Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

Unless we are literally prepared to plunge backward into pre-technological primitivism, and accept all the consequences – a shorter, more brutal life, more disease, pain, starvation, fear, superstition, xenophobia, bigotry and so on – we shall move forward to more and more differentiated societies. This raises severe problems of social integration. What bonds of education, politics, culture must we fashion to tie the super-industrial order together into a functioning whole? Can this be accomplished? "This integration," writes Bertram M. Gross of Wayne State University, "must be based upon certain commonly accepted values or some degree of perceived interdependence, if not mutually acceptable objectives."

A society fast fragmenting at the level of values and life styles challenges all the old integrative mechanisms and cries out for a totally new basis for reconstitution. We have by no means yet found this basis. Yet if we shall face disturbing problems of social integration, we shall confront even more agonizing problems of individual integration. For the multiplication of life styles challenges our ability to hold the very self together.

Which of many potential selves shall we choose to be? What sequence of serial selves will describe us? How, in short, must we deal with overchoice at this, the most intensely personal and emotion-laden level of all? In our headlong rush for variety, choice and freedom, we have not yet begun to examine the awesome implications of diversity.

When diversity, however, converges with transience and novelty, we rocket the society toward an historical crisis of adaptation. We create an environment so ephemeral, unfamiliar and complex as to threaten millions with adaptive breakdown. This breakdown is future shock.

Eons ago the shrinking seas cast millions of unwilling aquatic creatures onto the newly created beaches. Deprived of their familiar environment, they died, gasping and clawing for each additional instant of eternity. Only a fortunate few, better suited to amphibian existence, survived the shock of change. Today, says sociologist Lawrence Suhm of the University of Wisconsin, "We are going through a period as traumatic as the evolution of man's predecessors from sea creatures to land creatures ... Those who can adapt will; those who can't will either go on surviving somehow at a lower level of development or will perish – washed up on the shores."

To assert that man must adapt seems superfluous. He has already shown himself to be among the most adaptable of life forms. He has survived Equatorial summers and Antarctic winters. He has survived Dachau and Vorkuta. He has walked the lunar surface. Such accomplishments give rise to the glib notion that his adaptive capabilities are "infinite." Yet nothing could be further from the truth. For despite all his heroism and stamina, man remains a biological organism, a "biosystem," and all such systems operate within inexorable limits.

Temperature, pressure, caloric intake, oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, all set absolute boundaries beyond which man, as presently constituted, cannot venture. Thus when we hurl a man into outer space, we surround him with an exquisitely designed microenvironment that maintains all these factors within livable limits. How strange, therefore, that when we hurl a man into the future, we take few pains to protect him from the shock of change. It is as though NASA had shot Armstrong and Aldrin naked into the cosmos.

It is the thesis of this book that there are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb, and that by endlessly accelerating change without first determining these limits, we may submit masses of men to demands they simply cannot tolerate. We run the high risk of throwing them into that peculiar state that I have called future shock.

We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism's physical adaptive systems and its decision-making processes. Put more simply, future shock is the human response to overstimulation.

Different people react to future shock in different ways. Its symptoms also vary according to the stage and intensity of the disease. These symptoms range all the way from anxiety, hostility to helpful authority, and seemingly senseless violence, to physical illness, depression and apathy. Its victims often manifest erratic swings in interest and life style, followed by an effort to "crawl into their shells" through social, intellectual and emotional withdrawal. They feel continually "bugged" or harassed, and want desperately to reduce the number of decisions they must make.

To understand this syndrome, we must pull together from such scattered fields as psychology, neurology, communications theory and endocrinology, what science can tell us about human adaptation. There is, as yet, no science of adaptation per se. Nor is there any systematic listing of the diseases of adaptation. Yet evidence now sluicing in from a variety of disciplines makes it possible to sketch the rough outlines of a theory of adaptation. For while researchers in these disciplines often work in ignorance of each other's efforts, their work is elegantly compatible. Forming a distinct and exciting pattern, it provides solid underpinning for the concept of future shock.

What actually happens to people when they are asked to change again and again? To understand the answer, we must begin with the body, the physical organism, itself. Fortunately, a series of startling, but as yet unpublicized, experiments have recently cast revealing light on the relationship of change to physical health.

These experiments grow out of the work of the late Dr. Harold G. Wolff at the Cornell Medical Center in New York. Wolff repeatedly emphasized that the health of the individual is intimately bound up with the adaptive demands placed on him by the environment. One of Wolff's followers, Dr. Lawrence E. Hinkle, Jr., has termed this the "human ecology" approach to medicine, and has argued passionately that disease need not be the result of any single, specific agent, such as a germ or virus, but a consequence of many factors, including the general nature of the environment surrounding the body. Hinkle has worked for years to sensitize the medical profession to the importance of environmental factors in medicine.

Today, with spreading alarm over air pollution, water pollution, urban crowding and other such factors, more and more health authorities are coming around to the ecological notion that the individual needs to be seen as part of a total system, and that his health is dependent upon many subtle external factors.

It was another of Wolff's colleagues, however, Dr. Thomas H. Holmes, who came up with the idea that change, itself – not this or that specific change but the general rate of change in a person's life – could be one of the most important environmental factors of all. Originally from Cornell, Holmes is now at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and it was there, with the help of a young psychiatrist named Richard Rahe, that he created an ingenious research tool named the Life-Change Units Scale. This was a device for measuring how much change an individual has experienced in a given span of time. Its development was an important methodological breakthrough, making it possible, for the first time, to qualify, at least crudely, the rate of change in individual life.

Reasoning that different kinds of life-changes strike us with different force, Holmes and Rahe began by listing as many such changes as they could. A divorce, a marriage, a move to a new home – such events affect each of us differently. Moreover, some carry greater impact than others. A vacation trip, for example, may represent a pleasant break in the routine. Yet it can hardly compare in impact with, say, the death of a parent.