by Mark Jeftovik, Activist Post:
In 1970, futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler released the first of three seminal books about the trajectory that America, and the world was on. They published them at roughly decade intervals: Future Shock (1970), Power Shift, (1984), and Third Wave (1991). There were others (like War & Anti-War and Revolutionary Wealth), but those three laid out what was coming down the pipe and they were largely correct about it because their core premise was so simple:
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The rate of change was accelerating.
That was it. But it affected everything. The ramifications went beyond cycle theory or long waves because it meant that cycles and long waves would themselves accelerate.
As this acceleration accelerated, it would begin to overwhelm the coping mechanisms of both individuals and institutions alike. Nobody would be exempt, and everybody was facing a kind of technological and cultural shell shock, which they called: Future Shock:
It is impossible to produce future shock in large numbers of individuals without affecting the rationality of the society as a whole. Today, according to Daniel P. Moynihan, the chief White House advisor on urban affairs, the United States “exhibits the qualities of an individual going through a nervous breakdown.” For the cumulative impact of sensory, cognitive or decisional overstimulation, not to mention the physical effects of neural or endocrine overload, creates sickness in our midst.
Of course, the “today” in the above passage was in 1970.
The Tofflers probably underestimated how bang-on they were, and the pace of change we’re experiencing just over the past few years (since “The Jackpot” event of 2020) probably would have dazzled both of them (Alvin passed away in 2016 and his wife Heidi in 2019).
I have long ascribed the kind of rampant “mass formation psychosis” (to use the Dr. Peter Malone term) to one thing above all else: Future Shock.
While the Tofflers exhaustively explored the coming breakdown of our prevailing systems of government, education, military and business, there a few additional catalysts at play today – since the Jackpot – which are converging, and adding even more instability and disruption to the future shock.
I can think of three:
#1) We’re in a Crack-Up Boom
The first Future Shock book dropped right on the cusp of the Fiat Era. Less than a year later, the Nixon Shock would rug-pull the concept of “money”, and set in motion yet another accelerant: compounding debt and money creation.
Take all the cognitive dissonance and social breakdown that the Tofflers said future shock would cause, and add to that a doom-loop of money-printing and Cantillon Effect (if you don’t know what that is, just think of it in terms of accelerating wealth inequality).
All fiat currencies throughout history have gone to zero, no exceptions and as they approach their final glide path, society starts to experience the effects through ever accelerating inflation (sound familiar?)
There have been close to a dozen hyperinflations over the course of the 20th century, and there have already been a few in the 21st (the Venezuela and Zimbabwe) and a couple that have been teetering on the precipice (Argentina still struggling with 104% inflation in 2024, Turkey, Nigeria).
