Arcata, CA
Saturday November 1, 2003
Okay, let me finish typing up Future Shock.
"The voter may be polled about specific issues, never about the general shape of the preferable future. Indeed, nowhere in politics is there an institution through which an ordinary man can express his ideas about what the distant future ought to look like. He is never asked to think about this, and on the rare occasions when he does, there is no organized way for him to feed his ideas into the arena of politics. Cut off from the future, he becomes a political eunuch.
We are, for these and other reasons, rushing towards a fateful breakdown of the entire system of political representation. If legislatures are to survive at all, they will need new links with their constituencies, new ties with tomorrow. Social future assemblies could provide the means for reconnecting the legislator with his mass base, the present with the future.
Conducted at frequent and regular intervals, such assemblies could provide a more sensitive measure of popular will than any now available to us. The very act of calling such assemblies would attract into the flow of political life millions who now ignore it. By confronting men and women with the future, by asking them to think deeply about their own private destinies as well as our accelerating public trajectories, it would pose profound ethical issues.
Simply putting such questions to people would, by itself, prove liberating. The very process of social assessment would brace and cleanse a population weary to death of technical discussions of how to get someplace it is not sure it wants to go. Social future assemblies would help clarify the differences that increasingly divide us in our fast-fragmenting societies; they would, conversely, identify common social needs - potential grounds for temporary unities. In this way, they would bring various policies together in a fresh framework out of which new political mechanisms would inevitably spring.
Most important of all, however, social future assemblies would help shift the culture toward a more super-industrial time-bias. By focusing public attention for once on long-range goals rather than immediate programs alone, by asking people to choose a preferable future from among a range of alternative futures, these assemblies could dramatize the possibilities for humanizing the future - possibilities that all too many have already given up as lost. In so doing, social future assemblies could unleash powerful constructive forces - the forces of conscious evolution.
By now the accelerative thrust triggered by man has become the key to the entire evolutionary process on the planet. The rate and direction of the evolution of other species, their very survival, depends upon decisions made by man. Yet there is nothing inherent in the evolutionary process to guarantee man's own survival.
Throughout the past, as successive stages of social evolution unfolded, man's awareness followed rather than preceded the event. Because change was slow, he could adapt unconsciously, "organically." Today unconscious adaptation is no longer adequate. Faced with the power to alter the gene, to create new species, to populate planets or depopulate the earth, man must now assume conscious control of evolution itself. Avoiding future shock as he rides the waves of change, he must master evolution, shaping tomorrow to human need. Instead of rising in revolt against it, he must, from this historic moment on, anticipate and design the future.
This, then, is the ultimate objective of social futurism, not merely the transcendence of technocracy and the substitution of more humane, more far-sighted, more democratic planning, but the subjection of the process of evolution itself to conscious human guidance. For this is the supreme instant, the turning point in history at which man either vanquishes the process of change or vanishes, at which, from being the unconscious puppet of evolution he becomes either its victim or its master.
A challenge of such proportions demands of us a dramatically new, a more deeply rational response toward change. This book has had change as its protagonist - first as potential hero. In calling for the moderation and regulation of change, it has called for additional revolutionary changes. This is less paradoxical than it appears. Change is essential to man, as essential now in our 800th lifetime as it was in our first. Change is life itself. But change rampant, change unguided and unrestrained, accelerated change overwhelming not only man's physical defenses but his decisional processes - such change is the enemy of life.
Our first and most pressing need, therefore, before we can begin to gently guide our evolutionary destiny, before we can build a humane future, is to halt the runaway acceleration that is subjecting multitudes to the threat of future shock while, at the very same moment, intensifying all the problems they must deal with - war, ecological incursions, racism, the obscene contrast between rich and poor, the revolt of the young, and the rise of a potentially deadly mass irrationalism.
There is no facile way to treat this wild growth, this cancer in history. There is no magical medicine(*until now with the Internet*), either, for curing the unprecedented disease it bears in its rushing wake: future shock. I have suggested palliatives for the change-pressed individual and more radically curative procedures for the society - new social services, a future-facing education system, new ways to regulate technology, and a strategy for capturing control of change. Other ways must also be found. Yet the basic thrust of this book is diagnosis. For diagnosis precedes cure, and we cannot begin to help ourselves until we become sensitively conscious of the problem.
These pages will have served their purpose if, in some measure, they help create the consciousness needed for man to undertake the control of change, the guidance of his evolution. For, by making imaginative use of change to channel change, we cannot only spare ourselves the trauma of future shock, we can reach out and humanize distant tomorrows."
THE END
Okay, it's Sunday November 9 and I'm just now finishing typing up this book. Much has happened, so let me get back to logging.
6:41am I just woke up and it's freeeeezing, man. It's colder than it's ever been.
Oh, AJ(Annoying Jonathan) smoked me out. I was walking down the railroad tracks and he comes up and offers. We go sit down and I was talking shit to AJ, like I always do. I wouldn't if he wasn't so damn annoying. I was just playing around. He got all pissed off at me like some little kid and kicked me in the shin with his steel-toe boot. I went, "Oww! That fucking hurt!" He tells me, "Well, don't piss me off." I told Jonathan, "Man, they're just words. Don't let me. You should be stronger than that. Sticks and stones, man. I am just going to forgive you and keep talking shit." He told me, "I've asked you nicely not to piss me off." I repeated myself, "Just don't let the mere words coming out of my mouth offend you so much, pussy." Hehe, Okay, I didn't really call him a pussy.
9:48am Cindy just gave me a whole dollar! That's very generous of you.
Badass, got me an apple-fritter.
Okay, I came over to The Endeavor to see if the care-package from my mom was there. The package wasn't there yet. I'm going to go to my spanging-alley and get some spare change for a camera.
I asked this guy for a cigarette and he said, "No, they're really expensive. I don't give them away."
10:15am Dennis just gave me a whole dollar! I appreciate it, Dennis.
10:50am I just walked all the way to the library. I'm bored. I'm going to go sit on the computer all day.
2:42pm I just finished at the library. I came to the bathroom to take a shit and I'm all suited up for the cold. Man, this sucks. I'm feeling sick again. My throat doesn't hurt anymore, but I'm feeling all tired and drained. I got some cold sweats. I'm going to go to the barn and lie down.
3:01pm I walked to the donut shop(real slow). It took me a long time. I was just shuffling my feet pacing there. I'm going to get me a donut before I go crash at the barn. Man, I feel like shit.
But I've been sicker.
The worst is yet to come, maybe.
3:08pm Lush just gave me some change. I appreciate it, Lush.
3:16pm I'm walking to the barn.
3:27pm I stopped at St. Vincent de Paul and . . . oh shit! I just realized I've been taping over some stuff.
3:29pm I just noticed that I was taping over a lot of my stuff. That sucks. I don't know how much I lost. I'm walking to the barn because I'm all sick, it sucks.
3:49pm I got to the barn like five minutes ago. I met up with Jerome and he followed me out to the barn. Jerome just got into town again and hasn't seen how the barn has evolved without him. I'm just going to lay here and fall asleep.
7:55pm I just got woken up. There's a big fight in the barn. Cocapelli and Jose . . err somebody got hit in the mouth with a flashlight. There's all this fighting in the barn. What the hell? Just because someone was talking shit about someone's girl. VIOLENCE ONLY LEADS TO MORE VIOLENCE. WORDS CAN ONLY OFFEND YOU IF YOU LET THEM. Just dismiss that shit. Be bigger than that. Immature kids.
NO AGGRO IN THE BARN!
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