For me this story took root when I bought from Amazon “Speeches That Changed The World” (compiled by Owen Collins, Westminster John Knox Press, 1999) while I was living in Europe in 2001-02. I remember being awestruck especially by the First Inaugural speech by President Washington and his humility, integrity, and authenticity stuck with me. Although it was not published in that book, inexplicably, during this period I also read FDR’s Fourth Inaugural speech and his words of strength, optimism, and love for humanity impacted me deeply at a time when I was undergoing a period of intense personal development.
These were lessons in the power of the written word as spoken at an auspicious moment in history by a great leader.
I visited the site of the Dachau Concentration Camp first in 1998 when I spent a few days touring with Finnish colleagues and friends after we had attended a conference at Augsburg in Bavaria. They did not join me at Dachau as they explained they felt a great sense of shame because Finland was a Nazi ally. Then living in Munich in 2002 I visited Dachau numerous times as I insisted any Australian (especially family) who stayed with us must go there. It is heart-wrenching, for certain, but for some reason there I have always felt more of the light from the love of humanity shining through and over the darkness. Even though the Nazis meticulously and systematically categorised and divided their prisoners as indicated by ‘badges’ sewn on their prison uniforms, ultimately, they were all human beings, sometimes forced into desperate decisions, but more often showing miraculous altruism in their common goal of survival.
Then as many in the Western world objected to the extension of American-led operations in the Middle East into Iraq in early 2003, and even though I was a vulnerable early-career research scientist returned to my home nation without a job, thus unemployed and working tirelessly to develop a job for myself through research grant writing, to my professional email signature I appended the passage from FDR’s speech that appears twice in this text (in the second instance I intentionally degenderised the quote).
It was not a time to be silent or ambivalent.
I have used that same quote on my email signature almost continuously for 20 years and even though at that earlier time I would frequently have someone respond by email along the lines of “how far away from that are we now!”, to me the words remain every bit as relevant as they have ever been over those 20 years, or indeed the almost 80 years since FDR spoke them.
One of my first posts on MacroEdgo in December 2019 was a reproduction of FDR’s Fourth Inauguration speech in full, and soon after that I purchased a copy of “As He Saw It” by Elliott Roosevelt, the son of FDR, published in 1946, and I typed and posted the entire introduction on MacroEdgo in February 2020.
Introducing that extended quote I said:
“Elliott Roosevelt explains why he was the only person who could give an accurate depiction of events, negotiations and deals brokered, and his own father’s viewpoints on these. I think most would agree that a loving son would faithfully seek to have his father’s vision for the world remembered accurately when events transpired which made it clear that promises were broken and that vision was not being enacted.”
Perhaps in some way wrapped up in my own complicated relationship with my father, I always felt there was a duty upon me to remind humanity of these words and events for their enormous contemporary context. However, that would have to wait as I felt an even greater duty to share what I understood about the challenges that a newly discovered coronavirus highly pathogenic to human beings would present to our societies, and Elliott’s book remained half-read on my bedside dresser covered in a deepening layer of dust as I rapidly passed 100 posts on MacroEdgo, many concerned with COVID-19, but many also dealing with the issues discussed in detail herein in “Reset”.
As 2022 drew to a close I shared on social media my cautious optimism that “perhaps 2023 will be when we truly begin to feel ‘normal’ again”, in relation to the pandemic, and the dark tunnel that I and my family had been forced to walk and endure by the unscrupulous acting upon my love which we solved for ourselves, so I was in a place to look forward and seek to produce a more enduring impact for society than I had previously with any of my earlier writing.
After not working in paid employment for nearly 20 years, as I am a stay at home Dad, I applied for a job to work in an organisation committed to pressuring corporations to act responsibly especially in responding to climate change. That act crystallised my preference to not be ‘restricted’ to one organisation or to a subset of the problems humanity faces. Unsurprised when I received notification of being unsuccessful, I was also relieved as I had already commenced my writing of “Reset” in earnest.
“Reset” transports the reader back to World War II to feel the elation and relief that the world had escaped tyranny and disaster, and to open a window to how it felt for humanity to be on the cusp of brighter future than anyone had dared to dream for a decade and half since the 1929 collapse on Wall Street which ushered in the Great Depression.
The deeper questions “Reset” poses is whether we human beings have made the most of the opportunity that we made for ourselves from the sacrifices of many, and if not then why not, ultimately to propose a way back towards a brighter future for all human beings – a Reset.
The story is told through the eyes of Elliott Roosevelt, the son of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ‘FDR’, and the author of a number of books where he explained his perception of developments from his unique viewpoint, drawing on his father-son relationship with one of the most important leaders of the modern world.
This emotional teleportation is achieved by presenting three timelines from the mid-1930s to early 1990s. Societal characteristics are naturally different in each timeline dependent upon decisions taken by leaders and within broader humanity, and economic features are critical.
The first timeline is dark but not nearly as dark as many other alternate histories around the outcome of World War II because in this story the extremists were eliminated by more moderate forces, and the American experience – though isolated – is even ‘rosy’; the second timeline is the brightest highlighting the most optimistic timeline under the extended steerage of FDR; and the third much closer to the first than the second, in fact it is our modern history, and it is followed by a no-holds-barred discussion of what is required to get humanity back on the track towards a more optimistic future.
Elliott’s own path, also, leading to different ‘versions’ will also be dependent on the decision he and others reach, and influential economists of the time, especially Hjalmar Schacht of Germany and John Maynard Keynes of Britain, are also key characters sometimes with vastly different outcomes in their lives dependent on broader circumstances within humanity.
Key dates, especially deaths of important characters, repeat through the timelines imbuing a sense of destiny.
The concluding part focuses on a potential future still within grasp, but only just, in the form of a father and son podcast somewhat reminiscent of the fireside chats that FDR was famous for during the Great Depression. It provides contemporary context to the current social and environmental crises we confront, while providing a parallel to that earlier difficult period.
The father and son discuss how the features in societies that were present in the early 90s – where the timelines finished – have become entrenched. Factors that have caused this, and ways that humanity could be led back towards the brighter path, are discussed in warm and compassionate terms paralleling the relationship between FDR and his son Elliott.
This story is the most important to be told at this moment in time.
It is the story that humanity needs to hear right now, and it can’t wait.
There have been other engaging pieces spanning non-fiction, documentary, science-fiction, and outright fiction which have had impact, certainly. But none has put the whole story together – instead we talk about actions of people within societies without truly highlighting the ‘why’.
If we can understand the ‘why’ as well as the ‘how’ we came to be in this position, the keys to doing the best we can from here become clear and harder to ignore.
Then there is a chance that we will leave all in the future generations a semblance of the quality of life that previous generations, especially in rich Western nations, have been fortunate to experience.
Besides the influences already mentioned, in the early stages of writing I bought and read “Confessions Of ‘The Old Wizzard” (1956) By Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht. Midway through writing I bought and read “Economists At War: How a handful of economists helped win and lose the world wars” (2020) by Alan Bollard, and as I completed writing I bought and read “Hitler’s Shadow Empire: The Nazis and the Spanish civil war” (2015) by Pierpaolo Barbieri. All of these helped me considerably in honing my historical understanding of events and providing finer details, but most importantly they confirmed for me that my ideas were sound and that my alternate histories were plausible.
Then as I finished writing I bought and began reading “Utopia: The influential classic” (2021) by Thomas More with an introduction by Niall Kishtainy. It was the first time I had read More’s classic written 500 years ago, and here I must make a serious confession which is a pointer to my (almost non-existent) literary education and my broader outlook. Truthfully, I am not what would be commonly considered ‘well read’ at all. Moreover, I have intentionally avoided reading the classics because I wanted to be certain that my thoughts were my own, well as much as we can in a media-saturated world where ideas of earlier thinkers pervade common social norms and thought along with their continual contemporaneous adaption. Undoubtedly this speaks to a certain level of arrogance on my part and a strong desire to be ‘original’ indicative of my natural contrarian impulse.
I found it fascinating to compare More’s thinking, he heavily influenced by classic Greek and Roman philosophers, with mine in “Reset” and specifically the tug of war through human history between wealth and power on one hand and on labour on the other. Moreover, reading More’s Utopia made me all the more confident in saying that herein I have not proposed a utopia in the second timeline nor in the fireside podcast, but a realistically attainable world.
Having said that, I realise that the features for a better humanity that I propose, many of which others no doubt have before me, if more disparately or outside contemporary context, will not be instantaneously, and are even unlikely to be rapidly, implemented. I do believe that these features encapsulate the general direction of human progress and I expect that from the vantage point of 500 years in the future most if not all of what I have described will have come to pass. In actual fact, I would expect that much of it will be in place in under 80 years as the next (Gregorian) century dawns, in large part because it needs to be for humanity to continue to progress socially and technologically.
As a thinker – in modern parlance, a thought leader – I admit to continuous frustration for how long it takes for the masses to catch up, and I lay a large part of that blame at the feet of the human beings elected and entrusted to lead, especially when so much damage is being done to human beings and to the natural world in that delay.
I also made extensive use of publicly available resources via the internet including Wikipedia.
All text was written and researched by Brett Edgerton.
Quotes in the ‘Historical record’ sections are mostly taken from “As He Saw It” by Elliott Roosevelt published in 1946.
All pencil sketches were produced by generative AI (Dall-E) from text prompts by Brett Edgerton.
On MacroEdgo the complete “Reset” story is available for download in a Word document.
Available to download also is “Reset”: The Movie Treatment which tells the same story in the same fashion, but is condensed especially in the “Remantar” timeline and in the “A Future of Our Own Making: A father and son fireside podcast”, to be presented to members of the movie industry with the aim of the story being told in a trilogy.
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© Copyright Brett Edgerton 2023
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