F. M. Esfandiary - Up-Wingers: A Futurist Manifesto

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UP-WINGERS
by F.M. ESFANDIARY
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Non-Fiction

Copyright 1973 by F. M. Esfandiary

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

This book is dedicated to visionaries everywhere who catalyze humanity's advances and who represent the best in each of us.

introduction

I have often been told that I am too optimistic about the future.

How can anyone be too optimistic?

My regret is that I am not optimistic enough. It is not possible to project the fantastic worlds which will continue to open up to us in the coming years. Worlds which far transcend my most daring optimism.

No one today can be too optimistic.

* * * *

We are daily surging ahead in many areas: biologygeneticsphysicsbiochemistryastronomymedicinesurgeryfetologycommunicationtransportationfood-productioncomputationweather-forecastingenvironmental monitoringinternational relationsinterpersonal relationsself-image.

Advances in these and many other areas since 1955 have been more monumental than all the progress in the previous two thousand years.

Even fifteen years ago many of today's breakthroughs would have been dismissed as fantasiestoo Utopian and optimistic. To us they are already routine.

This rate of advance is now accelerating. Progress is faster and more global than ever.

* * * *

Precisely because of the accelerating rate of change we urgently need plans for the coming years.

Unfortunately most projections of the future are pessimistic. Western intellectuals in particular, hobbled by puritan guilt and self-doubts, flood the world with books and films and scenarios foredooming the future. To them our successes and potentials are not real. Only our failures.

Their reactionary outlook has helped make people afraid of progress and the future. If the future is so bleak is the unconscious reasoning why think about it? Safer to hide in the womb of the past or of Mother Nature."

We must develop a bold new philosophy of the future. A hopeful outlook which can embolden people to want to face the future. To want to plan for it.

More than ever we need short-range and long-range plans. Guidelines to help us steer our onrushing breakthroughs making them work for all humanity.

In our fluid times however plans and guidelines (such as I have outlined in this book) cannot be definitive. Lengthy guidelines may have been possible in slower times. Today we cannot and should not even attempt to structure the future through elaborate plans. Our increasingly fluid times demand fluid guidelines.

The plans I have worked out here are for the Near Future and the Middle Futurethe next twenty thirty forty years.

Beyond 2020 the human situation will have changed so unrecognizably that it is superfluous to plan for it now.

* * * *

In this tract I have bypassed the plodding pace of print. Most books are too slow for our times. Up-Wingers addressed primarily to the fluidattempts to approximate the rhythm of electronics. Brief crisp rapid bursts of ideas intended to inform goad provoke catalyze...

We not only need new ideas and visionsbut also need new ways to communicate them.

F. M. Esfandiary

PART 1

cosmic upheaval on planet earth

A cosmic upheaval is now surging on Planet Earth.

We are at a major evolutionary milestone.

3 billion years ago the emergence of life in the oceans.

400 million years ago the emergence of life on land.

70 million years ago the primates.

3 million years ago the rise of animal/humans.

Today the emergence of a new concept of life

1. beyond the animal/human.

2. extending beyond Planet Earth.

This Cosmic Upheaval is one of the most extraordinary developments in the entire evolution of life on this planet. The last evolutionary leap of such magnitude occurred millions of years ago.

It is important to understand that some of the breakthroughs now burgeoning all around us are no longer simply historicbut evolutionary.

The asexual creation of new mutants and the emergence of cyborgs are not historic developments. They are evolutionary breakthroughs. The biological upheaval now in its infancy is moving toward radically new concepts of lifebeyond animal/human.

The bursts to the moon and to the planets are also not historic events. They are major evolutionary breakthroughs. The Space Age still in its infancy is catapulting us beyond the premises that govern life on this planet. We are witnessing today the very beginning of a cosmic dimension which is not only altering life on this planet but affecting our entire solar system and the universe beyond.

Today when we speak of immortality and of going to another world we no longer mean these in a theological or metaphysical sense. People are now striving for physical immortality. People are now traveling to other worlds.

Transcendence is no longer a metaphysical concept. It has become reality.

* * * *

These new dimensions in human life defy all our philosophiesall our social economic political systemsall our age-old concepts of life and natureTime and Space.

Until now human civilizations throughout the ages have been predicated on the same fixed premises

Nature governs all life on this planet.

We are bound by the laws of evolution.

We are confined to flesh and blood bodies.

We are permanently confined to this planet.

We are finitewe are born and we die. Today so far as we know for the first time since the emergence of life on this planet all these premises are challenged.

We have no philosophy no ideology no conceptual or social system to accommodate this emerging dimension.

This new cosmic dimension defies all our human traditions.

We now need new conceptual frameworks and new visions to guide us as we venture into uncharted spheres which are potentially full of hope.

up-wingers

To transcend more rapidly to higher levels of evolution we must begin by breaking out of the confinement of traditional ideologies.

We are at all times slowed down by the narrowness of Right-wing and Left-wing alternatives. If you are not conservative you are liberal if not right of center you are left of it or middle of the road.

Our traditions comprise no other alternatives. There is no ideological or conceptual dimension beyond conservative and liberal beyond Right and Left.

Right and Lefteven the extreme Leftare traditional frameworks predicated on traditional premises striving in obsolete ways to attain obsolete goals.

The premises of the entire Left are indistinguishable from those of the entire Right. The extreme Left is simply a linear extension of the extreme Right. The liberal is simply a more advanced conservative. The radical Left a more advanced liberal. You can move farther and farther Left to the most radical Left you will still be advancing within an intrinsically orthodox framework.

It is no longer only the Right that is conservative. The entire Left is also suddenly conservative. The liberal and the radical Left have fallen behind. But they will not face their new conservatism. They resist and attack the new breakthroughsthe more they resist the more conservative they grow and therefore the more cynical.

There is no cynicism more bitter than that of liberals or radical Left-wingers who sense that they have fallen behind the times.