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“Powerless in the hands of disruptive change – informational technologies, environmental collapse, breakdown of international order, global waves of migration -- we stand at future’s gate, uncertain of our fate.”

 Managing the Disruptions of Change

In the Foreseeable Future 

Edward Renner

When my grandfather was born there were neither cars, airplanes, nor phones. Yet, before he died, man had walked on the moon. We now live in the Post-Modern World, with technological progress happening at an even faster rate.

 Rapid change is a powerfully disruptive force – a wave of creative destruction -- leaving in its wake a residue of vulnerable people. Illustrated by a strategy celebrated in the film “Money Ball,” a machine and a statistician can do a better job of making baseball decisions than a scout or manager. Now, a beginning surgeon can practice on an image, rather than a live patient. There are autonomous taxis to drive us and autonomous weapons to protect us, both without human intervention. They are all examples of human progress, of an emerging era of Artificial Intelligence which discards human roles and occupations, and with them, the personal identity of the individuals.

 People are losing a sense of control over their life. They are becoming insecure about how to retain their place and purpose. These creative disruptions of change are not about liberal or conservative political ideologies; they are deeply felt personal psychological issues.

Disruptive Changes

The magnitude and nature of change has dramatically shifted through history. For 5,000 years people lived in the past tense. Yesterday was the best predictor of their tomorrow. For the next 500 years – the Modern Era of science and technology, roughly from 1500 to 2000 – people lived in the present tense. Today could be whatever we wanted it to be. Now, for the next 50 years – roughly 2000 to 2050 – we must learn to live in the future tense. We must learn how to live today as if it were tomorrow, or there will not be a tomorrow worth living.

The rate of change is now so fast that individuals must make the transition from one historical era – the present to the autonomous future -- all within one lifetime. The magnitude of change we are facing has never been experienced before in the history of human existence. These are uncharted times that require adopting new ways of thinking.

In the distant the past, most of the events that impacted a person’s life were physically and temporally close at hand; but today the effects of change are increasingly external and arbitrary, and their mechanisms are largely distant and invisible. Our neighborhood is no longer the families on our block, or those on the other side of our town, city or even region. Our neighborhood now includes nations and people on the other side of the globe – who we have never seen nor spoken to – but who’s actions, beliefs, and values affect our daily lives in essential ways.

When people lose their personal sense of place, purpose, and control over their own fate, they become vulnerable to exploitation by opportunists offering solutions that promise to restore their lost identity.

The Opportunist

Opportunists give the vulnerable someone to be angry at. In the US today it is often immigrants or the 1%. “Us” versus “them” restores an identity, albeit a dysfunctional one. Human displacements and global migrations are here to stay for the foreseeable future, and the 1% are not going to relinquish their wealth and power within the current political and economic structures. In such situations, there is no middle ground between “us” and “them.” Both Conservatives and Progressives have propositions, with opposing alternatives, that are unacceptable to the other and unattainable.

In her book, There Is Nothing for You Here (2021), Fiona Hill, who is a specialist in Russian affairs and was an adviser to Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama, and Presidents Trump’s assistant on the National Security Council for Russian affairs, suggested that the political, social and economic situations in the US are becoming so severe – “there is nothing for you here” -- that they are undermining the foundations of our democracy, making us, similar to Russia, vulnerable to authoritarian appeals, which are responsible for our political divide between the left and the right.

The personal challenge today for the vulnerable – who will soon be the majority -- is to resist the opportunist who offers the simple political ideological solutions of left versus right. It is our mind that allows us to be fooled by the opportunist who plays on our fears of vulnerability – the loss of personal identity. Most people, from all walks of life, and all educational levels, will need to discover new ways of thinking to restore a sense of purpose and direction to living, to retain a personal identity suitable for an uncertain future.

The End of Living in the Present Tense

The Modern Era gave us a sense of certainty. Science and knowledge advanced to such a degree that facts replaced faith and fate from the past, as the basis for daily living. We know that the heavens and the earth were not created in seven days, that humans evolved over thousands of years, and that space and the stars are an unknown infinite expanse. Because we understand causal relationships, events, such as the weather, have become largely predictable. Socially, we can reliably communicate with others at any time or place. Politically, we know about every nation on the planet and the people who live there. Economically we have the financial means and transportation necessary for global commerce.

 Science and technology have now taken us to the limits of the Modern Era. As our clearest example, we have the power to understand we are killing the very planet we need to sustain ourselves. History books are full of accounts of previous societies that collapsed because they depleted their local natural resources. Science has shown us that we are consuming our global resources faster than the earth can regenerate them, and that our consumption rate is increasing. By living as we do in the present tense, we are in the process of extinguishing ourselves. 

Collectively, humankind has no choice but to drastically change some of our most fundamental beliefs and values or become the authors of our own demise within our own lifetime. The future can no longer be an extension of the present; rather, the foreseeable future must now dictate the present.

 Living in the Future Tense

 At this moment, the most important challenge we face as individuals – making the transition from one historical era to the next, all within one lifetime – is a unique human experience. There are no guidelines for learning how to live today (the present tense) as if it were tomorrow (the future tense). Yet, if we are to have a worthwhile future for ourselves, we must create it ourselves in how we live today, in the present.

Living in the future tense means renegotiating our present values and behaviors to purposefully create a future we would consider worth living for. It will require a process of embracing complexity and adopting a perspective of time.

Embracing Complexity. Using singular political ideological perspectives – as we are now doing -- oversimplifies the complexity of our current social issues, resulting in seemingly irreconcilable differences. A recent example was the politicization of COVID management. To reject a mandatory mask or vaccine mandate because it is an infringement on personal freedom is a singular political perspective that over-rides the social and economic elements of the pandemic and fails to identify the most appropriate comprehensive set of management practices when all three elements are simultaneously considered. Likewise with the current stalemate in response to climate change, the political, social, and economic elements are interactive and must be reconciled with each other simultaneously.

These objective, definable “social issues” only appear to be intractable because they are complex and because there are no simple solutions. The changes that must made to live in the future tense all have political, economic, and social elements which need to be reconciled with each other. The new role for our individual perspectives is to account for the complex interplay between these three elements; they are interactive, simultaneous, and interdependent.

The singular political ideology of conservative vs liberal has divided the nation and paralyzed our transition from the Present Era to the New Post-Modern Future we must create within our lifetime. The immutable flow of the creative destructions of scientific and technological change does not follow the dictates of our political ideologies. It is time to get off the left versus right ideological merry-go-around, which is going nowhere in the present, and to get on the bullet train of time into the future. Time is the principal axis, and our political, social, and economic ideologies are simply perspectives and tools for adapting to (not degerming) the disruptions of change from scientific and technological innovations.

Adopting the Perspective of Time. We need to understand our current social issues through the comparative mental perspectives of distinguishing between thinking in the past, present, and future tense. For example, long in the past, severe weather was seen as the wrath of the Gods. Later, knowledge of the mechanics of the weather allowed us to predict and track hurricanes. Now, with a geological understanding of climate change we know that our children’s life will not be sustainable without significant disruptions to our current ways of thinking and living.

Just as the statues erected in the past to appease the anger of the Gods were ineffective in tempering the weather, so too are the institutions of today ineffective for solving the disruptive challenges we can anticipate. Complex issues rest on political, social, and economic values which at any moment are in a natural state of tension – they are dependent on each other, interactive and simultaneous. When a significant number of people can be persuaded that any one of the three – such a political ideology -- is an overarching hierarchical value, it is a prescription for falling into the “intractable problem” trap: Cheap fossil fuel will support economic growth, until we suffocate; a pandemic will subside only when enough people have developed a natural or vaccine-based immunity.

Only the passage of time tells the full story. Time is the water-like process that dissolves (resolves) the competing political, economic, and social values of any issue into a final all-inclusive solution (resolution). We need to personally reject appeals to any singular overarching value and embrace the complex disruptions of change over time as our primary perspective. The future used to be about other people’s fate, now it is about our own.

If we believe building our future is an ongoing, collaborative, and participatory process, then embracing complexity and adopting a perspective of time to solve our current and pressing issues is a difficult but not impossible challenge. In some ways, it’s like taking a trip, except instead of downloading maps or packing our bags, our preparation must be psychological and personal. We know what our destination is, but we don’t know exactly what will happen or who we will meet along the way. Shifting our collective mindset from the past and present tenses into Living in the Future Tense is to begin a wide-eyed, open-end adventure. What an exciting – and challenging -- time to be alive!

Living in the future tense is an essential, ongoing, interpersonal, cooperative, and self-reflective process. No one knows the answers. No one has ever been in this situation before. As individuals we cannot afford to relinquish our identity to opportunists; we need to own our personal coherent sense of the foreseeable future to shape our present behaviors. To do otherwise is to be powerless in the hands of disruptive change, standing at future’s gate, uncertain of our fate.

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Edward Renner is a retired Professor of Psychology who has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Illinois, and the University of South Florida.