The Fourth Age: Fifth Edition (PB) (2012)

Peace is advanced as a condition to be desired, yet human social orders around the world are structured in a way that peace is nearly impossible to achieve within them. The Fourth Age proposes that we can move beyond the short-term, localized periods of peace seen in the Civilized Age and advance toward a period of universal and perpetual peace. This book establishes a philosophy of life and a system of morality that have the potential to eliminate conflict at its source, but only in those associations of men that commit to the philosophy and that embrace the moral code. The book promotes principles of social interaction that flow from our humanness that will allow us to move away from faulty social paradigms of civilized cultures and advance toward an Age of Humanity. It draws upon archaeological and historical data to show how world conflict came to permeate the civilized era, and it shows how conflict can be made to subside. The crowning achievement of this book is its philosophy of humanity that is derived from qualities that define us as human and that transcend the political, religious, and economic dogmas of civilized cultures. The book establishes confidently the moral and ethical basis for conflict and war without relying on any of the prevailing belief systems. In doing so, it refutes the popular notion that love is the answer to human conflict; it suggests that something as simple as cultural tolerance and non-interference in the affairs of others might suffice. The Fourth Age demonstrates that political, religious, and economic subjugation are the principle sources of conflict in the civilized age, and it establishes guidelines that men need to agree upon in order to eradicate conflict. The substance of such an agreement must be that all men have a natural inheritance consisting of a ration of political sovereignty, a share of the fruits of the earth, and a spiritual portion of the divinity of god, which gives them the right to govern, the right to subsist, and the obligation to maintain the balance of goodness and rightness in society.