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In 1977 I gave a seminar at Stanford, about global trends. I said our global community was on course for a September 11th type event. I described an alternative procreative behavior that could change that course. The response was silence. The "universal one child per family behaviors" which could reverse these trends were not even on the intellectual horizon of the best and brightest of this Stanford seminar on Ethics of Development in a Global Environment. If this group could not understand what I had said, certainly 4.5 billion people who would have to make these decisions could not understand either. Daily and local terrorism was absent from our vision of our future. Our thinking lacked the ability to show us that future. Our thinking lacked the ability to value such a prediction if it was presented by others. Lacking either future view or way of creating it. Lacking a view of which behaviors caused the past to turn into the present. Lacking a view of which behavior turned the present into the future. There was no reason to shift behaviors to obtain an alternative future. We were going to be the first species which could see its predicament in the abstract and not be able to create the will to change it. The SKIL Dinner program at Stanford University was a direct result of this seminar experience. Between 1978 to 1988, hundreds of people attended. Bit by bit the concept of temporal blindness and its implications for our global community were collected into the two volumes presented in this web page Time Blind books.The books have not been published. Partly due to my poor writing skill. But also the harshness of a story that describes each of us as intellectually and behaviorally irresponsible. I am still working on having my community understand the content of that seminar. September 11th refocused my efforts into the current dinner program. |