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     "THE INTER-WEAVE PROBLEM

     Our political institutions also reflect an our-of-date organization of knowledge. Every government has ministries or departments devoted to discrete fields suck as finance, foreign affairs, defense, agriculture, commerce, post office, or transportation. The United States Congress and other legislative bodies have committees similarly set aside to deal with problems in these fields. What no Second Wave government - even the most centralized and authoritarian - can solve is inter-weave problem: "how to integrate the activities of all these units so they can produce orderly, wholistic programs instead of a mishmash of contradictory and self-canceling effects.
     If there is one thing we should have learned in the past few decades, it is that all social and political problems are interwoven - that energy, for example, affects economics, which in turn affects health, which in turn affects education, work, family life, and a thousand other things. The attempt to deal with neatly defined problems in isolation from one another - itself a product of the industrial mentality - creates only confusion and disaster. Yet the organizational structure of government mirrors precisely this Second Wave approach to reality.
     This anachronistic structure leads to interminable jurisdictional power struggles, to the externalization of cost (each agency attempting to solve its own problems at the expense of another), and to the generation of adverse side effects. This is why each attempt by government to cure a problem leads to a rash of new problems, often worse than the original one.
     Governments typically attempt to solve this inter-weave problem through further centralization - by naming a "czar" to cut the red tape. He makes changes, blind to their destructive side effects - or he piles on so much additional red tape himself that he is soon dethroned. For centralization of power no longer works. Another desperation measure is the creation of innumerable interdepartmental comittees to coordinate and review decisions. The result, however, is the construction of yet another set of baffles and filters through which decisions have to pass - and a further complexification of the bureaucratic labyrinth. Our existing governments and political structures are obsolete because they view the world through Second Wave lenses.
     In turn, this aggravates another problem.

    THE DECISIONAL SPEEDUP

     Second Wave governments are parliamentary institutions were designed to make decisions at a leisurely pace, suited to a world in which it might take a week for a message to travel from Boston or New York to Philidelphia. Today is an Ayatollah seizes hostages in Tehran or coughs in Qom, officials in Washington, Moscow, Paris, or London may have to respond with decisions within minutes. The extreme speed of change cathes governments and politicians off guard and contributes to their sense of helplessness and confusion, as the press makes plain. "Only three months ago," writes Advertising Age, "the White House was telling consumers to shop hard before spending their bucks. Now the government is going all out to prod comsumers into spending more freely." Oil experts foresaw the petroleum price explosion, reports Aussenpolitik, the German foreign policy journal, but "not the speed of developments." The 1974-1975 recession hit U.S. policy makers with what Fortune magazin e temrs "stunning speed and severity."
     Social change, too, is accelerating and putting additional pressures on the political decision-makers. Business Week declares that in the United States, "as long as the migration of industry and population were gradual...it helped to unify the nation. But within the past five years the process has burst beyond the bounds that can be accommodated by existing political institutions."
     The politicians' own careers have accelerated, often catching them by surprise. As recently as 1970 Margaret Thatcher forecast that, withing her lifetime, no woman would ever be appointed to a high Cabinet post in the British governmen. In 1979 she herself was the Prime Minister.
     In the United States, Jimmy Who? shot into the White House in a matter of months. What's more, although a new president does not take office until the January following the election, Carter became the de facto president immediately. It was Carter, not the out-going Ford, who was battered with questions about the Middle East, the energy crisis, and other issues almost before the ballots were counted. The lame-duck Ford instantaneously became, for practical purposes, a dead duck, because political time is now too compressed, history moving too fast to permit traditional delays.
     Similarly, the "honeymoon" with the press that a new president once enjoyed was truncated in time. Carter, even before inauguration, was blasted for his Cabinet selections and forced to withdraw his choice for head of the CIA. Later, less than halfway through the four-year term, the insightful political correspondent Richard Reeves was already forecasting a short career for the President because "instant communications have telescoped time so much that a four-year Presidency today produces more events, more troubles, more information, than any eight-year Presidency did in the past."
     This hotting up of the pace of political life, reflecting the generalized speedup of change, intensifies today's political and governmental breakdown. Put simply, our leaders - forced to work through Second Wave institutions designed for a slower society - cannot churn out intelligent decisions as fast as events require. Either the decisions came too late or indecision takes over.
     For example, Professor Robert Skidelsky of the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, writes, "Fiscal policy has been virtually unusable because it takes too long to get appropriate measures through Congress, even when a majority exists." And this was written in 1974, long before the energy stalemate in America entered its sixth interminable year.
     The acceleration of change has overpowered the decisional capacity of our institutions, making today's political structure obsolete, regardless of party ideology or leadership. These institutions are inadequate not only in terms of scale and structure but in terms of speed as well. And even this is not all."

    Ok, I know I'm copying a lot of stuff out of this book, now. But I think it's all important. Every word reinforces the notion that change is long overdue. I mean, it's 2003 already. This book was written in 1980, for crying out loud. When will we ever learn? Ok, here's another relevant section, I think.

    "THE COLLAPSE OF CONSENSUS

     As the Second Wave produced a mass society, the Third Wave de-massifies us, moving the entire social system to a much higher level of diversity and complexity. This revolutionary process, much like the biological differentiation that occurs in evolution, helps expl ain one of today's most widely noted political phenomena - the collapse of consensus.
     From one end of the industrial world to the other we hear politicians lamenting the loss of "national purpose," the absence of the good old "Dunkirk spirit," the erosion of "national unity," and the sudden, bewildering proliferation of high-powered splinter groups. The latest buzzword in Washington is "single issue group," referring to the political organizations springing up by the thousands, usually around what each percieves as a single burning issue: abortion, gun control, gay rights, school busing, nuclear power, and so on. So diverse are these interests at both the national and local levels that politicians and officials can no longer keep track of them.
     Mobile-home owners organize to fight for country zoning changes. Farmers battle power transmission lines. Retired people mobilize against school taxes. Feminists, Chicanos, strip miners, and anti-strip miner organize, as do single parents and anti-porn crusaders. A midwest magazine even reports formation of an organization of "gay Nazis" - an embarassment, no doubt, to both the heterosexual Nazis and the Gay Liberation Movement.
     Simultaneously, national mass organizations are having trouble holding together. Says a participant at a conference of voluntary organizations, "Local churches are not following the national lead any more." A labor expert reports that instead of a single unified political drive by the AFL-CIO, affiliated unions are increasingly mounting their own campaigns for their own ends.
     The electorate is not merely breaking into splinters. The splinter groups themselves are increasingly transitory, springing up, dying out, turning over more and more rapidly, and forming a yeasty, hard-to-analyze flux. "In Canada," says one government official, "we now assume the life-span of the new voluntary organizations will be six to eight months. There are more groups and they are more ephemeral." In this way, acceleration and diversity combine to create a totally new kinds of body politic.
     These same developments also sweep into oblivion our notions about political coalitions, alliances, or united fronts. In a Second Wave society a political leader could glue together half a dozen major blocs, as Roosevelt did in 1932, and expect the resulting coalition to remain locked in position for many years. Today it is necessary to plug together hundreds, even thousands, of tiny, short-lived special interest groups, and the coalition itself will prove short-lived as well. It may cleave together just long enough to elect a president, then break apart again the day after election, leaving him without a base of support for his programs.
     This de-massification of political life, reflecting all the deep trends we have discussed in technology, production, communications, and culture, further devestates the politician's ability to make vital decisions. Accustomed to juggling a few well-organized and clearly organized constituencies, they suddenly find themselves besieged. On all sides, countless new constituencies, fluidly organized, demand simultaneous attention to real but narrow and unfamiliar needs.
     Specialized demands flood in to legislatures and bureaucracies through every crack, with every mailbag and messenger, over the transom and under the door. This tremendous pile-up of demands leaves no time for deliberation. Furthermore, because society is changing at an accelerating pace and a decision delayed may be far worse than no decision at all, everyone demands instant response. Congress, as a result, is kept so busy, according to Representative N.Y. Mineta, a California Democrat, that "guys meet each other coming and going. It doesn't allow for a coherent train of thought."
     Circumstances differ from country to country, but what does not differ is the revolutionary challenge posed by the Third Wave to obsolete Second Wave institutions - too slow to keep up with the pace of change and too undifferentiated to cope with the new levels of social and political diversity. Designed for a much slower and simpler society, our instituions are swamped and out of synch. Nor can this challenge be met by merely tinkering with the rules. For it strikes at the most basic assumption of Second Wave political theory: the concept of representation.
     Thus the rise of diversity means that, although our political systems are theoretically founded on majority rule, it may be impossible to form a majority even on issues crucial to survival. In turn, this collapse of consensus means that more and more governments are minority governments, based on shifting and uncertain coalitions.
     The missing majority makes a mockery of standard democratic rhetoric. It forces us to question whether, under the convergence of speed and diversity, any constituency can ever be "represented." In a mass industrial society, when people and their needs were fairly uniform and basic, consensus was an attainable goal. In a de-massified society, we not only lack national purpose, we also lack regional, statewide, or citywide purpose. The diversity in any congressional district or parliamentary constituency, whether in France of Japan or Sweden, is so great that its "representative" cannot legitimately claim to speak for a consensus. He or she cannot represent the general will for the simple reason that there is none. WHat, then, happens to the very notion of "respresentative democracy"?
     To ask this question is not to attack democracy. (We shall shortly see how the Third Wave opens the way to an enriched and enlarged democracy.) But it makes one fact inescapably plain: not only our Second Wave institutions but the very assumptions on which they were based are obsolete.
     Built to the wrong scale, unable to deal adequately with transnational problems, unable to deal with interrelated problems, unable to keep up with the accelerative drive, unable to cope with the high levels of diversity, the overloaded, obsolete political technologiy of the industrial age is breaking up under our very eyes."