Beyond The Axial Age

As will be discussed throughout this site, we can look at humanity before the Axial Age (about 2500 years ago), and after the Axial Age (time to the present). It’s now time for humanity to move into a new mode of thinking.

This new mode of thinking is absolutely not a turning back. Too many groups call for a return to something. A return to an enchanted pre-scientific worldview, a return to the 1950s, or whatever other golden age. That’s both impossible and unhelpful, as we left the past in the past for good reason.

It’s time to move into a society where we recognize that the random forces that gave us the Axial Age philosophies, the concept of human rights, sin, guilt, responsibility, and accomplishment, were wrong. There is no guilt or accomplishment because there is no free will. Everything in our modern era was built on this concept of inalienable rights, which was a massive mistake, as it ignores the biological reality of what we now know. This legal fiction of rights has long ceased to be beneficial to the individual or society.

A future world will be one that has extreme concern for the individual, while also abandoning the concept of rights, as well as abandoning the concept of forms. This will require far more cooperation and understanding than what we’re used to now.

It will have to be a world of understand for the individual. Some people should have more rights than others, and nothing should be assumed or given at birth.

The biggest change will be to stop thinking of good vs evil, hero vs villain, lazy vs hardworking. These are all concepts coming from humanity before it understood the biological reality of our situation. In a future world, we will still value highly motivated people, who should continue to be compensated greatly, but we’ll remove moral judgment on anyone else. People who are motivated to push humanity towards a better version of itself should have more freedom, and those who struggle not to harm themselves or others should be more limited.

This project will face massive opposition from all sides. Conservatives will strongly push back at the idea that accomplishment wasn’t by someone’s own free will and hard work (remember the Obama “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” trope). From people on the left, they will claim racism, eugenics, and inequality are right around the corner.

How this new system is created I don’t know, but it has to be created. We simply can’t continue on our present path without a more fundamental change to how we view ourselves.