His project of that state was based on the concept of...

His project of that state was based on the concept of humanistic democracy in which the citizen has an active role. Inhabitants must take care about their contributions to the public good themselves and create and protect democratic institutions for that purpose.

The causes of a catastrophic fate of democracy in Europe and of a gradual restoration of totalitarian political systems in the first half of the 20th century were in Masaryk’s explanation allocated inside the human being, in his psychology and education, rather than out of him.

Futures studies, according to that humanistic and anthropocentric political thinking, help to illuminate the conditions for an active role of everybody in the public life, offering the warnings and opportunities for his or her particular cultural activities.

Such an approach, typical for the Czech cultural practice, has appeared also during so-called Prague Spring in 1968, when new alternatives of political arrangements were analysed and scenarios for the transition of local political practice to the “socialism with human face” were prepared. Possibilities of foreign interventions, coming from the contemporary “outer world”, were allocated to the second plan of that project.

The third historically important cultural feature of local futures studies relates to the conception of technical skill. In the thinking of “technocrats” is that skill often conceptualised like a creative process, rather than an exploitation of artefacts for various cultural activities.

Starting the 19th century was that technocratic concept intensively elaborated by engineering experience while the adaptation of human being to new technology remained as a task for humanistic thinkers and their historical and actual experience dealing with the human behaviour.

The care about social and cultural impacts of a new technology, which has appeared in futures studies practice in the second half of the 20th century, has been manifested in the Czech history by visions derived from humanistic and democratic ideology. The known novelist Karel Capek has introduced an idea of the “robot” in the world awareness.

The possibility of the subjugation of human beings by “robots” like products of human technological creativity which have got out of the control of their creators, he declared twenty years earlier, than analytical warnings of ecologists and biological engineers had appeared.