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

more fruitful for human beings to control and channel intelligently the accelerating flow of events. Over a half-century ago the United States Electric Light Company gave its dynamic inventor Hiram Maxim a $20,000 annual life pension and exiled him to England. They felt they needed to get rid of him because his brilliant mind kept inventing improvements. His creative ability made their equipment obsolete before they had time to pay for it. Maxim produced some of his greatest inventions in England. At the time that he was being knighted for his outstanding accomplishments, the United States Electric Light Company was going out of business.

Probably the only thing we can know for sure about the future is that it will be very different from what we have today. But whatever difficulty we may have in trying to understand life in times to come, it is little compared with the trouble people in the twenty-first century will have understanding the way we do things today. In the future people will find it almost impossible to believe that human beings could have organized themselves into nations and then could have used scientifically designed weapons to slaughter each other. As they watch movies of the past, they will be astounded by the tobacco smoke emanating from the nostrils and by the ostentatious clothing and dangling jewelry. They will find animal emotions of hostility and jealousy most incredible. Individuals in the twenty-first century will not look back with nostalgia to a world threatened by atomic oblivion, with economic and political activities vitiated by greed and hypocrisy, and with mental disorders growing at a phenomenal rate. How crude and pathetic we will appear in the eyes of our descendants!

Civilization Lightens Man’s Burden

One measure of the degree of civilization at any given time is the extent to which it requires individuals to sacrifice themselves. In the past millions of men were required to sacrifice their lives during the recurrent wars. These individuals usually sacrificed themselves willingly, for they had been conditioned this way.

An Englishman once described America as, “A place where everybody furiously works overtime making labor-saving machinery.” To operate the economy of industrial nations today, many individuals are required to sacrifice the prime portion of their lives in an eight-hour-per-day pattern of labor. They are conditioned so that they do not usually consider it a sacrifice. The work week is getting shorter. Some people in the preceding century had to work twice as many hours to make a poorer living. Furthermore, working conditions are improving, fringe benefits increasing, time-and-a-half more common—if not double time—vacations longer, and every now and then someone manages to convince himself that some part of his job is interesting. Men and women are working to get money to buy things they want, or they are working for recognition in terms of titles and achievements. But the fact remains that the prime portion of the lives of most twentieth-century men and many women is consumed by more or less compulsory, more or less monotonous, more or less repetitive, more or less boring tasks which are associated with a pay check.

The mature society of the future will burden man with a minimum of obligations. Most societies of the past and present could not operate unless its citizens were heavily committed and obligated to certain set patterns. But as we shall see, the automated world of the future will for the first time free mankind from these heavy obligations to the group. He will be able to face himself deeply and fundamentally. No longer will his parents, his boss, and his country tell him how he should act. Our future society will require minimal work, criticism will not be considered disloyalty, and diversity in sexual and family patterns will be possible.

In the future individuals will do most for their social group by developing themselves into dynamic, happy human beings. Men and women will ask themselves: “What fills me as a human being? What things add to my feeling of worth? What do I enjoy? What do I really need? What things make me feel intellectually vital, emotionally warm, and physically strong? What makes me feel ten feet tall, that life is glorious, and that today is wonderful?”

Steps to the Future

The rate at which we progress toward the better world of the future will depend upon how rapidly we use the scientific method to test out various solutions to our problems. In the past we have fired professors who advocated doing things that were different from the present mores of our tribe. In the future we must take these creative men and give them the facilities they need to test their ideas scientifically.

We must plan to increase the available power and energy in all parts of the world to enormously higher levels. Intelligence guided by scientific methodology must be applied to the technological and sociological reconstruction of our entire planet. A cybernated food production system must be designed to meet the needs of a stable world population. Areas must be set aside for industry that will be coordinated with a vast international transportation system. A product that is cybernetically manufactured anywhere on earth should be cybernetically delivered to almost any building on earth in less than twenty-four hours.

We must open our eyes and minds to use to the fullest man’s enormous ability to create. Knowledge is exploding. It is reported in Schools for the Sixties, a volume sponsored by the National Education Association that over the last 2,000 years, knowledge doubled for the first time by 1750, for the second time by 1900–(150 years later) for the third time by 1950–(50 years later), and for the fourth time by 1960–(10 years later). The world’s supply of technical knowledge is now doubling every seven years. Most of the scientists who have ever lived are alive today. “By now,” said Dr. A. C. Hall, the Defense Department’s Deputy Director of Research and Engineering for Space, “we seldom doubt the technical feasibility of anything.”

Dr. George Gallup in his book