To hear many liberals talk, one might guess they all live in the year 2075. These future denizens are just visiting the rest of us in the present, to inform us of what’s coming and the verdict of generations unborn.
Have you noticed this phenomenon?
A certain subspecies of progressive cannot open his/her/xer mouth without pronouncing with great authority the judgements of the future. Here is a recent example from Future Man and DOJ inquiry target John Brennan:
Rand Paul is beneath contempt.
He typifies the worst of @realDonaldTrump’s craven enablers.
Any Senator excusing this dangerous behavior makes a mockery of public service.
History will revile all of you. https://t.co/3BLs2kmtti
— John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) February 4, 2020
According to Brennan, future history (or “fu-story”) will rain calumny on Senator Paul for asking that impeachment facts known by the House be brought into the sunlight for examination by the Senate.
How does Brennan know what fu-story thinks with such certainty? Why, because justice! Because freedom! Because democracy! Senator Paul is an enemy of all these ideals, and the All-Knowing Revolutionary One-World Zorbac Government of 2075 will most assuredly history-slap Senator Paul for his ignorant sins of the present … or something like that.
Educating Senator Paul about his approaching fu-story villain-hood seems to be Brennan’s attempt at shaming Senator Paul into shutting up. (In case you are curious, it reeeeeally didn’t work.)
The impeachment has brought on fu-story fits from a lot of Twitter graphomaniacs. Future Woman Alyssa Milano wrote to newly converted Future Man Mitt Romney:
Thank you for doing what’s right, @MittRomney. History will remember you as a decent, courageous, man among cowards and fools. pic.twitter.com/YPQkDTex1p
— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) February 5, 2020
And Future Man Josh Gad–a comedian who will be funny sometime in the future–added his fu-story verdict against all those senators who did not see the writing on the wall and vote to convict President Trump in the Senate, as Romney did:
Thank you @SenatorRomney for your political courage and for honoring your oath to the Constitution. Your colleagues will not be kindly looked upon in the history books of tomorrow.
— Josh Gad (@joshgad) February 5, 2020
Sweeping future judgements of strangers and the whole world used to be the wheelhouse of nut jobs wearing sandwich boards on the sidewalk, or insular cults with peculiar sex practices.
Hard-headed people with education thought that–outside carefully controlled events like physics experiments–predicting future outcomes with certainty was impossible and quite literally insane. And predicting future people’s viewpoints on current events and practices? MOST insane of all.
The fu-story craze seems to trace back at least in part to the patron saint of fu-story, Barack Obama. Obama spoke about fu-story and its judgements all the time. Barry O apparently didn’t have as much private confidence in fu-story as he demonstrated in public, spying on Candidate Trump to make sure he didn’t derail fu-story with his MAGA nonsense (which fu-story will find repulsive).
But Obama has been surpassed. There is no greater future-history expert alive today than teenage Swedish climate mega-tourist Greta Thunberg. For example, back in July, Thunberg said:
If [adult leaders] don’t act now, then in the future they will be seen as some of the greatest villains in human history and we will not judge them easy. But, I mean, they can still change that.
It’s all there: “future … villains … history … judgement … REPENT!” Future Man Leonardo DiCaprio echoed Thunberg’s fu-story warning when he had the humbling privilege of meeting Her Futureness:
History will judge us for what we do today to help guarantee that future generations can enjoy the same livable planet that we have so clearly taken for granted.
Americans have been brainwashed for decades by Hollywood and their partners in the academy and media. The creative and tenured illuminati continue to flog an ineluctable Star-Trek future. Earth will live under a benevolent one-world government, and all enlightened people will get along in a sparkling progressive Utopia that resembles one giant university campus.
As dramatized, future people look back on militaries, borders, national identification, fossil fuel use, law enforcement, personal defensive weapons, religion, differences between the sexes, and eating a good steak as practices of bygone dark ages.
But as Woody Allen pointed out in Sleeper, the opposite future is just as likely:
Conservatives have let the magical thinking of fu-story slide by unchallenged for too long. Some conservatives even make the unforced error of taking fu-story seriously and attempting to refute it: “No! YOU are going to be judged by history, John Brennan! So there!”
The real antidote is simple: “You think you can predict the future and the thoughts of future people? Pfffft! Please! You can’t even predict what will happen in a year. If you could, you’d be a stock-picking multi-billionaire ….”
If REAL history and scientific inquiry have taught humanity anything, it is that none of us knows for sure what the future holds. That is the essence of conservatism:
Don’t assume you know what comes next, then force reckless and irresponsible change on society. You might get a nasty surprise–like social chaos, mass murder, economic depression, or mass starvation. If you doubt these dangers lurk, ask the Soviets.
Fu-story is toxic. It transforms real human beings into characters in a drama with a predetermined ending. The Nazis and Bolsheviks both thought they had a lock on the future–most psychotic mass movements do. As Eric Hoffer wrote in his classic work of socio-political thought The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements:
The followers of a mass movement see themselves on the march with drums beating and colors flying. They are participants in a soul-stirring drama played to a vast audience–generations gone and generations yet to come. they are made to feel that they are not their real selves but actors playing a role, and their doings a “performance,” rather than as the real thing.
Stories are nice, but they are STORIES. In real life, you can’t flip to the end of the book and find out what happens, or what people will wind up doing and thinking.
Treating real life like a story is called “fortune telling,” and fortune telling is unserious entertainment. It’s past time for liberals’ fu-story to be laughed at–publicly, loudly, and often.
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