by Jose Ramos
Introduction
In this essay I touch on a few of the insights I’ve gathered over the last decade in the futures studies field, hopefully of benefit for thinking about the next generation of practitioners. I don’t think the emerging generation of practitioners is any different than any previous. Each has to invent itself the same as the last one. This is therefore just one dip into a conversation for generational evolution. To consider generational evolution I’m going to use a kind of kitchen dialectics. I’ve done and seen a few stupid things over the years, so I’m going to employ some old fashion Maoist self-criticism as well as hypocritical finger pointing. What use is a revolution if we can’t conjure up counter-revolutionaries from our distorted imaginations, anyways? Who knows, perhaps I’ll send myself out to a work camp to re-learn a few things. In this sense, it is a personal and inter-personal dialectics, a dialectics of stupidity, but hopefully through reflection it becomes a dialectics of wisdom. Of course the wisdom of today becomes the stupidity of tomorrow, so all of this might also be quickly dated. But then the stupidities of today may also become the wisdoms of tomorrow as well! The nature of cultural and ideational change is complex, if not entertaining.(continue…)