The future is a fickle thing. It is a mystery that is impossible to uncover and an aspect of our reality that carries an immense amount of weight. Yet we can attempt to predict what will happen in this shroud of uncertainty and estimate the trajectory of current trends, but it can only take us so far. There is an aspect of chance that influences future outcomes in a way that makes it almost impossible to do it accurately.
No one has accurately predicted the whole future. In recorded history, people have used religion, signs, history, and science to foretell what will come; some practices were more accurate than others, but none have been exact or have been able to predict every aspect of the future. Despite all of this, I will attempt to make an accurate prediction of what the future will entail, and maybe, I will be right.
The best way to predict the future is to understand the past. In some ways, the past thirty years have been great, marked by rapid technological developments, the integration of the digital world into every facet of our lives, economic development in third-world countries, and an elevation of extreme poverty from 1.8 billion to now 600 million (according to the World Bank). The world is more interconnected than ever before and yet even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the capitulation of the Soviet Union, and what should have been Pax Americana (American peace), history is not over and problems still stand.
American political scientist and economist, Francis Fukuyama boldly proclaimed that we live in the “end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” He wrote this after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of socialism as an alternative to American-style democracy. Ideologically all other alternative modes have been beaten, and the contradictions of society have been resolved; this is undoubtedly false. Looking back to 1989, this is not the perfect utopia, and we still have lots of work to do and lots of progress needs to be made. There are many contradictions naturally connected to our current makeup of society that have been left unresolved. From 1989 to now, we have seen these contradictions start to manifest themselves.
One of these contradictions is the contradiction of climate change, the destruction of our planet caused by the greenhouse gases from industry, and machinery. If we do find a way to address this crisis, we would have to deal with the contradiction that our system incentivizes infinite growth on a finite planet. Additionally, we would have to address the economic crises caused by overproduction and the constant need to expand profits, markets, and products. This unnecessary expansion of capital has brought us a lot of development and breakthroughs. It has connected and advanced the world beyond the past feudal structures, but it has also given us a socioeconomic system hellbent on unsustainable growth and a liberal framework to justify it.
We have not reached the end of history, and there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. There are still many contradictions that have yet to be materialized. We’ve seen many things in the past decade, and we will see many more. We are lucky to live in an age of civilization that is only a mere ten thousand years in the making, compared to the millions of years spent as a paleolithic populous, and the eons of years our ancestors spent to evolve into our current form.
The future of mankind will only go forward as the lingering reverberations of civilization ring out. The near future will only be an extension of the past and present that will only take time to see and find out what will appear.
