Why do many feel anxious about the future?
The sense of anxiety stems from our ignorance of what the future holds. Had we known what awaited us, we might have been at the peak of happiness, if the future were bright, or at the nadir of misery, if it were bleak. Our anxiety about the future intensifies as we age and as major events beyond our control occur, such as wars, pandemics, or serious illnesses. Typically, the future is a source of obsession for low-income individuals, who cannot guarantee having the strength or money to provide dinner for their families. The destitute and the ultra-wealthy, logically, are less concerned than others about what the future holds for them.
Professor and Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, a critic of his government’s policies, states that one of the easiest ways to instill a sense of reassurance about the future, on a broad scale, is to convince everyone to believe in the same narrative. Narratives are the true drivers of history, and they do not need to be true. Some of the most powerful narratives in history were pure fiction, while others were entirely false. However, you must make everyone, or at least a large segment of the population, believe in the same narrative. Science is not about truth—at least, that is my view as a historian—and it is not, in essence, its goal. The true goal of science as a project and an institution is not to reach the truth, but to attain power. Some individuals, and some scientists, may be deeply interested in truth on a personal level. But as an institution, the true goal of science is power. He who possesses data possesses the future, and many other things. Data is information.
He added that we are approaching a point in human history where we possess sufficient biological knowledge and computational power, and all we need to systematically penetrate the lives of millions of people is data. To penetrate people means knowing them better than they know themselves. Someone in San Francisco or Beijing knows you, knows more about you than you know about yourself—your health status, your weaknesses, your whims, and even your illnesses—as well as things you did five or twenty years ago and have completely forgotten, but they remember. This is something we have never faced before; even the intelligence agencies of old could not do this. We are already beginning to see the emergence of comprehensive surveillance systems covering residents of major cities.
In places like Israel, where we have a massive laboratory for testing the surveillance of others, called the “Occupied Territories,” where 2.5 million Palestinians live and are treated as “experimental rats” with the aim of exerting total control over them with the minimum number of soldiers, we see this dynamic in action. When we access data and analyze the information we have, we can then determine the number of soldiers needed to control millions of people, provided we possess complete and accurate data about them.
Thus, the future is worrying for many reasons, but it becomes more or less alarming depending on what we know, and on our psychologies, family or material circumstances, and health status.
Ahmad Al-Sarraf
