The History Channel’s new, “America: The Story of Us” was their attempt to compress 400 years of American history into 6 parts and 12 hours of time. This monumental task of telling the story in 12 hours was handed not to the finest historians, political scientist, or philosophers. Rather, the epic tale of America was handed to an array of celebrities, politicians, sports personalities, and pundits. Only the History Channel could bring you diverse commentary ranging from Sean Hannity to rapper Sean P Combs (or is it just Diddy?).
Since the existence of mankind we have always imagined future humans as more of an intelligent and advanced being. I’ve always dreamt that in the future we will be traveling in floating cars, settling on other planets, or cure cancer and the like. But, rarely does anyone think of the nature of freedom that man of the future will have or come to realize. What kind of government will people have in a hundred years, or 500 years? Will people of the future have more or less freedom than today? Will people of the future be more intelligent or less intelligent than today?
The truth is that no one knows for certain how future man will evolve both intellectually and physically or whether man will continue to exist at all. There have been a few works of fiction that have attempted to answer these questions. Perhaps we can find clues if we examine the H.G. Wells, classic “Time Machine” and the movie “Idiocracy” which are both works of fiction that offer suggestions as to what the future may hold for our descendents.
The H.G. Wells book, “Time Machine” posits the question of what man will be like in the future from the perspective of the inventor of a time machine that makes several stops in the future. At first, the time traveler is unsure of his invention and the prospects of returning to his time safely. He starts out only a few years into the future and finds that only a few things have changed. After some successful attempts into the future, the time traveler becomes more curious. He stops 20 or so years into the future and finds the world is at war. He stops 60 or so years into the future and finds the future even more troubling. At this point in the story the time traveler is in great distress about the prospect of peace in the world and decides to crank up his time machine much further into the future. Along the way he can see that the world is flashing by like swings of a pendulum from destruction to rebuilding and from peace to war. The time traveler finally arrives where the world, at last, seems to be at peace. The time traveler finds a girl and asks her, “what type of government do you have?” and she replies to him, “Government? We have no government”. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end here and we are led to believe that since there are no governments that people have become slaves to evil creatures known as Morlocks. Leave it to Wells, an unapologetic statist, to leave the reader believing that only through the elimination of social classes by way of the State can we ever find happiness. (H.G. Wells was one of the first believers in One-World-Government which he called a World State).
The topic is again revisited via a time "masheen" of sorts in the 2003 movie, “Idiocracy”. In this movie, the character Joe is selected for a one year cryogenic experiment by the U.S. Army because he is perfectly average in every sense of the word. The experiment goes defunct however, and Joe is forgotten until his capsule opens after being in a trash landslide 500 years into the future. Joe awakens to find the world that cannot even solve humanities most basic problems. He is quickly snapped up as an “unscannable” due to his lack of UPC tattoo, which is used to identify everyone, and arrested. At his mock trial, Joe states his case logically and passionately only to find that justice in the future was not only blind but rather retarded as well. It is then discovered that Joe’s aptitude tests taken before he was sent to prison reveal him to be the smartest man alive. Joe is then given the opportunity to earn a Presidential pardon if he can solve all of their problems in two weeks. After a tumultuous battle with the dumb masses Joe goes on to solve some of the more obvious problems and eventually becomes President as well.
I find it very interesting that the consensus of both works of fiction find the future not to be a place of more intelligence and human advancement but a place where freedom is non-existent and our wits dulled beyond repair. Both works, however flawed, have discovered that there is distinct link between intelligence and freedom.
We should examine our present conditions in an attempt to make any link between the “now” and the future. When we are born we have our footprints inked and placed upon an official State document. We are enrolled in a social security system that pays out more than it receives by no choice of our own. Most of us are enrolled in government run schools where individuality is suppressed by an onslaught of standardized testing, pledge of allegiance, federalized textbooks, and an increase in lowering standards - all funded by tax payers by no choice of their own. We are given permission to travel by way of license and fined or imprisoned for not having such. When we enter the workforce we find that part of our wages has been deducted to pay for things we do not want by no choice of our own or face fines or imprisonment for noncompliance. If we wish to start our own business we are subjected to zoning, licensing, permits, and inspections before we conduct a living for ourselves. We find our major media outlets to be engaging in bias rather than hard journalistic facts. We find our money only worth something because of legal tender laws which make it so. We face the likelihood that our own health decisions will be decided by someone other than us.
Do we now have the clues as to what type of future mankind may have? I can only piece together some broken fragments from my imagination to formulate my opinions on our future. In order to make any proper forecast you must also look at the past. In past years we have to ask if we are more free than today and whether we believe we may have been more intelligent than today? Well, judging by the fact that most of the “conditions” we have to meet to be in “compliance” by our own government didn’t exist at the time this nation was founded we must say no –we are not more free and are not continuing to get freer. The question of intelligence is harder to answer because we would need to know when human intelligence had peaked and when it began to fall. However, when you see “America: The Story of Us” with commentary from Donald Trump, Al Sharpton, Tim Gunn, Melissa Etheridge, Michael Strahan, Margret Cho, Sean Combs, or Tom Brokaw you may have just found the keystone to an argument against any prospect of a more intelligent human in the future.
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