My Conversation with Myself Continues…Was beginning of our civilization a step forward or backword?

It’s us who are capable of Paradise, but it’s our culture that’s stuck...

Image by Frank Reppold from Pixabay

Last week was part one of my conversation with myself, a strategy I learned decades ago from Joe Sugarman as a way of brainstorming.

I received a lot of feedback on the article, but what surprised me most was that many of the comments were from people asking me to “finish” the conversation with myself I’d written to jump-start my thinking on what eventually became my book Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture.

So, here’s part 2 of 3 (and if you want to read part 3, let me know). This picks it up with the last question I’d asked myself:

---

Ok, so the folks to the north of us have started planting wheat or sweet potatoes or whatever, and their population is growing. What happens next?

Weather. Weather goes in cycles, but often the cycles are longer than the memory of a single person. In the United States, for example, we’re now moving back into the weather cycle that, in the 1930s, produced the dustbowl in the Midwest, leading to ruinous crop losses (only this time it’s worse because of global warming). That’s a sixty or seventy year cycle. There are other weather cycles that climatologists have identified that run hundreds of years. The “little ice age” which killed off the people trying to colonize Greenland in the 1700s is an example. It froze the river Thames in England, something that hadn’t happened in the memory of the British Empire and hasn’t happened since. Nobody’s sure how long that cycle is. So, anyhow, weather happens and the people who are growing the crops hit a bad year. Too much or too little water, or a short season, or a hard winter: something that radically cuts the productivity of their cropland. They’re experiencing starvation, and getting desperate.

Can’t they just move somewhere else where there’s food to be found?

Sure, and that’s what they do. But the “somewhere else” they have their eye on is where we live.

Uh, oh.

Yep. So, first they had to decide that they’d break the law that all the other humans were living by, which is that “you shouldn’t do intensive agriculture...”

There was such a law? There’s evidence of such a thing?

Here are two quick examples. First, among most of the Aboriginal tribes of Australia it was explicitly built into their culture, their stories, what we’d call their religions, that it was bad luck to engage in agriculture. It would lead to the doom and destruction of the tribe, because fields of food just attracted hungry ghosts.

Second, consider this little quote from the fourth book of Genesis in the Bible: “And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering: But unto Cain and to his offering [of agricultural crops] he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell. And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door.... And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.”

What’s that all about?

Cain was the first farmer, in this Biblical story. He was the first human ever to engage in intensive agriculture. And the LORD didn’t like Cain’s offering — he told Cain that he’d sinned, presumably by farming. And Cain was so upset that the LORD had dissed him like that, that he killed his brother, Abel. I think it’s a warning against agriculture, and it’s pretty typical of the kinds of stories and religious mythologies you find among herding and hunting/gathering peoples all over the world.

So that’s what got us in this mess: agriculture.

Actually, no. It’s not agriculture per se. It was the decision to engage in agriculture intensively, and to centralize that as the basis of our food supply. That always leads to a population explosion, which then puts the tribe at risk of famine. And it also leads to a concentration of wealth, as those who control the food literally control the power of life and death over others.

Ok, so the farmers from the north are coming to get us. They’re gonna kill us off or enslave us, and convert our land into cropland. Is that about it?

Yeah.

So what do we do?

We have three choices: run, fight, or submit.

Which do we choose?

It all depends on our situation. If there’s someplace to run to, then we would probably do that. That’s what most tribal people do. It’s what the Indians in the jungles of Brazil do when the loggers come in to clear land for cattle for the hamburger chains of the United States. It’s what the Native Americans did when Europeans first started to overrun the East Coast and then the Midwest. And if we’re out of places to run, we can submit, which is what many of the Native American tribes did, hoping to get good treatment at the hands of the Europeans. Usually they were made into slaves, but at least they were still alive.

And if we choose to fight?

Well, keep in mind that in this example we have a culture that’s not based on warfare. Our life is pretty laid back, and we have no army. We don’t even have a police force or a jail. So we can try to fight back, but first we have to develop the weapons of war and a social structure to support that.

A step forward in human evolution?

A step backwards.

Backwards?! I thought we were constantly moving forward, or at least forward through a cycle?

That’s the point we started with — that that notion is wrong. The beginning of our civilization wasn’t a step forward in human evolution or in creating a way of life that works best for humans and all other life on the planet. It was a step backwards.

But we have cars and trains and planes and antibiotics!

And one in four of us will die of cancer, and we spend our lives frantically working to make the rich richer, living in terror that we’ll be downsized and lose our health insurance. And we’re producing killer germs faster than we’re producing germ killers, and right now at this moment fully a third of the world’s population is infected with tuberculosis and half the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day and often goes to sleep hungry.

I never see that on TV.

No, you never see that on TV. But it’s what’s real.

But I read this book the other day that said that we were all evolving spiritually, and if we’d just learn to pray correctly we could reach the next level, a much better way of life, happier lives. In fact, I’ve read that in dozens of books — most of them “New Age” books — that we’re spiritually evolving, and the agency of that evolution is, depending on the book or author, intervention by God, angels, space aliens, ancient masters, hidden wise people, or a particular type of spiritual exercise, meditation, or yoga. And if we could only move to the next step, the world would be a happier place.

The second half is right, but instead of using the world “evolving,” I’d use the word “recovering.” Like Darwin’s finches, we’re cycling from one beak to another. We made a terrible mistake a few thousand years ago, and now most of the human race and the rest of the natural world is paying the price for it. If we can figure out a way to undo that mistake, then life may become good again. We can return to the Garden of Eden.

The cycle.

Yes, we’re in the midst of a cycle. It’s one that has been repeated many times before.

You mean there were trains and cars and televisions before?

Probably not. But there were people who thought they could control and dominate nature before. The earliest known record is The Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written between five and seven thousand years ago. It tells the story of a man who created a mighty empire and a huge army based on a human population bloated by his huge irrigated fields of barley. His people were farmers before the story of Cain and Abel was written: their land was apparently where Adam and Eve sent their son to find a wife. And the Epic of Gilgamesh also tells of how the fields became exhausted from over-planting, and finally the soil was poisonous to the crops, too salty, because of over-irrigation. And his civilization collapsed.

Did they learn their lesson?

Apparently not: they just moved on and started again. But some of the later prophets warned against what they were doing. Jesus, for example, said, “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?”

A rhetorical question?

A warning. Read it in context and you’ll see and hear what I mean.

So we’re not spiritually evolving?

I’d say no, we are not. Others may be, those who never left the path that we strayed from. But we’re in the bottom of the cycle, the pit. We first need to climb back up, spiritually speaking, to the place where our Older Brothers, the Kogi and other indigenous people, are already standing.

And they’re spiritually evolving?

Most likely: it’s an ongoing process, albeit probably a slow one. But they’ve been working at it for the past seven thousand years, while we’ve been fighting wars with each other over agricultural land. We’ve been stuck, and all this “spiritual progress” that everybody is talking about is, in my opinion, really an effort to get us back on track or back up to where we were before Gilgamesh made his fatal decision.

So let me see if I understand what you’re saying. There’s the large cycle of life on the planet, and of the development of human life...

And that’s a cycle of millions of years: you probably won’t notice a change in that cycle in a single lifetime. Parts of that cycle included the dying off of Cro-Magnon man, and the killing off or assimilation of Neanderthals and Denisovans into modern humans. And the differentiation of the races of modern humans. We’re talking long-term stuff, here.

Ok, there’s that cycle, a biological cycle. And we don’t know where that’s going, maybe towards the assimilation of all races into one, or maybe into the emergence of new ones, or maybe it’s just where it is, but it’ll take thousands of years to know. And then within that cycle, there’s the cycle of cultures, which can and do change within a lifetime or two. And that’s really the cycle that we should be paying attention to, because that’s the one we’re moving through. Right?

Yes. This cycle bottomed out over the past three thousand years, and is probably moving back upwards, as it were, toward its beginning point, now.

It’s beginning point? What are the stages of this cultural cycle?

Well, to simplify it, we could say there are four stages to the large cycle, and within the large cycle there are smaller cycles, which we’ll get to them a few minutes. But the four big stages are: Paradise, Defiance, Terror, and Recovery — and then back to Paradise.

Can we go through them, one at a time? Starting with Paradise?

Sure. Paradise is the first, but also the last, because this is a cycle and not a line: we keep cycling through it. It’s why every culture has stories about paradise in its ancient past...except those few cultures which are experiencing paradise right now, who are at that point in the cycle today.

There are such people alive?

Sure. And they’re well documented. Although we’re doing our level best to exterminate them as fast as we can.

And when a culture is in the Paradise part of the cycle, how do they live?

That’s the most stable part of the cycle, which is why probably most of human history was lived in Paradise. To be in that part of the cycle, people must have a cyclical rather than linear sense of time. They’re connected into the cycles of nature, of birth and death, of the seasons. They know that what goes around comes around. They have a memory of a time when people lived the Defiance, the Terror, and the Recovery. They tell stories to themselves to warn themselves not to step out of Paradise into Defiance, because it’ll inevitably lead to Terror, which will then require Recovery to get back to Paradise. The most obvious feature of Paradise is stability. Population is stable, the social order is stable, the food supply is stable, and things don’t change much.

Sounds boring!

Exactly. And cultures which remember Paradise consider anything other than that to be unpleasant. It’s why the ancient Chinese, who remembered the time of Paradise, would say, “May you live in interesting times,” as a curse.

Yeah, I guess if I lived in Paradise, I wouldn’t want things to change much. Hey — is this why our notion of heaven is that it’s a place where nothing much changes, and people sit around playing harps all day?

The words “Paradise” and “heaven” are often interchangeable in some modern religions, so I’d guess that the modern notion of heaven is a distorted or distant memory of the Paradise part of the cultural cycle.

And that’s why everybody is always trying to get there! This makes sense!

Yes, although if you were in charge during a time of Terror, then you’d want the idea of Paradise to be thought of as something unattainable by normal humans. This isn’t because the folks in charge during the times of Terror were inherently nasty — it was the times as much as the people — but because during that part of the cycle the idea of a Paradise part of the cycle was simply unimaginable. It couldn’t be real in the physical world, they’d think, so it must be metaphysical. So if you were in charge during that time, you’d tell people that they’d have to die to get there, and the way to make sure you get there after you die is to do what the people in charge tell them to do right now. “Just pick that cotton, boy, and when you die you’ll be rewarded with Paradise.”

But isn’t that what our religions explicitly say? I mean, like, some Christians even believe that if a baby dies unbaptized, she won’t go to heaven!

That’s what the religions teach, because they were the ones who happened to be in charge during the time of the cycle called Terror. They were just telling their truth as they knew it: it made sense to them, because during the Terror the idea of Paradise is so distant and far away that it seems unattainable, just like in the dead of winter you don’t think, when looking at the snowdrifts, that Summer may happen the next morning. It’s inconceivable. So they were just telling their truth: Paradise is unattainable on this Earth, at least in our lifetimes. They couldn’t see the cycles beyond their own lives. But the founders of our modern religions could see the cycles beyond their own lives, and so that’s what they taught. For example, Jesus said, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! For, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” He was saying that it is possible, and that if enough people reformed the culture, it could even be possible in a single lifetime.

It’s us who are capable of Paradise, but it’s our culture that’s stuck?

Not stuck, so much, but just here and now in this part of the cycle. And every culture, no matter where they are in the cycle, has a faint memory or a fable or a story about the time of Paradise that they’d once known. If they’re fully into the Defiance, the story is about how they’re going to either improve on or recover Paradise, depending on whether they walked away from it intentionally or were driven away from it. If they’re fully into the Terror, then they tell themselves it’s in a long-distant future, or only available upon death, because it seems so far away that it looks like those are the only sensible possibilities. And when they move into the Recovery, then they begin to believe that Paradise is actually a possibility within their own lifetime, that they could re-achieve it now, then the stories begin to shift into the arena of what can be done now, in this generation, to bring about Paradise. But everybody, all cultures, have such stories, because all cultures sprang from the roots of humanity, which has been around long enough that we all have distant ancestors who experienced the time of Paradise and told or wrote stories about it. Those stories echo either as fables or as religious myths or simply as part of the collective unconscious.

You mentioned Winter and Summer before. Are the four seasons an apt metaphor for this?

Very apt. Summer is the time of Paradise. All is well and life is good. Then the weather turns nasty: Autumn has arrived, and the cold of Autumn defies the warmth of Summer, causing annual plants to die and the trees and perennials to lose their leaves. This is like the time of Defiance, and the analogy is particularly good because most times of Defiance are actually brought about by changes in the climate. It’s a time of turbulence, of change, of danger. Those with arks survive; others may perish. Then, after Autumn, come the short days and bitter cold nights of Winter, the time of Terror. If Winter is upon us and I have food stored and you have none, I can get you to do just about anything in exchange for some food so you can survive. Similarly, during the cultural cycle of Winter, Terror, those in charge who control the food supply exercise absolute control over everybody else. The Samurai had the right to cut off a person’s head and present his family with the bill. The kings and their local Lords exercised the “right of the first night,” sleeping with every new bride the night of her honeymoon before her husband could legally touch her. People were bought and sold with the land, and life was cheap — except, of course, the life of the ruling classes. And, like Winter, the season of Terror can seem very stable, like it’ll go on forever. But, of course, it’s just a season, and pretty soon, like the first shoots of Spring breaking up through the thawing ground, the cracks in the social order begin, heralding the transitional time of Recovery or Springtime. This is a time of willy-nilly growth, all sorts of unexpected things popping up all over, movements and religions and political parties...

Sounds like the time of Recovery is rather interesting, almost pleasant.

Sometimes. Sometimes it’s brought about by another sort of crisis, though. The breakdown or overthrow of the older and seemingly stable social order that reigned during the Terror. Disasters such as famine or plague. If it happens slowly it could be a time of relatively peaceful evolution into Paradise; more often, though, it’s a time of brutal upheaval, the riding of the four horsemen. Actually, the Bible has stories of all four of these cycles, pretty clearly defined. You’ll also find them laid out explicitly in the literature of Hinduism.

Ok, so now we’re back to the Paradise part of the cycle. People have figured out how to live in harmony with their environment and with each other. But what then brings about the Defiance again? Why would somebody change things if they were living in Paradise?

As far as I can tell, there are three possible triggers. The first and probably most common one is that there’s an ecological disaster, which is not of human making. A volcano blows up, a drought or extreme rainy period extends for a few years, the oceans rise and flood the homeland, there’s a huge series of earthquakes, or — as has happened about every ten thousand years during the hundred to two-hundred-thousand years of human history — there’s a major meteorological shift like the beginning or end of an ice age.

Any one of which would disrupt the community’s food supply?

Right. Or their water supply: food and water are the two things humans can’t live more than a few days without. So something external to the culture causes a drop in the food supply, and suddenly the people must come up with a new way to live. The gods have thrown them out of paradise, at least in their own minds, and if they don’t do something quickly they’ll starve.

And in the story in Genesis, the two things they tried were herding or domesticating animals for food, which is what Abel did, and intensive agriculture, which is what Cain did.

Yes. And those, basically, are the only two options. The three ways that people have always provided for their food are hunting/gathering, herding, and farming.

What about scavenging? I read an article somewhere about ‘man the scavenger’ that said that early humans were opportunists, like crows or buzzards.

Well, first off, we’re not designed to be carrion eaters. We don’t have the digestive system, the intense stomach acids like vultures and hyenas do to destroy putrifying bacteria, for it. But if people came across a fresh lion kill and there was something left over or they could scare away the lions, they’d be silly not to eat what they could. Really, though, this is just an aspect of hunting/gathering.

Got it. So when something happened that caused hunting and gathering to no longer be a viable option, in Genesis they tried herding and agriculture. And God didn’t like agriculture. He wasn’t happy with Cain’s offering.

So it would seem. And you find similar stories still extant among the Bedouin people of that region: they’ll herd goats, but they won’t plant fields. They’re nomads. The same is true of the Karamajong of northern Uganda, who herd cattle and live mostly from the blood and milk of their cows. And you’ll find distaste for settling down and planting among the Roma people, who are often referred to as Gypsies. All of these peoples chose the path of Abel, which the Bible says was the path God preferred. The rest of us, it seems, chose the path of Cain, which is to live off intensive agriculture.

And what’s wrong with that?

Intensive agriculture creates a situation kind of like that faced by so many Americans who are trying to live a lifestyle that makes them look richer than they are. They can’t pay for a quarter-million-dollar house, but the bank will loan the money for one. So they take the loan and live in the house, but a third of their paycheck every month has to go to the bank. They’ve stepped out onto the thin ledge of debt, and if they lose their job and can’t find a comparable one quickly, they lose their home. Similarly, with intensive agriculture people step out onto the thin ledge of an artificially inflated food supply. Irrigated and fertilized fields of mono-culture crops produce huge amounts of food, but are very fragile: a bumper crop of locusts or a few years or drought will wipe out the food supply just like the modern-day householder losing his job wipes out his money supply. In both cases, the result is disaster.

And herding is more resilient?

Yes, and so is hunting/gathering. Assuming low human population density, you can move from place to place when local conditions get bad.

But didn’t the Bedouins wipe out much of the lands of northern Africa about five hundred years ago, turning scrublands into desert by overgrazing?

Yes, they did. Some of that land is only now recovering, and governments have in many cases banned them from grazing. I didn’t say the pastoral life was optimal, just that it was less fragile than intensive agriculture, and produces more food than hunting/gathering. When something local happens that makes hunting/gathering no longer viable, it’s the least fragile of the two options left.

Ok, you said there were three different ways that people could leave or be thrown out of Paradise, or that would cause the Paradise part of the cycle of culture to end and the Defiance part of the cycle to begin. What are the other ways people would move from Paradise-time into Defiance-time?

The second trigger for moving away from Paradise is the actual act of defiance. A group of people, a small tribe, for example, decides that even though their culture and religion teach that intensive agriculture is dangerous, they’re going to try it anyway. They’re going to defy the gods. This is a subtext to The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest foundational stories of our culture. Gilgamesh went out and cut the head off the god who protected the forests, and then cut down the forests. He used the logs to build a great city — Uruk or Ur — and he turned the former forestland into irrigated cropland.

And the story ended in disaster when the cropland suffered from salination and siltation?

Right. One part of the Epic is another of those ancient warnings about agriculture, just like Genesis.

But Gilgamesh’s people didn’t turn away from agriculture, did they?

No, they concluded that somebody must have done something wrong, but weren’t willing to believe that their way of living was what it was. So they blamed the gods. For example, maybe it was the revenge of Enlil, the top god, for Gilgamesh’s having cut off the head of Hambuba, the forest god. In any case, they moved on to another nearby land, conquered the people there, and set up agricultural shop again.

And the cycle of land destruction and famine happened again?

As it does to this day, all over the world. Even with the promise of genetically modified foods and super-duper pesticides and fertilizers, an ever-increasing food supply will always just produce an ever-increasing population...until the food supply hits the limits of its growth. And intensive agriculture exhausts land, so when that limit is hit, there isn’t a sudden stability of food supply, but a sudden decline.

It’s coming here, now?

It’s already started. Over ninety countries in the world can no longer grow enough food to feed their own people.

But Western Europe and the United States and Canada aren’t among them, right?

So long as we can continue to convince the nations sitting on top of huge oil reserves to keep pumping it out and selling it to us cheaply, so our tractors and fertilizer factories can keep running.

Ok, I want to get back to that in a minute, but first let’s finish the three ways people walk away from or are thrown out of the time of Paradise. You mentioned climate change or natural disaster, and somebody coming up with the bright idea to ignore the historic injunctions against intensive agriculture. What’s the third?

Invasion.

Oh, yeah. You mentioned that earlier, but just in passing. You read the history of the world, though, from the time of Joshua conquering cities all over the Middle East, to the settling of the Americas by Europeans, and it seems that invasion is probably the most common trigger for the transition from Paradise to Defiance and then to Terror.

In our recent history, yes. Talk with the Abenaki Indians of Vermont and northern New York State, though. They can tell you stories of the last cycle, when the mountains of blue ice moved north and they settled the lands. Their memory is, literally, ten thousand years long. Joseph Bruchac, an Abenaki storyteller, wrote a beautiful novel about those early times titled Dawn Land. You’d probably enjoy reading it.

So invasion isn’t the most common way that the cycle starts over by throwing people from Paradise into Defiance and Terror?

In recent history it is, but in the history of the human race, I’d say the anthropological record shows that climate change is the most predictable and unstoppable.

Ok, so we have these four cycles, these four seasons. Do they happen to every culture?

Yes. Every culture has a memory of Paradise and a longing to return to it, and is somewhere in one of the three other stages of the cycle if they’re not in Paradise.

Does this happen worldwide?

If you mean, “Does the entire world make the same shift at the same time?” then I’d say the answer is a qualified “no.” There are still a few — a very few — cultures alive on the planet right now who are living in the Paradise part of the cycle. Others are in Defiance, Terror, or Recovery.

And what about our modern culture? The United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe, what we call the First World? Where are we in the cycle?

Overall, we’re in Recovery. It started in the 18th century, when the American and French Revolutions brought back from the Iroquois the basic ideas of how a culture governs itself during a time of Paradise. [I write about this at length in The Hidden History of American Democracy.]

The Iroquois were living in a time of Paradise?

It’s not that simple. The Iroquois, as we refer to them, weren’t one people, they were a confederation of a half-dozen tribes, formed around 1570, and referred to as the Iroquois League. It appears from the histories of the time that the Onondaga and the Cayuga were living closest to the Paradise part of the cycle, and the Mohawk and Oneida were fully into Defiance. It’s harder to know about the Seneca and the Tuscurora. All, however, were thrown into Defiance by the arrival of whites, which prompted the formation of the Iroquois League, what they called the Hodenosaunee. In any case, all lived within either a few lifetimes or in physical proximity to people who lived in a time of Paradise because the fundamentals of it were so well known to them. They hadn’t descended into the season of Terror when Paradise was thought to be distant and unattainable. Even when they fought against the whites, they did so in the hopes that they could recover or return to a time of Paradise.

And that was also the idea of the Founding Fathers? That they could overthrow the tyranny of the British and create a Paradise time here?

I think that was the idea of some of them. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was very enamored of the ways the Native Americans had organized their tribes, and borrowed heavily from the Iroquois in his writing of the Declaration of Independence. Others, though, like John Adams and George Washington, seemed more interested in maintaining a hierarchical form of government, an oligarchy of the educated and wealthy. Washington, as president, wanted to be addressed and treated as if he were a king; Adams argued that only white men who owned land should have full rights of citizenship and be allowed to vote or participate in the government. Nonetheless, Jefferson and those aligned with him, particularly Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, and James Madison, built many of the Paradise time notions of governance into the U.S. Constitution, and thereby set the stage for the beginning of the Recovery.

Does Recovery come about because people decide to make it happen?

It may seem that way, but my guess is that it’s not. I believe it’s brought about by the exact opposite of the conditions that lead to the Defiance.

I’m confused: I thought you said three things could lead to the beginning of Defiance.

Yes, three situations: climate change, invasion, or decision. But at the core of all three is one primary impact on people: scarcity. When resources become scarce, then people leave Paradise in search of another Valhalla, or in an attempt to recover Paradise. The scarcity can be brought about by change in climate or by invasion, or by some third thing that would cause a decision to be made — for example the emergence of a very powerful but essentially sociopathic leader — or exposure to what seems to be the opportunity for riches. The classic example of this are the hundreds of indigenous tribes who are living on land rich in tropical woods, gold, or other natural resources that we want. Instead of just killing them off, we’ve discovered that it’s just as effective to give them televisions. Within a year or so, they decide that they don’t really live in a paradise after all: the real paradise is what they see on TV. And they want it, so they’re willing to deal with the loggers or miners to exchange their land for cash and jobs. Or at least a few of them are willing to make this deal-with-the-devil choice, and so we designate them as the tribal leaders and sign contracts with them and then give them a bunch of money and put the tribal government in their hands. We’ve done it, literally, hundreds of times in the past century: it’s much more effective and much less messy than simply going in and killing them like Custer tried to do with the Lakota because he wanted to lay a gold-mining claim to their lands for his retirement. The point is that all these transitions from Paradise to Defiance are rooted in scarcity or the perception of scarcity.

And so the transition from Terror to Recovery is based in the opposite of scarcity?

Yes, it’s rooted in abundance. Or the appearance of abundance. And you can see both micro and macro cycles of this. At their peaks, both the Greek and Roman empires thought they had unlimited fuel supplies in the forests of Greece and Italy. They entered what are still referred to as golden ages, and had the luxury of a relatively leisure lifestyle and the development of philosophy and entertainment. But these golden ages were not true times of Paradise, because they weren’t sustainable, weren’t in balance. They were based on the rapid consumption of a finite resource, in this case, wood. When each empire wiped out their forests — as the Sumerians had under Gilgamesh a thousand or two years earlier — then they, too, entered periods of scarcity. Nobody had time to be a philosopher or playwright, and their empires moved into terrifying times of warfare and expansion, capturing nearby and distant lands to get fuel and slaves. Their art shifted to scenes of war, their literature to the stories of warriors and conquest, their technology to instruments of destruction.

A micro cycle of abundant resources causing Recovery, leading to Paradise, then running out of fuel and dissolving into Defiance, and then leading to a reign of Terror?

Yes, the same as we’ve seen in Europe over the past thousand years. Every time a new fuel source is discovered, a pseudo-Paradise time is entered into when art and culture blossom. Coal around a thousand years ago, oil and nuclear power over the past century. In the United States, we are only now beginning to exhaust the abundance of natural resources that were here when Europeans first arrived: we’ve consumed about half our oil, and are discovering that the damage to our environment from burning coal is so costly we need to make it more scarce, even though there’s still a lot of it in the ground.

So what, then, is it that brings a culture back into the time of the true Paradise? I read these books that say that there are angels or channeled beings who’ll do it for us, and others say that space aliens are “helping” us toward it, and the religious folks are expecting some cataclysmic event or the appearance on the scene of a messianic figure, and some say that it’ll be the triumph of science or free trade. And where we started: some people saying that we’re “evolving” as a species toward Paradise. It’s all incredibly confusing. Which is it?

[I’ll wrap up the conversation next week in the last post on this…]