While people are worried about the future today - the keywords include climate change and lack of resources - many intellectuals in the 1960s were thinking the opposite. As futurologists, they wanted to take the future by storm and finally turn "the world in the year 2000" into the promised land that the British economist John Maynard Keynes had already painted as a utopia in the sky of their dreams in 1930.
Thanks to capital growth, increased productivity and increasing technological progress, the economy towards the beginning of the 21st century would not only meet the basic needs of all people, but also ensure that no one would go to work for more than 15 hours a week. Futurologists in the 1960s raved about paradisiacal conditions without asking themselves whether people could even endure paradise. Didn't the Bible say that they had no business being there and were driven out?
As the sociologically oriented futurologists unrestrainedly celebrated the imminent arrival in the promised land of doing nothing, the physicist Dennis Gabor, who was soon to win a Nobel Prize, also thought about "Humanity Tomorrow", as his book published in 1969 was called, in which he listed "three great dangers" that "threaten our culture: annihilation by nuclear war, paralysis due to overpopulation and the age of leisure."
Gabor said that in the first two cases, people know what to do, as they are in a situation for which evolution has prepared them well with their struggle for survival. And contrary to the economist's hope, the physicist feared that "people are not at all psychologically prepared for the age of leisure." He points out that Keynes knew this, but only wrote it covertly. In his essay "The Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren", he said that "for those who have to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, leisure is a long-awaited dessert - until they get it." What people need is neither paradise nor eternal peace. What gives them the desire to live is the struggle and the hope of proving themselves in the process. In the USA, they say, "Winning isn't everything, winning is the only thing." But you can only win if you have fought first. This is what "humanity tomorrow" needs: battles that it can win. For example, against climate change.
