The success of our first conference in enabling enemies of both the past and present to discuss the future as friendly colleagues convinced me that my epiphany was valid. Thinking about the future really does have the power to liberate people from the burdens of past and present — the unpleasant memories that make us resentful and suspicious of each other and the never-ending crises that demand everybody’s immediate attention and keep us distracted from what we can do to create a better future world.
By setting aside — even if only temporarily — the burdens of the past and present, we can think about the exciting things we can do by working together for a better future world. For that reason, the World Future Society really does have the potential to become a powerful force for world peace.
The future also provides a valuable common ground for people who do not know each other well and have different backgrounds, interests, and attitudes. Finding common ground is critically important in human relations but often hard to achieve — even when everyone concerned belongs to the same organization. A Ford Motor Company executive summed it up when he confessed to me, “We don’t talk to each other very well.”
To provide common ground for group discussions, major corporations often call in a futurist to meet with their executives. By hearing a general discussion of the major trends shaping the future world that everyone will share, members of a group have a framework for communicating more meaningfully with each other about the important issues that concern their group. Focusing on their common future, they can transcend the petty fears and jealousies that too often obsess their thinking and limit interactions to comments about sports and the weather.
Besides providing common ground for group discussions, thinking seriously about the future enables us to anticipate many opportunities and challenges that lie ahead, so that we can prepare to deal with them effectively. Foresight is, I believe, the gateway to wisdom.
But good foresight for individuals and organizations is not enough. Today we need global foresight if humanity is to survive and prosper in the years ahead. Rapidly advancing technology is radically reshaping our planet’s natural environment and revolutionizing our everyday lives even more than we recognize. Progress makes our lives increasingly comfortable physically, but it is undermining our traditional customs and values, leaving us feeling rootless and uncertain. Today, our human enterprise is like a great ocean liner packed with passengers but with no one steering the ship and no known destination.
Most people believe that politicians are the ones to deal with our perplexing global problems, but my experiences as a young journalist reporting on politicians in four nations convinced me that we cannot expect politicians to solve our great world problems. It’s not that politicians are stupid or evil. On the contrary, I found the politicians I dealt with to be mostly intelligent, well-meaning, and very likeable folks trying to do difficult jobs as well as they could.
I vividly remember when Harry S. Truman unexpectedly took a seat next to me in a restaurant while I was with a pack of journalists following him around. As I sat, frozen to my chair with awe at being face-to-face with the man who had ordered atomic bombs dropped on Japan, I was struck by his sheer humanity. He was smart and charming but had no magical powers. He was a fallible human being like myself, yet he had been given the godlike power to consign thousands upon thousands of people to their deaths in Japan and later Korea. The scale of those horrors passes all understanding, yet I could not blame him for his decisions. In his situation, I might have decided history the way he did.
The world’s political systems cannot solve the momentous problems we face. These institutions must be revamped and new institutions developed. But it was not until I began developing my proposal for a World Future Society that I realized that this Society might play a key role in that process.