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Fred Polak Quotes
1907–1985 Netherlands
Frederik Lodewijk Polak (May 21, 1907 – September 17, 1985) was a Dutch sociologist, politician and futurist. He was one of the Dutch founding fathers of futures studies, perhaps best known in the field for theorising the central role of imagined alternative futures in his classic work The Image of the Future.
Netherlands Academics Authors Businesspeople Politicians Also known as: Polak, Fred
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Optimum realization aims at a harmonious synthesis of effectiveness and justice in the furthest possible surveyable part of future time.
Once he (man) became conscious of creating images of the future, he became a participant in the process of creating this future.
Social change will be viewed as a push-pull process in which a Society is at once pulled forward by its own magnetic images of an idealized future and pushed from behind by its realized past.
The brain attempts to recognize this odor image by scanning and resolving it into previously stored patterns
Awareness of ideal values is the first step in the conscious creation of images of the future... for a value is by definition that which guides a 'valued' future.
My own philosophical position, if I may put it that way, is very briefly as follows
The effectiveness to be aimed at calls for the application and refinement of all conceivable prognostic techniques for adding to knowledge of the future, including those which can be effectively developed over an ever-wider time scale.
All kinds of separate, fragmented portions of the jigsaw puzzle are of little avail, unless they are fitted together in the best possible way, to form an image of the future depicting a number of main areas of development.
Values, means and ends... [that drive this process in current societies; mean that we now] stagger under the double load of not only having to construct (his) own future but having to create the values that will determine its design.
Every great thinker who has concerned himself with the historical process has speculated about the meaning of time and its flow in history. Marx, Hegel, Spengler, Toynbee, and Sorokin, each with his own variation on the theme of time-flow as mechanically patterned fluctuation, predict the future but ignore its dynamic interaction with the past and the present.
The trends in modem technology reveal most clearly the contrasting modes of development in thinking about the future. Technology offers an unprecedented confirmation of the possibilities of the utopia, often far exceeding the utopian fantasies in its concrete achievements. Through technology, Homo sapiens can transform ail things; at last man appears to be master of his own fate.
The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society's image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive.
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