Paleo-Future reader Mark Plus sent me a very interesting piece from the June 1981 issue of Future Life magazine. The author, F.M. Esfandiary, insisted that the Right/Left political and social dynamic was outdated. The new direction was Up.Mr. Esfandiary would later change his name to FM2030 because he was convinced that he would live to see the year 2030, which would have been his hundredth birthday. He died in the year 2000 at the age of 69 and was cryogenically frozen.
An excerpt from his 1981 piece about "Up-Wing Priorities" appears below. I will likely return to this article in the future as it goes in many interesting directions.
Around 2010 the world will be at a new orbit in history. We will translive all over this planet and the solar sphere - at home everywhere. We will be hyperfluid: skim on land - swim in the deep oceans - flash across the sky.
Family will have given way to Universal life. People will linkup/linkout free of kinship and possessiveness.
We will stream ahead propelled by a cornucopia of abundance.
Life expectancy will be indefinite. Disease and disability will nonexist. Death will be rare and accidental - but not permanent. We will continuously jettison our obsolescence and grow younger.
At 2000 plus ten all this will be the norm - hardly considered marvelous.
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ReplyDeleteGood lord, and this was *after* Reagan was elected -- talk about not seeing the writing on the wall!
ReplyDeleteI knew FM slightly. I talked to him on the phone a few times, and I met him in person back in 1995 (I think at the conference Michael Shermer mentions in his book How We Believe). Yes, he really believed all the stuff he wrote, despite the growing cognitive dissonance between his paleo-future vision and the less than transformed reality.
ReplyDeleteYou can also download a 62MB video about FM here.
I might add that FM's view of polyamorous individuals rearing loosely attached children bears more than a passing resemblance to Robert Heinlein's portrayals of "futuristic" sexual and family life in his later novels. To the best of my knowledge, I don't think FM and Heinlein ever crossed paths, or that Heinlein influenced his younger contemporary FM. Something in the cultural Zeitgeist in the 1960's and 1970's led some future-thinking individuals down this path.
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