Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.
Human beings were held accountable long before there were corporate bureaucracies. If the knight didn’t deliver, the king cut off his head.
Never in history has distance meant less.
If you have the right knowledge you can substitute it for all the other facts of production.
We need people who can see straight ahead and deep into the problems. Those are the experts. But we also need peripheral vision and experts are generally not very good at providing peripheral vision.
My wife and I, unlike many intellectuals, spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age, in which you are an appendage of a machine that sets the pace.
We will only keep people from fleeing the countryside into urban favelas, villas miseries, shantytowns and squatter villages when the productivity gap is closed between what brute labor on the soil can accomplish and what advanced technology makes possible today – and will make possible tomorrow.
Idea-assassins rush forward to kill any new suggestion on the grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd.
There are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb.
Every generation gets a chance to change the world Pity the nation that won’t listen to your boys and girls Cos the sweetest melody is the one we haven’t heard.
If industrialism, with its faster pace of life, has accelerated the family cycle, super-industrialism now threatens to smash it altogether.
By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education.
Freedom of expression is no longer a political nicety, but a precondition for economic competitiveness.
To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before.
I work virtually every waking hour.
The secret message communicated to most young people today by the society around them is that they are not needed, that the society will run itself quite nicely until they – at some distant point in the future – will take over the reigns. Yet the fact is that the society is not running itself nicely... because the rest of us need all the energy, brains, imagination and talent that young people can bring to bear down on our difficulties. For society to attempt to solve its desperate problems without the full participation of even very young people is imbecile.
To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before. We must search out totally new ways to anchor ourselves, for all the old roots – religion, nation, community, family, or profession – are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust. It is no longer resources that limit decisions, it is the decision that makes the resources.
Rooting about in themselves for the source of their discomfort, they undergo agonies of unnecessary guilt. They seem blankly unaware that what they are feeling inside themselves is the subjective reflection of a much larger objective crisis: they are acting out an unwitting drama within a drama.
If just a tiny fraction of the sums spent on scientific and technological research and innovation were devoted to labs for designing and testing new organizational and institutional structures, we might have a much broader range of options to head off the looming implosion.
What most business, political and civil leaders have not yet clearly understood is a simple fact: An advanced economy needs an advanced society, for every economy is a product of the society in which it is embedded and is dependent on its key institutions.
We are moving swiftly into the era of the temporary product, made by temporary methods, to serve temporary needs.