THE THIRD WAVE
This means that to avoid violent upheaval we must begin now to focus on the problem of structural political obsolescence around the world. And we must take this issue not merely to the experts, the constitutionalists, lawyers, and politicians, but to the public itself—to civic organizations, trade unions, churches, to women’s groups, to ethnic and racial minorities, to scientists and housewives and businessmen.
We must, as a first step, launch the widest public debate over the need for a new political system attuned to the needs of a Third Wave civilization. We need conferences, television programs, contests, simulation exercises, mock constitutional conventions to generate the broadest array of imaginative proposals for political restructuring, to unleash an outpouring of fresh ideas. We should be prepared to use the most advanced tools available to us, from satellites and computers to video-disc and interactive television.
No one knows in detail what the future holds or what will work best in a Third Wave society. For this reason we should think not of a single massive reorganization or of a single revolutionary, cataclysmic change imposed from the top, but of thousands of conscious, decentralized experiments that permit us to test new models of political decision-making at local and regional levels in advance of their application to the national and transnational levels.
But, at the same time, we must also begin to build a constituency for similar experimentation-—and radical redesign— of institutions at the national and transnational levels as well. Today’s widespread disillusionment, anger, and bitterness against the world’s Second Wave governments can either be whipped into fanatic frenzy by demagogues calling for authoritarian leadership or it can be mobilized for the process of democratic reconstruction.
By launching a vast process of social learning—an experiment in anticipatory democracy in many nations at once—we can head off the totalitarian thrust. We can prepare millions for the dislocations and dangerous crises that lie before us. And we can place strategic pressure on existing political systems to accelerate the necessary changes.
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