Golden Age

The Golden Age is presented as a lost, pre-agricultural human condition and as a counter-image to civilization’s systems of labor and hierarchy. Recounted through Fergusson’s account, it gives the dialogue a past in which human life could supposedly meet its needs without cultivation, exploitation, or extensive work.

The Pre-Neolithic Ideal

The speaker places this age about fifteen thousand years ago, before Homo sapiens began tilling the soil. People lived in hunter-gatherer cultures and satisfied their needs with what wild nature provided. As the account describes it, they were healthier and stronger, lived longer, and experienced almost no violence or exploitation. Women and men were equal, power hierarchies were largely absent, and people worked very little.

This is not offered merely as a chronological label. The speaker calls the condition a real paradise, Golden Age, and Eden, presenting the remembered past as a life of relative equality and material sufficiency. The claim is attributed to Fergusson’s discovery, so the passage frames it as a historical thesis within the conversation rather than an independently established account of prehistory.

Agriculture and Exile

The decisive break comes with the discovery of soil cultivation. In the speaker’s telling, civilization begins at the same moment that humanity falls into capitalism and the slavery of work, along with the cultural superstructure built around them. The Golden Age therefore serves as the opposite pole to settled, work-centered life: what civilization gains in organization, it is said to lose in freedom from labor and hierarchy.

The speaker also presents the Golden Age as a shared cultural memory. Exile from it is remembered in human mythologies across cultures and continents. That recurring memory gives the proposed past a double status: it is described as a way of life that once existed and as an origin story through which humanity continues to imagine its loss.

Role in the Argument

The Golden Age challenges the idea that capitalism is simply an unavoidable expression of human nature. The dialogue instead suggests that capitalism becomes compelling because it offers an obvious way to manage limited resources, while Fergusson’s account supplies an alternative precedent: a society said to have met its needs without agriculture, extensive labor, or entrenched power structures.

Set beside the dialogue’s description of Transformers fitting themselves into quasi-families, quasi-houses, and simulated professions, the Golden Age also sharpens a critique of inherited social forms. The past is invoked not as a practical blueprint for mechanical life, but as evidence that work and its surrounding institutions need not be treated as the only imaginable basis for existence.