A Guide to the Making of a Future

Unless you prefer suffering one

By MARTIN REZNY

I have now finished watching the season finale of 11.22.63, a show about going back in time to thwart the assassination of JFK, and I must say, the resolution to its story left me disappointed. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil it for you, not yet at least, but it has made me think about how we think about our role in the shaping of future events, and there’s something important I have to say to that. It does start with explaining the danger of self-fulfilling beliefs.

Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Fall For Determinism

To cover the basic science while keeping it simple, consider two basic views on future-making that stand in mutual opposition — constructivism and determinism. Constructivism is a notion that we construct our future, while determinism is a notion that future is determined. In a language that’s more natural and ancient, it’s the age-old debate over agency versus destiny, whether the future lies in the hands of man, or rather those of God or nature.

Right off the bat I would like to say that determinism, even if in fact correct, is no way to live. I don’t happen to believe it is correct, but even if our own ability to direct our future heading is an illusion, I would like to make it clear that it is in any scenario a superior approach to reality. In the spiritual sense, determinism would mean that god or gods have decided what will happen to us all in advance and we can only live it, while science merely inserts physics.

If everything right down to your mental states and “choices” of action is completely determined by the mechanical laws of nature and could have only ever unfolded in a single way independently of your conscious mind, then nothing matters. You have no responsibility, none. “You” and every subjective experience “You” have is only a backwards rationalization, an attempt to make sense of and justify what “You” never controlled. Pretty bleak, right?

For that reason I will continue this essay firmly on the side of constructive philosophy of the future and future-making, even if it means entertaining an illusion. The first step has to be stating what should be obvious by now — if you believe that future is determined and fully outside of your own control, then it will be. That mentality is what will make it that way, even if it otherwise weren’t outside of your control. You need to begin by doing this:

1) Assume your actions can impact the future

That’s not really that hard of a first step, now is it. We humans can often be deluded in assuming that we have control over things that we don’t actually have any ability to control, but being wrong sometimes about our ability to change things for the better is better than being always right about being powerless to change anything ever. What happens when you convince yourself you can’t change things is that you merely step aside and let others take over.

Maybe the others want to change things in ways that will negatively impact your life, maybe they have a vested interest in keeping them exactly as bad for you as they currently are. Or maybe they’d do a better job at future-making than you ever could for everyone involved, which is something you should always consider, but there is a responsibility. As they say, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Inaction is a choice too.

There is a warning as well. One of the points that the Kennedy anti-assassination show is trying to make, and this may be a minor unspecific spoiler, is that it is difficult to completely foresee the consequences of one’s actions. Doing what seems to be the right thing now doesn’t necessarily guarantee a better outcome later, and there’s all of the complications of trying to figure out what it means to do the right thing, or what’s a better outcome.

Before you take action in the present with the intention of impacting the overall direction of events into the future, you need to stop and think for a moment. Or a long series of moments. The fact that one cannot fully predict every consequence of any decision doesn’t mean that no attempt should be made. But perhaps even more importantly in regards to the future, such reasoning would be too narrow or incomplete without a broader effort:

2) Imagine your better future, in detail and in scope

If you fail to imagine a better future, then it doesn’t matter much whether you can assess consequences of your actions with any accuracy. You will either have no meaningful actions to take that you can think of, or, if you’ll be able to think of some actions to take, they will not make much meaningful difference even if you successfully take them. The word that needs to apply to your idea of a future is “vision”, and that implies that the future has to be what you see.

This right here may be the main problem of today, since most people know that the current world order is wrong, both morally and in a scientific sense on a number of levels, but most people also believe there simply isn’t a better alternative. Even as things are getting demonstrably worse for more and more people, they’d rather cling to the evil they know, rather than chancing a future they can barely fathom. And fathoming it less barely is exactly what’s needed.

The word for such visions has been “utopia” for quite a while, and for various reasons, both cultural and historic, it has somewhat fallen in disrepute. The connotation is that utopias are lies, unreal and unachievable things, turning easily into dystopias. While no attempts at future construction are guaranteed to succeed and not all “utopias” are well thought out or even very humane or moral, we shouldn’t dwell solely on failures just because they stand out more.

It is indeed prudent, as another saying goes, to be careful what you wish for, but there have been many once fanciful utopian notions that have worked out and have become permanent fixtures of our lives and of what it means to be human. Much like violent crime is more eye-catching and that is why it dominates the news, failures of progressive ideologies like communism and threats of cataclysms, however rare or unlikely, come to mind more easily.

Instead, you can find inspiration and perspective in looking at what is sometimes called the arc or the direction of history, and if that sounds too subjective to you, try looking at history of technology and the undeniable impacts new inventions have always had. On both levels, whatever you think about good and bad or right and wrong, significant change is the clear constant, and for better or worse, it is directed by us. Which brings me to this:

3) Start living in your better future, now

One of the more toxic opinions that I keep hearing as a fan of art criticism is that fiction, and especially the various subgenres of speculative fiction, are mainly vehicles for escapism. This is exactly what I don’t mean by saying you should start living in your better future right now. The purpose is not to leave this world as it is and escape it to an internal, self-contained refuge. Even if you can’t act in any way, having a mindset resisting the status quo is an act.

Escapism would mean that when you do things in the real world, you accept it, with all its wrongs, injustices, prejudices, and everyday common sense idiocies, and at the same time, you treat your better future as a fantasy. Your mindset may not hold sway over the external social events yet, but there is a difference between treating fiction as a fantasy, and treating it as a mirror of a greater truth. A truth that you believe is as real a thing as any social construct.

Assuming your vision is compelling, events will be affected, eventually, once more people start sharing your mindset, but that will never happen if you don’t believe in the reality of that future yourself. A vision again means something you see, and one can only see what exists. We could quibble about the definition of existence, but a future must be sufficiently existing already if it can wholly inform your sense of self and worldview. It’s like time travel.

If you live in a future that is better than the present, you are equivalent to a time traveller who has returned to the past. If you take action to facilitate the rise of that future, you are a time traveller who has returned to the past to fix it. Which brings me to my disappointment with the ending of the 11.22.63 first season (major spoilers from now on; warning: you have been warned). The grand conclusion was that saving Kennedy was bad, followed by a reset.

There wasn’t even any specific explanation of why would events go bad, or how, just straight up generic dystopia of a post-apocalyptic landscape. What was the moral of the story? That we’re already living the best possible version of events? There was not even any conspiracy surrounding the assassination in this interpretation, just crazy ol’ inscrutable Harvey Lee Oswald, who may have actually been a hero, because killing Kennedy sure has helped the world.

Now you might say that it doesn’t matter, because this is just about escapism, it’s just meant to entertain, to sell. What it is is a failure of imagination, that’s what it is. As a fan of science fiction of any kind, I am physically incapable of not enjoying a time travel story, regardless of any flaws, and this one was enjoyable to watch, but art needs to at least attempt to do more than that. With any thought put into it, time travel isn’t just a gimmick, it tells the truth.

The truth there is that times other than the present exist in a very real sense and real people live in them. Or do you doubt the past actually happened, or that the future will actually happen? The truth is that things don’t stay the same, and the truth is that our choices and actions, the content of our minds made manifest, is what drives the change. Finally, while there is intermittent regress, the truth is that since we can imagine progress, we have a direction.

Final Thoughts, Finitivism, and Finality

If you require more of a scientific, objective, potentially physical or mathematical way of looking at the future that doesn’t require mechanistic causality, I do have something to offer you. Instead of past pushing us into the future, imagine the future pulling us towards itself. Or rather, all of the possible futures existing in some sort of dimension ahead of us in time as attractors, and us being half attracted, half steering ahead between them.

The way of thinking starting from the consequence and not the cause has a name, though it doesn’t come up all that often. It’s called finitive thinking. I may have stumbled upon it when reading Foucault, but I honestly can’t remember exactly where I encountered it during my studies of political philosophy. I’m also reasonably sure I’m adapting it here to a new context, but I believe it does help make sense of the nature of potential physics involved.

It is possible that when you invoke an idea of potential future and start influencing other minds to focus on it as well, you could be affecting what looks from a statistical point of view as odds of it coming to pass. Not necessarily by changing the odds, but by helping select one of the possible outcomes, regardless of their relative apparent likelihood. After all, what statistics tell you is only how often certain things happen, their frequency.

In any single instance, any possible outcome can be treated as exactly as likely to happen. It is also important to understand that distributions of frequencies of certain things happening can realistically change at any moment, and may be saying all about the past and nothing of the future. From this point of view, believing in statistics may actually be a form of bias that serves to reinforce that version of the future where statistics so far continue remaining accurate.

Finitive thinking, when applied to physics, would mean that you consider futures backwards-affecting our behavior and perhaps even that of seemingly coincidental events the more the stronger we focus on them. In a somewhat similar way to how Stephen King’s interpretation of the past fought to remain the same against interference, though the other way around and with no need for a time to have subjective intention or inconsistent and random influence.

Like in the case of the self-fulfilling prophecy signal of doom in Tomorrowland movie, I think a signal may also be a good metaphor for how this would work. Imagine any vision of a future as a beacon marking a place to go and us as being variably good at seeing those beacons, as well as free to decide whether or when or how best to pursue them. Also imagine that most of the time, we’re sharply divided in all of these ways. Focus is tantamount to a force.

And finally, finality, or the idea that all things end. It is one of these common sensical, yet ultimately unprovable concepts, because it literally cannot be ever disproven as long as time continues. With it, in the human context, there is also this idea of inevitable decline, and admittedly, decline is easy to make happen. Assuming we have a vision of a better future, focus on it, and live it, the finality is what we have to fight against. How else can we test its veracity?

It has so far been the nature of life to attempt exactly that, and so far successfully, because the complexity of life has been steadily growing. In spite of entropy and all the natural limitations, it seems to be a natural instinct of life itself to push ever onward against them. Maybe we’ll hit the wall one day, or maybe universe is truly infinite and everlasting and we shall always overcome. But for that, we need to make our future, not just let it happen.

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