THE THIRD WAVE
The nuclear family, socially imposed schedules, well-defined roles, visible status distinctions, and comprehensible lines of authority—all these factors created adequate life structure for the majority of people during the Second Wave era.
Today the breakup of the Second Wave is dissolving the structure in many individual lives before the new structure-providing institutions of the Third Wave future are laid into place. This, not merely some personal failing, explains why for millions today daily life is experienced as lacking any semblance of recognizable order.
To this loss of order we must also add the loss of meaning. The feeling that our lives “count” comes from healthy relationships with the surrounding society—from family, corporation, church, or political movement. It also depends on being able to see ourselves as part of a larger, even cosmic, scheme of things.
The sudden shift of social ground rules today, the smudging of roles, status distinctions, and lines of authority, the immersion hi blip culture and, above all, the breakup of the great thought-system, indust-reality, have shattered the world-image most of us carry around in our skulls. In consequence, most people surveying the world around them today see only chaos. They suffer a sense of personal powerlessness and pointlessness.
It is only when we put all this together—the loneliness, the loss of structure, and the collapse of meaning attendant on the decline of industrial civi lization—that we can begin to make sense of some of the most puzzling social phenomena of our time, not the least of which is the astonishing rise of the cult
THE SECRET OF THE CULTS
Why do so many thousands of apparently intelligent, seemingly successful people allow themselves to be sucked into the myriad cults sprouting today in the widening cracks of the Second Wave system? What accounts for the total control that a Jim Jones was able to exercise over the lives of his followers?
It is loosely estimated today that some 3,000,000 Americans belong to about 1,000 religious cults, the largest of which bear names like the Unification Church, the Divin*
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