Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

Not long after this, another expert announced publicly that it was "nothing less than feeblemindedness to expect anything to come of the horseless carriage movement." Six years later the one-millionth Ford rolled off an assembly line. And then there was the great Rutherford, himself, the discoverer of the atom, who said in 1933 that the energy in the atom's nucleus would never be released. Nine years later: the first chain reaction.

Again and again the human brain – including the first class scientific brain – has blinded itself to the novel possibilities of the future, has narrowed its field of concern to gain momentary reassurance, only to be rudely shaken by the accelerative thrust.

This is not to imply that all the scientific or technological advances so far discussed will necessarily materialize. Still less does it imply that they will all occur between now and the turn of the century. Some will, no doubt, die a-borning. Some may represent blind alleys. Others will succeed in the lab, but turn out to be impractical for one reason or another. Yet all this is unimportant. For even if none of these developments occur, others, perhaps even more unsettling, will.

We have scarcely touched on the computer revolution and the far-ramifying changes that must follow in its churning wake. We have barely mentioned the implications of the thrust into outer space, an adventure that could, before the new millennium arrives, change all our lives and attitudes in radical and as yet unpredicted ways. (What would happen if an astronaut or space vehicle returned to earth contaminated with some fast-multiplying, deathdealing microorganism?) We have said nothing about the laser, the holograph, the powerful new instruments of personal and mass communication, the new technologies of crime and espionage, new forms of transport and construction, the developing horror of chemical and bacteriological warfare techniques, the radiant promise of solar energy, the coming discovery of life in a test tube, the startling new tools and techniques for education, and an endless list of other fields in which high-impact changes lie just ahead.

In the coming decades, advances in all these fields will fire off like a series of rockets carrying us out of the past, plunging us deeper into the new society. Nor will this new society quickly settle into a steady state. It, too, will quiver and crack and roar as it suffers jolt after jolt of high-energy change. For the individual who wishes to live in his time, to be a part of the future, the super-industrial revolution offers no surcease from change. It offers no return to the familiar past. It offers only the highly combustible mixture of transience and novelty.

This massive injection of speed and novelty into the fabric of society will force us not merely to cope more rapidly with familiar situations, events and moral dilemmas, but to cope at a progressively faster rate with situations that are, for us, decidedly unfamiliar, "first-time" situations, strange, irregular, unpredictable.

This will significantly alter the balance that prevails in any society between the familiar and unfamiliar elements in the daily life of its people, between the routine and non-routine, the predictable and the unpredictable. The relationship between these two kinds of daily-life elements can be called the "novelty ratio" of the society, and as the level of newness or novelty rises, less and less of life appears subject to our routine forms of coping behavior. More and more, there is a growing weariness and wariness, a pall of pessimism, a decline in our sense of mastery. More and more, the environment comes to seem chaotic, beyond human control.

Thus two great social forces converge: the relentless movement toward transience is reinforced and made more potentially dangerous by a rise in the novelty ratio. Nor, as we shall next see, is this novelty to be found solely in the technological arrangements of the society-to-be. In its social arrangements, too, we can anticipate the unprecedented, the unfamiliar, the bizarre.

The year 2000 is closer to us in time than the great depression, yet the world's economists, traumatized by that historic disaster, remain frozen in the attitudes of the past. Economists, even those who talk the language of revolution, are peculiarly conservative creatures. If it were possible to pry from their brains their collective image of the economy of, say, the year 2025, it would look very much like that of 1970 – only more so.

Conditioned to think in straight lines, economists have great difficulty imagining alternatives to communism and capitalism. They see in the growth of large-scale organization nothing more than a linear expansion of old-fashioned bureaucracy. They see technological advance as a simple, non-revolutionary extension of the known. Born of scarcity, trained to think in terms of limited resources, they can hardly conceive of a society in which man's basic material wants have been satisfied.

One reason for their lack of imagination is that when they think about technological advance, they concentrate solely on the means of economic activity. Yet the super-industrial revolution challenges the ends as well. It threatens to alter not merely the "how" of production but the "why." It will, in short, transform the very purposes of economic activity.

Before such an upheaval, even the most sophisticated tools of today's economists are helpless. Input-output tables, econometric models – the whole paraphernalia of analysis that economists employ simply do not come to grips with the external forces – political, social and ethical – that will transform economic life in the decades before us. What does "productivity" or "efficiency" mean in a society that places a high value on psychic fulfillment? What happens to an economy when, as is likely, the entire concept of property is reduced to meaninglessness? How are economies likely to be affected by the rise of supranational planning, taxing and regulatory agencies or by a kind of dialectical return to "cottage industry" based on the most advanced cybernetic technologies? Most important, what happens when "no growth" replaces "growth" as an economic objective, when GNP ceases to be the holy grail?

Only by stepping outside the framework of orthodox economic thought and examining these possibilities can we begin to prepare for tomorrow. And among these, none is more central than the shift in values that is likely to accompany the super-industrial revolution.

Under conditions of scarcity, men struggle to meet their immediate material needs. Today under more affluent conditions, we are reorganizing the economy to deal with a new level of human needs. From a system designed to provide material satisfaction, we are rapidly creating an economy geared to the provision of psychic gratification. This process of "psychologization," one of the central themes of the super-industrial revolution, has been all but overlooked by the economists. Yet it will result in a novel, surprise-filled economy unlike any man has ever experienced. The issues raised by it will reduce the great conflict of the twentieth century, the conflict between capitalism and communism, to comparative insignificance. For these issues sweep far beyond economic or political dogma. They involve, as we shall see, nothing less than sanity, the human organism's ability to distinguish illusion from reality.

Much excitement has accompanied the discovery that once a techno-society reaches a certain stage of industrial development, it begins to shift energies into the production of services, as distinct from goods. Many experts see in the services the wave of the future. They suggest that manufacturing will soon be outstripped by service activity in all the industrial nations – a prophecy already on its way toward fulfillment.