The Fourth Age (TFA)
FIFTH EDITION SAMPLE
The PDF link here opens a sample of my latest writing project as revised in June of 2012. The book is available on amazon.com and is available for several popular eReader devices, including the Kindle and the Nook.
The goal of TFA is ambitious: it seeks to influence the course of human cultural evolution. Over the past ten thousand years, humanity has progressed from savage to barbaric to civilized, but in the setting we call civilized we find the world close to self-annihilation. TFA proposes that we must move toward creating a more humanized society, the fourth age of cultural evolution. If we are to achieve such a movement, people will have to re-examine much of what they have been taught in schools and churches.
TFA addresses a philosophy of life unlike any being proposed in modern social, political, or religious circles. It is in fact so significantly different from ethical and spiritual systems in vogue today, that nearly everyone who reads it will find something with which to disagree. Some might even be offended. To those, I apologize. It is not the intent to offend. It is the intent instead to bring people into an era of tolerance and to bring an end to human conflict. Indeed, TFA contains a rational, internally consistent, and humane philosophy of social interaction that has the capacity to bring the world into an age of enduring peace.
The essential ideas that must be understood in order to create movement toward a more humane society are all contained in the book. But how can we bring such a strangely different society into existence? I believe that it can be done, and I believe that it can be done without revolution. It can be done without bringing to bear the conflict and strife the book so strongly opposes.
Quotes from the Book
Caution
...evaluate all versions of history with a critical eye and seek to understand the underlying agenda of the author. (9)
...after social patterns rooted in dominance and subjugation became commonplace, it became possible to portray warfare as a respectable, indeed heroic, method of social interaction. (22)
...human logic, even in brilliant minds, can be led astray with astounding ease. (96)
Individual facts, however well proven, must somehow be made to fit the paradigm, else they are set aside, and perhaps ignored, as oddities. (97)
Man
By 6,000 years ago, man had spread into South America to the southern tip of the continent. Man could claim the world as his home. (19)
The Harappa culture in India appears to have been a classless society and a society free of warfare. (29)
Morality
In anthropology, the word “civilization” refers only to a degree of complexity of culture. Civilized cultures might or might not be more “moral” than savage or barbarian cultures. (22)
Logically, an immoral act remains immoral whether it is committed by a person, by a group, by a nation, or by the people of the planet in concert. (30)
Intellectually, modern man has built upon the accumulated knowledge passed to him by his predecessors; morally, he remains self-centered and depraved. (107)
Power Brokers
...the kind of people who have brought us to this point in human history, the one percent of the civilized world who profit from the present state of affairs, will do what they can to keep the world on its present course. (9)
By controlling a nation’s land, conquerors control the means of subsistence giving them latitude to control the level of subservience of the conquered population, even to the extent of enslavement if they deny subsistence to invoke involuntary servitude. (49)
...they demonstrated openly their disregard for human life, and they forced victims to accept subjugation on threat of death. (84)
The capacity for warfare is a vital element in enforcing exploitation by subjugation. (101)
...it strains human nature, given the opportunity to dominate another, not do so. (106)
Civilized societies would deny a man his daily bread as a means to subjugate him. (111)
Religion
The shared divinity found in Egyptian spirituality is an idea that would have entered into the dogma of Christianity had it not been for the Emperor Constantine. (36)
Christians were persecuted early in the growth of the faith, but they overcame this persecution and went on themselves to set new standards for religious intolerance. (54)
Islam built empires and amassed followers quickly by embracing forceful extension of its philosophy. (58)
The reward for the penitent victim of Torquemada was a merciful end to their suffering by a quick death, following which, presumably, their freshly redeemed souls were received forthwith into heaven. (65, 66)
...the paradigm of spiritual supremacy is held by proponents of every religion, and true believers are unmoved when factual evidence flies in the face of their beliefs. (99)
...it is Christian, Judaic, and Islamic dogma, more than patriotism, that brings men to submit meekly and to offer their lives and their property to sustain parasitic political regimes and religious orders.... (105)
...there are no God-Kings. (105)
Race
The Egyptians depicted the Libyans as fair-skinned Caucasian. The Asians were of a beige hue. The Egyptians themselves were shown in a dark-brown pigment, and the Nubians were shown as black. (42)
Darwinism, by inferring a natural process in the disappearance of the so-called lower races, made the prospect of their extinction, their elimination as a source of contamination to the white race, seem to be a necessity of evolution rather than a barbarity of white racism. (72)
...it became unthinkable to many that blacks in America, Africa, or elsewhere were capable—in any historical period—of intellectual or cultural expression beyond the simplest and most childlike achievements. (78)
...the random enslavement of blacks, the leasing and selling of black convicts in the United States, continued into the 1950’s.... (79)
The United States built wealth in the 17th Century using the forced labor of a slave economy.... (92)
There is no master race. (104)
Politics
All systems of government in civilized societies, past and present, are founded upon some form of subjugation.... (84)
...kings will be called upon to dismiss the royal guard. (101)
There is no master politic. (106)
Humanity
Subjugation and exploitation on any scale is objectionable if it comes about by way of violence or by fraud. (85)
The social interactions most contrary to human principles are those that allow people to exploit others in order to amass inordinate wealth.... (86)
...a man embraces humanized principles when he advocates social interactions founded upon collaboration and cooperation.... (88)
The scope of the cultural changes that must be wrought to achieve universal peace—such as absolute and eternal disarmament, the disbanding of all offensive forces, and the dissolution of all means of defense—are so extreme and would so drastically disrupt the social order that such changes will seem unthinkable. (100)
Civilized societies are weaker than primitive societies in the quality that defines humanness because civilized societies depend for their operation upon subjugated masses.... (102, 103)
If one member of the human race is sovereign or divine, all are equally sovereign and divine and all are equally entitled to a voice in their collective destinies. (105)
People who are committed to maintaining moral balance in society have no additional political, religious, or social obligations except such as they might impose upon themselves. (112)
Non-interference in the legitimate affairs of others is vital to peaceful coexistence. (112)
Civil laws must and will acknowledge the political right of every human being to have a voice in his destiny. (113)
Theological laws will acknowledge the divinity of the human spirit and the spiritual equality of men.... (113)
International laws will repeal private ownership of planetary resources.... (113)
You embrace the evil within you; we embrace the divine. (116)
Nubia
Fossil evidence places the origin of modern man in Ethiopia. (18)
The Greek author Homer in 750 BC paid tribute to the Nubians of his day when he stated in The Iliad that Zeus and all of the gods of Greece traveled to Africa to “feast with Ethiop’s faultless men.” (46)
Shabaka overpowered the North and brought all of Egypt under Kushite control. (46)
...major universities had done little archaeological research along the Nile River south of the First Cataract before interest in the region peaked early in the 20th Century. (79)
If the evidence of these mammoth sculptures is to be believed, there was an advanced African presence in the Americas at about the time that Moses and the Hebrews departed from Egypt and were crossing the deserts in search of a Jewish homeland. (80, 81)
Europe
Neandertalensis in Europe, however, was a subspecies doomed to extinction; it does not represent a stage through which other forms of Homo sapiens have passed. (19)
The Fertile Crescent is a device that imports antiquity to the Tigris-Euphrates Valley by attaching it to the ancient city of Jericho. (27)
The nations of Europe, under the spiritual and cultural leadership of the Holy Roman Church, stumbled into intellectual arrest and stagnation.... (57)
Intellectual Inquiry
The ability to speak is of such significance to human evolution that it can be rightly called a revolution in intellectual inquiry. By communicating ideas, man transfers knowledge from person to person with the outcome that every link in the cultural chain is potentially as strong intellectually as the strongest link. (17)
Writing brought about a second revolution in human intellectual inquiry because it allowed knowledge to be accumulated and advanced beyond the capacity of individual memory. New generations of students, having access to all existing knowledge, elaborate upon and extend it. (37)
The establishment of the library at Alexandria brought on the third revolution in intellectual inquiry because it concentrated knowledge within a central repository making the accumulated knowledge of man available to anyone who could travel to this coastal city in the north of Africa, as many Greek scholars did. (52)
The invention of the printing press during the second half of the 15th Century made translated copies of Arabic and Greek manuscripts available on a scale that would bring the fourth revolution in intellectual inquiry. The mass production of books allowed the accumulated knowledge of man to be spread around the globe giving access to this knowledge not only to members of the wealthier classes but eventually to the common man. (62)
The world is witnessing the fifth revolution in intellectual inquiry in the age of the Internet, which has the capacity to put every human being into communication with every other and which offers the wisdom of the ages to anyone curious enough to inquire into it. (115)
