A Manual for Fortune-Telling

What follows are key essential pointers for integrating with future horizons. They are:

1. Fortune-telling isn’t chance; to really predict the future you have to understand the interweaving nature of the past, present, and future.
2. You predict the future by utilizing the fusion of imagination, logic, and induction.
3. If you want to predict the future, study the past.
4. Study all angles.
5. Personal knowledge of history and future predictions of events are symmetrical.
6. Your scope of the future is only as in-depth as your comprehension of the past.
7. There is always this timely equilibrium between past and future.
8. The man that constantly looks forward to the future is blind.
9. You can’t predict the future of a dream, only of reality.

Again, you'll notice there are not the conventional 10, but 9 key pointers. After all, a list of 10 would be all too predictable, right!:)

Fortune-telling isn’t chance; to really predict the future you have to understand the interweaving nature of the past, present, and future. A friend of mine proposed that we learn what technologies the future will hold and then “invest in that”. This is a great plan, but to answer that question you should answer another question, first. Why wasn’t Nostradamus a great world leader? He, after all, could predict future wars, catastrophes and calamities and with that foreknowledge could prevent serious calamity. He almost suffered from the Cassandra Complex, and at the very least, couldn’t implement his knowledge.

You predict the future by utilizing the fusion of imagination, logic, and induction. First, imagination creates the capacity of visualization. You can know where we’re headed and what technologies will be present in the future from logic and induction, but imagination paints that picture. The second tool for predicting future events is logic. You can do all the imagination-visualization but without logic and the predictable calculations from events in the past, the future imagination will never hold water. Logic creates the reliability of the imagination painting of the future. Finally, there’s induction. Induction opens the door of all types of possibilities of inference by expanding the association between cause and effect, action and reaction, event and consequence. Know this simple truism: all future events sequentially follow the events from the past and the immediate present.

If you want to predict the future, study the past. In the 1950s, large (500+ employees) corporate companies housed over 38% of the work force. This led to the decrease in individuality and the increase of conformity, resulting in the loss of identity. One’s loss of identity consequently produced increased dosages of TV and book reading self-medication. A surge in religious faith – 15% increase from less than half to 65% church membership – indicates the presence of soul-searching for the lost identity created by the corporate, mass-produced societies.

Look at the Kellog-Briand Pact of 1928. Couldn’t the historian who saw Germany’s economy plummet into inflammation; the French, British, and American war economies get dumped on a well as a result of World War 1 logically infer that war was globally undesirable. Through the inductive analysis of the past disdain for the economically, militaristically, and societally destructive nature of war, the consequence would be some kind of anti-war treaty.

Study all angles. Who knew that World War 2 would challenge the nature of sanity and insanity, individual versus society, and the role of rules, specifically how externally-created rules – rules created by bureaucracy, friends families, governments – form an absurd life of their own, trivializing important things like life and death, while emphasizing clerical, unimportant things. Surviving this insane system, according to Heller, is about being insane. This type of writing could be predicted with historical study of the deranged and twisted events of World War 2; it was the only natural consequence.

In the early 1900s, American society experienced a huge surge in the purchasing of so-called “big ticket” items, such as cars, refrigerators, homes, electronics, with emergence of widespread consumer credit. Let’s apply all three ingredients of fortune-telling. With induction the drastic consequence of an increase in spending would lead to a distraught, possibly strained economy. Logically, fluctuations in consumer spending result in the presence of new types of merchandise. Where is this input coming from? Well, in the past it had been purely domestic, so logically, this could create an out-of-balance, overly domesticated economy with not enough imports. Now, just throw in the side tidbit that a lot of stock market investors had been excessively relying on margin trading. Utilize imagination to visualize this 1920s landscape:
Excessive reliance on American products, not enough imports
Excessive – almost 90% -- of trades bought on margin
Recently fluctuated economy with consumer credit
The only thing you need here is a match – the 1929 Stock Market Crash, and you’ve got depression. It’s important to note that there was a 2nd major crash, a 1929 version 2.0, if you will, that occurred in 1987 – almost identical to the 1929 crash, but it was those major precedents in the 1920s that resulted in the subsequent economic depression.


Personal knowledge of history and future predictions of events are symmetrical. William Levitt started housing projects that led to mass-produced communities of suburbia. The conformity led to loneliness with company – an anomie – depicted by The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman, The Organization Man, William Whyte, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, Sloan Wilson. The content of those authors could easily have been induced by studying the increase in corporate involvement, causing the consequence of decrease in identity, causing the consequence of increase in literature about identity. Ask yourself, what are we experiencing today, that will depict the literature of tomorrow.

Apply this utilization of symmetrical past-future events with the anti-segregation laws emerging in the mid 1950s in a little town of Arkansas, where Little Rock got a little rocky. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, challenged the Plessey v. Ferguson, 1896 trial, claiming that separate schools does not equal “separate but equal” racial interaction. Bring in the old friends of induction and logic and you can infer, after lynchings, hundreds of years of slavery, and an entire civil war fought over the rights of African Americans that there was going to be some tension when 9 black students began to “legally” attend an all-white school in Arkansas. Eisenhower foresaw this and pos a squadron of 10,000 National Guardsmen and 1,000 paratroopers to protect the students. The future tension was predicted by the past so the correct actions could be taken to pave a secure integration.

Your scope of the future is only as in-depth as your comprehension of the past. The Beats were the poets who basically felt, lived, and wrote about the brunt this alienation, identityless, conformity of the late post-war era 1950s. They were vagabond poets lived a life full of jazz, drinking, Buddhism and wrote about their feelings. Most notable beats were On the Road, Kerouac and Howl, Ginsberg. Looking at the 68% rise in church-goers and the self-medication from an increase books and TV, this identityless genre can be logical inferred and imagined. Ask yourself what qualities of life have dramatically increased or decreased; those are the real shapeshifters of the future landscape.

There is always this timely equilibrium between past and future. This is what induction is all about. Take the 1950s ante-bellum (post world war 2) era. With all the model T fords, flappers, and the decade of the glorious, no one would expect that a mere 30 years later there would be an entire literary genre devoted to rebelling against the alienation produced by mass society. Before the 1950s hit, no one could predict an author like Salinger, who wrote with a stream of consciousness style, heeding the loss of innocence would become an important piece of literature reflecting that time period.

The man that constantly looks forward to the future is blind. He is facing a hurricane and will be blinded by the unfolding events. Rabbit, Run, by John Updike was a response to “On the Road” showing that families go through turmoil when a man goes on the road (Rabbit, the basketball player, in this case). Could this response to Kerouac’s works be expected to the predictor who only looks forward, who only faces the wind? No, the seasoned fortuneteller would look back and see an entire genre of anti-conformity writing had emerged from the murky depths of the anti-bellum era, whereas the person who only looked forward would only see one or two authors with this pattern and not an entire genre. The comprehensive predictor induces from a full-scale analysis of the past and consequently infers a full-scale imaginative visualization of the future.

You never want to have to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea. Such a Hobson’s choice arises by not examining the past patterns to prevent future Morton’s Forks.

You can’t predict the future of a dream, only of reality. Remember, reality implies the consequences of actions. In a dream, you can never predict the future because consequences have no bearing. With dreams, the action is severed from the reaction and the cause-and-effect sequence has no contingency. But with reality, action is tethered to consequence, creating a logical milieu, enabling the utilization of induction. In reality, induction and logic, along with imagination all have their say and all can be used to predict the future landscape.

So let's sum up this list of essential pointers for connecting with the future:

1. Fortune-telling isn’t chance; to really predict the future you have to understand the interweaving nature of the past, present, and future.
2. You predict the future by utilizing the fusion of imagination, logic, and induction.
3. If you want to predict the future, study the past.
4. Study all angles.
5. Personal knowledge of history and future predictions of events are symmetrical.
6. Your scope of the future is only as in-depth as your comprehension of the past.
7. There is always this timely equilibrium between past and future.
8. The man that constantly looks forward to the future is blind.
9. You can’t predict the future of a dream, only of reality.

Again, you'll notice there are not the conventional 10, but 9, key pointers. After all, a list of 10 would be all too predictable, right!:)