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Upwingers [MultiFormat]
eBook by F. M. Esfandiary
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$12.99 |
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$11.04 |
eBook Category: General Nonfiction
eBook Description: A lost, shining example of 70's socio-futurist wondering, Upwingers is a stirring manifesto. Real proclamations are hard to find in this day and age of sound bites and half-hearted cynicism. See why the Village Voice called F.M. Esfandiary "a man so rational, so articulately confident, that he emanates a kind of ultimate optimism--the triumph over alienation and irrationality." He deals in possibilities; he makes the unknown his favorite subject and with Upwingers, he makes the future a revolutionary rendezvous.
eBook Publisher: E-Reads, Published: e-reads, 1973
Fictionwise Release Date: October 2002
Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [116 KB]
, ePub (EPUB) [111 KB]
, Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [94 KB]
, Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [393 KB]
, Palm Doc (PDB) [107 KB]
, Microsoft Reader (LIT) [156 KB]
, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [157 KB]
, hiebook (KML) [296 KB]
, Sony Reader (LRF) [185 KB]
, iSilo (PDB) [87 KB]
, Mobipocket (PRC) [110 KB]
, Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [151 KB]
, OEBFF Format (IMP) [152 KB]
Words: 160010
Reading time: 457-640 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
 
introductionI 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: biology--genetics--physics--biochemistry--astronomy--medicine--surgery--fetology--communication--transportation--food-production--computation--weather-forecasting--environmental monitoring--international relations--interpersonal relations--self-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 fantasies--too 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 Future--the next twenty thirty forty years. Beyond 2020 the human situation will have changed so unrecognizably that it is superfluous to plan for it now.
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