Futurists & The American Tradition of Long-Term Strategic Thinking

I always imagined I could do something to impact the world without being given institutional permission to do so. To do this, we must give ourselves permission to be bold in ways that frighten most people. Bold means showing up first and making contact with the danger from the civilizational problem you wish to solve, where you otherwise would never be given permission to do so. Ordering hierarchies within slow institutions are incompatible with a frontier mindset.

When a genuinely new domain emerges, institutional authority temporarily disappears because no institution has accumulated experience there. During that period, the people closest to the frontier possess the greatest authority. This is the result of selection pressure in the wild eliminating everything unfit to survive in uncertainty.

To become to this person, I suggest that we not think in social categories, ranks, organizations, and track records. Instead, I suggest we think of the world and all the institutions in it as flat. Whoever shows up first defines the terrain before institutions have time to organize around it. Frequency of contact with the frontier is proportional to our authority in it—a hierarchy established exclusively by frontier proximity. This is where the tradition of futurism comes from.

What is more, Futurism is America's tradition of long-term thinking. America's greatest strategic advantage has never been toughness or coordination. It has been individuals willing to move into the unknown before anyone else. It is people driven by entirely different reward structures from everyone else. Imagine a better future for everyone being your primary reward. For many of them, this is the reward of the futurist.

Those futurists are our first line of defense in an era of accelerating competition and incredible uncertainty, both internally and externally. They are the people who refuse to allow fear, bureaucracy, or those who wish to slow our social, intellectual, and scientific progress to determine the future. The future has always belonged to those willing to build it first. Some things take decades to plan and build. That is the role of the Futurist. It's definitely not the role of those more concerned with their place in social and institutional hierarchies than those concerned with the world itself. It becomes a mindset.

Futurism is America's tradition of long-term thinking. America's greatest strategic advantage has never been its wealth, strategic location, history, or power. It has been individuals willing to move into the unknown before anyone else; futurists are our first line of defense in an era of accelerating competition and profound uncertainty, both internally and externally. Futurists are the people who refuse to allow fear, bureaucracy, or those who wish to slow our social, intellectual, and scientific progress to determine the future. The future has never belonged to those who waited for permission from a central or electoral authority. The future never belonged to those who seek consensus from their communities, countries, or other collectives.

The future almost exclusively belongs to those—sometimes random—novelty-seeking and high-risk taking rugged individualists and futurists who give themselves permission to go into the dark void and build it before everyone else arrives. The American version of long-term thinking is led by these types of personalities who see what needs to be done in the quietness of their own mind, and then act on it before slower institutions can follow in on behind them. These are people less concerned with their place in the world, in an organization, and more consumed with the world itself, creating an ordering hierarchy defined not by statuts and titles, but by over-the-wire tested competence and solo or small team high risk-reward success rates. They are the Infantry scouts and pioneers of the American civilization who have, and forever will, pave the future for the rest of us.