Looking Forward by Kenneth Jr. (snow like ashes .txt) 📗

reflects his surroundings. If man were to come into the world with a fixed “nature” consisting of automatic responses, civilization would be impossible. Like the ants, we would live out our lives in patterns that are modified but little with the passing of time. The wonderful thing about us is that we come into this world with maximum flexibility.

Values of the Future

We believe that man’s pursuit of happiness under the conditions of the twenty-first century will permit him to achieve the fullest expression of the following values:

Life and Liberty. A matured society will permit man a maximum degree of life, liberty, and freedom. Individuals will understand themselves. They will choose patterns of living that will deeply express their own inner selves. Never before has society been able to permit all individuals to express their intellectual, emotional, and physical needs. At long last, individuals will no longer be subordinated and pressured to conform to a set pattern.

Economic Abundance. There will be economic abundance so that the material needs of men are amply met. Competitiveness, acquisitiveness, thriftiness, and the hardworking syndrome will be as extinct as the dinosaur.

Health and Longevity. The ideal of radiant health will continue to be valued as it has in the past. But for the first time it can be realized. Scientific nutrition along the lines suggested by one of the authors in How to Live Longer—Stronger—Slimmer* will be built into everyday life-patterns. Improved genetic designs and living conditions which promote maximal health will give a freedom from disease and a maximum of energy that was seldom achieved in older civilizations. The average life-span may well exceed 150 years in the twenty-first century. Eventually, it will stretch toward immortality.

* Kenneth S. Keyes, Jr., How to Live Longer—Stronger—Slimmer (New York: Frederick Fell, 1966).

Love and Friendship. Man’s feelings of friendship, warmth, and love for all other men will deepen to an extent that can not be understood by those who live in the twentieth-century world of scarcity. Friendship and love in the twentieth century are so clouded with conscious and unconscious hostilities, competitiveness, envy, greed, and insecurity that the deepest levels of human warmth can not be approached. Only in a mature society is it possible for man to savor fully his relationships with fellow human beings.

Physical Pleasures. The potential that men and women have for enjoying the pleasures of sex will reach their greatest fruition in a mature society. Sexual behavior in mid-twentieth-century America will be regarded as incredibly primitive, for it is overladen with guilt feelings inculcated by early raining. In the twenty-first century sexual emotions will be treasured because of their historical association with the creation of life. Deep feelings of pleasure, oneness, and relaxation will flow from the mature expressions of human sexual feelings.

Appreciation of Beauty. Man’s appreciation of beauty will expand from the narrow ranges of the present into the greatly enlarged horizons he will achieve in the future. The physical beauty of human beings will not be confined to the narrow standards of the “beauty queen” mentality of today. The beauty of human beings of all ages from birth to the lovely mellowness of old age will be appreciated. Esthetic experience will become a pervasive reality in the lives of all men. Almost everything in the twenty-first-century world will be beautiful. Man’s esthetic sense will not be dulled by exposure to sham and artificiality, slums, jukeboxes, and advertising art. As we will discuss in a later chapter, music will acquire new dimensions that completely transcend the limited orchestral ranges of today. Beauty will become an integral part of life, not just something we appreciate at detached moments. People will be more interested in producing art than in acquiring and displaying it.

Deep Levels of Self-Knowledge and Communication of Feelings. People in the twenty-first-century world will achieve penetrating levels of rapport, both with themselves and with the feelings of others. Many of the inner feelings of people in the twentieth century are repressed and do not come fully into awareness. It is extremely rare that one’s innermost feelings can be continually, fully, and freely expressed, even between friends or lovers. In the future all feelings will be eagerly sought, verbalized, and thoroughly accepted by others. This will produce a new dimension of relaxed living that is almost unknown today.

Vicarious Sharing of the Delights of Others. The relaxed egos of individuals in the twenty-first century will permit them to achieve a deep pleasure in sharing the happiness and the experiences of others. The achievement of happiness will not be on a narrow self-centered basis in which one ego fights another for a feeling of worth. People in the future will feel that the happiness levels of all individuals are to a large degree interlocked and rise and fall together. For example, if one person is sick, the disease might spread to others. If he is unhappy, the interaction with others might make them unhappy. If an individual is given an inferior status, his resentment might lead to hostile acts that hurt others. Hence, individuals in the twenty-first century will value the feelings of other people as their own and derive a deep satisfaction from knowing that all men in their society live relaxed, deeply-fulfilled and fascinating lives. No one will stand alone.

The Challenge of Life. The challenge of life that men and women will experience in the future will, perhaps, be a supreme value. For the first time all men and women will live a multidimensional life, limited only by their imagination. In the twentieth century we could classify people by saying, “He is good in sports. She is an intellectual. He is an artist.” In the future all people will have the time and the facilities to accept the fantastic variety of challenges that life offers them. Men and women will feel perfectly at home in all parts of their world. The satisfaction of a continuing self-development will be a normal part of life, not a rare