There appear to be a number of serious obstacles to raising funds for futurist activities. One hurdle is that most people have great difficulty understanding that it really is possible to think more realistically about the future. It’s certainly true that we can’t know much at all about the future — but that little bit we can know is critically important for making wise decisions.
A second obstacle is that the future of humanity is everybody’s business, and whatever is everybody’s business is treated as somebody else’s business, certainly not ours.
A third obstacle is people’s feeling that we should solve all immediate problems before trying to deal with any future problems. This fixation on immediate problems, however trivial they may be, leads nations as well as individuals and organizations to lurch from one crisis to another, always too busy with the current “crisis” to forestall the next.
A fourth obstacle is that people like to deal with well-defined problems that can be solved quickly using a direct approach that produces quantifiable and photogenic results. People hate coping with problems that are poorly defined, bafflingly complex, and impossible to solve quickly using a direct, well-approved approach. (In the seventeenth century, an approved approach to illness was to pray to God or a saint or, if that failed, to burn a witch or two.)
A fifth obstacle is that we cannot show on television the victims of future wars. We now live in a visual culture where TV images have largely displaced the human imagination. So the orphans of future wars have no standing because their faces cannot now be seen on television. Nor can their cries be heard.
A sixth obstacle is that futurist publications are unattractive to advertisers because futurists as a group are not big consumers of any substantial category of goods.
These obstacles continue to keep the World Future Society impoverished, so the Society has never been able to realize its potential.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Society has survived into the twenty-first century and still lives in hope while the mighty Soviet Union has faded into history. Back in 1971 when Mikhail and I had our chats, I don’t think either of us dreamed that things would turn out quite that way.
Next: A groundbreaking conference focusing on energy helps crystalize the challenges ahead for the Society and the world.