FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Space

THE THIRD WAVE

who writes or paints for money alone is not so different from the Polish, Czech, or Soviet novelist, painter, or playwright who sells his creative freedom for such economic perquisites as a dacha, bonuses, access to a new car or otherwise unobtainable goods.

Such corruption is inherent in the divorce of production from consumption. The very need for a market or switchboard to reconnect consumer and producer, to move goods from producer to consumer, necessarily places those who control the market in a position of inordinate power—regardless of the rhetoric they use to justify that power.

This divorce of production from consumption, which became a defining feature of all industrial or Second Wave societies, even affected our psyches and our assumptions about personality. Behavior came to be seen as a set of transactions. Instead of a society based on friendship, kinship, or tribal or feudal allegiance, there arose in the wake of the Second Wave a civilization based on contractual ties, actually or implied. Even husbands and wives today speak of martical contracts.

The cleavage between these two roles—producer and consumer—created at the same time a dual personality. The very same person who (as a producer) was taught by family, school, and boss to defer gratification, to be disciplined, controlled, restrained, obedient, to be a team player, was simultaneously taught (as a consumer) to seek instant gratification, to be hedonistic rather than calculating, to abandon discipline, to pursue individualistic pleasure—in short, to be a totally different kind of person. In the West especially, the full firepower of advertising was trained on the consumer, urging her or him to borrow, to buy on impulse, to “Fly now, pay later,” and, in so doing, to perform a patriotic service by keeping the wheels of the economy turning.

THE SEXUAL SPLIT

Finally, the same giant wedge that split producer from consumer in Second Wave societies also split work into two kinds. This had an enormous impact on family life, sexual roles, and on our inner lives as individuals.

One of the most common sexual stereotypes in industrial society defines men as “objective” in orientation, and women as “subjective.” If there is a kernel of truth here, it probably lies not in some fixed biological reality but in the psychological effects of the invisible wedge.