• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

The TWA Hotel at Kennedy Airport in New York gives one an acute case of temporal dissonance. It’s a step backward in time to the “Golden Age of Travel” -- the 1960s.

But even though you’re transported back 60 years, it seems like you’re looking into the future. The original space -- the TWA Flight Center -- was designed in 1962 by noted architect Eero Saarinen.

This was a time when America was in love with the idea of the future. Science and technology were going to be our saving grace. The future was going to be a utopian place filled with flying jet cars, benign robots, and gleaming, sexy white curves everywhere.  The TWA Flight Center was dedicated to that future.

It was all part of our love affair with science and technology during the ‘60s. Corporate America was falling over itself to bring the space-age-fueled future to life as soon as possible.

That’s when Disney first envisioned the community of tomorrow that would become Epcot. Global Expos had pavilions dedicated to what the future would bring. There were four World Fairs over 12 years, from 1958 to 1970, each celebrating a bright, shiny white future. There wouldn’t be another for 22 years.

This fascination with the future was mirrored in our entertainment. “Star Trek” (pilot in 1964, series start in 1966) invited all of us to boldly go where no man had gone before, namely a future set roughly three centuries from then.

For those of us of a younger age, “The Jetsons” (original series from 1963 to 64) indoctrinated an entire generation into this religion of future worship. Yes, tomorrow would be wonderful -- just you wait and see!

That was then -- this is now. And now is a helluva lot different.

Almost no one -- especially in the entertainment industry -- is envisioning the future as anything else than an apocalyptic hellhole. We’ve done an about-face and are grasping desperately for the past. The future went from being utopian to dystopian, seemingly in the blink of an eye. What happened?

It’s hard to nail down exactly when we went from eagerly awaiting the future to dreading it, but it appears to be some time during the last two decades of the 20th century. By the time the clock ticked over to the next millennium, our love affair was over.

As Chuck Palahniuk, author of the 1999 novel Invisible Monsters, quipped, “When did the future go from being a promise to a threat?”

Our dread about the future might just be a fear of change. As the future we imagined in the 1960s started playing out in real-time, perhaps we realized our vision was a little too simplistic.

The future came with unintended consequences, including massive societal shifts. Maybe it was the uncertainty of the future that scared the bejeezus out of us.

It could also be the change in how we got our information about the impact of science and technology on our lives. It’s probably no coincidence that our fear of the future coincided with the decline of journalism.

Sensationalism and endless punditry replaced real reporting just about at the time we started this about-face.

When negative things happened, they were amplified. Fear was the natural result.

We felt out of control, and we keep telling ourselves that things never used to be this way.  

The sum total of these factors was the spread of a recognized psychological affliction called anticipatory anxiety: the certainty that the future is going to bring bad things down upon us. This went from being a localized phenomenon (“my job interview tomorrow is not going to go well”) to a widespread angst (“the world is going to hell in a handbasket”). Call it existential anticipatory anxiety.

Futurists are, by nature, optimists. They believe things will be better tomorrow than they are today.

The opposite of this mindset is called rosy retrospection, which often comes bundled with anticipatory anxiety -- a known cognitive bias that comes with a selective memory of the past, tossing out the bad and keeping only the good parts of yesterday. It makes us yearn to return to the past, when everything was better.

That’s where we are today. It explains the worldwide swing to the right. MAGA is really a four-letter encapsulation of rosy retrospection: Make America Great Again! Whether you believe that or not, it’s a message that is very much in sync with our current feelings about the future and the past.

As writer and right-leaning political commentator William F. Buckley said, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’”