Esfandiary, F. M.

Author, philosopher, designer, long-range planner, and lecturer, FM-2030 was born Fereidoun Esfandiary on October 15, 1930 in Brussels, Belgium. His father, A. H. Sadigh Esfandiary, served in the Iranian diplomatic service from 1920 to 1960 and witnessed the rule of two Shahs, Iran's occupation in World War II and the struggle that restored Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to the throne in 1953. As a diplomat's son, F. M. Esfandiary spent his youth traveling between European countries, Afghanistan, Iran, and India. He attended primary school in Iran and England and completed his secondary education at Colleges Des Freres, a Jesuit school in Jerusalem. He represented Iran in the 1948 Olympic Games in London before moving to America to attend the University of California at Berkeley. He transferred from Berkeley to the University of California at Los Angeles and graduated in 1952. From Los Angeles, he followed the career path of diplomacy and served on the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine from 1952-54. Esfandiary's nomadic youth and his experience at the U.N influenced his idea of a future dominated by blurred national boundaries and identities.

Between 1959 and 1966, he turned to writing and published three novels, which were translated into twelve languages: The Day of Sacrifice (1960), The Beggar (1965), and Identity Card (1966). In addition to these novels, he published review and opinion essays in the New York Times, the Nation, Saturday Review and the Village Voice . Esfandiary's novels dealt with the struggle for identity amongst political, religious and social turbulence of the modern age. He was critical of what he considered underlying social tyrannies of the Middle East, including authoritarian family life and remnants of feudal behavior patterns. Esfandiary's theme of the meaninglessness of national identity, ultimately led to an existentialist critique of bureaucracy in his final novel, Identity Card . During these years Esfandiary maintained residences in New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Tehran.

By the end of the 1960s, Esfandiary's work turned into philosophical speculation over changes in the world as it faced the millennium. Political contests of the Middle East were increasingly difficult for him to follow and he focused on the transnational protest movements of the 1960s. His cosmopolitan claims and belief that the psychological proximity of people transcended national borders fit in particularly well in the climate of political change. As he sought an intellectual basis for the unification of social movements around the globe, Esfandiary conceived of a future in which universal dialogue was to be capable of cutting through political, national and racial barriers, and prejudices and political difference would slowly melt away. Influenced as he was by existentialist philosophy and the social tumult of the era, Esfandiary moved beyond what he thought were normative forms of expression and began to approach the subject of the future life of humans to help others deal with the changes he believed marked the postindustrial age.

Esfandiary became an instructor within the continuing education program at the New School for Social Research in 1969 where he would teach courses in futuristics in cooperation with the World Future Society until 1977. In his lectures he aimed to illustrate specific accelerating factors that assisted society's outgrowth of insularity and provincialism. Optimism One, published in 1970, described a philosophical futurism characterized by strident hope and grand vision that culminated in the thesis that man had reached a new stage in evolution. He intentionally pitted his optimism against trends in social science that criticized the industrial age as an era of alienation. Up-Wingers and Telespheres completed Esfandiary's attempt to provide an overview of the social, economic, political and educational infrastructures of the postindustrial age. Technological development in areas such as genetics, alternative energy, computing, genetic engineering, health sciences, and communications provided Esfandiary with the intellectual means to announce the abundance of all necessary resources. His message of abundance of limitless raw materials was delivered in opinion editorials for the New York Times . By 1979, Esfandiary was determined to call attention to the fact that governments, churches or industrial complexes would be not be able to stop the forces of the new values in the postindustrial technology.

After 1981, Esfandiary acted as a consultant to private companies and government agencies. His seminar at the UCLA Extension School, 'Major Transformations: The Next 20 Years,' was held from 1979 to 1991. Esfandiary's theories of futuristics included themes originally developed in his novels, but became infused with ideas of salvation through high technology. Unpublished works from this period, including Countdown to Immortality, evince his categorical approach to the arrival of immortal man. He embraced the breakdown in traditional values of work, family, and government and articulated his theories in a pastiche of scientific facts. His predictions leaned on historical materialism, convinced that the conflict between United States and Soviet Union would result in space civilization. Other forecasting was more prescient, such as his idea that schools would be replaced by teleducation, shopping would take place in telemarkets and centralized cities would transform into museums. He changed his name to FM-2030 in 1988 to show personal commitment to his ideas. Though a source of some confusion, the name change was intended to remind readers, students and peers that his predictions would be commonplace by the year 2030. In 1989, he published Are You a Transhuman?, a self-diagnostic test for measuring one's transhumanism.

FM-2030's increasing emphasis on the physical transgression of death was informed as much by his imagination as his confidence in technology. As philosophers discussed the dehumanization in modern society, Esfandiary believed man's only limits were boundaries of his visions and ideals. Positive universal man was the next step beyond earth and the time-bound human. In the last two decades of his life, Esfandiary worked on several unpublished works, published opinion pieces in the Los Angeles Times and continued to give seminars at the Florida International University. In the year 2000, FM-2030 was placed in cryonic suspension at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona.

From the guide to the F. M. Esfandiary / FM-2030 papers, 1943-2000, (The New York Public Library. Manuscripts and Archives Division.)