Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

The reason for the crushing conformity required of pre-industrial man, the reason the Temne tribesman has to "go along" with his fellows, is precisely that he has nowhere else to go. His society is monolithic, not yet broken into a liberating multiplicity of components. It is what sociologists call "undifferentiated."

Like a bullet smashing into a pane of glass, industrialism shatters these societies, splitting them up into thousands of specialized agencies – schools, corporations, government bureaus, churches, armies – each subdivided into smaller and still more specialized subunits. The same fragmentation occurs at the informal level, and a host of subcults spring up: rodeo riders, Black Muslims, motorcyclists, skinheads and all the rest.

This split-up of the social order is precisely analogous to the process of growth in biology. Embryos differentiate as they develop, forming more and more specialized organs. The entire march of evolution, from the virus to man, displays a relentless advance toward higher and higher degrees of differentiation. There appears to be a seemingly irresistible movement of living beings and social groups from less to more differentiated forms.

Thus it is not accidental that we witness parallel trends toward diversity – in the economy, in art, in education and mass culture, in the social order itself. These trends all fit together forming part of an immensely larger historic process. The Super-industrial Revolution can now be seen for what, in large measure, it is – the advance of human society to its next higher stage of differentiation.

This is why it often seems to us that our society is cracking at the seams. It is. This is why everything grows increasingly complex. Where once there stood 1000 organizational entities, there now stand 10,000 – interconnected by increasingly transient links. Where once there were a few relatively permanent subcults with which a person might identify, there now are thousands of temporary subcults milling about, colliding and multiplying. The powerful bonds that integrated industrial society – bonds of law, common values, centralized and standardized education and cultural production – are breaking down.

All this explains why cities suddenly seem to be "unmanageable" and universities "ungovernable." For the old ways of integrating a society, methods based on uniformity, simplicity, and permanence, are no longer effective. A new, more finely fragmented social order – a super-industrial order – is emerging. It is based on many more diverse and shortlived components than any previous social system – and we have not yet learned how to link them together, how to integrate the whole.

For the individual, this leap to a new level of differentiation holds awesome implications. But not the ones most people fear. We have been told so often that we are heading for faceless uniformity that we fail to appreciate the fantastic opportunities for individuality that the Super-industrial Revolution brings with it. And we have hardly begun to think about the dangers of over-individualization that are also implicit in it.

The "mass society" theorists are obsessed by a reality that has already begun to pass us by. The Cassandras who blindly hate technology and predict an ant-heap future are still responding in knee-jerk fashion to the conditions of industrialism. Yet this system is already being superseded.

To denounce the conditions that imprison the industrial worker today is admirable. To project these conditions into the future, and predict the death of individualism, diversity and choice, is to utter dangerous clichés.

The people of both past and present are still locked into relatively choiceless life ways. The people of the future, whose number increases daily, face not choice but overchoice. For them there comes an explosive extension of freedom.

And this freedom comes not in spite of the new technology but very largely because of it. For if the early technology of industrialism required mindless, robot-like men to perform endlessly repetitive tasks, the technology of tomorrow takes over precisely these tasks, leaving for men only those functions that require judgment, interpersonal skills and imagination. Super-industrialism requires, and will create, not identical "mass men," but people richly different from one another, individuals, not robots.

The human race, far from being flattened into monotonous conformity, will become far more diverse socially than it ever was before. The new society, the super-industrial society now beginning to take form, will encourage a crazy-quilt pattern of evanescent life styles.

In San Francisco, executives lunch at restaurants where they are served by bare-breasted waitresses. In New York, however, a kooky girl cellist is arrested for performing avant garde music in a topless costume. In St. Louis, scientists hire prostitutes and others to copulate under a camera as part of a study of the physiology of the orgasm. But in Columbus, Ohio, civic controversy erupts over the sale of so-called "Little Brother" dolls that come from the factory equipped with male genitalia. In Kansas City, a conference of homosexual organizations announces a campaign to lift a Pentagon ban on homosexuals in the armed forces and, in fact, the Pentagon discreetly does so. Yet American jails are well populated with men arrested for the crime of homosexuality.

Seldom has a single nation evinced greater confusion over its sexual values. Yet the same might be said for other kinds of values as well. America is tortured by uncertainty with respect to money, property, law and order, race, religion, God, family and self. Nor is the United States alone in suffering from a kind of value vertigo. All the techno-societies are caught up in the same massive upheaval. This collapse of the values of the past has hardly gone unnoticed. Every priest, politician and parent is reduced to head-shaking anxiety by it. Yet most discussions of value change are barren for they miss two essential points. The first of these is acceleration.

Value turnover is now faster than ever before in history. While in the past a man growing up in a society could expect that its public value system would remain largely unchanged in his lifetime, no such assumption is warranted today, except perhaps in the most isolated of pre-technological communities.

This implies temporariness in the structure of both public and personal value systems, and it suggests that whatever the content of values that arise to replace those of the industrial age, they will be shorter-lived, more ephemeral than the values of the past. There is no evidence whatsoever that the value systems of the techno-societies are likely to return to a "steady state" condition. For the foreseeable future, we must anticipate still more rapid value change.

Within this context, however, a second powerful trend is unfolding. For the fragmentation of societies brings with it a diversification of values. We are witnessing the crack-up of consensus.

Most previous societies have operated with a broad central core of commonly shared values. This core is now contracting, and there is little reason to anticipate the formation of a new broad consensus within the decades ahead. The pressures are outward toward diversity, not inward toward unity.

This accounts for the fantastically discordant propaganda that assails the mind in the techno-societies. Home, school, corporation, church, peer group, mass media – and myriad subcults – all advertise varying sets of values. The result for many is an "anything goes" attitude – which is, itself, still another value position. We are, declares Newsweek magazine, "a society that has lost its consensus ... a society that cannot agree on standards of conduct, language and manners, on what can be seen and heard."