The foresight - and flaws - of past visionaries

In 1940, HG Wells - yes, the famous science fiction author - published a small book titled "The Rights of Man" (my copy Penguin, 2015, ISBN 978-0-241-97676-0); sexist title, notwithstanding the disclaimer Wells included, but a major step towards our modern understanding of human rights, and written with a view to stimulating discussion. I'd known about Wells' prediction of scientific advances, but was less familiar - until recently - of his foresight in other matters.

According to the Wikipedia link I gave above, Wells:

• had stated that his epitaph should be: "I told you so. You damned fools"; 
• predicted - in 1933 - that World War Part Two would begin in January, 1940.

Impressive - sadly so, but impressive.

Also included in the Wikipedia article was an explanation of the widening gap that social class would become - which was a key theme in "The Time Machine". As I look now at the growing problems of inequity that Thomas Piketty and others have so eloquently written about, and the possible future problems with employment owing to automation etc (which will simply continue to concentrate power in the hands of the already elite), I consider that Well's prediction was even more prescient than he thought.

I can see the same enhanced prescience in other writings, and in particular, part of his preamble to the revised declaration of rights contained in "The Rights of Man". Read this ...

It becomes imperative to adjust [people’s] life and institutions to these increasingly dangerous conditions. [They] being forced, almost in spite of [themselves], to collectivise what was once a patchwork of separate sovereign states and at the same time to rescue [their] economic life from devastation by the immensely enhanced growth of profit-seeking business and finance. [They are] doing this clumsily and blindly, and with a great sacrifice of happiness, and well-being. Governments become either openly collectivist under stress of necessity, or they become the instruments of monopolising financial and business organisations; their power and aggressions increase, they concentrate controls, they subordinate the functions of religious organisations, education and the press to their domination; the direction of scientific and literary work and a multitude of social activities never concede hitherto to the state, fall into their hands; they are not organised for such purposes; abuses and tyrannies increase, and liberty, and particularly liberty of thought and speech, decays. Throughout the whole world we see variations of this same subordination of the individual to the organisation of power. Phase by phase these ill-adapted governments are becoming uncontrolled absolutisms; they are killing that free play of the individual mind which Is the preservative of human efficiency and happiness. The populations under their sway, after a phase of servile discipline, are plainly doomed to relapse into disorder and violence. Everywhere war and monstrous economic exploitation break out, so that those very same increments of power and opportunity which have brought mankind within sight of an age of limitless plenty, it may be lost forever, in an ultimate social collapse.

 ... and consider the "subordination of the individual to the organisation of power" which has occurred in response to violent extremism.

At least, however, we have not reached the same state of violence as happened in , and we have people, organisations and a few nations who are working for the maintenance of freedom - guided, in part, by the vision of HG Wells, and others like him.

Here's to continuing and implementing that vision.

Postscript - I have re-read Wells' book using an e-book version, and I now consider his sexism - which is aggressively paternalistic in one place - to be too much to overlook. The general concepts and wording are worth using as quotes from time to time, but whenever I do so now, I will correct the sexism - and with no loss to the quality of writing to modern sensibilities that are free of sexism, just as writing that is free of racist pejoratives also has no loss of quality.
I've also noted others sources that have been prescient, and the blatant errors in Wells' expectations of the future (such as us all living under "collectivism by around 1960), and thus are less enamoured of Wells' predictions.