Meanwhile New Zealand has its own troubles with break-aways. The South Island’s hydroelectric power provides much sprouted in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana during the heating-oil shortages of the mid-1970’s and declared: “Let the Bastards Freeze in the Dark.” The thinly veiled implication of secession could also be found in the wording of an ad placed in The New York Times by the state of Louisiana. It urged the reader to “Consider an America without Louisiana.”
Midwesterners today are being advised to stop “chasing smoke-stacks,” to move to more advanced industry, and to start thinking like regionalists, while Northeastern governors are organizing themselves to defend that region’s interests. The public mood was hinted at in a full-page ad placed by a Coalition to Save New York. The ad charged that “New York Is Being Raped” by federal policies and that “New Yorkers can fight back.”
What does all this belligerent talk around the world, not to mention the protests and violence, add up to? The answer is unmistakable: potentially explosive internal stresses within the nations spawned by the industrial revolution.
Some of these stresses obviously arise from the energy crisis and the need to shift from a Second Wave to a Third Wave energy base.Others can be traced to conflicts over the transition from a SecondWave to a Third Wave industrial base. In many places we are also witnessing, as suggested in Chapter Nineteen, the growth of subnational or regional economies that are as large, complex, and internally differentiated as national economies were a generation ago. These form the economic launching pad for separatist movements or drives for autonomy.
But whether taking the form of open secessionism, of regionalism, bilingualism, home-rulism, or decentralism, these centrifugal forces also gain support because national governments are unable to respond flexibly to the rapid de-massifi-cation of society.
As the mass society of the industrial era disintegrates under the impact of the Third Wave, regional, local, ethnic, social, and religious groups grow less uniform. Conditions and needs diverge. Individuals, too, discover or reassert their differences.
Corporations typically meet this problem by introducing more variety into their product lines and by a policy of aggressive “market segmentation.”
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