THE THIRD WAVE
A political system must not only be able to make and enforce decisions; it must operate on the right scale, it must be able to integrate disparate policies, it must be able to make decisions at the right speed, and it must both reflect and respond to the diversity of society. If it fails on any of these points it courts disaster. Our problems are no longer a matter of “left-wing” or “right-wing,” “strong leadership” or “weak.” The decision system itself has become a menace.
The truly astonishing fact today is that our governments continue to function at all. No corporation president would try to run a large company with a table of organization first sketched by the quill pen of some eighteenth-century ancestor whose sole managerial experience consisted of running a farm. No sane pilot would attempt to fly a supersonic jet with the antique navigation and control instruments available to Bleriot or Lindbergh. Yet this is approximately what we are trying to do politically.
The rapid obsolescence of our Second Wave political systems, in a world bristling with nuclear weapons and poised delicately on the edge of economic or ecological collapse, creates an extreme threat for the entire society—not merely for the “outs” but for the “ins,” not merely for the poor but for the rich, and for the non-industrial parts of the world as well. For the immediate danger to all of us lies not so much in the calculated uses of power by those who have it, as in the uncalculated side effects of decisions ground out by politico-bureaucratic decision machines so dangerously anachronistic that even the best of intentions can eventuate in murderous outcomes.
Our so-called “contemporary” political systems are copied from models invented before the advent of the factory system—before canned food, refrigeration, gaslight, or photography, before the Bessemer furnace or the introduction of the typewriter, before the invention of the telephone, before Or-ville and Wilbur Wright took whig, before the automobile and the airplane shrunk distance, before radio and television beganworking their alchemy on our minds, before Auschwitz industrialized death, before nerve gas and nuclear missiles, before computers, copying machines, birth control pills, transistors, and lasers. They were designed in an intellectual world that is almost unimaginable—a world that was pre-Marx, pre-Darwin, pre-Freud and pre-Einstein.
This, then, is the single most important political issue fac- 415ing us: the obsolescence of our most basic political and governmentalinstitutions.
As we are jolted by crisis after crisis, aspiring Hitlers and Siulins will crawl from the wreckage and tell us that the time lias come to solve our problems by throwing away not only our obsolete institutional hulks but our freedom as well. As we race into the Third Wave era, those of us who want to ex-p.md human freedom will not be able to do so by simply defending our existing institutions. We shall—like America’s founding parents two centuries ago—have to invent new ones.
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