Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

There is a less obvious geographical pattern to the movement of management men, but, if anything, the turnover is heavier. A decade ago William Whyte, in The Organization Man, declared that "The man who leaves home is not the exception in American society but the key to it. Almost by definition, the organization man is a man who left home and ... kept on going." His characterization, correct then, is even truer today. The Wall Street Journal refers to "corporate gypsies" in an article headlined "How Executive Family Adapts to Incessant Moving About Country." It describes the life of M. E. Jacobson, an executive with the Montgomery Ward retail chain. He and his wife, both forty-six at the time the story appeared, had moved twenty-eight times in twenty-six years of married life. "I almost feel like we're just camping," his wife tells her visitors. While their case is atypical, thousands like them move on the average of once every two years, and their numbers multiply. This is true not merely because corporate needs are constantly shifting, but also because top management regards frequent relocation of its potential successors as a necessary step in their training.

This moving of executives from house to house as if they were life-size chessmen on a continent-sized board has led one psychologist to propose facetiously a money-saving system called "The Modular Family." Under this scheme, the executive not only leaves his house behind, but his family as well. The company then finds him a matching family (personality characteristics carefully selected to duplicate those of the wife and children left behind) at the new site. Some other itinerant executive then "plugs into" the family left behind. No one appears to have taken the idea seriously – yet.

In addition to the large groups of professionals, technicians and executives who engage in a constant round of "musical homes," there are many other peculiarly mobile groupings in the society. A large military establishment includes tens of thousands of families who, peacetime and wartime, move again and again. "I'm not decorating any more houses," snaps the wife of an army colonel with irony in her voice: "The curtains never fit from one house to the next and the rug is always the wrong size or color. From now on I'm decorating my car." Tens of thousands of skilled construction workers add to the flow. On another level are the more than 750,000 students attending colleges away from their home state, plus the hundreds of thousands more who are away from home but still within their home state. For millions, and particularly for the "people of the future," home is where you find it.

Such tidal movements of human beings produce all sorts of seldom-noticed side effects. Businesses that mail direct to the customer's home spend uncounted dollars keeping their address lists up to date. The same is true of telephone companies. Of the 885,000 listings in the Washington, D. C., telephone book in 1969, over half were different from the year before. Similarly, organizations and associations have a difficult time knowing where their members are. Within a single recent year fully one-third of the members of the National Society for Programmed Instruction, an organization of educational researchers, changed their addresses. Even friends have trouble keeping up with each other's whereabouts. One can sympathize with the plaint of poor Count Lanfranco Rasponi, who laments that travel and movement have destroyed "society." There is no social season any more, he says, because nobody is anywhere at the same time – except, of course, nobodies. The good Count has been quoted as saying: "Before this, if you wanted twenty for dinner, you'd have to ask forty – but now you first ask 200."

Despite such inconveniences, the overthrow of the tyranny of geography opens a form of freedom that proves exhilarating to millions. Speed, movement and even relocation carry positive connotations for many. This accounts for the psychological attachment that Americans and Europeans display toward automobiles – the technological incarnation of spatial freedom. Motivational researcher Ernest Dichter has unburdened himself of abundant Freudian nonsense in his time, but he is shrewdly insightful when he suggests that the auto is the "most powerful tool for mastery" available to the ordinary Western man. "The automobile has become the modern symbol of initiation. The license of the sixteen-year-old is a valid admission to adult society."

In the affluent nations, he writes, "most people have enough to eat and are reasonably well housed. Having achieved this thousand-year-old dream of humanity, they now reach out for further satisfactions. They want to travel, discover, be at least physically independent. The automobile is the mobile symbol of mobility ..." In fact, the last thing that any family wishes to surrender, when hardpressed by financial hardship, is the automobile, and the worst punishment an American parent can mete out to a teen-ager is to "ground" him – i.e., deprive him of the use of an automobile.

Young girls in the United States, when asked what they regard as important about a boy, immediately list a car. Sixty-seven percent of those interviewed in a recent survey said a car is "essential," and a nineteen-year-old boy, Alfred Uranga of Albuquerque, N. M., confirmed gloomily that "If a guy doesn't have a car, he doesn't have a girl." Just how deep this passion for automobility runs among the youth is tragically illustrated by the suicide of a seventeen-year-old Wisconsin boy, William Nebel, who was "grounded" by his father after his driver's license was suspended for speeding. Before putting a .22 caliber rifle bullet in his brain, the boy penned a note that ended, "Without a license, I don't have my car, job or social life. So I think that it is better to end it all right now." It is clear that millions of young people all over the technological world agree with the poet Marinetti who, more than half a century ago, shouted: "A roaring racing car ... is more beautiful than the Winged Victory."

Freedom from fixed social position is linked so closely with freedom from fixed geographical position, that when super-industrial man feels socially constricted his first impulse is to relocate. This idea seldom occurs to the peasant raised in his village or the coalminer toiling away in the black deeps. "A lot of problems are solved by migration. Go. Travel!" said a student of mine before rushing off to join the Peace Corps. But movement becomes a positive value in its own right, an assertion of freedom, not merely a response to or escape from outside pressures. A survey of 539 subscribers to Redbook magazine sought to determine why their addresses had changed in the previous year. Along with such reasons as "family grew too big for old home" or "pleasanter surroundings" fully ten percent checked off "just wanted a change."

An extreme manifestation of this urge to move is found among the female hitch-hikers who are beginning to form a recognizable sociological category of their own. Thus a young Catholic girl in England gives up her job selling advertising space for a magazine and goes off with a friend intending to hitchhike to Turkey. In Hamburg the girls split up. The first girl, Jackie, cruises the Greek Islands, reaches Istanbul, and at length returns to England, where she takes a job with another magazine. She stays only long enough to finance another trip. After that she comes back and works as a waitress, rejecting promotion to hostess on grounds that "I don't expect to be in England very long." At twenty-three Jackie is a confirmed hitch-hiker, thumbing her way indefatigably all over Europe with a gas pistol in her rucksack, returning to England for six or eight months, then starting out again. Ruth, twenty-eight, has been living this way for years, her longest stay in any one place having been three years. Hitchhiking as a way of life, she says, is fine because while it is possible to meet people, "you don't get too involved."