Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

  At Cornell University, Jose Villegas, a professor in the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis, has begun constructing with the aid of black and white students, a variety of "ghetto games" which reveal to the players the consequences of various proposed courses of action and thus help them clarify goals. Ghetto 1984 showed what would happen if the recommendations made by the Kerner riot commission – the U. S. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder – were actually to be adopted. It showed how the sequence in which these recommendations were enacted would affect their ultimate impact on the ghetto. It helped players, both black and white, to identify their shared goals as well as their unresolved conflicts. In games like Peru 2000 and Squatter City 2000, players design communities for the future.

  In Lower East Side, a game Villegas hopes actually to play in the Manhattan community that bears that name, players would not be students, but real-life residents of the community – poverty workers, middle-class whites, Puerto Rican small businessmen or youth, unemployed blacks, police, landlords and city officials.

  In the spring of 1969, 50,000 high school students in Boston, in Philadelphia and in Syracuse, New York, participated in a televised game involving a simulated war in the Congo in 1975. While televised teams simulated the cabinets of Russia, Red China, and the United States, and struggled with the problems of diplomacy and policy planning, students and teachers watched, discussed, and offered advice via telephone to the central players.

  Similar games, involving not tens, but hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, could be devised to help us formulate goals for the future. While televised players act out the role of high government officials attempting to deal with a crisis – an ecological disaster, for example – meetings of trade unions, women's clubs, church groups, student organizations and other constituencies might be held at which large numbers could view the program, reach collective judgments about the choices to be made, and forward those judgments to the primary players. Special switchboards and computers could pick up the advice or tabulate the yes-no votes and pass them on to the "decision-makers." Vast numbers of people could also participate from their own homes, thus opening the process to unorganized, otherwise nonparticipating millions. By imaginatively constructing such games, it becomes not only possible but practical to elicit futural goals from previously unconsulted masses.

  Such techniques, still primitive today, will become fantastically more sophisticated in the years immediately ahead, providing us with a systematic way to collect and reconcile conflicting images of the preferable future, even from people unskilled in academic debate or parliamentary procedure.

  It would be pollyanna-like to expect such town halls of the future to be tidy or harmonious affairs, or that they would be organized in the same way everywhere. In some places, social future assemblies might be called into being by community organizations, planning councils or government agencies. Elsewhere, they might be sponsored by trade unions, youth groups, or individual, future-oriented political leaders. In other places, churches, foundations or voluntary organizations might initiate the call. And in still other places, they might arise not from a formal convention call, but as a spontaneous response to crisis.

  It would similarly be a mistake to think of the goals drawn up by these assemblies as constituting permanent, Platonic ideals, floating somewhere in a metaphysical never-never land. Rather, they must be seen as temporary direction-indicators, broad objectives good for a limited time only, and intended as advisory to the elected political representatives of the community or nation.

  Nevertheless, such future-oriented, future-forming events could have enormous political impact. Indeed, they could turn out to be the salvation of the entire system of representative politics – a system now in dire crisis.

  The mass of voters today are so far removed from contact with their elected representatives, the issues dealt with are so technical, that even well educated middle-class citizens feel hopelessly excluded from the goal-setting process. Because of the generalized acceleration of life, so much happens so fast between elections, that the politician grows increasingly less accountable to "the folks back home." What's more, these folks back home keep changing. In theory, the voter unhappy with the performance of his representative can vote against him the next time around. In practice, millions find even this impossible. Mass mobility removes them from the district, sometimes disenfranchising them altogether. Newcomers flood into the district. More and more, the politician finds himself addressing new faces. He may never be called to account for his performance – or for promises made to the last set of constituents.

  Still more damaging to democracy is the time-bias of politics. The politician's time horizon usually extends no further than the next election. Congresses, diets, parliaments, city councils – legislative bodies in general – lack the time, the resources, or the organizational forms needed to think seriously about the long-term future. As for the citizen, the last thing he is ever consulted about are the larger, more distant, goals of his community, state or nation.

  The voter may be polled about specific issues, never about the general shape of the preferable future. Indeed, nowhere in politics is there an institution through which an ordinary man can express his ideas about what the distant future ought to look, feel or taste like. He is never asked to think about this, and on the rare occasions when he does, there is no organized way for him to feed his ideas into the arena of politics. Cut off from the future, he becomes a political eunuch.

  We are, for these and other reasons, rushing toward a fateful breakdown of the entire system of political representation. If legislatures are to survive at all, they will need new links with their constituencies, new ties with tomorrow. Social future assemblies could provide the means for reconnecting the legislator with his mass base, the present with the future.

  Conducted at frequent and regular intervals, such assemblies could provide a more sensitive measure of popular will than any now available to us. The very act of calling such assemblies would attract into the flow of political life millions who now ignore it. By confronting men and women with the future, by asking them to think deeply about their own private destinies as well as our accelerating public trajectories, it would pose profound ethical issues.

  Simply putting such questions to people would, by itself, prove liberating. The very process of social assessment would brace and cleanse a population weary to death of technical discussions of how to get someplace it is not sure it wants to go. Social future assemblies would help clarify the differences that increasingly divide us in our fastfragmenting societies; they would, conversely, identify common social needs – potential grounds for temporary unities. In this way, they would bring various polities together in a fresh framework out of which new political mechanisms would inevitably spring.

  Most important of all, however, social future assemblies would help shift the culture toward a more super-industrial time-bias. By focusing public attention for once on long-range goals rather than immediate programs alone, by asking people to choose a preferable future from among a range of alternative futures, these assemblies could dramatize the possibilities for humanizing the future – possibilities that all too many have already given up as lost. In so doing, social future assemblies could unleash powerful constructive forces – the forces of conscious evolution.

  By now the accelerative thrust triggered by man has become the key to the entire evolutionary process on the planet. The rate and direction of the evolution of other species, their very survival, depends upon decisions made by man. Yet there is nothing inherent in the evolutionary process to guarantee man's own survival.

  Throughout the past, as successive stages of social evolution unfolded, man's awareness followed rather than preceded the event. Because change was slow, he could adapt unconsciously, "organically." Today unconscious adaptation is no longer adequate. Faced with the power to alter the gene, to create new species, to populate the planets or depopu
late the earth, man must now assume conscious control of evolution itself. Avoiding future shock as he rides the waves of change, he must master evolution, shaping tomorrow to human need. Instead of rising in revolt against it, he must, from this historic moment on, anticipate and design the future.

  This, then, is the ultimate objective of social futurism, not merely the transcendence of technocracy and the substitution of more humane, more far-sighted, more democratic planning, but the subjection of the process of evolution itself to conscious human guidance. For this is the supreme instant, the turning point in history at which man either vanquishes the processes of change or vanishes, at which, from being the unconscious puppet of evolution he becomes either its victim or its master.

  A challenge of such proportions demands of us a dramatically new, a more deeply rational response toward change. This book has had change as its protagonist – first as potential villain and then, it would seem, as potential hero. In calling for the moderation and regulation of change, it has called for additional revolutionary changes. This is less paradoxical than it appears. Change is essential to man, as essential now in our 800th lifetime as it was in our first. Change is life itself. But change rampant, change unguided and unrestrained, accelerated change overwhelming not only man's physical defenses but his decisional processes – such change is the enemy of life.

  Our first and most pressing need, therefore, before we can begin to gently guide our evolutionary destiny, before we can build a humane future, is to halt the runaway acceleration that is subjecting multitudes to the threat of future shock while, at the very same moment, intensifying all the problems they must deal with – war, ecological incursions, racism, the obscene contrast between rich and poor, the revolt of the young, and the rise of a potentially deadly mass irrationalism.

  There is no facile way to treat this wild growth, this cancer in history. There is no magic medicine, either, for curing the unprecedented disease it bears in its rushing wake: future shock. I have suggested palliatives for the change-pressed individual and more radically curative procedures for the society – new social services, a future-facing education system, new ways to regulate technology, and a strategy for capturing control of change. Other ways must also be found. Yet the basic thrust of this book is diagnosis. For diagnosis precedes cure, and we cannot begin to help ourselves until we become sensitively conscious of the problem.

  These pages will have served their purpose if, in some measure, they help create the consciousness needed for man to undertake the control of change, the guidance of his evolution. For, by making imaginative use of change to channel change, we cannot only spare ourselves the trauma of future shock, we can reach out and humanize distant tomorrows.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Among the more hallowed cliches of our time are the notions that an author's life is a lonely one, that his ideas spring from some mystical inner source, and that he writes under the spell of inspiration. Most professional writers know better. However well these descriptions may apply to other authors and other books, they do not apply to this one. Future Shock is a product of gregarious, face-to-face and mind-to-mind contact with hundreds of people, so many, in fact, in so many different universities, research institutes and offices, that it would be impossible for me to list them all.

  Apart from my own, the single most important influence on the book has been that of my wife, Heidi, who has been not the proverbial "patient spouse who kept the children out of the authorial den," but, rather, an active intellectual partner in the enterprise, arguing through point after point, forcing me to clarify and integrate the concepts on which the book is based. As in the past, she also served as resident editor, reading or listening to each chapter, suggesting cuts, additions, and fresh insights. It is, in large measure, her book as well as mine.

  Several friends also read all or part of the manuscript in advance, offering valuable comments. Dr. Donald F. Klein, director of psychiatric research, Hillside Hospital, New York, Dr. Herbert Gerjuoy, a psychologist, Dr. Benjamin Singer, a sociologist, and Harold Lee Strudler, Esq., were each kind enough to help me in this way. I must also thank Miss Bonnie Brower who served as research assistant during the early stages of the project, and cheerfully helped me filter the masses of material that mounted depressingly at times on my desk.

  A special note of gratitude is owed to Professor Ellis L. Phillips of the Columbia University School of Law and to the Ellis L. Phillips Foundation for displaying superhuman patience, allowing me, again and again, to defer important commitments to the Foundation while completing this book.

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