FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Civilization, Prophecy

THE THIRD WAVE

To begin with, many of today’s changes are not independent of one another. Nor are they random. For example, the crack-up of the nuclear family, the global energy crisis, the spread of cults and cable television, the rise of flextime and new fringe-benefit packages, the emergence of separatist movements from Quebec to Corsica, may all seem like isolated events. Yet precisely the reverse is true. These and many other seemingly unrelated events or trends are niter-connected. They are, in fact, parts of a much larger phenomenon: the death of industrialism and the rise of a new civilization.

So long as we think of them as isolated changes and miss this larger significance, we cannot design a coherent, effective response to them. As individuals, our personal decisions remain aimless or self-canceling. As governments, we stumble from crisis to crash program, lurching into the future without plan, without hope, without vision.

Lacking a systematic framework for understanding the clash of forces in today’s world, we are like a ship’s crew, trapped in a storm and trying to navigate between dangerous reefs without compass or chart. In a culture of warring specialisms, drowned in fragmented data and fine-toothed analysis, synthesis is not merely useful—it is crucial.

For this reason, The Third Wave is a book of large-scale synthesis. It describes the old civilization in which many of us grew up, and presents a careful, comprehensive picture of the new civilization bursting into being in our midst.

So profoundly revolutionary is this new civilization that it challenges all our old assumptions. Old ways of thinking, old formulas, dogmas, and ideologies, no matter how cherished or how useful hi the past, no longer fit the facts. The world that is fast emerging from the clash of new values and technologies, new geopolitical relationships, new life-styles and modes of communication, demands wholly new ideas and analogies, classifications and concepts. We cannot cram the embryonic world of tomorrow into yesterday’s conventional cubbyholes. Nor are the orthodox attitudes or moods appropriate.

Thus, as the description of this strange new civilization unfolds in these pages, we will find reason to challenge the chic pessimism that is so prevalent today. Despair—salable and self-indulgent—has dominated the culture for a decade or more. The Third Wave concludes that despair is not only a sin (as C. P. Snow, I believe, once put it), but that it is also unwarranted.