Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

This picture of a cracked consensus is confirmed by the findings of Walter Gruen, social science research coordinator at Rhode Island Hospital, who has conducted a series of statistical studies of what he terms "the American core culture." Rather than the monolithic system of beliefs attributed to the middle class by earlier investigators, Gruen found – to his own surprise – that "diversity in beliefs was more striking than the statistically supported uniformities. It is," he concluded, "perhaps already misleading to talk of an 'American' culture complex."

Gruen suggests that particularly among the affluent, educated group, consensus is giving way to what he calls "pockets" of values. We can expect that, as the number and variety of subcults continues to expand, these pockets will proliferate, too.

Faced with colliding value systems, confronted with a blinding array of new consumer goods, services, educational, occupational and recreational options, the people of the future are driven to make choices in a new way. They begin to "consume" life styles the way people of an earlier, less choice-choked time consumed ordinary products.

During Elizabethan times, the term "gentleman" referred to a whole way of life, not simply an accident of birth. Appropriate lineage may have been a prerequisite, but to be a gentleman one had also to live in a certain style: to be better educated, have better manners, wear better clothes than the masses; to engage in certain recreations (and not others); to live in a large, well-furnished house; to maintain a certain aloofness with subordinates; in short, never to lose sight of his class "superiority."

The merchant class had its own preferred life style and the peasantry still another. These life styles, like that of the gentleman, were pieced together out of many different components, ranging from residence, occupation and dress to jargon, gesture and religion. Today we still create our life styles by forming a mosaic of components. But much has changed. Life style is no longer simply a manifestation of class position. Classes themselves are breaking up into smaller units. Economic factors are declining in importance. Thus today it is not so much one's class base as one's ties with a subcult that determine the individual's style of life. The working-class hippie and the hippie who dropped out of Exeter or Eton share a common style of life but no common class.

Since life style has become the way in which the individual expresses his identification with this or that subcult, the explosive multiplication of subcults in society has brought with it an equally explosive multiplication of life styles. Thus the stranger launched into American or English or Japanese or Swedish society today must choose not among four or five classbased styles of life, but among literally hundreds of diverse possibilities. Tomorrow, as subcults proliferate, this number will be even larger.

How we choose a life style, and what it means to us, therefore, looms as one of the central issues of the psychology of tomorrow. For the selection of a life style, whether consciously done or not, powerfully shapes the individual's future. It does this by imposing order, a set of principles or criteria on the choices he makes in his daily life.

This becomes clear if we examine how such choices are actually made. The young couple setting out to furnish their apartment may look at literally hundreds of different lamps – Scandinavian, Japanese, French Provincial, Tiffany lamps, hurricane lamps, American colonial lamps – dozens, scores of different sizes, models and styles before selecting, say, the Tiffany lamp. Having surveyed a "universe" of possibilities, they zero in on one. In the furniture department, they again scan an array of alternatives, then settle on a Victorian end table. This scan-and-select procedure is repeated with respect to rugs, sofa, drapes, dining room chairs, etc. In fact, something like this same procedure is followed not merely in furnishing their home, but also in their adoption of ideas, friends, even the vocabulary they use and the values they espouse.

While the society bombards the individual with a swirling, seemingly patternless set of alternatives, the selections made are anything but random. The consumer (whether of end tables or ideas) comes armed with a pre-established set of tastes and preferences. Moreover, no choice is wholly independent. Each is conditioned by those made earlier. The couple's selection of an end table has been conditioned by their previous choice of a lamp. In short, there is a certain consistency, an attempt at personal style, in all our actions – whether consciously recognized or not.

The American male who wears a button-down collar and garter-length socks probably also wears wing-tip shoes and carries an attaché case. If we look closely, chances are we shall find a facial expression and brisk manner intended to approximate those of the stereotypical executive. The odds are astronomical that he will not let his hair grow wild in the manner of rock musician Jimi Hendrix. He knows, as we do, that certain clothes, manners, forms of speech, opinions and gestures hang together, while others do not. He may know this only by "feel," or "intuition," having picked it up by observing others in the society, but the knowledge shapes his actions.

The black-jacketed motorcyclist who wears steel-studded gauntlets and an obscene swastika dangling from his throat completes his costume with rugged boots, not loafers or wing-tips. He is likely to swagger as he walks and to grunt as he mouths his anti-authoritarian platitudes. For he, too, values consistency. He knows that any trace of gentility or articulateness would destroy the integrity of his style.

Why do the motorcyclists wear black jackets? Why not brown or blue? Why do executives in America prefer attaché cases, rather than the traditional briefcase? It is as though they were following some model, trying to attain some ideal laid down from above.

We know little about the origin of life style models. We do know, however, that popular heroes and celebrities, including fictional characters (James Bond, for example), have something to do with it.

Marlon Brando, swaggering in a black jacket as a motorcyclist, perhaps originated, and certainly publicized a life style model. Timothy Leary, robed, beaded, and muttering mystic pseudo profundities about love and LSD, provided a model for thousands of youths. Such heroes, as the sociologist Orrin Klapp puts it, help to "crystallize a social type." He cites the late James Dean who depicted the alienated adolescent in the movie Rebel Without a Cause or Elvis Presley who initially fixed the image of the guitar-twanging rock-'n'-roller. Later came the Beatles with their (at that time) outrageous hair and exotic costumes. "One of the prime functions of popular favorites," says Klapp, "is to make types visible, which in turn make new life styles and new tastes visible."

Yet the style-setter need not be a mass media idol. He may be almost unknown outside a particular subcult. Thus for years Lionel Trilling, an English professor at Columbia, was the father figure for the West Side Intellectuals, a New York subcult well known in literary and academic circles in the United States. The mother figure was Mary McCarthy, long before she achieved popular fame.

An acute article by John Speicher in a youth magazine called Cheetah listed some of the better-known life style models to which young people were responding in the late sixties. They ranged from Ché Guevara to William Buckley, from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to Robert Kennedy. "The American youth bag," wrote Speicher, lapsing into hippie jargon, "is overcrowded with heroes." And, he adds, "where heroes are, there are followers, cultists."