The World Future Society’s First Conference

On December 1, 1966, the newly founded World Future Society had exactly three members, but by 1970 our membership had grown to 4,000.

During this time, we upgraded THE FUTURIST from a newsletter to an illustrated magazine that won acceptance in the offices and libraries of 30 nations. We also recruited a distinguished Board of Directors. We established a special service to provide futurists with scholarly papers dealing with the future. And we began shipping books about the future to people around the world.

Our new members worked in many fields and an increasing number of different countries. Some of these futurists focused mainly on problems — how to prevent war, adjust to new technology, deal with high population growth, etc. — but others seemed simply captivated by the technological wonders that made the future just plain fun to think about!

The 1960s were, after all, a decade when the world’s economies soared, the media announced amazing new technologies every day, and the good life seemed to be everyone’s natural right. The sky itself no longer limited human aspirations, since space travel had opened up the universe. So, for many people, the future became the substance of their hopes — a dreamland of endless wonders.

Television had begun showing the world to itself in living color, stirring up people’s demand for a better life, and by the late Sixties, the baby-boom generation was emerging into young adulthood, bursting with energy, impatiently questioning age-old traditions, and demanding immediate reform of every institution. Minority ethnic groups organized demonstrations to obtain freedom from discrimination, students sought freedom from academic constraints, and women demanded liberation from their traditional roles as housewives and mothers and access to jobs dominated by men. Contributing to the unrest was outrage at U.S. government policies and the Vietnam War, which was killing thousands of young American men.

A few people wanted to break free entirely from the culture in which they had been reared and began creating little utopias, or “experimental communities,” seeking to validate a popular slogan of the era: “The future is NOW!”

One experimental community, called Twin Oaks, was based on psychologist B.F. Skinner’s utopian novel Walden Two, which I had read in college and found intriguing. Skinner was one of the first people to join the World Future Society, and Twin Oaks happened to be located near Louisa, Virginia, within driving distance of my home, so I arranged for my wife, three sons, and myself to spend a weekend living at Twin Oaks.

The communitarians made us welcome, and I was fascinated to hear of the residents’ experimentation with new ways to deal with interpersonal relationships, such as having one member — known as the “generalized bastard” — assigned to hear all the complaints members had about one another and then provide feedback to the offenders. So I provided readers of THE FUTURIST with sympathetic articles on Twin Oaks and other social experiments going on at the time. I believed then as well as now that humanity needs to do much more experimenting with new social institutions if we are to deal effectively with the challenges of the future.

The Society itself was a social experiment, and we, too, were reinventing our organization to meet the demands of our members and our changing perceptions of what the Society should be and do.