Opinion: The Disease of the Future

In the jet age of fast mass travel, the idea of culture shock is familiar enough. Visitors to strange lands often find themselves psychologically off balance when they encounter unfamiliar foods, languages and customs. In one extreme case, a girl Peace Corps volunteer arrived on an island in the Far East and within hours found herself unable to breathe, eat or drink; she was shipped right back home. Yet culture shock is mild by comparison with what Alvin Toffler, a scholar and former FORTUNE editor, identifies in a striking new book (Random House; $8.95) as Future Shock. The term, likely to become part of the American language, is defined by Toffler as "the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future. It may well be the most important disease of tomorrow."

What brings on future shock, according to Toffler, is a rate of social change that has become so fast as to be impossible for most human beings to assimilate. "The malaise, mass neurosis, irrationality and free-floating violence already apparent in contemporary life are merely a foretaste of what may lie ahead unless we come to understand and treat this disease," Toffler argues. "Future shock arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one's own society. But its impact is far worse. For most travelers have the comforting knowledge that the culture they left behind will be there to return to. The victim of future shock does not."

Yeatsian Gloom. Today, Toffler contends, we are all renters, all nomads. "We have not merely extended the scope and scale of change, we have radically altered its pace," he says. "We have in our time released a totally new social force—a stream of change so accelerated that it influences our sense of time, revolutionizes the tempo of daily life, and affects the very way we 'feel' the world around us."

What Toffler calls "a fire storm of change" leaves in its wake "all sorts of curious social flora—from psychedelic churches and 'free universities' to science cities in the Arctic and wife-swap clubs in California." With Yeatsian gloom, he adds: "It breeds odd personalities, too: children who at twelve are no longer childlike; adults who at 50 are children of twelve. There are anarchists who, beneath their dirty denim shirts, are outrageous conformists, and conformists who, beneath their button-down collars, are outrageous anarchists. There are married priests and atheist ministers and Jewish Zen Buddhists. We have pop . . . and op ... and art cinetique . . . There are Playboy Clubs and homosexual movie theaters . . . amphetamines and tranquilizers . . . anger, affluence and oblivion. Much oblivion."

Ad-hocracies. All this arises because men can no longer absorb all that is relentlessly new, and traditional institutions seem unable to encompass and interpret headlong technological change and its social consequences. Writes Toffler: "It is not simply that we do not know which goals to pursue. The trouble lies deeper. For accelerating change has made obsolete the methods by which we arrive at social goals. The technocrats do not yet understand this, and, reacting to the goals crisis in knee-jerk fashion, they reach for the tried and true methods of the past."