Into The Future – Boldly or Not?

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

Ready or not, the future calls.  Science fiction and multiversal stories notwithstanding, time marches on, ever forward.  The future is inevitable.  Do we shape the future or are we shaped by it? As I have perused the news this last few days I have seen many pieces looking upon the future, generally with pessimism.  Such thinking presumes we shape the future – that what we do today shapes what happens tomorrow.  But is that really the case?

Let’s start with a simple tweet that makes the case that we are all “at the mercy of the bottom quintile.”  It says, “…the taxes you pay are to support the bottom quintile….”  But that is a choice, not an inevitability.  It can be changed.  Even if we lack the will to change it, events can do so for us.

An op-ed from Israel bemoans the loss of American industrial might – and how such has been the historical bulwark against tyranny.  It foreshadows a future where tyranny rules.  And yet the greatest industrial miracle America ever pulled off was not its World War II industrial output, but how fast it built the capacity to do so.  I am currently reading Gen. Leslie R, Groves, the man that ran the Manhattan Project, memoir of that project.   It is the largest, most logistically complex project in human history.  It happened in three years and was completely unforeseen going into the war.  It happened alongside the nation building up its capacity to turn out war machinery, from trucks to tanks to ships to aircraft, at a truly alarming rate.  It all happened at the flip of an historical switch.  No one, save perhaps Winston Churchill, saw it coming.

Arthur Brooks sees a Gen Z desperately afraid of risk – in virtually any form, from simple human interaction to investment – and worries the future such forebodes.  He concludes they need a serious dose of optimism – which they do.  He fails to note; however, that this fear was generated in a few short months when the world decided to cower from a germ rather than proceed boldly forward.  Gen Z was in junior and senior high when their lives were put on hold and they were told to hide in their rooms until permitted to come out.  Of course they are risk averse.  But the optimism stripped from a generation in months can be restored equally as fast.  All it took was a germ to rob them of their optimism; it could be something as small to return it.

The host worries deeply about AI.  I waffle on the subject between fear that Skynet will eventually wish to destroy us all and how much AI pessimists sound like Oppenheimer after the war whose ego told him he had given mankind the means to destroy itself – and yet here we are.  AI is not nearly as smart as we like to think it is.  Like nuclear weapons, it’s power is not as absolute as its creators imagine it to be.  The host concludes his worried piece invoking the Almighty:

The end of humanity doesn’t particularly disturb those with a certain religious conviction about God. There is a “plan” that believers hold to no matter what comes our way.

Even those profoundly confident of God’s infinite goodness must still ask what does God expect of mere mortals staring at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

The answer: Don’t go there.

The cautionary note is heard and understood, but it is also self-contradictory.  Mankind disobeyed God and did in fact eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  We are not the better for it, but we are here.  God and His providence, otherwise known as “history,” intervened.  God’s effort to return mankind to the state in which He intended us to live continues.

The future is not in our hands, we just like to think it is.  It is in God’s hands and there are none better.