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Category Archives: acceleration of change

Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock:” The Strategy of Social Futurism

31 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by essaybee2012 in 800th LIfetime, acceleration of change, accidental century, Alvin Toffler, anarchy, anticipatory democracy, capitalism, change, change management, collective future shock, cults, Dionysian experience, econocentric, environment, evolution, existentialism, Future Shock (1970), heirarchical organization, industrialism, intelligence, irrationalism, John Kenneth Galbraith, John Maynard Keynes, Jungian, Le Plan, long-range planning, Michael Harrington, mysticism, nihilism, nostalgia, now generation, now-ness, organic adaptation, pattern, planlessness, pre-scientific attitudes, pre-technocracy, psychology, random, rationalism, Raymond Fletcher, religion, short-range planning, Sir Geoffrey Vickers, social futurism, social policy, social science, socialism, society, super-industrialism, technocracy, technocratic planning, technology, unconscious adaptation, undemocratic

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With the 45th anniversary of this 1970 book approaching in 2015, it would be good to review the book’s still-intact relevance.  It remains today on my top-ten list of essential reads.  The following is the third installment of my condensation of favorite sections and passages. –SB

Toffler, Alvin.  Future Shock.  Random House, 1970.

http://www.abebooks.com/9780553277371/Future-Shock-Toffler-Alvin-0553277375/plp

THE STRATEGY OF SOCIAL FUTURISM:  Can one live in a society that is out of control?   That is the question posed for us by the concept of future shock. For that is the situation we find ourselves in.  If it were technology alone that had broken loose, our problems would be serious enough.  The deadly fact is, however, that many other social processes have also begun to run free, oscillating wildly, resisting our best efforts to guide them.

. . .

How can we prevent mass future shock, selectively adjusting the tempos of change, raising or lowering levels of stimulation, when governments—including those with the best intentions—seem unable even to point change in the right direction?

. . . Raymond Fletcher, a frustrated Member of Parliament in Britain, recently complained: “Society’s gone random!”

If random means a literal absence of pattern, he is, of course, overstating the case.  But if random means that the outcomes of social policy have become erratic and hard to predict, he is right on target.  Here, then, is the political meaning of future shock.  For just as individual future shock results from an inability to keep pace with the rate of change, governments, too, suffer from a kind of collective future shock—a breakdown of their decisional processes.

With chilling clarity, Sir Geoffrey Vickers, the eminent British social scientist, has identified the issue:  “The rate of change increases at an accelerating speed, without a corresponding acceleration in the rate at which further responses can be made; and this brings us nearer the threshold beyond which control is lost.”

THE DEATH OF TECHNOCRACY:

What we are witnessing is the beginning of the final breakup of industrialism and, with it, the collapse of technocratic planning.  By technocratic planning, I do not mean only the centralized national planning that has, until recently, characterized the USSR, but also the less formal, more dispersed attempts at systematic change management that occur in all the high technology nations, regardless of their political persuasion.  Michael Harrington, the socialist critic, arguing that we have rejected planning, has termed ours the “accidental century.”  Yet, as Galbraith demonstrates, even within the context of a capitalist economy, the great corporations go to enormous lengths to rationalize production and distribution, to plan their future as best they can.  Governments, too, are deep into the planning business.  The Keynesian manipulation of post-war economics may be inadequate, but it is not a matter of accident.  In France, Le Plan has become a regular feature of national life.  In Sweden, Italy, Germany and Japan, governments actively intervene in the economic sector to protect certain industries, to capitalize others, and to accelerate growth.  In the United States and Britain, even local governments come equipped with what are at least called planning departments.

First, technocratic planning, itself a product of industrialism, reflects the values of that fast-vanishing era.  In both its capitalist and communist variants, industrialism was a system focused on the maximization of material welfare.  Thus, for the technocrat, in Detroit as well as Kiev, economic advance is the primary aim; technology the primary tool.  The fact that in one case the advance redounds to private advantage and in the other, theoretically, to the public good does not alter the core assumptions common to both.  Technocratic planning is econocentric.

Second, technocratic planning reflects the time-bias of industrialism.  Struggling to free itself from the stifling past-orientation of previous societies, industrialism focused heavily on the present.  This meant, in practice, that its planning dealt with futures near at hand.  The idea of a five-year plan struck the world as insanely futuristic when it was first put forward by the Soviets in the 1920’s.  Even today, except in the most advanced organizations on both sides of the ideological curtain, one- or two-year forecasts are regarded as “long-range planning.”  A handful of corporations and government agencies, as we shall see, have begun to concern themselves with horizons then, twenty, even fifty years in the future.  The majority, however, remain blindly biased toward next Monday.  Technocratic planning is short-range.

Third, reflecting the bureaucratic organization of industrialism, technocratic planning was premised on hierarchy.  The world was divided into manager and worker, planner and plannee, with decisions made by one for the other.  This system, adequate while change unfolds at an industrial tempo, breaks down as the pace reaches super-industrial speeds.  The increasingly unstable environment demands more and more non-programmed decisions down below; the need for instant feedback blurs the distinction between line and staff; and hierarchy totters.  Planners are too remote, too ignorant of local conditions, too slow in responding to change.  As suspicion spreads that top-down controls are unworkable, plannees begin clamoring for the right to participate in the decision-making.  Planners, however, resist.  For like the bureaucratic system it mirrors, technocratic planning is essentially undemocratic.

The forces sweeping us toward super-industrialism can no longer be channeled by these bankrupt industrial-era methods.  For a time they may continue to work in backward, slowly moving industries or communities.  But their misapplication in advanced industries, in universities, in cities—wherever change is swift—cannot but intensify the instability, leading to wilder and wilder swings and lurches.  Moreover, as the evidences of failure pile up, dangerous political, cultural and psychological currents are set loose.

One response to the loss of control, for example, is a revulsion against intelligence.  Science first gave man a sense of mastery over his environment, and hence over the future.  By making the future seem malleable, instead of immutable, it shattered the opiate religions that preached passivity and mysticism.  Today, mounting evidence that society is out of control breeds disillusionment with science.  In consequence, we witness a garish revival of mysticism.  Suddenly astrology is the rage.  Zen, yoga, séances, and witchcraft become popular pastimes.  Cults form around the search for Dionysian experience, for non-verbal and supposedly non-linear communication.  We are told it is more important to “feel” than to “think,” as though there were a contradiction between the two.  Existentialist oracles join Catholic mystics, Jungian psychoanalysts, and Hindu gurus in exalting the mystical and emotional against the scientific and rational.

This reversion to pre-scientific attitudes is accompanied, not surprisingly, by a tremendous wave of nostalgia in the society.  Antique furniture, posters from a bygone era, games based on remembrance of yesterday’s trivia, the revival of Art Nouveau, the spread of Edwardian styles, the rediscovery of such faded pop-cult celebrities as Humphrey Bogart or W. C. Fields, all mirror a psychological lust for the simpler, less turbulent past.  Powerful fad machines spring into action to capitalize on this hunger.  The nostalgia business becomes a booming industry.

The failure of technocratic planning and the consequent sense of lost control also feeds the philosophy of “now-ness.”  Songs and advertisements hail the appearance of the “now generation,” and learned psychiatrists, discoursing on the presumed dangers of repression, warn us not to defer our gratifications.  Acting out and a search of immediate payoff are encouraged.  “We’re more oriented to the present,” says a teen-age girl to a reporter after the mammoth Woodstock rock music festival.  “It’s like do what you want to do now. . . . If you stay anywhere very long you get into a planning thing. . . . So you just move on.”  Spontaneity, the personal equivalent of social planlessness, is elevated into a cardinal psychological virtue.

All this has its political analog in the emergence of a strange coalition of right wingers and New Leftists in support of what can only be termed a “hang loose” approach to the future.  Thus we hear increasing calls for anti-planning or non-planning, sometimes euphemized as “organic growth.”  Among some radicals, this takes on an anarchist coloration.  Not only is it regarded as unnecessary or unwise to make long-range plans for the future of the institution or society they wish to overturn, it is sometimes even regarded as poor taste to plan the next hour and a half of a meeting.  Planlessness is glorified.

Arguing that planning imposes values on the future, the anti-planners overlook the fact that non-planning does so, too—often with far worse consequence.  Angered by the narrow, econocentric character of technocratic planning, they condemn systems analysis, cost benefit accounting, and similar methods, ignoring the fact that, used differently, these very tools might be converted into powerful techniques for humanizing the future.

When critics charge that technocratic planning is anti-human, in the sense that it neglects social, cultural and psychological values in its headlong rush to maximize economic gain, they are usually right.  When they charge that it is shortsighted and undemocratic, they are usually right.  When they charge it is inept, they are usually right.

But when they plunge backward into irrationality, anti-scientific attitudes, a kind of sick nostalgia, and an exaltation of now-ness, they are not only wrong, but dangerous.  Just as, in the main, their alternatives to industrialism call for a return to pre-industrial institutions, their alternative to technocracy is not post-, but pre-technocracy.

. . .

We need not a reversion to the irrationalisms of the past, not a passive acceptance of change, not despair or nihilism.  We need, instead, a strong new strategy.  For reasons that well become clear, I term this strategy “social futurism.”  I am convinced that, armed with this strategy, we can arrive at a new level of competence in the management of change.  We can invent a form of planning more humane, more far-sighted, and more democratic than any so far in use.  In short, we can transcend technocracy.

. . .

ANTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY:

. . .

By now the accelerative thrust triggered by man has become the key to the entire evolutionary process on the planet.  The rate and direction of the evolution of other species, their very survival, depends upon decisions made by man.  Yet there is nothing inherent in the evolutionary process to guarantee man’s own survival.

Throughout the past, as successive stages of social evolution unfolded, man’s awareness followed rather than preceded the event.  Because change was slow, he could adapt unconsciously, “organically.”  Today unconscious adaptation is no longer adequate faced with the power to alter the gene, to create new species, to populate the planets or depopulate the earth, man must now assume conscious control of evolution itself.  Avoiding future shock as he rides the waves of change, he must master evolution, shaping tomorrow to human need.  Instead of rising in revolt against it, he must, from this historic moment on, anticipate and design the future.

This, then, is the ultimate objective of social futurism, not merely the transcendence of technocracy and the substitution of more humane, more far-sighted, more democratic planning, but the subjection of the process of evolution itself to conscious human guidance.  For this is the supreme instant, the turning point in history at which man either vanquishes the processes of change or vanishes, at which, from being the unconscious puppet of evolution he becomes either its victim or its master.

A challenge of such proportions demands of us a dramatically new, a more deeply rational response toward change.  This book has had change as its protagonist—first as potential villain and then, it would seem, as potential hero.  In calling for the moderation and regulation of change, it has called for additional revolutionary changes.  This is less paradoxical than it appears.  Change is essential to man, as essential now in our 800th lifetime as it was in our first.  Change is life itself. But change rampant, change unguided and unrestrained, accelerated change overwhelming not only man’s physical defenses but his decisional processes—such change is the enemy of life.

Our first and most pressing need, therefore, before we can begin to gently guide our evolutionary destiny, before we can build a humane future, is to halt the runaway acceleration that is subjecting multitudes to the threat of future shock while, at the very same moment, intensifying all the problems they must deal with—war, ecological incursions, racism, the obscene contrast between rich and poor, the revolt of the young, and the rise of a potentially deadly mass irrationalism.

There is no facile way to treat this wild growth, this cancer in history.  There is no magic medicine, either, for curing the unprecedented disease it bears in its rushing wake:  future shock.  I have suggested palliatives for the change-pressed individual and more radically curative procedures for the society—new social services, a future-facing education system, new ways to regulate technology, and a strategy for capturing control of change.  Other ways must also be found.  Yet the basic thrust of this book is diagnosis.  For diagnosis precedes cure, and we cannot begin to help ourselves until we become sensitively conscious of the problem.

These pages will have served their purpose if, in some measure, they help create the consciousness needed for man to undertake the control of change, the guidance of his evolution.  For, by making imaginative use of change to channel change, we can not only spare ourselves the trauma of future shock, we can reach out and humanize distant tomorrows.

Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock:” The 800th Lifetime  28 October 2014

Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock:” Introduction  28 October 2014

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Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock:” The 800th Lifetime

28 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by essaybee2012 in 800th LIfetime, acceleration of change, adaptation, agriculture, Alvin Toffler, barbarism, blue collar, change, civilization, culture, culture shock, disorientation, environment, future, Future Shock (1970), generations, history, impermanence, industrial revolution, industrialism, irrationality, Julius Caesar, Kenneth Boulding, Kurt W. Marek, lifetimes, Marco Polo, mass neurosis, Peace Corps, prehistoric man, psychological disease, psychology, resources, service economy, social landscape, social ties, society, super-industrialism, technology, time, transience, U Thant, United Nations, violence, white collar

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With the 45th anniversary of this 1970 book approaching in 2015, it would be good to review the book’s still-intact relevance.  It remains today on my top-ten list of essential reads.  The following is the second installment of my condensation of favorite sections and passages. –SB

Toffler, Alvin.  Future Shock.  Random House, 1970.

http://www.abebooks.com/9780553277371/Future-Shock-Toffler-Alvin-0553277375/plp

THE 800TH LIFETIME:  In the three short decades between now [1970] and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future.  Citizens of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations, many of them, will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time.  For them, the future will have arrived too soon.

This book is about change and how we adapt to it.  It is about those who seem to thrive on change, who crest its waves joyfully, as well as those multitudes of others who resist it or seek flight from it. . . . It is about the future and the shock that its arrival brings.

Western society for the past 300 years has been caught up in a fire storm of change.  This storm, far from abating, now appears to be gathering force.  Change sweeps through the highly industrialized countries with waves of ever accelerating speed and unprecedented impact. . . .

. . .

. . . A strange new society is apparently erupting in our midst.  Is there a way to understand it, to shape its development? . . .

Much that now strikes us as incomprehensible would be far less so if we took a fresh look at the racing rate of change that makes reality seem, sometimes, like a kaleidoscope run wild.  For the acceleration of change does not merely buffet industries or nations.  It is a concrete force that reaches deep into our personal lives, compels us to act out new roles, and confronts us with the danger of a new and powerfully upsetting psychological disease.  This new disease can be called “future shock,” and a knowledge of its sources and symptoms helps explain many things that otherwise defy rational analysis.

THE UNPREPARED VISITOR:

The parallel term “culture shock” has already begun to creep into the popular vocabulary.  Culture shock is the effect that immersion in a strange culture has on the unprepared visitor.  Peace Corps volunteers suffer from it in Borneo or Brazil.  Marco Polo probably suffered from it in Cathay. . . .

. . . culture shock is relatively mild in comparison with the much more serious malady, future shock.  Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.  It may well be the most important disease of tomorrow.

. . . unless intelligent steps are taken to combat it, millions of human beings will find themselves increasingly disoriented, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environments.  The malaise, mass neurosis, irrationality, and free-floating violence already apparent in contemporary life are merely a foretaste of what may lie ahead unless we come to understand and treat this disease.

Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society.  It arises from the super-imposition of a new culture on an old one.  It is culture shock in one’s own society. . . .

Take an individual out of his own culture and set him down suddenly in an environment sharply different from his own, with a different set of cues to react to—different conceptions of time, space, work, love, religion, sex, and everything else—then cut him off from any hope of retreat to a more familiar social landscape, and the dislocation he suffers is doubly severe.  Moreover, if this new culture is itself in constant turmoil, and if—worse yet—its values are incessantly changing, the sense of disorientation will be still further intensified.  Given few clues as to what kind of behavior is rational under the radically new circumstances, the victim may well become a hazard to himself and others.

Now imagine not merely an individual but an entire society, an entire generation—including its weakest, least intelligent, and most irrational members—suddenly transported into this new world.  The result is mass disorientation, future shock on a grand scale. . . .

BREAK WITH THE PAST:

. . . what is occurring now is, in all likelihood, bigger, deeper, and more important than the industrial revolution. . . . a growing body of reputable opinion asserts that the present moment represents nothing less than the second great divide in human history, comparable in magnitude only with that first great break in historic continuity, the shift from barbarism to civilization.

. . . Kurt W. Marek . . . observes that . . . “We open our eyes like prehistoric man, we see a world totally new.”

One of the most striking statements of this theme has come from Kenneth Boulding, an eminent economist and imaginative social thinker.  In justifying his view that the present moment represents a crucial turning point in human history, Boulding observes that . . . “The world of today . . . is as different from the world in which I was born as that world was from Julius Caesar’s. . . . Almost as much has happened since I was born as happened before.”

. . . It has been observed, for example, that if the last 50,000 years of man’s existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately sixty-two years each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes.  Of these 800, fully 650 were spent in caves.

Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it been possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to another—as writing made it possible to do.  Only during the last six lifetimes did masses of men ever see a printed word.  Only during the last four has it been possible to measure time with any precision.  Only in the last two has anyone anywhere used an electric motor.  And the overwhelming majority of all the material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800th, lifetime.

. . .

. . . if agriculture is the first stage of economic development and industrialism the second, we can now see that still another stage—the third—has suddenly been reached.  In about 1956 the United States became the first major power in which more than 50 percent of the non-farm labor force ceased to wear the blue collar of factory or manual labor.  Blue collar workers were outnumbered by those in the so-called white-collar occupations—in retail trade, administration, communications, research, education, and other service categories.  Within the same lifetime a society for the first time in human history not only threw off the yoke of agriculture, but managed within a few brief decades to throw off the yoke of manual labor as well.  The world’s first service economy had been born.

. . . Ten thousand years for agriculture.  A century or two for industrialism.  And now, opening before us—super-industrialism.

. . . Perhaps U Thant, Secretary General of the United Nations [1970], came closest to summarizing the meaning of the shift to super-industrialism when he declared that “The central stupendous truth about developed economies today is that they can have—in anything but the shortest run—the kind and scale of resources they decide to have. . . . It is no longer resources that limit decisions.  It is the decision that makes the resources.  This is the fundamental revolutionary change—perhaps the most revolutionary man has ever known.” . . .

. . .

In our lifetime the boundaries have burst.  Today the network of social ties is so tightly woven that the consequences of contemporary events radiate instantaneously around the world . . . .

. . .

. . . the final, qualitative difference between this and all previous lifetimes is the one most easily overlooked.  For we have not merely extended the scope and scale of change, we have radically altered its pace.  We have in our time released a totally new social force—a stream of change so accelerated that it influences our sense of time, revolutionizes the tempo of daily life, and affects the very way we “feel” the world around us. . . . this acceleration lies behind the impermanence—the transience—that penetrates and tinctures our consciousness, radically affecting the way we relate to other people, to things, to the entire universe of ideas, art and values.

To understand what is happening to us as we move into the age of super-industrialism, we must analyze the processes of acceleration and confront the concept of transience.  If acceleration is a new social force, transience is its psychological counterpart, and without an understanding of the role it plays in contemporary human behavior, all our theories of personality, all our psychology, must remain pre-modern.  Psychology without the concept of transience cannot take account of precisely those phenomena that are peculiarly contemporary.

By changing our relationship to the resources that surround us, by violently expanding the scope of change, and, most crucially, by accelerating its pace, we have broken irretrievably with the past.  We have cut ourselves off from the old ways of thinking, of feeling, of adapting.  We have set the stage for a completely new society and we are now racing toward it.  This is the crux of the 800th lifetime.  And it is this that calls into question man’s capacity for adaptation—how will he fare in this new society?  Can he adapt to its imperatives?  And if not, can he alter these imperatives?

Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock:” The Strategy of Social Futurism  31 October 2014

Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock:” Introduction  28 October 2014

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Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock:” Introduction

28 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by essaybee2012 in acceleration of change, adaptation, adaptivity, Alvin Toffler, change, coping, cultural lag, data, disease of change, future, Future Shock (1970), future-consciousness, Horizon Magazine, mapmakers, obsolescence, prophecy, psycho-biological, real time, social stress, tomorrow, William Ogburn

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With the 45th anniversary of this 1970 book approaching in 2015, it would be good to review the book’s still-intact relevance.  It remains today on my top-ten list of essential reads.  The following is the first installment of my condensation of favorite sections and passages. –SB

Toffler, Alvin.  Future Shock.  Random House, 1970.

http://www.abebooks.com/9780553277371/Future-Shock-Toffler-Alvin-0553277375/plp

INTRODUCTION:  This is a book about what happens to people when they are overwhelmed by change.  It is about the ways in which we adapt—or fail to adapt—to the future.

. . . for the most part, books about the world to come sound a harsh metallic note.  These pages, by contrast, concern themselves with the “soft” or human side of tomorrow. . . . they concern themselves with the steps by which we are likely to reach tomorrow. They deal with common, everyday matters—the products we buy and the discard, the places we leave behind, the corporations we inhabit, the people who pass at an ever faster clip through our lives.  The future of friendship and family life is probed.  Strange new subcultures and life styles are investigated, along with an array of other subjects from politics and playgrounds to skydiving and sex.

What joins all these—in the book as in life—is the roaring current of change, a current so powerful today that it overturns institutions, shifts our values and shrivels our roots.  Change is the process by which the future invades our lives, and it is important to look at it closely, not merely from the grand perspectives of history, but also from the vantage point of the living, breathing individuals who experience it.

The acceleration of change in our time is, itself, an elemental force.  This accelerative thrust has personal and psychological, as well as sociological, consequences.  In the pages ahead, these effects of acceleration are . . . systematically explored.  The book argues forcefully . . . that, unless man quickly learns to control the rate of change in his personal affairs as well as in society at large, we are doomed to a massive adaptational breakdown.

In 1965, in an article in Horizon, I coined the term “future shock” to describe the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.  Fascinated by this concept, I spent the next five years visiting scores of universities, research centers, laboratories, and government agencies, reading countless articles and scientific papers and interviewing literally hundreds of experts on different aspects of change, coping behavior, and the future.  Nobel prizewinners, hippies, psychiatrists, physicians, businessmen, professional futurists philosophers, and educators gave voice to their concern over change, their anxieties about adaptation, their fears about the future.  I came away from this experience with two disturbing convictions.

First, it became clear that future shock is no longer a distantly potential danger, but a real sickness from which increasingly large numbers already suffer.  This psycho-biological condition can be described in medical and psychiatric terms.  It is the disease of change.

Second, I gradually came to be appalled by how little is actually known about adaptivity, either by those who call for and create vast changes in our society, or by those who supposedly prepare us to cope with those changes.  Earnest intellectuals talk bravely about “educating for change” or “preparing people for the future.”  But we know virtually nothing about how to do it.  In the most rapidly changing environment to which man has ever been exposed, we remain pitifully ignorant of how the human animal copes.

Our psychologists and politicians alike are puzzled by the seemingly irrational resistance to change exhibited by certain individuals and groups.  The corporation head who wants to reorganize a department, the educator who wants to introduce a new teaching method, the mayor who wants to achieve peaceful integration of the races in his city—all, at one time or another, face this blind resistance.  Yet we know little about its sources.  By the same token, why do some men hunger, even rage for change, doing all in their power to create it, while others flee from it?  I not only found no ready answers to such questions, but discovered that we lack even an adequate theory of adaptation, without which it is extremely unlikely that we will ever find the answers.

The purpose of this book, therefore, is to help us come to terms with the future—to help us cope more effectively with both personal and social change by deepening our understanding of how men respond to it.  Toward this end, it puts forward a broad new theory of adaptation.

It also calls attention to an important, though often overlooked, distinction.  Almost invariably, research into the effects of change concentrate on the destinations toward which change carries us, rather than the speed of the journey.  In this book, I try to show that the rate of change has implications quite apart from, and sometimes more important than, the directions of change.  No attempt to understand adaptivity can succeed until this fact is grasped.  Any attempt to define the “content” of change must include the consequences of pace itself as part of that content.

William Ogburn, with his celebrated theory of cultural lag, pointed out how social stresses arise out of the uneven rates of change in different sectors of society. The concept of future shock—and the theory of adaptation that derives from it—strongly suggest that there must be balance, not merely between rates of change in different sectors, but between the pace of environmental change and the limited pace of human response. For future shock grows out of the increasing lag between the two.

The book is intended to do more than present a theory, however. It is also intended to demonstrate a method. Previously, men studied the past to shed light on the present. I have turned the time-mirror around, convinced that a coherent image of the future can also shower us with valuable insights into today. We shall find it increasingly difficult to understand our personal and public problems without making use of the future as a intellectual tool. . . . I deliberately exploit this tool to show what it can do.

Finally, and by no means least important, the book sets out to change the reader in a subtle yet significant sense. For reasons that will become clear . . . successful coping with rapid change will require most of us to adopt a new stance toward the future, a new sensitive awareness of the role it plays in the present. This book is designed to increase the future-consciousness of its reader. The degree to which the reader, after finishing the book, finds himself thinking about speculating about, or trying to anticipate future events, will provide one measure of its effectiveness.

With these ends stated, several reservations are in order.  One has to do with the perishability of fact.  Every seasoned reporter has had the experience of working on a fast-breaking story.  It is inevitable, therefore, in a book written over the course of several years that some of its facts will have been superseded between the time of research and writing and the time of publication.  Professors identified with University A move, in the interim, to University B.  Politicians identified with Position X shift, in the meantime, to Position Y. . . .

. . . The obsolescence of data has a special significance here, however, serving as it does to verify the book’s own these about the rapidity of change.  Writers have a harder and harder time keeping up with reality.  We have not yet learned to conceive, research, write and publish in “real time.” . . .

Another reservation has to do with the verb “will.”  No serious futurist deals in “predictions.” . . .  In those deliciously iconic words purported to be a Chinese proverb:  “To prophesy is extremely difficult—especially with respect to the future.”

. . .

. . . I have taken the liberty of speaking firmly, without hesitation, trusting that the intelligent reader will understand the stylistic problem. . . .

The inability to speak with precision and certainty about the future, however, is no excuse for silence. . . .

. . .

We who explore the future are like . . . ancient mapmakers, and it is in this spirit that the concept of future shock and the theory of the adaptive range are presented here—not as final word, but as a first approximation of the new realities, filled with danger and promise, created by the accelerative thrust.

Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock:” The Strategy of Social Futurism  31 October 2014

Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock:” The 800th Lifetime  28 October 2014

All photos by S.A. Bort

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