Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

To the subcult member, its heroes provide what Speicher calls the "crucial existential necessity of psychological identity." This is, of course, hardly new. Earlier generations identified with Charles Lindbergh or Theda Bara. What is new and highly significant, however, is the fabulous proliferation of such heroes and mini-heroes. As subcults multiply and values diversify, we find, in Speicher's words, "a national sense of identity hopelessly fragmented." For the individual, he says, this means greater choice: "There is a wide range of cults available, a wide range of heroes. You can do comparison shopping."

While charismatic figures may become style-setters, styles are fleshed out and marketed to the public by the sub-societies or tribe-lets we have termed subcults. Taking in raw symbolic matter from the mass media, they somehow piece together odd bits of dress, opinion, and expression and form them into a coherent package: a life style model. Once they have assembled a particular model, they proceed, like any good corporation, to merchandise it. They find customers for it.

Anyone doubting this is advised to read the letters of Allen Ginsberg to Timothy Leary, the two men most responsible for creating the hippie life style, with its heavy accent on drug use.

Says poet Ginsberg: "Yesterday got on TV with N. Mailer and Ashley Montagu and gave big speech ... recommending everybody get high ... Got in touch with all the liberal prodope people I know to have [a certain pro-drug report] publicized and circulated ... I wrote a five-page summary of the situation to this friend Kenny Love on The New York Times and he said he'd perhaps do a story (newswise) ... which could then be picked up by U.P. friend on national wire. Also gave copy to Al Aronowitz on New York Post and Rosalind Constable at Time and Bob Silvers on Harper's..."

No wonder LSD and the whole hippie phenomenon received the immense mass media publicity it did. This partial account of Ginsberg's energetic press agentry, complete with the Madison Avenue suffix "-wise" (as in newswise), reads precisely like an internal memo from Hill and Knowlton or any of the other giant public relations corporations whom hippies love to flagellate for manipulating public opinion. The successful "sale" of the hippie life style model to young people all over the techno-societies, is one of the classic merchandising stories of our time.

Not all subcults are so aggressive and talented at flackery, yet their cumulative power in the society is enormous. This power stems from our almost universal desperation to "belong." The primitive tribesman feels a strong attachment to his tribe. He knows that he "belongs" to it, and may even have difficulty imagining himself apart from it. The technosocieties are so large, however, and their complexities so far beyond the comprehension of any individual, that it is only by plugging in to one or more of their subcults, that we maintain some sense of identity and contact with the whole. Failure to identify with some such group or groups condemns us to feelings of loneliness, alienation and ineffectuality. We begin to wonder "who we are."

In contrast, the sense of belonging, of being part of a social cell larger than ourselves (yet small enough to be comprehensible) is often so rewarding that we feel deeply drawn, sometimes even against our own better judgment, to the values, attitudes and most-favored life style of the group.

However, we pay for the benefits we receive. For once we psychologically affiliate with a subcult, it begins to exert pressures on us. We find that it pays to "go along" with the group. It rewards us with warmth, friendship and approval when we conform to its life style model. But it punishes us ruthlessly with ridicule, ostracism or other tactics when we deviate from it.

Hawking their preferred life style models, subcults clamor for our attention. In so doing, they act directly on our most vulnerable psychological property, our self-image. "Join us," they whisper, "and you become a bigger, better, more effective, more respected and less lonely person." In choosing among the fast-proliferating subcults we may only vaguely sense that our identity will be shaped by our decision, but we feel the hot urgency of their appeals and counter-appeals. We are buffeted back and forth by their psychological promises.

At the moment of choice among them, we resemble the tourist walking down Bourbon Street in New Orleans. As he strolls past the honky-tonks and clip joints, doormen grab him by the arm, spin him around, and open a door so he can catch a titillating glimpse of the naked flesh of the strippers on the platform behind the bar. Subcults reach out to capture us and appeal to our most private fantasies in ways far more powerful and subtle than any yet devised by Madison Avenue.

What they offer is not simply a skin show or a new soap or detergent. They offer not a product, but a super-product. It is true they hold out the promise of human warmth, companionship, respect, a sense of community. But so do the advertisers of deodorants and beer. The "miracle ingredient," the exclusive component, the one thing that subcults offer that other hawkers cannot, is a respite from the strain of overchoice. For they offer not a single product or idea, but a way of organizing all products and ideas, not a single commodity but a whole style, a set of guidelines that help the individual reduce the increasing complexity of choice to manageable proportions.

Most of us are desperately eager to find precisely such guidelines. In the welter of conflicting moralities, in the confusion occasioned by overchoice, the most powerful, most useful "super-product" of all is an organizing principle for one's life. This is what a life style offers.

Of course, not just any life style will do. We live in a Cairo bazaar of competing models. In this psychological phantasmagoria we search for a style, a way of ordering our existence, that will fit our particular temperament and circumstances. We look for heroes or mini-heroes to emulate. The style-seeker is like the lady who flips through the pages of a fashion magazine to find a suitable dress pattern. She studies one after another, settles on one that appeals to her, and decides to create a dress based on it. Next she begins to collect the necessary materials – cloth, thread, piping, buttons, etc. In precisely the same way, the life style creator acquires the necessary props. He lets his hair grow. He buys art nouveau posters and a paperback of Guevara's writings. He learns to discuss Marcuse and Frantz Fanon. He picks up a particular jargon, using words like "relevance" and "establishment."

None of this means that his political actions are insignificant, or that his opinions are unjust or foolish. He may (or may not) be accurate in his views of society. Yet the particular way in which he chooses to express them is inescapably part of his search for personal style.

The lady, in constructing her dress, alters it here and there, deviating from the pattern in minor ways to make it fit her more perfectly. The end product is truly custom-made; yet it bears a striking resemblance to others sewn from the same design. In quite the same way we individualize our style of living, yet it usually winds up bearing a distinct resemblance to some life style model previously packaged and marketed by a subcult.

Often we are unaware of the moment when we commit ourselves to one life style model over all others. The decision to "be" an Executive or a Black Militant or a West Side Intellectual is seldom the result of purely logical analysis. Nor is the decision always made cleanly, all at once. The research scientist who switches from cigarettes to a pipe may do so for health reasons without recognizing that the pipe is part of a whole life style toward which he finds himself drawn. The couple who choose the Tiffany lamp think they are furnishing an apartment; they do not necessarily see their actions as an attempt to flesh out an overall style of life.