FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Civilization, Prophecy

THE THIRD WAVE

Until we cut through the foggy rhetoric that surrounds the issue of nationalism, we cannot make sense of the headlines and we cannot understand the conflict between First and Second Wave civilizations as the Third Wave strikes them both.

CHANGING HORSES

Before the Second Wave began rolling across Europe most regions of the world were not yet consolidated into nations but were organized, rather, into a mishmash of tribes, clans, duchies, principalities, kingdoms, and other more or less local units. “Kings and princes,” write the political scientist S. E. Finer, “held powers hi bits and blobs.” Borders were ill-defined, governmental rights fuzzy. The power of the state was not yet standardized. In one village, Professor Finer tells us, it amounted only to the right to collect tolls on a windmill, in another to tax the peasants, elsewhere to appoint an abbot. An individual with property in several different regions might owe allegiance to several lords. Even the greatest of emperors typically ruled over a patch work of tiny locally-governed communities. Political control was not yet uniform. Voltaire summed it all up: In traveling across Europe, he complained, he had to change laws as frequently as horses.

There was more to this quip than met the eye, of course, for the frequent need to change horses reflected the primitive level of transport and communications—which, hi turn, reduced the distance over which even the most powerful monarch could impose effective control. The farther from the capital, the weaker the authority of the state.

Yet without political integration, economic integration was impossible. Costly new Second Wave technologies could only be amortized if they produced goods for larger-than-local markets. But how could businessmen buy and sell over a large territory if, outside their own communities, they ran into a maze of different duties, taxes, labor regulations, and currencies? For the new technologies to pay off, local economies had to be consolidated into a single national economy. This meant a national division of labor and a national market for commodities and capital. All this, in turn, required national political consolidation as well.