The hippie becomes the straight-arrow executive, the executive becomes the skydiver without noting the exact steps of transition. In the process, he discards not only the externals of his style, but many of his underlying attitudes as well. And one day the question hits him like a splash of cold water in a sleep-sodden face: 'What remains?' What is there of 'self' or 'personality' in the sense of a continuous, durable internal structure? For some, the answer is very little. For they are no longer dealing in 'self' but in what might be called 'serial selves.'
The Super-industrial Revolution thus requires a basic change in man's conception of himself, a new theory of personality that takes into account the discontinuities in men's lives, as well as the continuities.
The Super-industrial Revolution also demands a new conception of freedom – a recognition that freedom, pressed to its ultimate, negates itself. Society's leap to a new level of differentiation necessarily brings with it new opportunities for individuation, and the new technology, the new temporary organizational forms, cry out for a new breed of man. This is why, despite 'backlash' and temporary reversals, the line of social advance carries us toward a wider tolerance, a more easy acceptance of more and more diverse human types.
The sudden popularity of the slogan 'do your thing' is a reflection of this historic movement. For the more fragmented or differentiated the society, the greater the number of varied life styles it promotes. And the more socially accepted life style models put forth by the society, the closer that society approaches a condition in which, in fact, each man does his own, unique thing.
Thus, despite all the anti-technological rhetoric of the Elluls and Fromms, the Mumfords and Marcuses, it is precisely the super-industrial society, the most advanced technological society ever, that extends the range of freedom. The people of the future enjoy greater opportunities for self-realization than any previous group in history.
The new society offers few roots in the sense of truly enduring relationships. But it does offer more varied life niches, more freedom to move in and out of these niches, and more opportunity to create one's own niche, than all earlier societies put together. It also offers the supreme exhilaration of riding change, cresting it, changing and growing with it – a process infinitely more exciting than riding the surf, wrestling steers, playing 'knock hubcaps' on an eight-lane speedway, or the pursuit of pharmaceutical kicks. It presents the individual with a contest that requires self-mastery and high intelligence. For the individual who comes armed with these, and who makes the necessary effort to understand the fastemerging super-industrial social structure, for the person who finds the 'right' life pace, the 'right' sequence of subcults to join and life style models to emulate, the triumph is exquisite.
Undeniably, these grand words do not apply to the majority of men. Most people of the past and present remain imprisoned in life niches they have neither made nor have much hope, under present conditions, of ever escaping. For most human beings, the options remain excruciatingly few.
This imprisonment must – and will – be broken. Yet it will not be broken by tirades against technology. It will not be broken by calls for a return to passivity, mysticism and irrationality. It will not be broken by 'feeling' or 'intuiting' our way into the future while derogating empirical study, analysis, and rational effort. Rather than lashing out, Ludditefashion, against the machine, those who genuinely wish to break the prison-hold of the past and present would do well to hasten the controlled – selective – arrival of tomorrow's technologies. To accomplish this, however, intuition and 'mystical insights' are hardly enough. It will take exact scientific knowledge, expertly applied to the crucial, most sensitive points of social control.
Nor does it help to offer the principle of the maximization of choice as the key to freedom. We must consider the possibility, suggested here, that choice may become overchoice, and freedom unfreedom.
Despite romantic rhetoric, freedom cannot be absolute. To argue for total choice (a meaningless concept) or total individuality is to argue against any form of community or society altogether. If each person, busily doing his thing, were to be wholly different from every other, no two humans would have any basis for communication. It is ironic that the people who complain most loudly that people cannot 'relate' to one another, or cannot 'communicate' with one another, are often the very same people who urge greater individuality. The sociologist Karl Mannheim recognized this contradiction when he wrote: 'The more individualized people are, the more difficult it is to attain identification.'
Unless we are literally prepared to plunge backward into pre-technological primitivism, and accept all the consequences – a shorter, more brutal life, more disease, pain, starvation, fear, superstition, xenophobia, bigotry and so on – we shall move forward to more and more differentiated societies. This raises severe problems of social integration. What bonds of education, politics, culture must we fashion to tie the super-industrial order together into a functioning whole? Can this be accomplished? 'This integration,' writes Bertram M. Gross of Wayne State University, 'must be based upon certain commonly accepted values or some degree of perceived interdependence, if not mutually acceptable objectives.'
A society fast fragmenting at the level of values and life styles challenges all the old integrative mechanisms and cries out for a totally new basis for reconstitution. We have by no means yet found this basis. Yet if we shall face disturbing problems of social integration, we shall confront even more agonizing problems of individual integration. For the multiplication of life styles challenges our ability to hold the very self together.
Which of many potential selves shall we choose to be? What sequence of serial selves will describe us? How, in short, must we deal with overchoice at this, the most intensely personal and emotion-laden level of all? In our headlong rush for variety, choice and freedom, we have not yet begun to examine the awesome implications of diversity.
When diversity, however, converges with transience and novelty, we rocket the society toward an historical crisis of adaptation. We create an environment so ephemeral, unfamiliar and complex as to threaten millions with adaptive breakdown. This breakdown is future shock.
Part Five: THE LIMITS OF ADAPTABILITY
Chapter 15
FUTURE SHOCK: THE PHYSICAL DIMENSION
Eons ago the shrinking seas cast millions of unwilling aquatic creatures onto the newly created beaches. Deprived of their familiar environment, they died, gasping and clawing for each additional instant of eternity. Only a fortunate few, better suited to amphibian existence, survived the shock of change. Today, says sociologist Lawrence Suhm of the University of Wisconsin, 'We are going through a period as traumatic as the evolution of man's predecessors from sea creatures to land creatures ... Those who can adapt will; those who can't will either go on surviving somehow at a lower level of development or will perish – washed up on the shores.'
To assert that man must adapt seems superfluous. He has already shown himself to be among the most adaptable of life forms. He has survived Equatorial summers and Antarctic winters. He has survived Dachau and Vorkuta. He has walked the lunar surface. Such accomplishments give rise to the glib notion that his adaptive capabilities are 'infinite.' Yet nothing could be further from the truth. For despite all his heroism and stamina, man remains a biological organism, a 'biosystem,' and all such systems operate within inexorable limits.
Temperature, pressure, caloric intake, oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, all set absolute boundaries beyond which man, as presently constituted, cannot venture. Thus when we hurl a man into outer space, we surround him with an exquisitely designed microenvironment that maintains all these factors within livable limits. How strange, therefore, that when we hurl a man into the future, we take few pains to protect him from the shock of change. It is as though NASA had shot Armstrong and Aldrin naked into the cosmos.
It is the thesis of this book that there are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb, and that by endlessly accelerating change without first determining these limits, we may submit masses of men to demands they simply cannot tolerate. We run the high risk of throwing them into that peculiar state that I have called future shock.
