FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Space

THE THIRD WAVE

a unit but 7,882. In his autobiography, Ford noted that of these 7,882 specialized jobs, 949 required “strong, able-bodied, and practically physically perfect men,” 3,338 needed men of merely “ordinary” physical strength, most of the rest could be performed by “women or older children,” and, he continued coolly, “we found that 670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one-legged men, two by armless men, 715 by one-armed men and 10 by blind men.” In short, the specialized job required not a whole person, but only a part. No more vivid evidence that overspecialization can be brutalizing has ever been adduced.
A practice which critics attributed to capitalism, however, became an inbuilt feature of socialism as well. For the extreme specialization of labor that was common to all Second Wave societies had its roots in the divorce of production from consumption. The U.S.S.R., Poland, East Germany, or Hungary can no more run their factories today without elaborate specialization than can Japan or the United States— whose Department of Labor in 1977 published a list of twenty thousand identifiably different occupations.

In both capitalist and socialist industrial states, moreover, specialization was accompanied by a rising tide of profession-alization. Whenever the opportunity arose for some group of specialists to monopolize esoteric knowledge and keep newcomers out of their field, professions emerged. As the Second Wave advanced, the market intervened between a knowledge-holder and a client, dividing them sharply into producer and consumer. Thus, health in Second Wave societies came to be seen as a product provided by a doctor and a health-delivery bureaucracy, rather than a result of intelligent self-care (production for use) by the patient. Education was supposedly “produced” by the teacher in the school and “consumed” by the student.

All sorts of occupational groups from librarians to salesmen began clamoring for the right to call themselves professionals—and for the power to set standards, prices, and conditions of entry into their specialties. By now, according to Michael Pertschuk, Chairman of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, “Our culture is dominated by professionals who call us ‘clients’ and tell us of our ‘needs.'”

In Second Wave societies even political agitation was conceived of as a profession. Thus Lenin argued that the masses could not bring about a revolution without professional help. What was needed, he asserted, was an “organization of revolutionaries” limited in membership to “people whose profession is that of a revolutionary.”