The dissonance between the dystopia of Blade Runner and the reality of our futuristic-sounding current years produces some feeling I don’t know what to call. It’s a mix of relief and horror. The worst near-future that the popular mind could accept in the 1980’s was some sort of corporate, dilapidated, post-Western slum where you didn’t know who was human or not. It sounds bad until you realise that the reality is somehow both better and worse. Sure, most people don’t live out on the streets, but our world is every bit as debauched as the worst 80’s nightmares predicted and we don’t even have flying cars.
Visions of the future have changed radically over the decades. You don’t hear a lot about it from before the 1950’s but it existed, at least before the wars, in the Victorian mind. They were great dreamers, and likely at the peak of our civilisation, they began dreaming about the world beyond their time. Naturally it was a world of incredible innovation and increasing human freedom. The dream of walking on another heavenly body was no longer the sole purview of isolated eccentrics. The 1950’s mostly continued this optimism but added in political overtones from the Cold War of a heavily armed and aggressive “thing” destroying the whole world. In the 1960’s and 70’s futurism developed into something closer to what we today call science fiction, from whence we get complicated scientific plot devices and diplomatic interactions with alien races in the visions of Asimov and Rodenberry. This is the first time I will ask you to take note in this article. Consider those names. Look at what has happened here - the natural forward projection of Western culture has been hijacked, commodified, and systematised by outsiders.
In the 1980’s the dream turns sour. 1979 brought Alien, later came Blade Runner and Terminator. For probably the first time, optimistic futurism is overtaken by something beyond us and out of our control - the good guys don’t always win like they did in the 1950’s. There is the dark cool of dystopia noir, a new feeling arising wherein Western man can see himself walking the rainy neon inner-city wearing a trenchcoat, a nihilist, individualist sort of optimism and no great civilisational impetus. The 1990’s post-Soviet world gave us more Star Trek, new age culture (second wave hippy-ism), and eternal childhood. There isn’t a whole lot to say about futurism in this period apart from a brief wave pre-Y2K which probably came from the internet, and what we now think of as “generic” futurism, the sleek and streamlined world of Minority Report, the awakening from the corporate 90’s back into the 80’s dystopia that The Matrix represented. Just as with the 1960’s onward, it is simulated futurism, a Hollywood palimpsest of other material packaged up and presented to the normies, often with utter and belittling disdain for them. No organic dreaming has been had for decades by this point.
Then at the Climax of the Obama era we get another run of the doomed future genre. Young adult fiction of the time was widely regarded as wholly dystopian; The Hunger Games, Maze Runner, etc., are visions for the youth that telegraph a world of no self-actualisation. They are taught to survive and wait for a hero, because the adults are all evil and the system is unbreakable. It’s probably no coincidence that these visions of the future came from a generation of writers who had grown up in a culture that had not manifested an organic vision for itself for decades, let alone actually achieved anything laid out in a previous one.
Finally we arrive at the crux of this article: There has been at least three generations born in the West with no organic vision of the future. How is it that none of the futures dreamt of since Victorian times have come to pass, why weren’t they actualised? There’s no eternal innovation and freedom, no sleek flying cars and white-picket-fence floating island households, no space colonies - it’s been 70 years, why aren’t we living in a 1950’s future? It’s 40 years since the 80’s, why aren’t we hiding in backstreets from the neon lights of MegaCorp? 20 years after Y2K and the internet is verging on unusable. All of these futuristic things sort-of happened, they had bits and pieces come true for us but not in a good way. What has happened? Simply, the elites, the actualisers of society, are not of the same stock as the dreamers and prophets. Recall when I asked you to take note above. Spiritually they are different, they are rubber-stampers and lever-pullers. Ethnically, they are strangers to us, outsiders who have a huge chip on their shoulder and something to prove (namely that we are bad and wrong). They have a wholly different conception of what society should be and they have the means to enable it. Our future since well before the 1950’s has been hijacked. We can even see this in popular fashion trends - fashion has always come and gone, but the drastic changes that now define each decade post-WW2 have melted into one. Go outside and look (unless you’re under curfew) - even kids are wearing completely different styles to each other. There’s no longer a shared subconscious among Westerners, because we are increasingly surrounded by divergent visions. You can wear whatever you want, dream whatever you want, identify however you want, because just over the road is a woman who doesn’t speak your language in bright sub-Saharan patterning with 6 kids. Why even bother?
Maybe we are coming up to a new dreaming. Before the US election in 2016, the anonymous culture-making machines of the internet began to realise the power of memetic projection and started creating new visions. In many ways they were a rehashing of older ones, but something began to be knitted together, the lights started to flicker back on as the vision coalesced out of the nebulae. Much as we may love our Western traditions and the tradlife dream, there is power in harnessing progress, accepting it and using it to dream for yourself once more. You can mould something new and inspiring. Remember inspiration? Remember hope? That is part of the appeal of Elon Musk’s visions, and where he is clearly an outlier among the wealthy and successful. Before moving to America, Musk had lived in hell on Earth, and even before that life in Canada he’d had the misfortune to be born white in South Africa. Like Eastern Europe, he has seen our bureaucrats’ vision of fully automated luxury gay diverse space communism, and his instincts seem to be to lead us around it. He is a politically neutral agent, don’t take his words in public too seriously as I’m not even sure he believes a lot of what he says when in PR-mode. But he presents us with a thoroughly Western vision of the future which is smart, streamlined, aesthetic, unobtrusive, and natural. The latest SpaceX rocket designs hearken back to the glorious 1950’s vision of space travel. Why doesn’t your company hearken back to some profoundly Western aesthetic? You can’t simultaneously complain about the bland, ugly, and uninspired future we are being served and yet refuse to colour your own present with things that are beautiful and inspire you to hope again.
Too many conservatives/traditionalists/rightists have completely given up all hope on the future and retreated into their libraries. They have seen too many awful futures and they have been psychologically manipulated by Hollywood into thinking the future will be completely against them, administrated by people that hate them, and engineered by misguided visionaries. It’s true, we are in a place that wise men from ages past warned us about. It’s also true that those who ignore traditional attitudes about the world will perish in some kind of horrific post-Western collapse scenario. But that does not mean abandoning the future to save the past. Recall the parable of the talents - if you love Western culture, you won’t bury it like Gobekli Tepe in the hope that you can dig it up later and admire it or that some future archaeologist will spread the word on how great things once were for us. You also won’t tear it down and debase it, obviously, because you don’t really hate it, you just hate what it’s becoming. Love does not destroy, it slowly builds, it strengthens and reinforces before adding something new. It is difficult to look away from the purity of beauty and courage we find in Western history and force our eyes onto this abomination we live in, but only because we have no visions for our future. It may not be time for people to wake up, not yet at least, because there is nothing for them to wake up to. Perhaps it is instead time for us to deeply dream, for ourselves, for the first time in a long time.