Remembering the Future

Probably a main reason I spend a lot of time trying to breathe some life into forgotten history, is I want to revive the idea of an attainable sustainable future. I’m no longer a young man, so this can’t be about me personally as much, although I do have a stake in the outcome. Yet I find myself driven to “keep the memes alive”.

The forgotten history is like a fading memory of a whole civilization, the one we might have built, the subjunctive future. My dad subscribed to The Futurist, a magazine, and I absorbed the notion that the future is something we plan for. Dad planned for a living.

After graduating from Princeton, having focused on philosophy, I was less sure how to implement any plans. I taught high school full time, in Jersey City. Some nights I would take the PATH train from Journal Square to Manhattan and participate in Area Center programs.

The Centers Network, as it was called, had a future facing orientation. Journalists claimed it was a cult. Maybe it was. Neil Mahoney, one of the est Trainers (right, same thing), said “cult” meant “large Irish family”.

I’d found out about est from Walter Kaufmann, then a professor of philosophy at Princeton with a lot of name recognition, and then got into conversations with David Raymond, a Princeton local, about enrolling in Werner Erhard’s program.

By the time I moved to Jersey City, with a group of friends, to share a group house, I was already volunteering around the trainings and seminars. I’d learned a lot about…