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     "The Scientific Trajectory

    We are creating a new society. Not a changed society. Not an extended, larger-than-life version of our present society. But a new society.
     This simple premise has not yet begun to tincture our conscioisness. Yet unless we understand this, we shall destroy ourselves in trying to cope with tomorrow.
     A revolution shatters institutions and power relationships. This is precisely what is happening today in all the high-technology nations. Students in Berlin and New York, in Turin and Tokyo, capture their deans and chancellors, bring great clanking education factories to a grinding halt, and even threaten to topple governments. Police stand aside in the ghettosof New York, Washington and Chicago as ancient property laws are openly violated. Sexual standards are overthrown. Great cities are paralyzed by strikes, power failures, riots. International power alliances are shaken. Financial and political leaders secretly tremble - not out of fear that communist(or capitalist) revolutionaries will oust them, but that the entire system is somehow flying out of control.
     These are indisputable signs of a sick social structure, a society that can no longer perform even its most basic functions in the accustomed ways. It is a society caught in the agony revolutionary change. In the 1920's and 1930's, communistsused to speak of the "general crisis of capitalism." It is now clear that they were thinking small. What is occuring now is not a crisis of capitalism, but of industrial society itself, regardless of its political form. We are simultaneously experiencing a youth revolution, a sexual revolution, a racial revolution, a colonial revolution, an economic revolution, and the most rapid and deep-going technological revolution in history. We are living through the general crisis of industrialism. In a word, we are in the midst of the super-industrial revolution.
     If failure to grasp this fact impairs one's ability to understand the present, it also leads otherwise intelligent men into total stupidity when they talk about the future. It encourages tghem to think in simple-minded straight lines. Seeing evidence of bureaucracy today, they naively assume there will be more bureaucracy tomorrow. Such linear projections characterize most of what is said or written about the future. And it causes us to worry about precisely the wrong things.
     One needs imagination to confront a revolution. For revolution does not move in straight lines alone. It jerks, twists and backtracks. It arrives in the form of quantum jumps and dialectical reversals. Only by accepting the premise that we are racing toward a wholly new stage of eco-technological development - the super industrial stage - can we make sense of our era. Only by accepting the revolutionary premise can we free our imaginations to grapple with the future.
     Revolution implies novelty. It sends a flood of newness into the lives of countless individuals, confronting them with unfamiliar institutions and first-time situations. Reaching deep into our personal lives, the enormous changes ahead will transform traditional family structure and sexual attitudes. They will smash conventional relationships between old and young. They will overthrow our values with respect to money and success. They will alter work, play and education beyond recognition. And they will do all this in a context of spectacular, elegant, yet frightening scientific advance.
     If transience is the first key to understanding the new society, therefore, novelty is the second. The future will unfold as an unending succession of bizarre incidents, sensational discoveries, implausible conflicts, and wildly novel dilemmas. This means that many members of the super-industrial society will never "feel at home" in it. Like the voyager who takes up residence in an alien country, only to find, once adjusted, that he must move on to another, and yet another, we shall come to feel like "strangers in a strange land."
     The super-industrial revolution can erase hunger, disease, ignorance and brutality. Moreover, despite the pessimistic prophecies of the straight-line thinkers, super-industrialism will not restrict man, will not crush him into bleak and painful uniformity. In contrast, it will radiate new opportunities for personal growth, adventure and delight. It will be vividly colorful and amazingly open to individuality. The problem is not whether man can survive regimentation and standardization. The problem, as we shall see, is whether he can survive freedom.
     Yet for all this, man has never truly inhabited a novelty-filled environment before. Having to live at an accelerating pace is one thing when life situations are more or less familiar. Having to do so when faced by unfamiliar, strange or unprecedented situations is distinctly another. By unleashing the forces of novelty, we slam men up against the non-routine, the unpredicted. ANd, by so doing, we escalate the problems of adaptation to a new and dangerous level. For transcience and novelty are an explosive mix.
     If all this seems doubtful, let us contemplate some of the novelties that lie in store for us. Combining rational intelligence with all the imagination we can command, let us project ourselves forcefully into the future. In doing so, let us not fear occasional error - the imagination is only free when fear of error is temporarily laid aside. Moreover, in thinking about the future, is is better to err on the side of daring, than the side of caution.
     One sees why the moment one begins listening to the men who are even now creating that future. Listen, as they describe some of the developments waiting to burst from their laboratories and factories."

     Once again, this book, Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, was published in 1970. This guy had it figured out then...but when will we ever learn?