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perceive of the future (the match being ignited), we know how to act now
(strike!). This leads me immediately to draw a conclusion, namely:
At any moment we are free to act toward the future we desire.
In other words, the future will be as we wish and perceive it to be. This
may come as a shock only to those who let their thinking be governed by
the principle that demands that only the rules observed in the past shall
apply to the future. For those the concept of “change” is inconceivable, for
change is the process that obliterates the rules of the past.
Quality/Quantity
In order to protect society from the dangerous consequences of change, not
only a whole branch of business has emerged, but also the Government has
established several offices that busy themselves in predicting the future by
applying the rules of the past. These are the Futurists. Their job is to confuse
quality with quantity, and their products are “future scenarios” in which the
qualities remain the same, only the quantities change: more cars, wider high-
ways, faster planes, bigger bombs, etc. While these “future scenarios” are
meaningless in a changing world, they have become a lucrative business for
entrepreneurs who sell them to corporations that profit from designing for
obsolescence.
With the diagnosis of the deficiency to perceive qualitative change, that
is, a change of our subject-object and subject-subject relationships, we are
very close to the root of the epidemic that I mentioned in my opening
remarks. An example in neurophysiology may help to comprehend the
deficiency that now occurs on the cognitive level.
The visual receptors in the retina, the cones and the rods, operate opti-
mally only under certain conditions of illumination. Beyond or below this
condition we suffer a loss in acuity or in color discrimination. However, in
the vertebrate eye the retina almost always operates under these optimal
conditions, because of the iris that contracts or dilates so as to admit under
changing conditions of brightness the same amount of light to the recep-
tors. Hence, the scenario “seen” by the optic nerve has always the same illu-
mination independent of whether we are in bright sunshine or in a shaded
room. How, then, do we know whether it is bright or shady?
The information about this datum resides in the regulator that compares
the activity in the optic nerve with the desired standard and causes the iris
to contract when the activity is too high, and to dilate when it is too small.
Thus, the information of brightness does not come from inspecting the sce-
nario—it appears always to be of similar brightness—it comes from an
inspection of the regulator that suppresses the perception of change.
There are subjects who have difficulties in assessing the state of their reg-
ulator, and thus they are weak in discriminating different levels of bright-
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