How fear for the future can help build a better one

Guess this decade: World leaders court controversy, uncertainty dominates public discourse and books about ecological collapse and democratic fragility top bestseller lists.

You’d be forgiven for thinking we are talking about the 2020s but the 1970s can be remembered as much for its anxieties about the future as for its immediate challenges, such as inflation, threat of nuclear war and terrorism.

The 1980s, too, carried a sense of unease: heightened nuclear tensions, the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS, economic turbulence and widespread social fears around drugs, crime and cultural change.

And the 1990s? Often recalled as an era of optimism after the Cold War, they also brought reminders of instability: a major recession, humanitarian crises and the emergence of new forms of terrorism.

In 1995, 85% said the “American Dream” was dead and in 1997, just 17% thought the next generation would be better off than they were.

With a great deal of hindsight bias, we now believe it was the decade of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, meaning, from now on all states would thrive for democracy and capitalism. But at the time, it was Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations – where he proposed that the future would be defined by ethnic conflict – that dominated how we looked at the future, afraid of bloody ethnic strife.

Even the 1950s, today celebrated for its alleged optimism, was in reality a bonanza of fears of nuclear war, communism, a recession and youth delinquency caused by rock’n’roll.

The truth is, no decade has ever leaned back in its chair and sighed, “Yes, the future is a good one.” That is because it is completely normal to worry about the future, as every generation does.

And, just like today, every generation is convinced that this is the first time things have been so bad. Today, we have Peter Thiel proclaiming that it is the “End of the Future,” because the speed of innovation has slowed down.

In 1918, German philosopher Oswald Spengler published a book titled The Decline of the West, positing that the era of great discoveries and cultural innovations was over.

In the late 1940s, British historian Arnold Toynbee echoed similar sentiments, convinced that Western civilization was exhibiting signs of creative exhaustion and spiritual decline.

In the 1960s, Daniel Bell proclaimed, much like Fukuyama, The End of Ideology and later made very similar statements to Thiel’s today, lamenting the end of innovation.

The irony is that each of these works was followed by a time that proved precisely the opposite. The decade following Spengler’s decline thesis gave us TV and radio, nuclear physics, antibiotics, aviation, plastics, cinema, jazz, Bauhaus, modernism, democracy, decolonization and the women’s right to vote.

Toynbee was proven wrong by space exploration, computers, birth control, the discovery of DNA, the emergence of a global financial order and the establishment of the European Union.

Bell was followed by the personal computer revolution, the biotechnology boom and the internet explosion, all driven by precisely the kind of entrepreneurial vision he thought was ending.

And in the 15 years since Thiel bemoaned the end of innovation, we have seen the arrival of private space exploration, new vaccines, artificial intelligence, solar and wind energy and the smartphone. So, were these writers just panicking over nothing?

No, they are part of the same general production cycle as the future. They turn out wrong because their fears stimulate actions that have the opposite effect.

Generating the future unfolds in this manner: humans – possibly the only species capable of vividly imagining a time that has never existed – draw cues from the past and present and construct the future as a realm of possibilities both positive and negative.

This future can evoke either feelings of desire to achieve it or fear if it’s an undesirable one.

Where you fall on the emotional spectrum depends not so much on your intellect or knowledge, but on your personality and the feeling itself has only limited predictive value.

Optimists tend to achieve better results; however, some fear can also propel them into action when they are framed with efficacy messages. And this action then changes the trajectory of the future.

Simply put, the reason the future ultimately becomes a better present than today is that we are scared of it.

History is full of examples to that effect. The gloomy predictions from Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb (1968) foresaw millions of deaths by the 1980s due to famine. However, Ehrlich assumed no technological or social progress and both ultimately undermined his scenario.

Thanks to the Green Revolution, corn production quadrupled and thanks to increased literacy, fertility rates began to decrease.

Science fiction films such as Soylent Green (1973) and Day of the Animals (1977) depicted a future filled with pollution and a depleted ozone layer, contributing to an avalanche of legislation that not only saved the ozone layer but also has today created cleaner air in most Western capitals than in the 1850s.

NATO spent decades imagining and preparing for the worst possible war with the Soviet Union, which then didn’t happen precisely because of this readiness. And then there is fear for democracy – a constant feature since this system was born.

Every single decade of the last century saw profound fears whenever the toxic three forces – societal polarization, economic downturn and constitutional vulnerability – converged. And while we are in yet another one of those phases, it is easy to forget that 100 years ago, democracy was a minority system that persevered against various dictatorships.

It has proven to be not just resilient but also capable of rebounding after backsliding, as seen in countries such as Malawi, Poland and Brazil.

For instance, in Poland, a coalition of parties set aside their differences to restore democracy, supported by a high voter turnout. In Malawi, the annulment and re-run of the 2020 election represented a form of democratic resilience, demonstrating that the courts could check executive power.

And in Brazil, backsliding was not just halted by the re-election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, but also by institutions staying strong during the storming of the Supreme Court.

This is not to say that the fears for and of the future are unfounded. However, our discomfort with these concerns should not cloud the fact that they have a purpose. Humans possess the capacity to imagine a future, so we take action in the present.

Therefore, our fears are normal and serve as a tool that shapes our future. We are not entitled to the absence of fear of the future; we are born with it. Instead of bemoaning all the things that can go wrong, we have to take action so that they don’t go wrong.