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    "A DESTINY TO CREATE

     Some generations are born to create, others to maintain a civilization. The generations who launched the Second Wave of historic change were compelled, by force of circumstance, to be creators. The Montesquieus, Mills, and Madisons invented most of the political forms we still take for granted. Caught between two civilizations, it was their destiny to create.
     Today in every sphere of social life, in our families, our schools, our businesses and churches, in our energy systems and communications, we face the need to create new Third Wave forms, and millions of people in many countries are already beginning to do so. Nowhere, however, is obsolescence more advanced or more dangerous than in our political life. And in no field today do we find less imagination, less experiment, less willingness to contemplate fundamental change.
     Even people who are daringly innovative in their own work - in their law offices or laboratories, their kitchens, classrooms, or companies - seem to freeze up at any suggestion that our Constiution or political structures are obsolete and in need of radical overhaul. So frightening is the prospect of deep political change, with its attendant risks, that the status quo, however surrealistic and oppressive, suddenly seems like the best of all possible worlds.
     Conversely we have in every society a fringe of pseudorevolutionaries, steeped in obsolete Second Wave assumptions, for whom no proposed change is radical enough. Archaeo-Marxists, anarcho-romantics, right-wing fanatics, armchair guerrillas, and honest-to-God terrorists, dreaming of totalitarian technocracies or medieval utopias. Even as we speed into a new historical zone, they nurse dreams of revolution drawn from the yellowed pages of yesterday's political tracts.
     Yet what lies ahead as the super-struggle intensifies is not a replay of any previous revolutionary drama - no centrally directed overthrow of the ruling elites by some "vanguard party" with the masses in tow; no spontaneous, supposedely cathartic, mass uprising triggered by terrorism. The creation of new political structures for a Third Wave civilization will not come in a single climactic upheaval, bus as a consequence of a thousand innovations and collisions at many levels in many places over a period of decades.
     This does not rule out the possiblity of violence along the way to tomorrow. The transition from First Wave to Second Wave civilization was one long blood-drenched drama of wars, revolts, famines, forced migrations, coups d'etat, and calamaties. Today the stakes are much higher, the time shorter, the acceleration faster, the dangers even greater.
     Much depends on the flexibility and intelligence of today's elites, sub-elites and super-elites. If these groups prove to be as shortsighted, unimaginative, and frightened as most ruling groups in the past, they will rigidly resist the Third Wave and thereby escalate the risks of violence and their own destruction.
     If, by contrast, they flow with the Third Wave, if they recognize the need for a broadened democracy, they in fact can join in the process of creating a Third Wave civilization, just as the most intelligent First Wave elites anticipated the coming of a technologically based industrial society and joined in its creation.
     Most of us know, or sense, how dangerous a world we live in. We know that social instability and political uncertainties can unleash savage energies. We know what war and economic cataclysm mean, and we remember how often totalitarianism has spring from noble intentions and social breakdown. What most people seem to ignore, however, are the positive differences between present and past.
     Circumstancs differ from country to country, but never in history have there been so many reasonably educated people, collectively armed with so incredible a range of knowledge. Never have so many enjoyed so high a level of affluence, precarious perhaps, yet ample enough to allow them time and energy for civic concern and action. Never have so many been able to travel, to communicate, and to learn so much from other cultures. Above all, never have so many people had so much to gain by guaranteeing that the necessary, though profound, be made peacefully.
     Elites, no matter how enlightened, cannot by themselves make a new civilization. THe energies of whole peoples will be required. But those energies are available, waiting to be tapped. Indeed if we, particularly in the high-technology countries, took as our explicit goal for the next generation the creation of wholly new institutions and constitutions, we could release something far more powerful even than energy: the collective imagination.
     The sooner we begin to design alternative political institutions based on the three principles described above - minority power, semi-direct democracy, and decisional division - the better our chances for a peaceful transition. It is the attempt to block such changes, not the chances themselves, that raises the level of risk. It is the blind attempt to defend obsolescence that creates the danger of bloodshed. This means that to avoid violent upheaval, we must begin now to focus on the problem of structural political obsolescence around the world. And we must take this issue not merely to the experts, the constitutionalists, lawyers, and politicians, but to the public itself - to civic organizations, trade unions, churches, to women's groups, to ethnic and racial minorities, to scientists and housewives and businessmen.
     We must, as a first step, launch the widest public debate over the need for a new political system attuned to the needs of a Third Wave civilization. We need conferences, television programs, contests, simulation exercises, mock constitutional conventions to generate the broadest array of imaginative proposals for political restructuring, to unleash an outpouring of fresh ideas. We should be prepared to use the most advanced tools available to us, from satellites and computers to video-disc and interactive television.

     No one knows in detail what the future holds or what will work best in a Third Wave society. For this reason we should think not of a single massive reorganization or of a single revolutionary, cataclysmic change imposed from the top, but of thousands of conscious, decentralized experiments that permit us to test new models of political decision-making at local and regional levels in advance of their application to the national and trasnational levels.
     But, at the same time, we must also behing to build a constituency for similar experimentation - and radical redesign - of institutions at the national and transnational levels as well. Today's widespread disillusionment, anger, and bitterness against the world's Second Wave governments can either be whipped into fanatic frenzy by demagogues calling for authoritorian leadership or it can be mobilized for the process of democractic reconstruction.
     By launching a vast process of social learning - an experiment in anticipatory deocracy in many nations at once - we can head off the totalitarian thrust. We can prepare millions for the dislocations and dangerous crises that lie before us. And we can place strategic pressure on existing political systems to accelerate the necessary changes.
     Without this tremendous pressure from below, we should not expect many of today's nominal leaders - presidents and politicians, senators and central committee members - to challenge the very institutions that, no matter how obsolete, give them prestige, money, and the illusion, if not the reality, of power. Some unusual, far-seeing politicians or officials will lend their early support to the struggle for political transformation. But most will move only when the demands from outside are irresistible or when the crisis is already so advanced, and so close to violence, that they see no alternative.
     The responsibility for change, therefore, lies with us. We must begin with ourselves, teaching ourselves not to close our minds prematurely to the novel, the surprising, the seemingly radical. This means figthing off the idea-assasins who rush forward to kill any new suggestion on grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd, oppressive, or unworkable it may be. It means fighting for freedom of expression - the right of people to voice their ideas, even if heretical.
     Above all, it means starting this process of reconstruction now, before the further disintegration of existing political systems sends the forces of tyranny jackbooting through the streets, and makes impossible a peaceful transition to Twenty-first Century Democracy.
     If we begin now, we and our children can take part in the exciting reconstitution not merely of our obsolete political structures, but of civilization itself.
     Like the generation of the revolutionary dead, we have a destiny to create."