

I am interested all of a sudden of that 2001 Nisqually earthquake with a magnitude of 6.8 which is not that far from the projected 7.2 magnitude "Big One" future Manila earthquake and only 0.2 magnitude stronger than the Haitian earthquake. Granted that Haiti is far poorer and more oppressed nation than the Philippines, I know that there's a big difference between 6.0 and 7.0 earthquake and even 0.4 is a significant difference. But given the destruction of the Haitian earthquake at 7.0 and the Washington earthquake at 6.8 with the future 7.0-7.2, I realize that it's not really me and my immediate family or clan that's going to be severely affected by such a future earthquake, it's going to be those people in the shanty towns and squatters that I am seeing everyday here. They are just nearby. They will be very devastated and local governments will be unprepared here, no matter what the propaganda, to deal with the disaster. And it's going to take a very significant amount of time before electricity and water services are going to be restored, so in a way we are going to be affected by that. Hospitals are going to be full of casualties and everything. That's the problem that I and my family are going to face and some minor injuries, depending on the situation if you are hit by a falling object or something or even none at all. But it's more of the aftermath that I am afraid of now as I make a rough comparison of your experience of an earthquake in a First World society versus of my semi-First World way of living in a Third World society. Me and my family are going to be very lucky in some way or another. But many others around us wouldn't be. That's the very sad part of it. Many places of the Greater Manila Area are going to resemble Kathmandu, which suffered from a far stronger earthquake, and Port au Prince and the damage are going to be divided on class lines. The Philippines is going to be lucky in terms of getting a chance to make a substantial recovery unlike small countries like Haiti and Nepal and despite the semi-ghettoized look of the place I live in, I know that we are going to be safe. But it's my other fellow countrymen... There's a mixture of relief and sadness over contemplating over that latest post in relation to my situation.

Thanks for reading,

SL

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

On to the posts again, and starting with this one. Freeknowledge, let me think about Open Letter 2.0. I understand wanting to speak their language some, but I really am after those in the Free Software Movement who want to serve the common good. You seem to be one of those, and it is why I have not quite given up on the movement yet. Those are the only people who are going to be any good for what I am attempting, and trying to fit into somebody's ideological framework has always been a mixed bag, primarily because they are all rooted in scarcity, and my message is one of abundance.

On this one and this one, I am not going to understand the Free Software Movement as well as you do, as I am not in it. Again, I was in the FE movement long before there was a Free Software Movement, designed information systems for a living, and spent more than a decade working for software companies, and if not for that voice leading me to Dennis, I very possibly would have gone to work for Microsoft in 1986, and I would not be working for a living anymore. But my soul would not have been fulfilled, and that has been one benefit of my journey, no matter how rough it was. No regrets, but I would not wish my journey on anybody.

You interested me in the Free Software movement more than a decade ago, and its similarities to the concepts of FE and what we tried were intriguing enough that I tried with the father of the movement, to help him understand FE, including both the challenges it faces as well as its potential. Stallman denied that we even faced the challenges that we did, as it sounded too much like a "conspiracy" to him, and he was stuck in the "Laws of Physics" trap, and I recently heard from a leading member of the Free Software Movement who tried to interest Stallman in FE at a public event, and Stallman was openly and publicly hostile to the idea of FE, and that person thought that Stallman's reaction was due to fear that FE would eclipse him and FS. It was one of countless examples that I have seen, as a "progressive" sees FE as the enemy, as bizarre as that can seem. If the father of the Free Software Movement reacted that way to the idea of FE, what chance do you really think I will have with the Free Software Movement as a whole?

If I do Open Letter 2.0, we'll see how I approach it, and thanks for your ideas. Really, my big essay is my statement, the kind I'll never do again in this lifetime, and all of this forum work is really ancillary to what I hope to do, which is build that choir, so that it can form a strong nucleus of people who understand FE and its ramifications, so they can keep their eyes on the ball and we can get something done. As you know, I give a pretty big nod to the importance of information and communication in that essay, and I would say that my site is kind of the ultimate in that regard. Nobody has ever attempted what I am doing, and it is uncharted territory. I have done what I can to make my work accessible to lay audiences, and I will reach out a little more to the Free Software Movement, but I am not going to spend that much time on it. Education is important, and I think that my work shows how I feel about that, and in that regard, the pals you want me to reach should see me as an ally, but the energy issue far and away eclipses all else. The rise of life on Earth was an energy event, not an education event, and some apes came along and learned to play the energy game in ways that no other animal ever had, and cultural learning in our line goes back to monkeys.

Education is indeed important, but what is in people's hearts is more important. I learned that the hard way. Seeking to uplift the world's poor through education is a noble motivation, but energy is going to uplift them far more. My recent posts on the Epochs and thought are germane to the issue of the world's poor and my work. While my work is freely available to anybody with Internet access and who can read English, I am not expecting that many people from poor nations are going to be able to get up to speed enough to be in the choir (those 5-7K), and they certainly won't be in position to really help make something happen (those 100K). They will be the most dramatic beneficiaries of FE, but they are not going to help my efforts much, I am afraid. People from industrial nations are going to be those who really help, for a few reasons, and one is because they already live in the Fourth Epoch and have made the mental strides, just by living in industrialized societies, which will make it easier for them to comprehend the Fifth. People from peasant societies (Third Epoch) are going to have a very difficult time understanding. People like you were privileged members of peasant societies, living on an island of relative affluence in a sea of poverty, and like many in India's high castes, you made your way to the USA. I am surrounded by them every day, living across the street from Microsoft like I do. They are all happy that they escaped, for all the challenges that living in the USA poses to them.

My intent to encourage your FS and rad left writings was to tell what you learned from them, especially how those lessons related to how you came to understand the FE issue. On that, your writings could be important, more important than mine, for reaching the Free Software Movement. I will try a little more with the Free Software Movement, but not that much. A lot of what Stallman and Moglen write is very lefty, and I tried with the rad left, too, ever since I first wrote to Uncle Noam back in 1992. I never found anybody home on the FE issue in the rad left, and I tried repeatedly with Noam and Uncle Ed. Heck, I still try with Uncle Ed, and so wanted to introduce him to Brian when he was alive, but alas, Ed was not interested. They are ancient saints with a lot on their plates, and I cannot blame them too much for staying focused on their lefty stuff, just like I really can't get too much on Stallman's case for running away from FE. It is just frustrating when the really big one, which makes the Free Software Movement's and the rad left's struggles entirely vanish, is treated as unimaginable or the enemy, as hard as that can be to believe at first. My experience has been that that is part of the problem. FE means the end of the world as we know it, and even the dimmest among us can begin to see that, and geniuses like Noam and Stallman cannot fail to get a glimmer of that potential, and quite frankly, it seems to scare them, just like it scares almost everybody, as they have dug into their niche of survival in a world of scarcity and won't budge. I have witnessed it literally thousands of times, from the dumbest to the smartest. The Fourth Epoch religion is seductive, particularly for the "intelligent," and Noam and Richard worship at its altar. As with all religions, it is managed by those with a vested interest in keeping control over the flock, and if it is done properly, the flock manages itself.

FE happening will be the biggest event in the human journey, by far, and the mere idea of it overloads the circuits of even people such as Noam and Stallman. Again, I know that I seek needles in haystacks. It can be as few as one-in-a-million people for my idea to work, and if we leave out peasant nations, it still would be only one-in-200,000 or so. That is still enough to work (I think that those I seek might be as many as one-in-a-thousand, but one-in-ten-thousand is likelier), and I plan to spend the rest of my life's "spare" time on this task. Others are charging at the ramparts, and I wish them the best, but I was already there, more than once, and I know what they are up against, and their own foibles and betrayals of their allies will do far more damage to their efforts than the organized suppression will. And the FE Young Warrior newbies always scoff and play games of denial, like those 18-year-old men getting ready for their first battle. Mine is going to be the lamb's path. Impatience is my Achilles heel, and the past 41 years of my journey, since I first glimpsed the future, have been teaching me patience. I fully get how desperate these times are, but I am not going to water down my message to reach the masses, etc. I already played that game several times, carrying Dennis's and Brian's spears, and it did not work, to put it mildly.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Anecdote time. I have several anecdotes to tell, of the culture clashes I have seen in the USA. From the very first cities in Sumer, social organization along kin lines no longer dominated, and professional affiliations were something new. Empires such as Rome and the USA became polyglot political entities, with many ethnic groups coming together. The "When in Rome" saying relates to the clash of cultures that can happen in such societies, and how to avoid them.

My family bought its first house in 1964, at the height of the building boom during the postwar boom, in a new city, Camarillo. The houses were kind of thrown up, and they did not design the streets very well, so they flooded when it rained. I remember our family driving by the home as it was being built. Our neighborhood was a mix of middle-class families, all with young children, as the Baby Boom had just ended. The entire community was new, and when we moved to Houston in 1966 and back to Ventura in 1967, we lived in new homes in new communities.

My youngest brother was not yet born, but I was six and my younger brother was five, when we moved into the first house that we owned. That brother got into trouble since he could walk, and within a day of moving in, he was fighting with the next-door neighbor's boy, who was my age. My brother was sent home from his first day of kindergarten, for being disruptive and combative, and that was only the beginning of his very "auspicious" academic career, which saw him get put into the army by my father at age 17, with the other choice being going to prison.

Anyway, the neighbor boy whom my brother fought with was from an Italian-American family that had just moved from New York City. After we had been moved in for a day or so, my father answered a knock on the door, and it was the father of the family next door. He introduced himself and told my father that their sons had been fighting. My father thanked the neighbor and was prepared to discipline my brother (he got spanked almost daily in those years; in my father's generation, beatings were common, and my father had his skull broken by his father, such were the brutalities of those days), but the new neighbor said that the issue was not yet settled. The neighbor informed my father that he was supposed to come out onto the front lawn and fight, because their sons fought. My father was stunned. While they may have done that in New York City or Italy, it was something never seen on the West Coast. My father was not sure what to say, but he declined the offer to fight. That family eventually adjusted to West Coast living.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet refugees came to the USA, and it became a flood after the Berlin Wall fell. Apparently, in the 1970-1980s, windshield wipers were hard to come by in the Soviet Union, and the Soviets just stole them from each other, so no cars had windshield wipers on them unless it rained, and then all cars would stop while everybody put theirs on. My father told me that Soviet immigrants were amazed at how easy it was to steal windshield wipers, and as theft was a way of life there, it caused problems when they came to the USA, thinking that anything not nailed down could be stolen. When Russian mobsters came with the immigrants, especially on the East Coast, they created quite a splash, as they were much more violent and ruthless than the relatively genteel and "soft" criminals that ran the East Coast's crime scene.

When I put my wife through graduate school in Ohio, after I staggered out of my home town, radicalized, it was quite a shock to me, to live in the stressless environment of central Ohio. I vividly recall the moment when it hit me, after living there a month, while I was walking to the nearly shopping center, that this was life in the Midwest, and I realized that in LA and even Ventura, I strapped on my mental armor just to go out the door, bracing myself for the crazy traffic and high-stress day that was ahead of me. I did not even realize I was doing it, and it took a month out of that environment to realize that I was doing it. To live without the daily stress of simply living was an incredible luxury to me, and when I took years off of my career, to do my study and writing, I also had a steep reduction in my stress-related coping mechanisms (drinking was one of them). When I began making pretty good money in high-tech, for the first time since my yuppie days in LA, I was not working on a tight budget, barely making the rent, digging out of debt, fasting because it was cheaper than eating, etc., and it was a fantastic relief to not be on the edge like that. I am very familiar with what daily stress can do to people, and I am a member of history's most privileged demographic group. The human horizons under an FE-based political-economy, in which everybody is richer than Bill Gates, can barely be glimpsed today, and most people cannot even imagine them.

This is prelude to telling some anecdotes about one of my wife's classmates in graduate school. In her class were two priests: one from Canada and one from India. The one from India I will call Frank. My wife was raised Catholic, her parents were extremely devout, and when they visited us in Ohio, we attended one of Frank's masses. Frank returned to India and founded a professional school in what he got his doctorate in. We were very friendly with Frank, and I took him to one of the Sunday meetings in the local mystical community. The woman who hosted the local gatherings had a lending library in her home, which I once helped her organize (about the same week that I met Brian), and he eagerly borrowed all the books he could, being a voracious reader, and he took advantage of what the West had to offer. I guess that you could call him a Catholic mystic.

He told stories of living on the family farm where he grew up. At night in bed, he could see the cobras that slithered through the ceiling, over his bed. One day, a tiger came and snatched one of their piglets, and his grandmother chased after the tiger with a stick, beating it, until it let go of the pig, which was unharmed. When I tell Americans those stories, it amazes them. Frank was a very good man, truly doing what he saw as God's work, as a relatively privileged Indian. But again, the cultures clashed. If a new book came out that he wanted to read, he would buy it at the bookstore, read it, and then return it for a refund. He saw nothing wrong with it, and I did not have the heart to tell him that it was unethical in the USA to do that. I am not sure if he ever figured it out.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Well, that was easy. I updated my desktop computer (my primary one) to Windows 10, and my laptop is in the midst of the process. Part of me is amazed at the progress made since 1984, when my CPA firm bought 3,000 of the first Macintoshes, and I lugged around the computer and the printer to clients. With my audit bag, I was carrying at least 50 pounds around like that, looking like a Sherpa porter.

I bought my desktop back in 2010, when I was making big high-tech bucks, and decided to buy the best machine that I could, so I did not have to update it every few years, which I did ever since I bought my first Windows 95 machine (they lasted, 2, 2, 3, 3, and 5 years, as I recall), after Apple laid an egg with its PowerPC and I was forced to join the evil empire at home. I already used PCs at work, and even bought and maintained our company's, playing with dip switched and jumpers to solve device conflicts, and the rest of that joy. Since that first Windows 95 machine, I always either built my own or had it custom made, and in 2010, I decided to buy all the components and assemble them and install the operating system, and Windows 7 was the first Windows that allowed somebody like me to do that, where I did not have to take it into a computer shop and let the techs fiddle with it. People like me have been one of Microsoft's customers/victims for more than 30 years, and it has definitely been a great way to build character and work on my patience issues. I never had any problems with that machine that I built myself (with all the most expensive components), and it is still nearly state of the art, five years later. With this O/S upgrade, I expect to use it for at least another five, which has been unheard of.

Not sure if I mentioned it Avalon, but Microsoft has been trying to change its bloodthirsty DNA, and when Windows 8 came out, lemon that it was (longtime customers like me were too wary for that, dreading the experience of a new operating system, which meant a new computer) and the only Vista or Windows 8 machines I ever worked on were when naïve relatives bought those machines and asked me to help them make it work), Microsoft quickly knew that it laid another egg, one of Balmer's last acts, and they set about to fix it, but the team that built Windows had that "screw the customer" attitude that Microsoft was legendary for, and when they kept up with that attitude, 13 of the 15 directors (that was my level when I was in high tech) that made Windows 8 and were working on the fix were fired, as one of the early acts of its new CEO.

So, people like me waited, to see what was coming, and there really was no avoiding Windows 10, so I made the plunge with the free upgrade (while I could), and am happy to report that it was easy as I had heard, and so far, everything works. Nice to report. It used to be nightmares that could take weeks, and reinstalling it after it scrambled everything, having hardware failures (and the tape backup did not restored, so I lost data, etc.). I sure appreciate how much easier it is today.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

More post responses, starting with this one. Thanks Freeknowledge, that is a thoughtful, provocative post, and I could spend a great deal of time dealing with it, but I'll try to be brief. To me, the speed of transmission of the Epochal breakthrough is not terribly important; what is really important is the event itself, and I think that I deal with the issue pretty well in the essay. I also deal quite a bit with cultural transmission mechanisms, from the cultural learning that monkeys do, to the human mastery of language to the "Internet" effect of cities, to literacy, and so on. Those are dealt with at length. Heck, I am taking advantage of the greatest communication medium in history to build my choir. I think that the advantages of communication are obvious to all who read my words.

I also think that I deal with manipulative ability very thoroughly in my essay, from the first jaws to the changes in the human-line hands that enhanced their manipulative ability, and their interaction with energy and intelligence, which led to the first stone tools, which in very short order, on the evolutionary scale, led to the rise of humanity, with the control of fire being the overwhelmingly seminal event. Each Epochal Event was dependent on some humans achieving a level of social organization and technical prowess to tap a new energy source. Once it was achieved, the spread of the practice was assured, wherever it could. Yes, Europe actively prevented the rest of the world from industrializing, because they wanted to enslave people and take their resources, and that dynamic lasts to this day, and along the way, it was understood that there is not enough hydrocarbon energy for all of humanity to industrialize. So those dynamics are certainly baked into the logic of what the USA did to Iran and Iraq, for instance.

What I don’t do is separate communication into one essay, manipulative ability into another, intelligence into another, and energy into another, but I show how they interact, which is the point of the essay. Only a comprehensive, interdisciplinary perspective is going to see the big picture, which is why I wrote the essay. I have given some nods to people who want to try to put some of it into smaller, bite-sized pieces, such as this presentation, or my executive summary at the essay's beginning. But I am not going to water it down much further, bust themes into separate essays, and the like when the big essay's purpose is to show their connections. I broke the essay into 30 chapters, have chapter summaries, and even some pictures ( ), and I have done what I could to make it easier to study, but it won't be easy for anybody, and the people I am looking for are not going to need to have what I have done dumbed down any more. You are invited to write the essays you suggest. It would be good homework for you.

The reason why the speed of the Epochal Events is not terribly important to me is that I think it is obvious that FE would spread like wildfire. It will be history's most transformative technology, and will not need to be advertised, sold, etc. Again, the day after the USA nuked Hiroshima, people began openly speculating about nuclear energy's potential. FE has already been developed into something that the public could immediately use, and safely. Again, the technology is not really the issue. It is all about integrity and sentience. The technology is going to be the easy part. If I got 5,000 people up to speed, making FE happen will be a joke, and Godzilla knows it.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Briefly, as is obvious, my work covers a lot of territory, and here is what I was reading just now. I have read it on and off for years. The Lyman Smith murders were huge news in Ventura, and a couple of years later, I lived a couple of blocks from the house where they were murdered. If you read Gary Wean's book, he goes into quite a bit of detail about the background of Smith just before he and his wife were murdered. Smith was a lawyer who had an airline that airlifted dairy cattle to the Shah's Iran (talk about a boondoggle!). When the Shah was overthrown in 1979, Smith quickly went out of business. According to Gary, his silent partners in the venture were some of Ventura County's judges, and they directed the planes to backhaul drugs, without Smith's knowledge, and Smith was going to be the fall guy if they ever got caught. As Smith was going bankrupt, he found out about what had happened. He cut a deal with the judges. If he was made a judge, which in corrupt Ventura County was like a license to print money, he would let bygones be bygones, and recover from the "opportunities" that being a judge in Ventura County afforded. A few days after he "cut the deal" with the judges, he and his wife were bludgeoned to death in their home.

One of the judges had his fingerprints on the doorknob, and he explained it away as just going to Smith's home to see how it was going. Gary made the case that that judge actually went to Smith's house to make sure the deed was done, and probably gloat over it, and Gary recounted a case when another lawyer who got in the way was threatened with Smith's fate to keep him silent. Lots of judges and lawyers who got in the way in Ventura came to untimely ends. Gary's primary suspect in the private plane "accidents" that kept happening to expendable people was arrested during the DeLorean Sting, and the Ventura County judges ensured that he never testified, as he knew too much.

Call me skeptical of the Night Stalker explanation of Smith's death.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I can't help myself, but want to write a little more about Gary's book. Gary met Dennis's wife around the time of the preliminary hearing, the one that changed my life, and Dennis's attorney at the time, the "maverick" attorney in Ventura County, who was not really maverick at all when it came to Dennis (he had been gotten to, it seemed), said that Gary's book was a "Who's Who of Ventura County." When Mr. Big Time Attorney took the case, just before I testified at the misconduct hearing, I gave him a copy of Gary's book, and he put it out in front of him on the table, in the courtroom, almost shoving it in the prosecution's face, with a big smile on his face. It was almost fun for a while.

The Lyman Smith murders were a little piece of Gary's puzzle. Heck, the JFK hit was just one piece, too. Before I ever met Gary, I already knew that the real versions of some events were what I eventually saw Gary write about. He named names, and I went to school with two of the names' sons, and one was a close friend, and in fact the only person from the first 20 years of my life whom I still have any contact with.

One thing that I learned was that gangsters in high places cultivate do-gooder images, as it is a great cover for their criminal activities. Gary surveilled Mickey Cohen as part of his job, and once caught him in a meeting with Jewish gangster judges, back in 1947. Cohen's errand boy judge, who was at that meeting, eventually betrayed Cohen and still sits on the federal bench, in the 9th circuit court today, at more than 90 years of age, and he is a noted "liberal" judge. That is the court that threatened to disbar Mr. Big Time Attorney for daring to file his lawsuit against the Ventura County officials.

The biggest real estate developer in Ventura County made it big in the drug trade, along with the judges there, and he actually built some developments in Seattle, and his reputation was being the most honest developer around. The pinch-hitter who was sicced on Dennis when the first hatchet lady quit her career, when her conscience finally got to her, when her nose was rubbed in her evil deeds, is a noted "philanthropist" and still works for the Attorney General's office in Washington, which is one reason why I turn down all public speaking invitations in my home state.

Damn, it is big stuff, but it is all swept under the carpet by the Establishment, as usual.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Reciprocal Altruism and the Free Software Movement

Free software/Wikipedia and other free(libre) Information and Knowledge resources in the age of the Internet have very weird and less understood aspects. The hardest to understand is the fact that Free Software, Wikipedia welcome free riders. So in that sense it is completely altruistic.

However there are 2 streams here people who put their work in the public domain (or something very close to it, lets not quibble), and people who give away their work under Stallman’s legalistic copyleft/sharealike terms. Those terms allow any form of personal and commercial use. The only reciprocity that they impose is that if the the work (and any changes to it) are republished they have to be under the copyleft/sharealike license. From a people standpoint there is no difference between the two. However because of the twist of copyleft it effectively serves as regulation on business who might otherwise prefer to not share.

Does this mean that copyleft/sharealike licensing is reciprocal altruism? I think not, because it does not expect anything back from people who merely use the knowledge. Yet copyleft was important in keeping the herd (of companies) together and not let the software splinter into pieces.

In the FE world people would seem to be more altruistic and loving, but does that mean they are altruistic? This is exactly the same question that can be asked about authors of anti-rival goods. That is an interesting philosophical question to ponder.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Briefly, to address my Windows 10 upgrade experience, I turned off Cortana, which is where most call out the privacy and data tracking issues, but I really do not need that kind of PDA help. But I remember hearing the rumors in the early 1990s that the NSA had an office at Microsoft, and the Snowden revelations were no surprise to me or those in my circles.

I have assumed that I have been under constant surveillance since I became Dennis's partner in early 1987, and I think it is a pretty safe assumption, but Godzilla usually just watches and listens. People who think that they can interact with me, anywhere and anytime, and think that their identities are hidden from Godzilla, are fools. That is one reason why no choir member is going to play the "I am anonymous" game. It is senseless, and also reflects a mentality (fear) that is at cross-purposes to my efforts.

Godzilla does not always just listen, as I discovered in that sunny day in early 1988, and when he strikes, you just have to try to survive, and I became a fly in his ointment when Mr. Professor and I sprung Dennis from jail. Godzilla has not forgotten about me. The White Hats watch, too, but again, they just watch, but we would hear from them, periodically, and in more ways than I can publicly disclose.

When Mallove was murdered, it capped a very strange week, and I did not blame Brian at all for moving to South America. Also, when that conference ended, I think that we may have been on the receiving end of Godzilla's psychotronic equipment that can scramble your emotional state. I felt it both times, and also in Ventura. My guess is that they turned it on us and hoped that nature would take its course, and Mallove came across as a guy who would be good in a bar fight, and he uttered some racial slur just before he was beaten to death. I think it quite possible that his little life-ending outburst was "helped" by Godzilla.

It is the same stuff that they used to implant cancer on Greer's team, and they messed with Greer in ways so that he was never the same. Those are very real risks of playing this game, but people in the choir are not going to have to worry about them. They are not going to mess with five thousand people scattered across the world who are "merely" singing.

The naïveté that denies that those activities exist is not healthy, but paranoia is also an unhealthy reaction. The only protection I know of is living in the light.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

On to more post replies, and I'll start with this one. OK, the Free Software Movement is behind us for now. I am highly sympathetic to anybody from lands that Europeans conquered and enslaved. Freeknowledge rarely heard about the reality of "settling" North America by Europeans while living in the USA, and he is far from alone. I was raised in a mission town, went to an elementary school named after the pious padre, who is up for sainthood today (like Mother Teresa), and the only mention I ever saw of the fate of the local natives while growing up was that the last native in the area lived in the riverbed near my home, and died around 1900. That was it, until I read David Stannard's American Holocaust in 1992, after getting a glimmer of the reality when reading of Columbus's heroic feat in Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

Being from the conquered lands, Freeknowledge certainly does not need to read up any more about the genocides and catastrophes that Europe inflicted on the world. For a Westerner with any integrity, it is required reading, IMO (but personal integrity is very rare in today's world). Yes, indeed, Polya's estimate on the carnage in India is indeed the only one I ever saw, too, and I have seen him attacked by Winston Churchill's defenders, etc. Estimates like that have to be beaten into oblivion by the imperial social managers.

Yes indeed, when one plays the "protest" and Left's game, it quickly becomes evident how impotent it all is, and it can do more harm than good (the means become the ends). In one sense, freeing up the "means of production" that Marx mentioned is really the only solution, and nothing would do it like FE, and there should be no coercion of the elites, but just the combined positive intention that Brian O advocated, and is the only path that I really ever advocated. The focus cannot be on the elite. They are not really the root of the problem: we are.

To this post, and then I will have to do chores. In brief, my criterion is very simple. If somebody performed any kind of effort, whether it was physical or mental work, with the intention that they be compensated for their labors, the moral obligation for anybody who benefits from those labors is to compensate the "authors," preferably in the way that they have asked to be compensated. This is also a very close cousin to the simple way to understand mysticism and karma, and Michael said it best, IMO: whenever anybody interferes with somebody's free will in a way that harms them, they have created a karmic ribbon that will have to be burned. Burning it in the same lifetime is ideal, but the "beauty" of our system is that the souls playing the "grow through the rigors of physical reality" game keep coming back until they have balanced those scales. Generally, in our earlier lifetimes, we incur the karma in our youthful egocentrism, and we pay it back in our later lives, and can even reach states that could be called enlightened.

If you read an author's work in the way that the author intended, that is the most ethical way to do it. There is also an octave above that, to also realize the circumstances around the author's production, and realize that the author may suffer from various constraints, and that going "above the call of duty" for an author is reaching a higher plane of awareness, and that is always a worthy goal. For instance, I own a few copies of Ralph McGehee's Deadly Deceits, and offered to buy his 1,000-volume intelligence library from him, when he finally "retired" from his CIABASE activities. All that he sold me were his first issues of LOOT (to complete my collection), and a couple of books, and he essentially gave the rest to a university, and I think that was a fine fate for his library. I helped out Ralph when I could, and it was an honor to, just like carrying Brian's spears was an honor. I bought 35 copies of Miracle in the Void and handed them out to friends. But I had a good job at the time, and when I am in those situations, I try to help.

But when I did the research and writing for my 2002 site, I think that most of my research material I got from the King County and University of Washington libraries (I did it by maxing out my credit cards and my wife's labors – people who do what I do often have long-suffering wives, and we can never make it up to them), and there was no other way to obtain such material, anyway. It was long before we had the resources that we have today. I spent a lot of time burrowing through the stacks of antiquarian bookstores, seeking books on my list (such as Carl Sauer's magnificent work). Today, you can order them in seconds at Amazon and similar sites. I had a standing order for years for Zwick's Weapons of Satire (which Uncle Noam mentioned, which was how I found out about it), and after a decade of looking, I was able to buy it on Amazon for about $200, and I see it is "only" $100 today. I traded email with Zwick when I was looking, and he wrote that he was planning to reprint the book (it was up to $300, if you could find a copy, back then), and I traded email with Zwick when he published his second Twain book, a couple of months before he died. Zwick was one of the good guys, and he is missed.

Getting a book from a library is not violating the author's intent, so is fine on "moral" grounds. Making copies of the book and not somehow contributing to the author is not "moral," no matter what legalistic arguments are made. Dennis and I learned the hard way about laws and their enforcement, and one of my favorite Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes was to remind people that everything that Hitler did was legal. Gandhi was a lawyer and decried legalism, which is the sign of a degenerate system. In the USA, the legal system is a huge racket, evil from top to bottom.

Walsch's "God" said it best, I think, in that in societies of highly evolved beings, there are only a few laws, they are simple, and everybody knows them, and I think that it goes without saying that they are not punitive and that punishment is not an aspect of their "enforcement," but it is enlightened far beyond what most people today can imagine. In a world of abundance, it becomes more comprehensible, which is one reason why I say that legalism and maneuvering, as a path to important change, is hacking at branches, not aiming for the root.

I try to trouble myself as little as possible with laws, and look to their spirit. In poor nations, paying $200 for a book is beyond almost anybody's means, and I favor ways to cheaply get information into their hands. Heck, I have given away all of my writings, which took seven years, full-time, to produce, without compensation, and most of my "spare" time for a quarter-century, but that was my choice. Other authors choose differently, and that is fine. The worthiest authors are not trying to make money from their writings, anyway, but it is a labor of love (or anguish, as they are desperately trying to right humanity's ship), and I put Chomsky, Zinn, Herman, McGehee, Peter Ward and others like them in that class, and none of them minds having their work used in almost any way that anybody wants to. Nevertheless, it is ethical to ask them first. For instance, I asked Ed if I could produce that picture and article in LOOT (that earliest picture I got from those issues that I bought from Ralph), and he enthusiastically allowed me to, just like Ward enthusiastically allowed me to produce a graphic from his book.

Back in my early days of writing, I published lengthy quotes of authors, but when I found my own scholarly voice, I stopped doing it. However, I will let this one of Zinn's stand, in his honor, and I will not edit down my quotes of Terrell and Sandos. They are testaments to my style in the 1990s, are damned fine quotes, and I am honoring those authors. I contacted Sandos more than once, to get his permission, but never heard back, so I suppose that he does not mind. Doing what I did is quite legal, under the Fair Use laws, but again, I do my best to honor the author's intention.

"Morality" is a charged term, and Michael stated that it is a form of terrorism by the dominant class against those who do not play ball. I prefer the idea of ethics. I contacted Heinberg as I published this essay, and he replied that I was not being unfair to his views, and he wished me the best. The man has integrity, to a degree (his exclamation points, in retrospect, should have told me what a dead-end he was going to be, but I had to try ), however far he is stuck in his scarcity-based mindset.

If people benefit from somebody's labors in a way that was not intended, I think that the recipients have an obligation to realize that they are, and try to make the best of their "gift," and should desire to somehow return the benefit to the laborer, if it was a geek coder or Uncle Noam, or at least try to pay it forward. To tell people that they have no right to compensation for their labors is what slaves are told.

As I have written plenty, I am keenly aware, every time I fill my tank with gasoline, every time that I buy produce, and so on, that I am a beneficiary of an inherently evil system, and I do what I can, each day, to change that system, and there is no place better than at the root, which always has been and always will be humanity's energy practices. We are all responsible for the world we live in, and that means that we can all do something about it. That is probably the primary message of my work. But if we are not operating from a loving heart, our efforts will be worthless, or worse than worthless. Not easy to do, in a world of scarcity and fear, but nothing worthwhile is going to be easy, which is why I know that I seek needles in haystacks.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade

[Melinda]

Posted by freeknowledge (here)
...In the FE world people would seem to be more altruistic and loving, but does that mean they are altruistic? This is exactly the same question that can be asked about authors of anti-rival goods. That is an interesting philosophical question to ponder.

Forgive me freeknowledge, if this post veers from your intended point. And forgive me Wade (or others) if you think it off-topic. But the altruism of FE is a powerful subject.

One dictionary definition of altruism :

“unselfishly concerned for or devoted to the welfare of others (opposed to egoistic)”

We could debate indefinitely about the extent to which some acts/motivations are more altruistic than others - and the deeper we go, the deeper it may involve getting into the microcosms of individuals (including personal traumas or associations with safety, goodness, joy etc – some of which we may not even be aware act as unconscious triggers to our behaviour.)

For me, the premise remains that if the world is made better for someone else, that can also make it better for me. If FE frees vast numbers of people to be less competitive, more open-minded etc, it means I get to live in and interact with a world of more kindness and benign creativity. It means I can enjoy greater abundance without the guilt (conscious or not) of others losing out for my benefit.

Equally, if I give a starving person the meal I just bought, their smile/relief (etc) can uplift me. If I stroke a lost cat to console it, its purring might soothe me. If I give an anonymous donation to a cause I deem good, I may get to 'enjoy' feeling selfless.

Many people who have children, or infant relatives, have a sense honed for what is good, pure, and worth preserving. They are reminded of an innate 'goodness', and an instinct to preserve it is called to action – whether it relates to the child's personal innocence, or the health of their outer world. Having a child is not inherently selfless, since it can bring a sense of meaning, love, or continuity after death, to someone's life. In that sense, even working for a better future for our own offspring can be argued selfish, since it may better preserve the memory of our goodness.

The late comedian George Carlin claimed that we don't need to save the planet, because it will likely survive regardless of what atrocities we inflict, outliving us all, and that in that sense environmentalism wasn't altruistically about saving the planet, it was about saving our own living environment in the absence of (for most of us) an alternative home. The same can be argued of saving other species, so we can enjoy the variety and ways they contribute to our health, aesthetic pleasure and (crucially) an interconnected ecosystem balance.

It's hard sometimes to encapsulate goodness in a neat guideline. For example, a biblical axiom often quoted in isolation (via numerous variations) says : “In everything, then, do to others as you would have them do to you” or “whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.” Although this gets into a grey area if someone enjoys, for example, self-harming, as they could argue that their neighbour could/should enjoy being abused. But on deeper inspection, people who abuse have often been abused themselves, and might rather convince themselves that their tendencies are acceptable, instead of dealing with the sense of loss and/or societal judgement that can fuel a wounded mentality.

Do we define goodness as what is most commonly accepted as good? Does that mean that junk food is better if it proves more popular than organic food? With that example it's easy to understand that its popularity is based on cheapness, availability, and (arguably) the inclusion of addictive ingredients. Delving a little deeper, a pop-culture phenomenon of arguably low-brow content may fill stadiums compared to the presentation of something with more 'refined' content that only attracts enough audience to fill a community centre. In those cultural terms, the evidence of what is 'good' may arguably be in how people's tastes change over generations as they are exposed to a broader range of ideas and experiences, along with the freedom to enjoy them. Some more 'refined' ideas benefit from a person being in less survivalist mode in order to appreciate their value, hence why their pursuit has long been the privilege of moneyed people, and why less wealthy people might associate them with elitism and may even resent their advocacy.

I came across a quote earlier, credited to the politician Winston Churchill : “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” The first thing I thought was, if the average voter lived in an abundant, environmentally friendly FE world, and had been educated to think creatively and believe their life had great value (rather than being primed for life as an obedient worker in a cut-throat economy) that 5 minute conversation might be very different. But in a world of scarcity, a quote like Churchill's can be used flippantly to justify elitism, so we can avoid looking deeper into the root causes of our most divisive differences.

Working towards a system that has balance, creating the most possible good for the most beneficiaries (including the planet, and all her living beings) is arguably the most good.

There's a line in the feature film Lawrence of Arabia, where the character Prince Faisal says to a journalist : “With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion. With me, it is merely good manners. You may judge which motive is the more reliable.”

When it comes to efforts that can be argued altruistic, I've often taken the approach that whether it's joyful or not / appreciated or not, it 'needs' to be done like cleaning the dishes - which just makes the kitchen a cleaner, easier, more beautiful place to be in tomorrow. Whether I approve of Faisal's character or not, the dispassionate approach he refers to is often necessary to survive the external and personal tests that come with altruistic endeavours. But the emotional upliftment that comes from truly feeling another's upliftment as closely as if it were our own, can lead to a harmony of emotional resonance which, blissfully, can open the door to heaven on earth.

People content to explore FE, or any other betterment, when it may not benefit them directly, may be going deeper than those determined to feel its benefits in their lifetime. Maybe they feel they'll reap the rewards in a future life, or when they rub shoulders with fellow altruists on the other side (after passing over.) Sometimes when I write here, it lifts me out of a malaise, because the satisfaction from speaking my truth, and the possibility of it resonating with others who are inclined to imagine a more beautiful world, is uplifting in the here and now. It can be both selfless and selfish. It sits between the polarities. In the mid point where contradictions meet. Perhaps, a place where alchemy can occur. Something we could arguably call magic.

[Krishna]

Thanks Melinda.
That was the kind of post I was hoping as a response for my philosophical questions.

After reading your response I can confidently say that the Free Software Movement is made of altruists (despite other contradictions in their lives).

Yes, it has rule of share-alike/copyleft (even that would go away in FE epoch). But the current rule of share-alike is no more complex than having grandmothers taking away FE toys from people using it for wrong purposes.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

On a break from chores. Windows 10 is buggier than the reviewers made it seem, but I think I can live with it. My O/S progression in the Wintel world was DOS 3, 5, 6 (my memory is a little fuzzy on all of the versions, but I used DOS machines from 1987 to 1992, and Apple Macintoshes from 1984 to 1986, and had a Mac at home from 1989 to 1995), Windows 3.1, 95, 98, millennium (horrible), 2000 (still the most enjoyable relative user experience of all of them), XP, 7, and now 10. I avoided Vista and 8 like the plague. I even had Microsoft pals tell me to not use Vista.

On this post, I find Stallman's arguments too lawyerly. He is basically arguing against private property and advocating the communist ideal. In a world of scarcity, good luck. Again, if he wants to give away his work, fine (he made money modifying the original, so he only believes in giving away some of this work; I find where he draws the line to be a little arbitrary). Again, my stance in this post will stand, and I won’t change it. As long as they are not advocating coercion or theft, I am fine, but to say that the thief would never have bought it in the first place is very lawyerly, and I have no use for that kind of logic. It is the related to the arguments that economists trot out, and I don’t have much respect for their profession.

On this post, it is very good work to realize that we are all UP, and that imperial peoples are blind, largely willfully, to the awesome price that they inflict on their subjects. That is so that they can live with themselves. Only psychopaths can become truly aware of the inflicted agonies and glory in it, and the various intellectuals sold their souls to provide ideological imperial service, and they generally believed it, similar to how most are willfully blind. Somebody such as Kipling bought the imperial BS hook, line, and sinker, and began to wake up when it cost his son his life (which Kipling eagerly encouraged his son to risk).

Even Hitler believed in his cause, and that the genocide that he planned was justified in light of his racist ideologies and class conflict ideology of people such as Marx. Hitler's Lebensraumpolitik was only the Promised Land and Manifest Destiny ideologies dressed up for the 20th century, along with racist ideology with a scientific veneer, such as eugenics, and the work of Henry Ford. Soon before he died, Ford watched footage of the aftermath in the death camps, saw what he helped manifest, and he had his greatest stroke.

It is really a pretty simple ethical issue, and Noam has stated it plenty: we are all most responsible for the predictable consequences of our actions. As an American, I am most responsible for the USA's behavior, not India's, Iraq's, or Russia's. I find today's situation with humans to be no different from what Jesus said, in that we look for the splinters in our neighbor's eye while ignoring the logs in our own.

On education, for the masses, it is indeed a proximal cause, but education may well be the key for what I am doing, but again, not many can handle the curriculum. My "peers" blow a fuse a few pages into my work. Their egos can't handle it. People have to relinquish their egocentric conceits in order to get past their in-group conditioning. Once people see all of humanity, indeed all life on Earth, as their in-group, they are approaching enlightenment, and that can only be done with love, in my experience. Fear is constricting and draws those borders of the in-group ever closer. Psychopaths draw that in-group line at where their skin ends, and as anthropologists have stated, if there has truly been any progress during the human journey, it has been people continually expanding their perceived in-group during the Epochs.

Before the first Epoch, it was exterminate your neighbors, if you could, and killing infants was normal. During the First Epoch, it was likely a similar practice, only relieved when wide-open spaces took off the energy pressure and spreading across Eurasia was an option. In the beginning of the Second Epoch, those wide-open spaces again beckoned, and again, humans killing humans was likely relatively rare in that brief golden age, but that golden age saw all the world's easy meat and all other human species driven to extinction, almost certainly by behaviorally modern humans. As humans bred, the easy meat went extinct, and energy became scarce, human-on-human violence reached its apogee, proportionally, with about a third of all men dying violently in the late phase of that Epoch.

The beginning of the Third Epoch, once again, began peacefully, and female status rose for the first time in the human line in ten million years. Communities of previously unimaginable size appeared, and people were not trying to kill each other, in those days of relative energy abundance. Those early Third Epoch societies usually grew to become civilizations, and women's status declined once again, but early civilization was peaceful and cities of previously unimaginable size thrived, and people were not trying to kill their neighbors (as the in-group became unimaginably large), until, once again, energy became scarce, and then it was warring city-states in Sumer, and the general pattern was repeated wherever civilization appeared. All early civilizations collapsed as they ran out of energy, and empires rose and fell in the Fertile Crescent for thousands of years, largely to the present day.

The Fourth Epoch began during Europe's conquest of Earth, and England kept enlarging its polity by conquering its neighbors, but Europeans were relatively civilized toward each other. The world's dark-skinned people were treated far differently, even genocidally, and that racist nature of Europe's warfare is seen to this day, as no white people are subjected to the USA's genocidal practices. The USA, like Rome, is a polyglot empire, and in the USA, racism, sexism, bigotry, and other in-group ideologies are under siege, and have largely been driven underground, if not quite extinguished.

All in-group ideologies are born of scarcity, specifically energy scarcity, and when there is plenty of energy surplus, times are good, and when it runs out, times get hard, people begin shrinking their in-groups once again, and we see it happening today, as the USA's middle class, for instance, shrinks.

Again, work like mine will not reach the masses and is not intended to, although it is available to anybody with Internet access and who can read English. Every Epochal Event was initiated by a relative or literal handful of people, and I don't see why it will be any different this time. Are there even 5,000 people on Earth who can sing at a level where they can form a choir? I think so, but we will find out. What is important to me today is not trying to make my message intelligible to more people, to water it down, to slice it in different ways, to sneak past people's ego mechanisms, and the like. It is to engage in a high-level discussion of the material in my big essay, but nobody on Earth has yet stepped up the plate. That conversation is going to attract the people that I seek, not "marketing" what I have already written. What I have already published is more than adequate for those I seek.

Yes indeed, the rise of the corporation is a Fourth Epoch phenomenon, and corporations will become obsolete in the Fifth, just like elites will.

On this post, good thinking on the Epochs. Again, tapping the new energy source was the Epochal Event, and all followed from that. Without the sedentary communities that a local and stable energy supply afforded, there would have never been civilization, no professions, no literacy, and the like. A local and stable energy source made it all possible, and about the only one of consequence was initially provided by agriculture. There was actually a brief preview of that phenomenon, when mammoth villages briefly flourished before the mammoths were driven to extinction. Then we began to see social stratification and elite grave goods. That could not have happened without a local and stable energy supply.

And what happened to the mammoth villages was also a preview of civilization, in that the societies collapsed when the energy ran out, and they reverted to simpler life and lost the skills that they learned when they were briefly sedentary. European "explorers" often happened on the remnants of lost civilizations, and the natives could not even recall the civilization that created the ruins. Within two centuries of the collapse of Mississippian culture, the Cherokee lost virtually all awareness of the culture of their ancestors, which built the mounds.

Without history's greatest energy-using society, by far, the Internet would not exist, and I would not be writing this. Only the USA could have invented the Internet, and it was because they rode history's greatest energy wave, which has crested and has been falling since the 1970s. Again, the energy event was first, and the social/economic/political changes came later.

When the group I envision can develop and demonstrate FE, ready for mass production (not some proof of concept prototype), without getting snuffed out by the organized suppression, the hard part will be over, but it won't be easy. The hard part is not technology or mass communication, but finding the people with enough personal integrity who have been awakened (those are closely related traits) and have enough mental horsepower to do the work. That dwarfs all else, and if I can get that choir going, those I seek will recognize the tune, and have been pining for it their entire lives. When that FE device, ready for mass production is given away to the world, there will not need to be any mass education or publicity, and those will be distant secondary issues. They will be a result of the event, not a cause. First, the 5,000-7,000, then the 100,000, and then the world. That is not the only way that it has to happen, but it is the only way that I am interested in pursuing, and I know it won't hurt. I have witnessed what has failed all too many times, and I barely survived the experiences.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade

[Melinda]

Posted by freeknowledge (here)
Thanks Melinda.
That was the kind of post I was hoping as a response for my philosophical questions.

After reading your response I can confidently say that the Free Software Movement is made of altruists (despite other contradictions in their lives).

Yes, it has rule of share-alike/copyleft (even that would go away in FE epoch). But the current rule of share-alike is no more complex than having grandmothers taking away FE toys from people using it for wrong purposes.

Hi freeknowledge,

My point with that post was really to question how purely altruistic any of us can claim to be.

If we live by an understanding that we are all aspects of a greater whole, consciousness experiencing itself as individuals, God's children (or any number of variations on the same theme) then service to others is ultimately service to self. We could risk disappearing into semantics over it, which is not my intention. Clearly, some behaviours are more selfish and destructive than others, and some are more considerate.

I agree that we can be driven by altruism in some ways, whilst being strained by our flaws in others. I don't know any individuals in the free software movement. Some of my experiences in humanitarian work revealed to me that some of the individuals working 'selflessly' for others had huge egos, similar to those you might witness in the entertainment or banking industries. But working for the good of the oppressed may have been a convenient outlet for them to closely engage those they claimed to dislike, and the pressures and virtues associated with the endeavour provided an excuse for disrespectful behaviour towards those even closer to them.

Working in the trenches of pioneering efforts, and/or working at the front-line of projects that take an active role in engaging some of the world's most destructive forces, is obviously not easy. And those who prefer not to be battle-tested can often reap the rewards of a quieter, less testing life with benefits enabled by people who did struggle to achieve them for others, and may grieve for some of the integrity they sacrificed along the way.

In that sense, in relation to this thread, I can see why Wade advocates the lamb's path. Because engaging the system on its own (corrupted) terms has intense pitfalls. But standing back to envision something new, and building the strength of subtle frequencies through spiritual sentience and comprehensive understanding, is a different approach.

As a last note (from me) on the copyright issue, there does seem to be a slippery area with some anti-copyright writers, in advocating freedom of information, along with freedom from legal and corporate tyranny, whilst suggesting that artists (who are hoped to be independent, purist or provocative voices within culture) get their funding from centralised government or corporate sponsors (both of which are often corrupt.) Funding through direct purchase may be more democratic in that sense. No-one gets increasingly taxed for art they don't like, and there's less need to pollute art and the audience mind with advertising. To dismiss all corporate-owned publishers (including the good they can do) is also to miss the legitimate reasons why many creators enlist their help with development/promotion in the first place, despite their flaws. As more creators attempt self-publishing, copyright has more value to them, rather than the larger companies they used to be confined to. But solutions that don't address the energy root of the problem (spiritually and physically) are bound to come up against those problems/contradictions in attempting to make the best of a rigged system.

That's my humble understanding of it.

On your last point, I can see the sense in laying down rules to a degree, as in software developers giving away goods on the condition that future improvements by others are also shared freely, to honour that principal and perpetuate growth. I'd agree that grannies guarding the FE goods is no more complex a principal. i.e. You can have this amazing gift, but only if you honour it in the spirit in which it's given, for the greater good of all. It will truly be something to see us get to a point where the benefit of living by that principal is self-evident. But we may need generations of rewiring, through experiencing abundance, before we get there as a planetary culture.

It's still uplifting to me, just imagining and remembering how it really is possible.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

On to more posts, starting with this one. Yes, the world is getting wired up, which is why communication will not be a big deal the day that FE comes out, or ETs land on the White House lawn. Yes, so-called "education" today is all Third and Fourth Epoch, and around 95% of the people in the West are scientifically illiterate, and those that are scientifically literate are also brainwashed, but in different, subtler ways.

In a world of scarcity, information is not used to educate and enlighten so much as it is used to control people. That is one of Noam's primary themes, which is primarily around political indoctrination, but it extends to economically, scientifically, and in all ways in which sentient people could upset the elite applecart. The danger is thinking that any group is somehow above the fray. That conceit is rife in mainstream science, bankers present themselves as some arcane priesthood with the secrets of the universe in hand, and so on. It is all a game, to gain a full belly and power over others. With FE and abundance, the motivation for those games simply disappears.

All of this intellectual property and "free" debate is meaningless in the Fifth Epoch, as is all of today's politics, a great deal of mainstream science and technology (on most important issues, science has been turned upside down, been classified, made proprietary, the good stuff sits in Godzilla's Golden Hoard, etc.), all ideas of economic exchange, most of today's social constructs, cities, politics, nations, races, and ethnic groups – it all becomes obsolete, and most of it very quickly. Cars will be seen as about as "advanced" as the oxcart. The point of the choir is for people to go there, at least in their heads, develop a comprehensive awareness, and understand how the world really works, not the indoctrinated version of it.

On this post, culture plays a role, but I'll agree that there are plenty of speculations about it. Culture is definitely conditioned by economic circumstances. The only reason why Japan was not conquered with the rest of humanity was that it was an insular island nation that knew the empire game and kept out the Europeans (China played a similar game, while it could), and then when the USA invaded Japan, it did not want to become like India and the Philippines, so it rapidly industrialized (and soon developed a "Manifest Destiny" ideology toward China, being as resource poor as Japan was, and invaded China, Manchuria in particular). Those Asian Tigers were all imperial outposts of Fourth Epoch nations, with Singapore and Hong Kong being British colonies, and South Korea and Taiwan are still quasi-colonies of the USA, in its neocolonial style, which benefitted from the USA's attempt to thwart communism. Nearby nations that did not play ball, such as Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, and the like either had their governments overthrown or were bombed into oblivion. Ralph helped keep Thailand in the capitalistic fold, to eventually wake up to the evil that he was part of. All nations of that region largely had their fates determined by the USA and the UK. Stuff like education and culture were ancillary, although they had their effects. Again, in the Fifth Epoch, that all becomes meaningless.

On this post, yes, the entire idea of patenting ideas, inventions, and the like is born of scarcity, and will become meaningless in the Fifth Epoch. But again, it is one thing to say that institutions should become obsolete, and another one to steal from people who did not intend to be stolen from. I get the idea of starving peasants and the elite in their enclaves, owning everything, including ideas, but the means will become the ends. Nobody needs to "steal" anything to make the Fifth Epoch happen, and my plan is to give away history's most lucrative and transformative technology, which will make all ideas of property, ideologies, "exclusionary agreements," and the like seem like the bickering of children in their terrible twosies. Again, to get too deeply into the ideology of "free" anything, property rights, and the like is to get mired in scarcity, and my work is about helping people think in terms of abundance.

To this post, all ethics, politics, social organization, ideologies, and the like have always been subservient to economics. That is what my Epochs are all about. Humans are simply playing the game that all life has, since the very beginning, which is energy-centric. After the energy issue, everything else is noise. Energy and consciousness are all that exists in our universe, and my big essay is largely about their interplay.

To "educate" people from poor nations into Fourth Epoch ideas is a mixed bag, with that clash of cultures idea that I recently mentioned. If they don't live in a Fourth Epoch political-economy, it is not easy to make their ideas work or even comprehend the Fifth Epoch. Again, I am not interested in educating the world's poor, as far as helping make FE happen. They are all welcome to read my work, but they aren't going to help much, if at all. Just like fat Americans watching their favorite TV show, with their inebriants in hand, are not going to help. Dennis chased after them, and I saw how that worked out. For what I am doing, they are going to be needles in haystacks, either people living in industrial nations or highly privileged people from poor ones, but I really have not landed one of those into the choir yet. I noticed that they drag too much of the baggage of their poor nations around with them.

If I had not been raised in history's richest nation as a member of history's most privileged demographic group, who came of age just as the USA began to run out of energy, I would very likely not have taken my journey. And this Internet that I write on would not exist but for the affluence of my nation (and maybe with some ET help). I accept that my position is in large measure an "accident" of my birth, but I was put here for a reason, and like my fellow travelers, I accept that I am here on special assignment, to help humanity turn the corner. Without that sense of purpose, I certainly would not have sacrificed my life like I did, or created the body of work that comprises my website.

To Melinda's wonderful post, amen. For somebody who is not scientifically trained, Melinda gets FE's potential like few others that I have encountered. Put an end to scarcity, and everything changes, and radically. On Melinda's Afghanistan story, Afghanistan is one of many nations in that part of the world that were modernizing, but the USA destroyed them in the name of energy and empire. Iran had a functioning republic, but the USA overthrew their government in the name of oil, putting a dictatorship on the throne, with torture chambers and the rest of the accoutrements that the USA is so well-known for. Iraq was the most secular and progressive Arab nation, where women had high standing, holding many important government positions. Any Arab in the world could get a free college education in Iraq. Look at it today, after we "liberated" them.

To this post, thanks heyokah. I rarely watch videos, and half-deaf Wade listening to somebody in accented English is not easy, but with the closed captions, I got the gist of it. Nice to hear talk like that. All complex systems, from complex life to ecosystems to civilizations can only be complex if they have the energy to power their complexity. If I could reach Harald Kautz Vella, I would. I have yet to see somebody like him really groove to my work, but one might, someday.

To this post, Melinda is always thoughtful. The bottom line is that in a world of scarcity, all "solutions" are going to be makeshift and have their downsides, as there is not enough to go around and everybody tries to get theirs. This is the insidious aspect of scarcity that almost everybody unthinkingly accepts like the air they breathe, which is why FE and abundance rocks their world so completely that their initial reactions are denial and fear, and most will then run away as fast as possible, as all they can see is the end of the world as they know it. With those kinds of universal reactions, even from the father of the Free Software Movement, Godzilla rarely needs to roll out of bed.

To SL's post, yes, the poor always suffer the most in natural disasters, as they have the fewest resources to cope with it, including the infrastructure of their daily lives. Make FE happen, and all of those issues literally vanish. Heck, there won't even be the chance for any more bolide events, as humanity domesticates the solar system.

To Freeknowledge's post, he had me put in a Stallman-like copyleft license on my site, and I did not mind. I suppose that you could call me a Free Software fellow traveler, in that I have given my work away, and the only restriction that I ask is that people don’t call my work theirs, try to sell it, etc. I don’t want something that was freely given away to become part of somebody's money-making scheme, and it will also damage what I am attempting. As I have written, I have been plagiarized and impersonated on the Internet, by professionals, of all things, and one reason why I put up chapter drafts of my big essay on this thread as I wrote them was so that somebody could not plagiarize me and say that I had plagiarized them. It was initially bizarre to be accused of plagiarism because somebody plagiarized me, even though it was an easily proven plagiarism. It is a jungle out there! So it is, in a world of scarcity.

To Freeknowledge's philosophical question of altruism and economics, which has been a continuing theme of his, giving away history's most lucrative technology will be the greatest act of altruism in the human journey, and will implode scarcity-based ideologies from the inside. They will simply become obsolete in a world of abundance. Nobody will need to argue against them, coerce people to give them up, and the like. People will happily put them aside, just like people stopped living in caves when something better came along. To people's self-interest, I happily admit that I want to live in a world like this, or this, and FE will make it happen. Indeed, nothing else can.

Melinda picked up the ball, here, and all I will say is that love is not something that the head has an easy time wrapping itself around, especially in a world of scarcity and fear. But love is the power of Creation, and a loving approach is the only hope we have of making FE happen. Intellectuals have a very hard time understanding, and virtually all of the leading Left voices have advocated violence and coercion at one time or another, going back to Marx, which shows that they do not yet understand, stuck in their Young Warrior delusions. The concepts are not too difficult, but those stuck in their heads will not understand the heart. I have seen the concept of other-serving described as service to self via service to others, and I suppose that is a good way to see it, but it really goes beyond those notions, IMO. The message of the Infinite Spirit is that we are all one, and other-servers, in a very real sense, see others as themselves, to a great degree.

I have witnessed incredible demonstrations of the power of love, and none more spectacular than when I sacrificed my life to save Dennis's, and the biggest miracle I ever witnessed soon happened, which we all clearly understood was a case of divine intervention. It cost Mr. Professor and I our lives, and I was not happy about what it ended up costing Mr. Professor, but that is how it works on our benighted planet, where the prophets and saints lose their lives at the hands of the elites and the mobs that they effortlessly manipulate (Dostoevsky's Parable of the Grand Inquisitor is an appropriate illustration). I don't believe in martyrdom, and plan to avoid the hero-martyr's fate, which befell too many of my fellow travelers, even for those who survived for a time.

To Freeknowledge's latest, if indeed the Free Software Movement has a higher altruism ratio than other groups, Open Letter 2.0 is on its way, and we will see if I can reach any more of them. I am going to resist writing too much in their language and conceptual framework, but see how many of them can understand mine. It should not be too much of a cognitive leap for them, like it would be for most others. Again, if Stallman was not home….

To Melinda's latest (and I am now caught up with the posts! ), another big amen. Yes indeed, doing "good work" can present challenges to people's egos, and in a world of scarcity, keeping a pure motivation is very difficult, but easier to do in nations with large energy surpluses (industrialized nations). Heck, Mother Teresa was a phony, as was Padre Serra (and both are up for sainthood), the Peace Corps and missionaries are "soft" tools of empire, etc.

Yes, indeed, trying to bring abundance through our system of scarcity is so hard that I consider it well-nigh impossible. Dennis made the most heroic attempts that I have seen or heard of, and if he could not make a dent, I don’t know who could. Yes, engaging the system like that is extremely perilous, and Dennis has the cleanest hands, by far, of anybody that I know who tried his route, and that is a big reason why people lie about him like they do, even his "allies."

I am now caught up on this thread. This may become quite a problem for me, as I resume my career, and I am not sure what I can do about it. I may have to focus on my choir activities to the detriment of my other public work. We will see how it goes.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade