CODA: THE FLASH FLOOD
These external pressures on industrial society are matched by disintegrative pressures inside the system. Whether we focus on the “family system in the United States or the telephone system in France (which is worse today than in some banana republics), or the commuter rail system in Tokyo (which is so bad that riders have stormed the stations and held rail officials hostage in protest), the story is the same: people and systems strained to the ultimate breaking point.
Second Wave systems are in crisis. Thus we find crisis hi the welfare systems. Crisis in the postal systems. Crisis in the school systems. Crisis in the health-delivery systems. Crisis in the urban systems.Crisis in the international financial system. The nation-state itself is in crisis. The Second Wave value system is in crisis.
Even the role system that held industrial civilization together is in crisis. This we see most dramatically in the struggle to redefine sex roles. In the women’s movement, in the demands for the legalization of homosexuality, in the spread of unisex fashions, we see a continual blurring of the traditional expectations for the sexes. Occupational role- lines are blurring, too. Nurses and patients alike are redefining their roles vis-a-vis doctors. Police and teachers are breaking out of their assigned roles and taking illegal strike action. Paralegals are redefining the role of attorney. Workers, more and more, are demanding participation, infringing on traditional management roles. And this society-wide crack-up of the role structure upon which industrialism depended is far more revolutionary in its implications than all the overtly political protests and marches by which headline writers measure change.
Finally, this convergence of pressures—the loss of key subsidies, the malfunctioning of the main life-support systems of the society, the break-up of the role structure—all produce crisis in that most elemental and fragile of structures: the personality. The collapse of Second Wave civilization has, created an epidpmic of personality crisis.
Today we see millions desperately searching for their own shadows, devouring movies, plays, novels, and self-help books, no matter how obscure, that promise to help them locate their missing identities. In the United States, as we shall see, the manifestations of the personality crisis are bizarre.
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