Sharing Fears with Friends

My intense anxiety slowly subsided, but the years of growing crisis left me with an obsession: Is there any way to decide what may happen in the future? We desperately need better knowledge of the future if we are to make intelligent decisions, but there seemed to be no way to get it.

I shared my concerns with various friends, partly because I hoped that they would help me in some way and partly because talking about it relieved my anxiety. I don’t believe I really expected that one of my friends would enable me to find answers to the questions that obsessed me. But one of them actually did.

This friend was John Dixon, my oldest and most unusual friend. He and I met when we were 6-year-old schoolboys in New York, and through the years, we always stayed in touch though our careers took us in very different directions. I followed my father and grandfathers into journalism, while John went his own unique way. He always did.

One of John’s “hobbies” was going after people doing interesting things. While we were still in school, John got Albert Einstein to solve a math problem assigned by one of the teachers. (No other kid came up with that solution to the homework problem!) After college, he persuaded the comprehensive designer Buckminster Fuller to give him a job, so John went around the world putting up Bucky’s signature domes in places as remote as Afghanistan. Along the way, he made friends everywhere with people whose work interested him. Many of them, like John and Bucky, seemed to have their eyes on the future.

When John relocated to Washington, we renewed our friendship. He got a job setting up an office for the Xerox Corporation, whose new copying machines were far better than any other manufacturer’s. John’s special task was to demonstrate to scholars the extraordinary usefulness of Xerox photocopiers. Once the scholars realized how much Xerox machines could help them in their work, they would demand that their institutions spend millions of dollars acquiring Xerox machines.

John’s strategy was to get scholars and scientists to send him their papers. He would then select the papers sure to interest specific scholars. Then he would have his staff send out photocopies to the designated recipients. Since John had a keen sense of what individual scholars were most interested in, his system worked beautifully. Scholars around the world became entranced with Xerox copies, and John acquired countless devoted and grateful admirers.

In this unique way, John established close contact with Bertrand de Jouvenel, a French economist who had become interested in how we can know more about the future; sociologists John McHale and Daniel Bell; and scholars at the RAND Corporation who were doing pioneering work in the use of scenarios and Delphi polling as tools for anticipating and preparing for possible future developments in military and political affairs.

John also began sending me papers he thought would interest me, and, since he knew me exceptionally well, his papers proved priceless. If I hadn’t had John’s help, I would never have learned about these scholars working on the future, and I also would not have heard of de Jouvenel’s book The Art of Conjecture, which was published in Monaco. I immediately ordered a copy and, when the book arrived, read it with growing excitement. De Jouvenel opened my eyes to what should have been obvious but I had failed to see due to my misconceptions of the future.