The Taboo on Foresight To see "outside" an existing system breaches a convention that helps keep the system functioning. Every social order incorporates among its key taboos the notion that people living in it should not think about how it will end and what rules may prevail in the new system that takes its place. Implicitly, whatever system exists is the last or the only system that will ever exist. Not that this is so baldly stated. Few who have ever read a history book would find such an assumption realistic if it was articulated. Nonetheless, that is the convention that rules the world. Every social system, however strongly or weakly it clings to power, pretends that its rules will never be superseded: They are the last word. Or perhaps the only word. Primitives assume that theirs is the only possible way of organizing life. More economically complicated systems that incorporate a sense of history usually place themselves at its apex. Whether they are Chinese mandarins in the court of the empe! ror, the Marxist nomenklatura in Stalin's Kremlin, or members of the House of Representatives in Washington, the powersthatbe either imagine no history at all or place themselves at the pinnacle of history, in a superior position compared to everyone who came before, and the vanguard of anything to come. This is true for practical reasons. The more apparent it is that a system is nearing an end, the more reluctant people will be to adhere to its laws. Any social organization will therefore tend to discourage or play down analyses that anticipate its demise. This alone helps ensure that history's great transitions are seldom spotted as they happen. If you know nothing else about the future, you can rest assured that dramatic changes will be neither welcomed nor advertised by conventional thinkers. You cannot depend upon conventional information sources to give you an objective and timely warning about how the world is changing and why. You have little choice but to figure it out for yourself.
