Summary: Here is a brief look at the future, seen thru my guesses, focusing on long-standing themes on the FM website. Enjoy, and I hope these will spark your own investigations into what lies ahead.
Good news – a new industrial revolution
A new industrial revolution has begun, ending the long stagnation since WWII ended. Wonders await us that we cannot even imagine, much as the people of 1860 could not imagine the world of 1950. The rate of economic growth will accelerate, bringing more security and prosperity to the world’s poor. The challenge of the next few generations will be harnessing this new tech and managing the political and social disruption it creates.
Pollution as we know it will be almost gone by 2100, and the challenge of the 22nd century will be repairing the damage done in the early 21st — as the world’s population grew to 10 or 12 billion. The world will become a garden again as the population crashes.
This will be a singularity like those in the past (e.g., fire, agriculture, writing). There will be no “singularity” in the sense of tech advancement making us like gods. See more about singularities here.
See my posts about the new industrial revolution here.
Good news: there will be no climate apocalypse
Bad news for the Left! There will be no climate apocalypse that destroys society, discredits capitalism, and gives them absolute political power. The world will continue to warm, with results both bad (as predicted) and good (not predicted, as this would ruin the narrative). The IPCC’s worst-case scenario, RCP8.5, will not happen. New energy technology will stabilize greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., CO2 and methane) by 2050. If necessary, measures will be taken in the following decades to reduce CO2 levels.
The failure of the highly publicized extreme predictions about future climate will contribute to the replication crisis in science. The resulting institutional changes in the conduct of science will make it far more effective.
See posts about the climate’s future here, and especially these about RCP8.5:
- Is our certain fate a coal-burning climate apocalypse? No!
- Manufacturing climate nightmares: misusing science to create horrific predictions.
Good news: about the wars among the great powers
Powerful elements among America’s elites are pushing for war with China or Russia. We are the world’s militarized belligerent great power, as Prussia/Germany was in the old world (details here). I am confident that they will fail to get the war they want, although there will be close calls. The American people might resist them. More likely, the rest of the world will rebel against us – and defend the international order build by the Greatest Generation on the ashes of WWII.
Or we might nuke somebody, probably a small nation – even non-nuclear armed one. Then the other major powers might ally against us, using economic sanctions to force us to become a client state under their supervision. See this scenario here.
News about the American Republic
On July 4, 2006 I wrote about the death of the Constitution. Since then I’ve documented the growing evidence. The system it created needs updating (details here), but that is not the core problem. America isn’t falling like the Roman Empire. It’s falling like Rome’s Republic. We no longer wish to bear the burden of self-government. We are sorting into classes: the bourgeoisie (who own almost everything), the inner party (who run America for its owners), the outer party of professionals and small businessmen, and the proles. See A picture of America, showing a path to political reform.
I have written over a hundred posts about ways to reform America, but none tell how to rekindle a love of liberty in a people. The political machinery bequeathed to us by the Founders remains there, decisive if powered by our will. Perhaps the Second Republic’s day has passed (the Articles of Confederation founded the First). But should a future generation desire freedom, the Third Republic lies in our future.
The gender wars
The story of the 20th century was the Left’s conquest of entire nations to use as lab rats to test their greatest creation – communism. The experiment failed. The casualties were beyond count. Russia has not yet healed. The story of the 21st century is the Left’s conquest of the West’s institutions, using us (and especially our children) as lab rats to test their vision of new men and women. The Left’s ideologies confidently. spin the dials our society’s controls. It will certainly fail, with results similar to allowing monkeys to manage a nuclear power plant. Several generations will become wreckage.
Perhaps we will learn about the danger of radical social changes without experimentation and testing. Perhaps we will learn wisdom after these expensive lessons. We can only guess about the specific ways this will go wrong. The mass drugging and oppression of boys will have awful consequences echoing far into the future. I believe that increasing numbers of men will refuse to marry, seeing that the risks, costs, and benefits no longer make sense.
The women of Generation Z and beyond will see the Boomers and Generation X as the golden age of women: they were able to marry, have children, and (if they wish) divorce on favorable terms for any reason. The increasing regulation of interpersonal relations by feminist-governing institutions will do little for them, especially in exchange for opportunities they have lost.
Long ago, I was taught at Cornell the basics of gender studies and feminism by Professor Judith Long Laws (author of The Second X: Sex Role and Social Role
See my hundreds of posts exploring this, what might be the greatest revolution in western history. Perhaps one of the largest in human history, large beyond our ability to see.
Europe: it is time to die
“Thou know’st it’s common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.”
— Queen Gertrude to Hamlet (Act I, scene 2).
European culture is dying, past the point of no return. Allowing in millions of migrants – proud and strong – with radically different values has revealed the senescence of Europe’s institutions. Europe’s ability to assimilate foreigners is minimal — as the bloody history of Jews in Europe proves. Now comes a cage match: a people who no longer believe in themselves vs. people with strong beliefs.
“Men do stupid things regularly and mad things occasionally. And sometimes, the impulse to self-destruction is so overwhelming it overtakes an entire nation. …The best a person can hope for when he goes mad is that he runs into a brick wall quickly …before he has a chance to build up speed. That is why success, in war and investing, is often a greater menace than failure. …
“People seem to make such obvious and moronic errors that it seems as if they were driven to it by some instinct of self-destruction — like lemmings periodically exterminating themselves in a march off the cliffs. What’s more, this diabolical instinct seems to report for duty at the very moment when the future seems the brightest — that is, when it is most needed! Just when men are most proud, most confident, most expansive in their ambitions and hopes …that is when they make the most lunkheaded judgments.”
— Bill Bonner in “Corrections” in March 2001.
The eventual outcome is certain but the conflict might wreck Europe. Perhaps the civilization that replaces it will be glorious, combining the best features of both in a new Islamic renaissance. Europe is rolling the dice, stacking everything they have built and everything they are on this gamble with open borders.
“I felt that Europe, in its state of derangement, had passed its own death sentence.”
— From The World of Yesterday
The advocates for open borders mock those who worry, since the migrants and their descendents will be a small minority for the next two generations – and a minority until the late 21st century.
That’s a foolish misunderstanding of social dynamics and of history. They would learn much by reading Richard Adam’s wonderful novel Watership Down
“What he had learned from all his experience of fighting was that nearly always there are those who want to fight and those who do not but feel they cannot avoid it. More than once he had fought alone and imposed his will on crowds of other rabbits. He held down a great warren with the help of a handful of devoted officers.
“It did not occur to him now – and if it had, he would not have thought it mattered – that most of his rabbits were still outside; that those who were with him were fewer than those on the other side of the wall and that until Groundsel had got the runs open they could not get out even if they wanted to. This sort of thing does not count among fighting rabbits. Ferocity and aggression are everything.
“What Woundwort knew was that those beyond the wall were afraid of him and that on this account he had the advantage.”
For more about this see my posts about immigration and about Islam, and especially these ….
- About Europe’s historic experiment with open borders.
- The lies about immigration keeping the borders open.
- Conversions to Islam will reshape the West.
- Omar Ali: Islam vs. Western liberalism; only one can win.
The essence of modern American politics
The Left seeks to remold our society, with or without our consent. The Right are agents of the 1% seeking to exploit and rule us. In this, the early stages of their clash, each allows the other’s operations – confident that their side will have ultimate victory. Both are our foes. Since the extremes control our institutions, we are helpless pawns.
This forces people to choose sides. It is a commonplace in prisons. Alone you are a victim. Do you join the Black gangsters, the neo-Nazis, or one of the other ethnic gangs? There are no nice choices. This is how societies polarize. This is the essence of Weimerica. It can end well for us, but only if we mobilize quickly. Otherwise we inherit the dust, as the Bible and Disney foretell.
See my posts about this.
For More Information
Ideas! For shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See my other posts about forecasts, and especially these…
- A look at our history – from the 23rd century.
- A look back at our time from the 2100 A.D. edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
- A vision of a perilous future for us all, and recommendations to avoid it.
- Visions of the future: Adam Posen asks what the world might look like if the 1% wins.
- Seven predictions about our future. Most are unusual. All are certain to happen (I think).
- See the trends shaping our future. Be forewarned, so you can prepare.
- A look ahead at the New America, after the gender wars.
The end of Tennyson’s Ulysses might be appropriate here,
“We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Mike,
That’s a great passage. But I believe our situation is the opposite of what Tennyson describes. We are equal in strength to past American generations, but grown weak in will.
That could be an interesting crime/prison drama; a “normal” blue or white collar guy gets sent to jail and in order to survive has to make a stomach-churning decision whether to join of those ugly gangs or face prison life alone.
The American Muse,
It’s a commonplace. No need for recourse to fiction. Also, facing prison life alone is not a pleasant option for most guys.
They have. See the movie Shot Caller.
The assumption reigns that the future of humanity is bound by geography or ethnicity or religion as these are society’s traditional fallback groupings. What if the future divide doesn’t fit with any of those traditional molds, but between those who choose to live in the global digital civilization that we’ve creating over the past thirty years v. those who continue to live in one of these traditional constructs around which civilization has been built until now?
John,
“The assumption reigns that the future of humanity is bound by geography or ethnicity or religion as these are society’s traditional fallback groupings.”
That has not been true since the late 17th century. A succession of western philosophers conceived universalist values: Thomas Hobbs, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, etc. From the Rights of Man thru the many UN documents, humanity was considered the only enduring — the primary — group. A succession of revolutions put this into practice — the French Revolution, the various communist revolutions, the ongoing gender revolution, the movement to open borders and unlimited migration, etc. These crafted the world in which we live, and are its foundational principles.
You could have fooled the Russian Marxists, the French existentialists, or even the founders of the UN who provided for national identification plaques for each of the General Assembly representatives with your assumption that national borders were not important to them.
To me what is new is the comparatively unfettered ability to communicate with anyone in the world at any time. My world is not borderless, but it is more global than it has ever been before. Time zones are often more of a real barrier than national borders. And I certainly have more in common with my colleagues in Dusseldorf or Shanghai than with many of my neighbors within a two mile radius of my home.
John,
Your replies typically make up stuff and give rebuttals to it.
“with your assumption that national borders were not important to them.”
It’s quite nuts to say that “future of humanity is bound by geography” is equivalent to “national borders not important to them.” People can believe both of those things without contradiction.
Thanks for this post it got me thinking. You might be interested in this which I found thought provoking. It is a post on the Middle East Forum about the death of fossil fuels ahe effect it will have on the rest of the world.
“The End of Carbon Fuels? A Symposium of Views” by Daniel Pipes in International Economy, Spring 2018.
Zander,
“Today, some experts, including Stanford’s Tony Seba, argue that the efficiencies of solar energy and electricity storage technology have made quantum improvements in just the last eighteen months.”
Color me skeptical.
“By 2030, predicts Seba, all new energy will be provided by solar and wind.”
I doubt that. That’s only 12 years away.
“All new mass market vehicles will be electric.”
Unlikely.
“And there will be fewer of these vehicles, as autonomous vehicles make a dramatic mass entry into the market.”
Possible, but I’m skeptical.
“Oil, gas, coal, and nuclear will become obsolete,” he argues.”
All these changes in 12 years? That would be a rate of change with no precedent in history. He’s made a common mistake:
The referenced post by Omar Ali has real insight. Cultures always fall when the nomenklatura lose faith. The two European world wars had profound effects on self belief and we are still working though the loss of confidence they produced.
On Europe and Islam, it may nevertheless be a bit more complicated than the piece allows. We could have much assimilation – there are quite some signs of this in the UK, for instance the current Home Secretary, and the current Mayor of London, both secular but Muslims in background, and the attitudes they represent in the wider community.
But the future could alternatively or also hold the continued rise of the radical right, as in Germany and the former Soviet satellite countries to the east.
Assimilation, as with German Jews pre-1930, is not much of a protection, as long as there is an identifiable group to target.
Continental Europe doesn’t have the Anglo Saxon democratic tradition. We need to remember that Germany has only been a functioning democracy post WWII, and that was imposed on it by the victors. The French have alternated between revolution and authoritarianism for much of their modern history. Continental Europe has few limits once they get going. Even Sweden, which we now regard as the home of political correctness gone mad, had a very dark history with Eugenics. They really do not have limits once they get started.
I would not rule out a sort of internal war on Islam in Continental Europe, complete with mass incarceration and expulsion. Its a slow burn, but its under way There are signs of this in Italy at the moment, Merkel may fall due to the immigration issue. Austria and Bavaria are the canaries in the coal mine.
George,
“for instance the current Home Secretary, and the current Mayor of London, both secular but Muslims”
I suggest not drawing conclusions from that. They are just the first wave. The number of non-secular Muslims (aka real Muslims, in their eyes) are growing fast. It will be a while before they claw a role in the British power structure.
Larry,
It is not the sex bots, it is the AI that goes with them. Imagine having a digital companion, someone to talk to, send text messages, remind you to buy milk. That will replace the need for a partner.
I’d never buy a robot for sex. However, I will buy the AI asap.
Sven,
That’s a great insight! Lots of talk about digital assistants, but I’ve seen nobody make that connection to the value of a human partner.