e Communism collapsed and
space flight was just an expensive journey to a dead end and dead
worlds, it follows that the majority of fictional futures were founded
on fallacies. And all the rest of the extrapolations dealt with
superficial social manifestations.

"For example, they wrote about civilizations dominated by advertising
and mass-motivation techniques. It's true that during my childhood
this seemed to be a logical trend--but once demand exceeded supply,
the whole mechanism of _stimulating_ demand, which was advertising's
chief function, bogged down. And mass-motivation techniques, today,
are dedicated almost entirely to maintaining minimum resistance to a
system insuring our survival.

"Another popular idea was based on the notion of an expanding
matriarchy--a gerontomatriarchy, rather, in which older women would
take control. In an age when women outlived men by a number of years,
this seemed possible. Now, of course, shortened working hours and
medical advances have equalized the life-span. And since private
property has become less and less of a factor in dominating our
collective destinies, it hardly matters whether the male or the female
has the upper hand.

"Then there was the common theory that technological advances would
result in a push-button society, where automatons would do all the
work. And so they might--if we had an unlimited supply of raw
materials to produce robots, and unlimited power-sources to activate
them. As we now realize, atomic power cannot be utilized on a minute
scale.

"Last, but not least, there was the concept of a medically-orientated
system, with particular emphasis on psychotherapy, neurosurgery, and
parapsychology. The world was going to be run by telepaths, psychosis
eliminated by brainwashing, intellect developed by hypnotic
suggestion. It sounded great--but the conquest of physical disease has
occupied the medical profession almost exclusively.

"No, what they all seemed to overlook, with only a few exceptions, was
the population problem. You can't run a world through advertising when
there are so many people that there aren't enough goods to go around
anyway. You can't turn it over to big business when big government has
virtually absorbed all of the commercial and industrial functions,
just to cope with an ever-growing demand. A matriarchy loses its
meaning when the individual family unit changes character, under the
stress of an increasing population-pressure w