When you stop to think about your future, what is it that you see for humanity? What is the perception that you hold for the possibilities of what the world could look like 50 or a 100 years from now? What are the limits between what you hope to be, and what you expect is realistic?
I have heard through my life, on a number of occasions, people express their disbelief of how quickly things change through the course of a lifetime. Many times people share a story about when they were young, in remembrance of the times before cell phones, before the internet, before Facebook. They speak in pure amazement of the unpredictable advancements of technology they witnessed in such a short period of history. I’m sure their were reflections similar to these throughout all of human history, certainly our predecessors pondered the times before indoor running water, before the town market, and before written communication. If you took a trip back to the Dark Ages, you would never find a person who would have believed that in a few hundred years from their time, mankind would have mass transportation powered by gasoline, individual networking and communication capable of spanning the globe, and markets filled with anything you can think of. This is due to the common sense fact that the idea of what will be must precede the reality. Because of this, people base their vision of the future, on the limitations of today. We remove the most powerful aspect of human foresight, the power to create the impossible. Well here is my vision for the future. It might not seem possible now, but future is limitless.
The first thing I would change about my world of the future is the focus of the people. The people are the vehicle for change, each individual is as meaningful as the next; rich, poor, fat, thin, blue or green. A change of perception is needed from, how we build financial security for our self, to how can we build evolutionary security for mankind. How can we ensure our standard of living on an organized level, so that we don’t need to hoard money, food, water, or any other resource out of fear that one day it wont be available? How can we ensure that our faiths will never be disregarded, without having to fight violently to qualify its truth? How can we ensure safety in our neighborhood, so that we never have to fear that we will be injured or taken from by an act of our neighbors? How can we make this happen efficiently so that we have time to spend with family, friends, and community that support us in this goal? There are many limitations in the now that make this possibility seem impossible, but viewing something as impossible never stopped it from happening, and it certainly never helped the impossible become reality.
The problem with my vision for the future is that, short of a global revolution by all individuals, nothing will bring to pass the change that is necessary. The development of our society is based on beliefs that peace and unity between people is not possible. Our governments are designed to inspire debate, conflict, argument, and distrust. Constantly struggling to out do the other guy, rather than work with him. We pick candidates on whether we think they are right or wrong, rather than on how well they work with others to accomplish challenging tasks in our countries. National corporations, who are closely associated with government influences, invest millions of dollars a year for production development that make it challenging for small businesses to compete. Sure you have the ability to compete in a free market, but do you have the resources to truly be competitive against a large corporation? In our middle and lower class communities, distrust has grown among residence as we see less and less effort by individuals to make pleasant conversation with strangers just for the sake of getting to know them. Instead we visit the internet multiple times a day to keep in touch with acquaintances, so we can avoid the hypothetical discomfort that is associated with the possibilities of human interaction. There is no observation of true comradery in our day to day living like there was during humanities most trying times.
The founding fathers of America had a vision for mankind in the creation of this great nation. A cause that would echo for hundreds of years, and that would suggest to residence that nothing is impossible with the power of the people. We joined together against men who sought to remove liberty from our society in WWI and WWII, seeing clearly that violence and destruction was not conducive to the world we wanted to live in. The post war eras provided prosperity that became synonymous
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with the American Dream, as the vision for the future among many people was to have a decent job, own a home, and start a family. As people began to indulge on the fruits of the capitalist economy, the perception shifted from the American dream, to the American struggle. People obsessed themselves with the need to have more; more cars, more money, more things.
That leads us to where we are. Currently a nation with no vision for the future, only struggle for the moment. A struggle to compete with the image of our neighbor, a struggle to prove our success through the assets that we own; but its all in vein. The proof of success has never been homes, cars, or power. Success is a measurement of happiness, and pride is created when you have happiness to spare and choose to give some back. You don’t have to be rich, or powerful to give joy and happiness. You don’t have to be republican, democrat, christian, Muslim, or Jewish. You just have to believe in a world where happiness is abundant, and it can always be shared, rather than in the limitations that tell you its impossible.
Hypo-Critical
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- Jim Selman: Is Your Problem Economic or Spiritual? (huffingtonpost.com)
- The Future is coming. Are you ready? (Sep, 1979) (modernmechanix.com)
- Samuel Moyn on the History of the Human Rights Movement (volokh.com)
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