FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Space

THE TECHNICIANS OF POWER

those who made the major investment allocations in industrial society set the limits within which the integrators themselves were compelled to function. Once a truly large-scale investment decision had been made, whether in Minneapolis or Moscow, it limited future options. Given a scarcity of resources, one could not casually tear out Bessemer furnaces or cracking plants or assembly lines until their cost had been amortized. Once in place, therefore, this capital stock fixed the parameters within which future managers or integrators were confined. These groups of faceless decision-makers, controlling the levers of investment, formed the super-elite in all industrial societies.

In every Second Wave society, consequently, a parallel architecture of elites sprang up. And—with local variation— this hidden hierarchy of power was born again after every crisis or political upheaval. Names, slogans, party labels and candidates might change; revolutions might come and go. New faces might appear behind the big mahogany desks. But the basic architecture of power remained.

Time and again during the past three hundred years, in one country after another, rebels and reformers have attempted to storm the walls of power, to build a new society based on social justice and political equality. Temporarily, such movements have seized the emotions of millions with promises of freedom. Revolutionists have even managed, now and then, to topple a regime.

Yet each time the ultimate outcome was the same. Each time the rebels re-created, under then* own flag, a similar structure of sub-elites, elites, and super-elites. For this inte-grational structure and the technicians of power who ruled it were as necessary to Second Wave civilization as factories, fossil fuels, or nuclear families. Industralism and the full democracy it promised were, in fact, incompatible.

Industrial nations could be forced, through revolutionary action or otherwise, to move back and forth across the spectrum from free market to centrally planned. They could go from capitalist to socialist and vice versa. But like the much-cited leopard, they could not change their spots. They could not function without a powerful hierarchy of integrators.

Today, as the Third Wave of change begins to batter at this fortress of managerial power, the first fleeting cracks are appearing in the power system. Demands for participation in in.-magement, for shared decision-making, for worker, consumer, and citizen control, and for anticipatory democracy