renewing american civilization: class seven - go … 07 the third wave and...renewing american...
TRANSCRIPT
Renewing American Civilization: Class Seven
>>The following is a special program produced by RCTV, Reinhardt College
>>Television, in Waleska, Georgia. From Reinhardt College in Waleska,
>>Georgia, this is "Renewing American Civilization." In this, the seventh
>>of 10 class presentations, Congressman Newt Gingrich, an adjunct
>>professor at Reinhardt college, will continue his course which presents
>>the foundational principles necessary to the Renewal of American
>>Civilization. This week's lesson, the Third Wave and American
>>Civilization, focuses on the Third Wave information age, American
>>Civilization, and the rules of human behavior.
And I would point out to all of you, since we're going to talk about the Third Wave today, that
while you all kind of go, "well, that's just an old 800 number," an old 800 number didn't exist 50
years ago, so it's amazing how rapidly we acculturate and acclimate ourselves to technologies. I
also want to mention, because it's fascinating for anybody who watches in Alabama, that
Michael Ciamarra, who is the head of quality for the government of Alabama, is hosting starting,
I think, this coming Thursday night at the state capitol, this course for all the senior leadership of
the Alabama government. And apparently Governor Fob James has decided to support it and to
be part of it, and it's -- we were sent an article from the Birmingham newspaper about the fact
that the class would be taught at the capitol in Alabama, which is sort of interesting, and they're
going to try to apply these ideas to Alabama state government.
And, of course, we start in terms of applying ideas with the notion that the five pillars of American Civilization are, first, the historic lessons of American Civilization. Second, personal strength. Third, entrepreneurial free enterprise. Fourth, the spirit of invention and discovery. And, fifth, quality as defined by Edwards Deming. And that the four areas in this course to which we will apply these pillars are, first, the Third Wave and American Civilization, which is today's topic. Second, creating American jobs in the world market. Third, replacing the culture of violence and poverty with a culture of productivity and safety. And, fourth, citizenship and community in the 21st century. And so each of the next four weeks, in a sense, this is the payoff period. We spent a week outlining the course in general. We spent five weeks outlining the pillars, and today is the first of the topical sessions which will be four in number.
Today's class is on the Third Wave and American Civilization. This is Alvin and Heidi Toffler's contribution to modern American systems. Let me say the Tofflers have been very successful authors for a very long period of time. Their most famous early book was "Future Shock," which is still in print and available all over the place, and "Future Shock," of course, created a title. I mean, people talk about "Future Shock," they made it up, but it -- as soon as the book came out in 1970, it made sense to people. This is the 25th anniversary of "Future Shock." About a decade later, they tried to say, all right, if we're going through this, what does it mean? And they came up with the book which is the title of today's lecture, which is "the Third Wave," and their argument, which we'll get into in a minute, is that the -- that Future Shock can be replaced by understanding that you are in the middle of a wave of change.
And it's sort of like thinking that you are trying to understand what is a giant tsunami, to use the Japanese term for a tidal wave. Well, if you know it's a tidal wave, you still have a big problem, but at least you know what the problem is. And so they're talking about we're in the Third Wave of change. They then wrote a book which I really recommend for people who care about national security. This is called "War and Anti-War," and in their effort to bring together the notion that all international relations are a continuum where you're always engaged in the tension between war and anti-war, they point out that from 1945 to the present, there have been three weeks in which there was not a war somewhere on the planet. Three weeks in 50 years. And since future -- since the Third Wave was, in many ways, the basis -- intellectually the basis of the army's air-land battle doctrine, had a dramatic impact, they have several chapters in here on how the army came to grips with thinking about the future and the intellectual basis of what we did in "Desert Storm."
Finally, reissued with a new cover, which we were kidding Jeff Eisenach, who designed the old cover, this is clearly a much better commercial cover than the one he had, and all of you can talk to Jeff about that later. He's a little sensitive. But this is Alvin and Heidi Toffler's new edition "creating a new civilization, the politics of the Third Wave," and it is really -- what they did is they edited together the best of the three books I just cited, plus "power shift," which is another book of theirs. Now, the point -- the reason I'm sharing with you is not just to say, "let's do a biography of the Tofflers," but they have been, since the late 1960s, trying to work out what's happening in a big way to the human race. Is there an underlying pattern? Is there an underlying explanation? It's a little bit like -- if I can use just a couple of very common human analogies.
I have a good friend who went out one day, and he's in his late 40s. In fact, you know him, Dr. Mel Steely. He went out one day -- he's going to hate me for having told this, because it's a true story, but he'll hate my having mentioned his name. He went out one day and he got all excited, and this happens often to guys in their 40s, and he said, okay, I can do it. I can do it. And he went out and he cut wood and he did everything for two days, and he got up Monday morning and he thought he was going to have a heart attack, and he went to the doctor. And his doctor checked him and looked at him a second and he said, "did you do something extraordinary all weekend?" And he said, "yeah," and he began to list it. And the guy said, "Mel, you have middle-aged fat man's disease." And Steely went -- he said, "you can't go out without any exercise, without any practice, have all these muscles that have been laying on a couch watching football, work for two days, and not expect to hurt."
Now, anybody who's a good runner, for example, will tell you. I mean, you run -- my daughter runs marathons. You run a marathon, it hurts, period. So if you're halfway through running the marathon and you're hurting, what it tells you is you're running a marathon. The reason I'm telling you is that the Tofflers -- these are patterns. I mean, all of us learn this stuff. If you drink too much the night before, you're probably not going to die the next morning, but there's a feeling which is directly related to drinking too much the night before. And you've got to figure out, what are these patterns? I mean, you don't study, you fail the test.
I'm driving at this because what the Tofflers did is they took the most human of things, which is to try to understand the patterns which affect you, how can you predict based on patterns, and they backed way up and they said, all right, let's look at the entire planet. Let's look at the whole
human race. What is happening to us? And frankly, what they wrote is very parallel to what Kenneth bolding wrote in "the meaning of the 20th century" and what peter Drucker wrote in "the age of discontinuities." The Tofflers believe that there have been three waves of change, from hunting-gathering to agriculture, from agriculture to industry, and from industry to the information age.
Now, they use the term "wave" because they said literally, the wave goes through everything, and it's not that there's a change up here or a change down here, but there's a wave which goes through everything. Now, in order to understand what we're talking about, again, we're staying at a very high level of abstractions. We're talking about civilizations. And it's important to understand that civilization is an all-encompassing framework within which people live their lives. It has a set of principles which distinguishes it from other civilizations. Now, this is something Americans don't often think about, because we're so big as a country and we're so sort of self-satisfied that we don't spend much time looking at other civilizations.
In many ways, we're an ahistorical society. But if you were to go and look at the Greeks, if I gave you a set of characteristics, you'd say, "oh, yeah that's Greek civilization" or "that's Mayan civilization" or "that's Han china," and some of them could be very simple, as you'll see later on. If I say -- and you can -- it's like a detective story. If I said "rice," you would know we had blocked in a series of possibilities. If I said "potato before 1500."
>>Ireland.
>>can't be Ireland. Potato doesn't come from Ireland. Before 1500. Where
>>does the potato come from?
>>North America.
>>no. Comes from south America.
>>south America.
>>potato comes from the Incas, and it changes the history of Ireland,
>>because the potato allows you to grow more protein per acre, okay? But
>>the potato's -- in fact, prior to 1500, it could not have been European.
>>Okay, so you go through -- my point is a rice-eating civilization is
>>different than a potato-growing civilization, because the entire rhythm
>>of growing rice is different. Rice has to be planted and transplanted.
>>It's a whole different cycle. A wheat-growing civilization has a whole
>>different cycle based on planting and harvesting. Wheat-growing
>>civilizations, which is the base of all western civilization, are peak
>>system civilizations. That is, you work very, very hard to plant. You
>>then do a little bit of getting rid of the weeds, you then work like
>>crazy to harvest. How does this relate, for example, to peak cycles of
>>studying just before finals?
And look at rice, which requires tending to on a much more regular basis, and a rice-growing civilization
would have a tendency to teach you to study every day. A wheat-growing civilization would have a
tendency to teach you to have a peak experience and relax and a peak experience and relax. Very
different rhythms. But I'm trying to drive at the notion people begin to acquire rhythms and patterns.
Why do -- look at the difference, and there's a wonderful book by V. O. Key called "the Mind of the
South" that gives you a similar example prior to the age of air conditioning. Look at patterns of life in
northern climates where people are literally locked in for the winter by bad weather. And you find
different rhythms and patterns than you find in a temperate climate where you can go outdoors all day
every day for the whole year. And so take a look at -- if I say to you, "let's talk about a set of
characteristics," and you begin to build the set of characteristics, for example, pyramids can only be two
places in the world. Where are they?
>>Egypt.
>>Egypt.
>>and Mexico.
>>Yeah, and the Mayans. And then you get into, what does that mean and why
>>does that mean it? So when we talk about civilizations, we're talking
>>about the unifying characteristics within which people normally live
>>their lives, and that different civilizations have a different set of
>>unifying characteristics within which people live their lives. Now, the
>>Toffler argument is that you really have had three what you would call
>>super civilizations. The shift from hunting-gathering to agriculture was
>>a supercivilization, as you'll see in a minute. Then the shift from
>>agriculture to industry is a supercivilization. That is, it affected
>>rice eaters and wheat eaters. Everybody, no matter what your background,
>>you were affected by this transition. And so the rise of information is,
>>in the Toffler model, a supercivilization. It transcends and absorbs.
>>The wave goes through all of the more normally studied civilizations.
>>Okay? Let's take a minute and look at Toffler's explanation of the three
>>waves of change.
>>Alvin Toffler: for uncounted millions of years, human beings lived on an
>>untamed planet. 10,000 years ago, some genius reached out and altered
>>our lives forever. By planting a seed, that hand launched the first wave
>>of change to surge across the earth. Everywhere, it turned nomads and
>>hunters into peasants and farmers. 300 years ago, like a hammer blow in
>>history, the industrial revolution spread a new civilization from Europe
>>outward. This was the second great wave of change in human history. Now
>>a third gigantic wave of change has been unleashed across the planet.
>>Our machines are evolving at a blinding rate. We too are changing.
>>These changes seem random, unconnected; some, even familiar. Yet this is
>>only an illusion, for taken together, they form a dramatic pattern. They
>>are creating a new civilization and killing an old one.
>>Now, in a sense, this is hunter-gatherer, this is agriculture, this is
>>industry, and this is the information age. And in a sense, what the
>>Tofflers are arguing is that this is the first wave. Because, remember,
>>they're talking about the layer of change. This is the second wave. And
>>this is the Third Wave. And, in fact, you never quite get there. But
>>notice also that because of the way in which the planet works, there are
>>places where agriculture never quite took. Very dry areas, very
>>mountainous areas. Guess what you get there? Hunter-gatherers. So that
>>as late as 40 or 50 years ago, there were still fairly significant
>>stretches of the planet that had hunting-gathering societies. There are
>>a handful left today, but mostly as deliberately maintained museums. I
>>mean, the people who survive in the Brazilian rain forests survive
>>because we deliberately will them to survive, because the sheer reach of
>>modern civilization is now so enormous that if we didn't discipline
>>ourselves, we'd overrun the Bushman of the Kalahari. I mean, these are
>>people who are -- who will rapidly be absorbed into this. And you have
>>to raise an ethical question at some point, is it really fair to the
>>human being who happens to have been born randomly into this environment
>>to not let them have a laptop, not give them a vaccination against polio,
>>and not dramatically raise their lives? And yet the second you do, you
>>blow apart this system.
>>it's like the Masers?
>>huh?
>>that's like the Masais?
>>No, no, no, the Masai would be here. This would be the Bushman, the
>>Kalahari. In fact, I have a list here. Let me just say, I'm putting
>>this up, because what I want to emphasize and go through for a minute is
>>that in each wave, everyone experiences the same general change, although
>>the details are different in each society. That is, during a period when
>>you're -- hunter-gatherers tend to be similar everywhere on the planet.
>>And then as this wave of agriculture occurs, they tend to all go through
>>the same thing, even though they express it in the ways that are unique
>>to their region. Agricultural civilizations are, in a way, very similar
>>to each other, and I'll come back to that. When they start to change
>>into industry, they all go through the same wave-like pattern, although
>>they express it differently in each civilization. Then when industries
>>arise, for example, male -- you know, males wear suits. It's almost
>>totally universal in an industrial society everywhere on the planet, and
>>it's an artifact. No particular reason to be true. As this begins to
>>break down, guess what happens? Guess what's the most commonly sold
>>article of clothing as you make the transition into an information age?
>>blue jeans.
>>blue jeans everywhere. And you see the breakdown of dress codes
>>everywhere. Okay? Microsoft is a good example.
>>yeah.
>>So there are identity patterns here. Now, let me walk you through just
>>some examples. Hunter-gatherer civilizations is a big item. I don't
>>believe this is a civilization, but everybody else who puts the class
>>together did, so they made me say it. But look at the Bushman -- I think
>>these are patterns of life, but they are precivilization. They don't
>>have the carrying capacity of a civilization. They don't have enough
>>information. But look at the Australian aborigines, the Bushman of the
>>Kalahari, the Indians of the Brazilian rain forest. You could have added
>>Papua, new guinea. I mean, anyplace where you are forced -- and this is
>>the definition of a hunting-gathering society. You are forced to keep
>>moving. That is, you can clear a plot, you plant for a little while, and
>>then you move. And then you clear a plot and you plant for a little
>>while. Or you gather food and you hunt. But you're limited by the
>>carrying capacity of the ecosystem. What's the number one characteristic
>>I just said that affects the capacity to become a civilization.
>>that they're unstable.
>>unstable in what sense?
>>they have no residency, they have no place --
>>right, and since they have no residency, what is it they can't do?
>>they can't set down roots, establish civilization.
>>right, and therefore, what is it that's very specific?
>>housing.
>>they don't have housing, or they have very, very shallow housing, and
>>therefore, when they move, what do they have to do?
>>they have to move everything with them, so they can't get any
>>possessions, so they have no idea of property rights.
>>exactly. You can't accumulate. You can't accumulate. Since you can't
>>accumulate, you cannot build several centuries of property.
>>that's right.
>>the minute somebody invents -- and it was probably initially not wheat,
>>but related to wheat, one of the cereals -- but the minute you get
>>potatoes or rice or a cereal and you can stay in one place, you now have
>>great grandfather's stool and great grandmother's ceramics.
>>plus the land that you're working it on.
>>But then -- you've jumped to property rights. We're not there yet. It's
>>not property rights yet. It's simply the notion that now you can
>>accumulate, and because you can accumulate, other things happen. If you
>>read a wonderful book called "the forest people," which is very romantic
>>about the pygmies till the last chapter, where he points out that this
>>society means you die if you have a disability, because it can't afFord
>>to carry you. Now you suddenly have people --
>>caring for the disabled.
>>right.
>>wait. Say that again.
>>in a hunting-gathering society, the weakest members die because you can't
>>afFord to carry them.
>>it's termed survival of the fittest.
>>that's right.
>>Ruthless kind of survival. I mean, it's all wonderful and it's all
>>romantic in the 90-minute film, and then you start thinking about the
>>12-year-old who has a limp and they're not going to make it. And it's a
>>wonderful book by Colin -- let's see, "the mountain people" and "the
>>forest people." I can't remember Colin's last name. It will come to me
>>in a minute. Anyway -- I haven't read it in almost 30 years, but it is a
>>-- it's very romantic, it's very wonderful. Look how natural they are,
>>and then you realize the cost of being natural. Here suddenly you live
>>longer because you're not moving. You suddenly get guess what life span?
>>
>>40, 50 years.
>>sure. What's the bible say is the natural life span?
>>three score and 10.
>>huh?
>>three score and 10.
>>Right, 70. We just passed it in the last -- in this century. Up until
>>this century, the natural life span. And by the way, it turns out that
>>people historically didn't die earlier, they died younger. What keeps
>>life -- what keeps average lives low in agricultural society is the
>>number of people who die before they're 5, but if you get through 5 years
>>of age, you have a fairly high likelihood in agricultural society, unless
>>you're a woman who dies in childbirth, of living to be three score and
>>10, because you're not -- you don't have to move all the time. Now when
>>winter comes, you've got a house, you've got food out back. You've got a
>>rootcellar, you've got all sorts of things that are natural.
And notice how it happens. Agricultural civilizations include Han china, pharaonic Egypt, Indus valley,
Assyria, Sumeria, Babylon, archaic Greece, the Hellenistic civilization, the romans, Mayas, Aztecs, Incas.
All of those are civilizations predicated on being able to grow food. And they all have similar patterns.
And you see the patterns begin to evolve. They all have priesthoods of some kind. They all have efforts
to understand a supreme being. They all have political organizations and structures. They all have
armies. They all have policing systems. They all have arguments over property rights. What is a property
right? Who owns the property? They all have holidays, which, by the way, comes originally from the
term "holy day."
>>they have the rise of the bureaucracies.
>>That's right. They all have bureaucracies. You go back to
>>Nebuchadnezzar at Babylon, you go back to hammurabi, the original order
>>of -- ruling of -- writing of the law. You know, if you have a law, you
>>have to have an enforcer. If you have an enforcer, it's a bureaucrat. I
>>mean, all these systems have their version of the IRS. They're all
>>patterns. Now, if then you have those, let's look at suddenly you get
>>the rise of industrial civilizations. Britain, bourgeois France,
>>imperial Germany, America, the Meiji restoration in France -- in Japan,
>>and czarist Russia.
And by the way, if you want to see really dramatic change, it is looking at the Meiji restoration which
occurs in 1868, when you suddenly have a group of younger leaders come together and say, "we had
better modernize Japan or we're going to be run over," and they systematically go out around -- they
send teams all over the world and they go and they study the French and the Germans and the
Americans and the British, and they come back -- and the Italians, and they come back and they say,
"here's how to modernize Japan. "let's take the best of each of these." And it is the most willfully self-
conscious act of modernization on the planet. And they say, "look, we are trapped here in agricultural
society. "this will not work. "we have to move to industrial society to survive. "if we don't, we'll be
devoured by the Europeans." And when they do, I'll give you just one example. The high watermark in
Japanese feudal society of the agricultural system militarily is what? What do you call a Japanese
warrior?
>>shogun.
>>samurai.
>>samurai. Shogun is the guy who organized it, and samurai are based on
>>the use of what weapons?
>>swords.
>>swords, and they're magnificent. If you see Kurosawa's great work "the
>>seven samurais," it's amazing. Okay? The second you move into here,
>>what do you get?
>>guns.
>>guns.
>>and the swords become obsolete.
>>The sword becomes obsolete, and so does the samurai way of life. And in
>>1870, there was a deliberate rebellion by the samurai, who get massacred
>>by peasants who have guns, because they prefer death to dishonor. And
>>it's the symbolic end of the agricultural era in -- again, it doesn't
>>fully end. In fact, in the information age, you can see Japanese
>>factories next to which there are artificially maintained rice paddies
>>going all the way back to here. And you see in much of the Japanese
>>drive and energy in the industrial era the samurai spirit of the warrior
>>and of nobility and of doing duty. But my point is each of these -- as
>>you see the transition here, for example, the word "bourgeois" comes from
>>French. It means middle class, or comes to characterize what we call
>>middle class. Actually, it meant originally the small property holders,
>>the small businesses and small manufacturers. This transition occurs in
>>every one of these countries.
>>breakdown of the monarchies.
>>The monarchies begin to collapse because the power structure of
>>agriculture doesn't make sense here. Money matters more, land matters
>>less. Land is really important here. So if you're in an old family, you
>>have lots of land, so you marry a new industrial -- all sorts of 19th
>>century novels about the new rising industrial class that has cash
>>deliberately marrying into the landed class for status, trying to make
>>this bridge. Okay? Now, if that's all true, let's look for a second --
>>since this is the one we grew up in, this is a very important thing to
>>keep in your head.
What I'm going to drive at today is not only is it true that we're going through the Third Wave, but it is a
knowable experience, because we've done it two other times. So we can study how people have done it.
And you are personally doing it. Because every one of you was born in this system. This is the dominant
system today. It's still the dominant system. This is the emerging system, the information age. And so if
you think about it, and we're going to take five examples just to give you a way of thinking about it, five
aspects of second-wave civilization, of the industrial era, standardization, synchronization,
specialization, massification, and centralization. Now, take a look at these five, and Toffler's now going
to walk you through them, and think about how they apply to way you live your daily life.
>>Alvin Toffler: take that quintessential object of the industrial age, the
>>gun. The gun was one of the first things to be manufactured out of
>>interchangeable standardized parts. Take one apart, and the parts fit
>>perfectly into another of the same type. What did this mean? Meant that
>>we'd taken the first step on the road to uniformity. And not just in
>>guns. The second wave of change not only standardized products, it
>>molded us to fit into a mass society. The world of repetitive work, of
>>identical products and images, of skyscrapers, factories, and commuters.
>>Standardization became a way of life. Synchronization, another principle
>>of industrial life. Millions of people sharing a common rhythm. And if
>>some archaeologist of tomorrow found a watch, it would tell a lot about
>>what makes us tick. The watch maintains the rhythm of 9:00 to 5:00. All
>>mass societies are not only standardized, they are synchronized.
>>announcement: -- has been delayed for two and a half hours.
>>Alvin Toffler: yet everyone hates the 9:00 to 5:00. "the Wealth of
>>Nations," of which this is a first edition, begins with a famous passage.
>>In it, he says, "the greatest improvements in the productive powers of
>>labor seem to have been the effects of the division of labor." And the
>>example he gave was that of the pin. "the important business of making a
>>pin," he wrote, "is divided into about 18 distinct operations. "by
>>dividing the task among many workers," Smith said, "greater productivity
>>could be achieved." Adam Smith used the pin to reveal another aspect of
>>the hidden code of industrial society, specialization, or the division of
>>labor. The basic code of mass society ran through every aspect of life.
>>
This popular amusement park in Vienna, for example, is a place where people come to enjoy themselves, to get away from the factory and the office, to bring their children on a Sunday afternoon. But Prater park is special. It boasts the world's biggest Ferris wheel, and big is what second-wave civilization was all about. From the earliest days of the industrial era, all of us were inculcated with the idea that heroic scale, sheer size, had something to do with virtue. The French rushed out and built the Eiffel tower. The Americans, the empire state building. The British, the queen Mary, and then the queen Elizabeth. And the Soviets, well, there's a story about Stalin that he used to call in his experts and say to them, "what's the biggest steel mill in the world? "build me a bigger one. "what's the biggest hydroelectric dam in the world? "I want a bigger one." Hand in hand with the idea of bigness came another basic principle.
Alexander Hamilton in the American colonies called for the centralization of political power. He wanted a strong central government for the united states. Later, at this very desk, in the reading room of the library of the British museum in London, a German emigre named Karl Marx called for the decisive centralization of power in the hands of the state. In capitalist as well as communist industrial nations, power flowed to the center. The power of the state, the power of
money. This concentration of power was paralleled by the concentration of energy, the concentration of production, and even the concentration of people.
>>take Toffler's main notion here that there are specific aspects. You get
>>standardized. I mean, this is, by the way, covered in Kessler's
>>"darkness at noon," where he says that in order to get people who are
>>used to the agricultural era where you worked from can to can't. What's
>>the term "can to can't" mean?
>>can see to can't see.
>>When you can see, when you can't see. When does a farmer work during the
>>harvest season? From can to can't. However, when you get here, two
>>things happen. First of all, since you now have electric lights, or you
>>had gas lights in the 19th century, there's no can't. You cannot
>>regulate your life by can to can't. There's a second thing, since you
>>want a lot of people to work simultaneously, they have to arrive at a
>>fixed time, right? Well, here you had no watches, no clocks. They were
>>basically irrelevant. Here, they become very important. And Kessler
>>said in the early parts of the Stalinist period, you shot the worker who
>>was late. It was a way of instructing the community. But the question
>>is, how do you make this transition? How many of you wear a watch?
>>Raise your hand. Okay. Totally a second wave. Nobody in the
>>agricultural era would have understood it. Not that they didn't to some
>>extent keep time. The Romans invent sundials.
>>they drew up calendars.
>>they had calendars? But they had broader senses of time. "see you
>>around sundown." Around sundown.
>>they measured by moons.
>>Yeah, but just think about -- think about the difference in rhythms here
>>and in specificity. Standardization. As late as 1890, one of the things
>>that makes henry Ford a genius is that he focuses on the standardized
>>car, because while we had had the development of standardized gun-making
>>as early as about 1807, we really don't get -- and Eli Whitney did it.
>>Eli Whitney, in addition to inventing the cotton gin, invented the
>>standardized manufacturing for guns. You don't get to a standardized
>>automobile till henry Ford. I mean, what they built prior to henry Ford
>>was cars which would fit together individually, but you couldn't take
>>that car apart and the car next to it apart and get them to fit together.
>>Ford is a maniac. People thought he was crazy because he was focused on
>>specialization, and that's the great breakthrough of the assembly line,
>>is getting manufacturers who will give you parts that are carefully
>>enough built that they are interchangeable. Because you can't have an
>>assembly line till you have interchangeable parts. Now, all of a sudden
>>that begins to disappear, and what I want you to understand is as you go
>>through each of these waves of change, each time you're going through a
>>wave of change, civilizational change goes through every society as a
>>wave which affects every aspect of life, economics, politics, family
>>structure, religion, the structure of society and power, government, and
>>military power and warfare.
So you can literally take this list -- and we'll come back to it in the second hour -- you can take this list
and you can say, okay, tell me about economics in the agricultural age. Tell me about economics in the
industrial age. Tell me about economics here. Tell me about the structure of family. What's family like if
you're a hunter-gatherer? What's family like if you're in an agricultural society? How does family change
here and how does it change here? And you begin to get very different patterns through all of the
manifestations of life.
Now, to give you an example which is, I think, absolutely fascinating, which Toffler did, and this comes out of a TV show that Alvin and Heidi did about 10 years ago. To give you an example of how these changes permeate everything, I want you to look at what Alvin Toffler calls "the music factory," remembering that the characteristics here are standardization, synchronization, people organized. And you may think about classes you've been in, show up at the same time, sit in the same desk, face forward, do the same thing, take the test at the same time, and I want you to look at what he calls "the music factory."
>>Alvin Toffler: before the age of the machine, concert music was performed
>>for princes and patrons, by quartets and quintets, by small chamber
>>groups. As the second wave arrived, however, the first concert halls
>>began to crop up in Vienna, in Paris, London and Tokyo, and eventually in
>>cities everywhere. With them came the impresario, the businessman who
>>financed concerts and sold tickets. The more seats he added, the more
>>tickets he could sell. But the bigger concert halls needed louder sound,
>>and therefore, more musicians. The small chamber group grew into the
>>full orchestra. (applause) the players all dressed in standard attire.
>>They were divided into specialized departments, each with its section
>>leader. (music playing) the conductor with his baton maintained central
>>control and synchronized the sound.
And so it was that the Second Wave got its music factory. Yet mass society was not just smoke stacks
and assembly lines. It was a rich, many-sided social system that affected every aspect of our daily lives. It
put the great willow run factory outside Detroit, but it also put the tractor on the farm, the typewriter in
the office, the refrigerator in the kitchen. It gave us the daily newspaper, the cinema, subways, and dc-
3s. It gave us corporations and cubism. It gave us Bauhaus buildings and Barcelona chairs and sit-down
strikes and vitamin pills and longer life, and it also universalized the ballot box. More important, it linked
all these things together, assembled them like a machine, and produced the most powerful, cohesive,
and expansive civilization the world had ever known.
>>can you see the parallel between the symphony orchestra and the factory?
>>Organized, routinized. Now, one example of the electronic age, we go
>>from the concert hall to what?
>>CDs.
>>A CD. You have your music. And, in fact, you'll begin to be able to go
>>to a store, buy -- make up your own CD, and say, "I want this song, this
>>song, this song, this song, this song," packaged, they will package it on
>>the spot, and we'll begin to be at the beginning of the next cycle, which
>>is you sit down with your computer and you write your music. So your
>>computer will literally create for you your symphony, which will then be
>>on your CD. I'm not going to comment on how good your symphony will be,
>>but --
>>isn't that like chuck Davis does with the synthesized music?
>>huh?
>>chuck Davis and the synthesized music, rather than having, you know,
>>where it's all computerized?
>>yeah. Well, to be honest, I don't know. You just opened up a whole new
>>zone. One question. Then we've got to keep moving.
>>one question, throughout history, though, civilizations have been adverse
>>to change. People don't like change.
>>of course.
>>stepping into this Third Wave, is there any way to overcome that or --
>>sure.
>>-- is that just --
>>We're going to talk about that. But part of it that helps you is to
>>understand this is not radically new. We have done this before. It's
>>like the first time you decide to go hang-gliding or the first time you
>>decide to go sky diving. If you know other people who have done it -- or
>>the first time -- to use something very simple for most humans, the first
>>time you get in a boat. It's comforting to know that lots of people have
>>gotten in boats. I mean, think about somebody who has never been on
>>water, and think about a society where you got up to the edge of the
>>river and you stopped, and the first time somebody comes along in this
>>little thin thing and says, "it will be okay." It feels very unstable,
>>any of you who have been in a canoe, very unstable, right? You might
>>even flip over. Some of you may have even done this, but if you know
>>it's okay, yes, you'll get wet, but you'll survive, you change things.
>>Now --
>>the first time you eat an oyster?
>>Yeah. It's too early on a Saturday morning. Now, what I want to walk
>>you through is a way of thinking about this, remembering that this
>>applies to everything, which is why I wanted to show you "the Music
>>Factory" to give you a sense of culture, everything. I want to show you
>>Daryl Conner, who lives here in Atlanta. He has a model of change I
>>think you'll find very helpful. He talks about being frozen, thawing,
>>and refreezing. Now, this is at the heart of how you make the
>>transition, and we'll come back later to his book "Managing at the Speed
>>of Change," which I recommend. It's a very, very useful framework for
>>looking at this and having some sense of how you -- how resilient
>>managers succeed and prosper where others fail, and he talks about this.
>>
Now, here's his concept. Normally you're frozen. You get up in the morning, you have a habit. The
habit's fixed. Then things begin to change, and it's almost like watching -- you can think about this with a
popsicle. It's almost like watching -- or with an ice cube. It begins to thaw, and you're changing and
pieces fall apart, and it doesn't feel right. It's what Drucker means by a discontinuity. See, as long as
you're frozen, it's predictable. Now it starts to change. Then you begin to figure out the future and you
begin to refreeze, because people normally have to have stable conditions of effectiveness. People are
very good if most of what they're doing is stable. They are very bad if they have to be constantly
inventing. So there's a natural drive for, okay, so what works? You know, if I'm not going to use gold and
I'm now going to switch to checkbooks, fine. Teach me how to do a checkbooks. If checkbooks are
beginning to disappear and I'm going to use a credit card, fine. Teach me how to do a credit card. But I
want to know the pattern that works.
Okay? And one of the things that makes us a society of extraordinary efficiency is that we shorten everything into habitual patterns very fast. That's why it's very hard to have long terms in America, because we shorten them all the time. I mean, Al Gore has "Reinventing Government," which within weeks became "Rego" in Washington language, because "reinventing government's" too long a phrase. Okay? Now, what you don't know in a discontinuity is, what are we going to refreeze like? Are we going to be lots of tiny triangles instead of a big triangle? Are we now going to be a brand new thing called a circle? Are we going to be a square? We don't know. By definition, if you're going through this, but if you know, "hey, it's okay. "Yes, the system's breaking down, but the other end of the breakdown is a new system," it's psychologically incredibly easier to go through change if your job in this phase is to find the new system.
Okay? Everybody understand this concept of frozen, beginning to thaw out, and then refreezing? This is at the heart of thinking about how you manage change. And it allows you to now see the thawing without going, "oh, my god, we're all going to collapse." No, we're going to find a new, more powerful, more appropriate way to refreeze. Now, in that framework, then, what I'd like you to be thinking about is, what other aspects of life would you add? In other words, we talked earlier -- remember we talk about economics, politics, family structure, religion, structure of society and power, government, military power and warfare.
When you start going through this, you need to start saying, all right, what are -- and you can do it much like Drucker's advice on how you take care of your schedule, which is you keep it. Just as you go through a day, think, is there something we've missed in the class that is a major aspect of life?
I mean, transportation, for example, or communications. You communicate in a hunting-gathering society face-to-face or maybe by certain signals, like "the water hole is near here," which would be a series of sticks on the ground or something. Very few signals. As you move into early agriculture, how do we communicate? What's the key to cultural artifacts in early --
>>writing.
>>no. Pre writing.
>>oh, hieroglyphics?
>>no. Hieroglyphics is just a form of writing. How was the odyssey and
>>the Iliad first maintained?
>>oral tradition.
>>stories of.
>>it's oral.
>>that's right.
>>there's an era -- if you go back to archaic Greece, there were a handful
>>of people who literally memorized the entire story, which meant when you
>>went to school, what did you practice?
>>oratory.
>>Oratory, memory, right? Can you remember 35,000 lines? Now, frankly, in
>>the age of the computer, it would be fairly dumb to have a large number
>>of people -- it's a wonderful thing to do as a hobby, but if you had
>>somebody who walked in and say, "hi, I can recite the entire "Odyssey"
>>and "the Iliad," you'd say, "fine, but I'd rather buy the book." That
>>begins to change with writing. And then in 1432, with the rise of the
>>movable type -- why do we have teachers stand up and lecture while
>>students take notes? Because prior to 1432, writing was very expensive.
>>There were very few books. A book took a year of a person's life to
>>copy. It was copied by hand. Only rich people had books, or important
>>institutions. So every student came to class, and in a pattern which
>>went back at least as far as Greece and china, the teacher stood up here,
>>wrote on the board, you wrote it down, you were creating your own
>>textbook. After Gutenberg invents movable type, textbooks become cheaper
>>and cheaper, but we keep this, in part, because we can't figure out how
>>to break out of the cultural framework of the professors.
And while this makes sense as a way of teaching a class that assimilates new information, it is -- this is
one of the reasons I tape the class. It's irrational to reteach this class. I mean, it's silly for me to stand up
here and repeat exactly next time what I said this time. So it depends on what you're trying to
accomplish and how you're trying to get it done, and so you go through what the new communications
are. Right now, we send faxes, but faxes are simply electronic transmissions of traditional writing. Faxes
are an interchange, in a sense, between -- they're part of the breaking down. When you start to send e-
mail, you're moving to the next stage. And so these things keep cycling.
What I'd like you to think about doing and the way I'd recommend you do it is as you take each of these aspects, then you start applying it to each of the three transitions. How did family change in each wave? How did work change in each wave? How are things different? And it's very important to understand, when you start talking about the Third Wave, that we are not in the mature phase. We are as developed in the Third Wave as the airplane was in 1908. That is, because people will start -- you'll run into really smart people who say, "oh, well, we're over here. "let me tell you, it's going to be a square." They haven't got a clue. Where we are is here. The old world is breaking down and the new world is vaguely emerging.
One of the most interesting books on this, by the way, is Huizinga's "the Waning of the Middle Ages," which is a study of the psychology of transition and how did the renaissance look if you were a medieval Christian. Because the renaissance was always written by secular historians as a good thing. It was a terrifying thing if you were a medieval Christian, because it was the
breaking down of the known world. It's a brilliant book called "the waning of the middle ages" by Huizinga. But my point is, what you can know is you're here. You're not here. You're no longer back here in the Second Wave, you're not frozen, but we don't have a clue what a mature Third Wave civilization will look like. What we know is things are dying, things are breaking down, and other things are emerging, and we're in this middle zone.
Now, in that sense, what you've got to try to think through is, how should you think, analyze, plan, and act in a period of decisive change? Notice they're separate. First you have to think. Then you analyze, then you plan. Only last do you act. And it's -- and you've got to know where you are in terms of the cycle of change to know what's an appropriate behavior. In a sense, there's a -- the Third Wave offers dangers and opportunities. It is like the Chinese character for "crisis," which is made up of two characters, one for danger and the other for opportunity. And we were trying last night to find the character. We didn't have it. If we can find it by next week, we'll show it to you retrospectively. But literally, the word in Chinese for "crisis" is actually made up of two words, danger and opportunity.
And so it is literally fair to say, as you were, in a sense, implying, this is a big problem. I mean, if you're a big winner here, you are now at risk. So that one person's -- the rise of Microsoft is enormous competition for IBM. The rise of e-mail is an enormous competition for the post office. The rise of an expert system for home diagnostic is a big threat for the family doctor. And so you've got to look at, how do people emerge and change and evolve and recognize that everything is both a danger and an opportunity simultaneously? But to grasp that, to grasp the dangers and opportunities of the Third Wave information age, we have to understand its characteristics, learn its principles, invent new habits, institutions, and systems, and sometimes invent new words and new meanings. Go ahead, Mai.
>>is this going to be as solid as this? Because when you stop and think
>>about the agriculture, it lasted much longer, and then the industrial age
>>lasted 300 years, and because it changed so rapidly, is it always going
>>to feel like it's in a melting stage?
>>truth is, we don't know. I mean, this could last for a generation or it
>>could last for a thousand years. We don't know. Because we don't know
>>-- and it could turn out to be something that is never like this but is,
>>instead, very, very flexible and fluid and permanently changing.
>>like what? What?
>>I don't know. My answer is I don't know. No one does. We've never been
>>through this in this particular version.
>>but it's not possible to go back, though.
>>It is highly unlikely, because this system, this is part of the
>>definition. This system is infinitely more competitive. This is the
>>center of productive power, okay? So what happens to the Bushman of the
>>Kalahari? Why is it that the only people who survive in
>>hunting-gathering are in marginal ecosystems? Because they all get
>>crowded out of the good spaces because they can't compete. I mean, the
>>Bushman of the Kalahari can't compete with the roman legion, they can't
>>compete with the Zulu force. And so they're literally squeezed out of
>>the good spaces into the last -- the desert Shoshoni can't compete, and
>>so they were pushed into the desert because the bigger agriculture
>>system. What happened? And this is what the Meiji restoration's about.
>>All of a sudden, the young leadership of Japan, when Perry arrives from
>>America in 1854, they look around they go, wow, what happens to every
>>Asian agricultural civilization? It collapses in the face of Europeans.
>>And they suddenly say, we had better change fast, because if we don't
>>make the transition, we will be non-competitive. We will be run over by
>>the Europeans. And so the question is -- I mean, what happened in"desert
>>shield"? In "desert shield" -- I mean "desert storm," you had a
>>second-wave Iraqi army dealing with an American army that is at least
>>beginning to move into the discontinuity. It was a non-competitive
>>environment. They were just two different worlds.
>>it gets right back down to survival, it's the survival instinct.
>>Yes. That for the civilization to survive, I think it almost has to
>>shift and make that transition. And what I want to walk you through when
>>we come back -- because we're going to start right here -- is I want to
>>start with the notion of, how do you under -- you know, what's the
>>difference between understanding characteristics and understanding
>>principles? And how should you think about this scale of transition?
>>And we're going to stay for a little bit right on this model, because
>>this is the thing that I think people find the scariest. Their first
>>reaction to a period of thawing is to cling to the old and to be
>>frightened. Whereas the most effective reaction may be to be very
>>curious about the thawing. To say, "gee, that's interesting," rather
>>than, "boy, does that terrify me," and to try to understand, what does it
>>mean? And that means you have to think about discovering.
It goes back to, listen, learn, help, and lead. You've got to go into a phase where you can't start thinking
about your vision of the future until you listen for a long time and learn what the options are. So it's a
very, very important model. And what we're going to try to do then is say, okay, how can I think about
this scale of change on a planet-wide basis? And what does it affect -- what does it do about me? I
mean, if there are billions of people on the planet and the whole planet's going to go through this
thawing process and the whole planet's going to go through this scale of change, then what does that
mean for me, for my business, for my family, for my country, for my community? And how can I begin to
figure out patterns that are helpful in going through a change on this scale? I think that's the key thing.
Okay? So we'll take a break and come right back and pick up right here. (break)
>>That's increasingly true. Let me say we're going to go back and pick up
>>where we were. Before we do, I just wanted to say Colin Turnbull is the
>>author I was mentioning earlier who wrote "the Forest People" and "the
>>Mountain People." And "the Forest People," in particular, is both a
>>wonderfully romantic introduction to the pygmies of Zaire, but also has a
>>very poignant description at the very end of what happened to those who
>>had any kind of weakness in that kind of world.
Let me go back. Remember we talked about the notion that to grasp the dangers and opportunities of
the Third Wave information age, we must understand its characteristics, learn its principles, invent new
habits, institutions, and systems, and sometimes invent new words and new meanings, and I want to
start with the very first of those, because each of them is different.
So I'm going to start by talking about understanding its characteristics. The best way to learn characteristics is the "listen" part of listen, learn, help, and lead. I mean, people say, "how can I learn this? " My answer is, go around your hometown. You don't have to go to M. I. T. Or Georgia tech. I mean, who in your hometown is doing something interesting? Go listen to them. People love to talk about what they do well. So just start listening.
And what you'd ideally have around the country, and this is something Benjamin Franklin helped create when he founded the American philosophical society and the public library and all sorts of voluntary associations, and you'd have people who got together, said, let's study this. What does it mean? What is everybody in our community doing? What's happening in our industry? What are the characteristics? And you just start listing them.
You know, for example, laptops clearly are going to give people a greater level of freedom. Why? Because they are dealing back with an embedded base. It's not that the society is freer. It's that the individual's freer because there's this huge embedded system of the telephones and of the Internet and of various bulletin boards, so it's actually very sophisticated, but the net result for you is you can be very freestanding. How can you first pick this up? I mean, I first picked it up watching people in airplanes. You all of a sudden find on virtually every airplane you fly on, there are six or eight or 10 people now using a laptop. Well, you say to yourself, "oh, this is a characteristic." And so part of it's just keep your eyes open. Characteristics bubble up at you. And if you start making lists of them, you begin to say, "gee, I'll bet these are characteristics of the thaw." That's why I mentioned blue jeans earlier. Somebody mentioned during the break women also wear -- now wear -- more and more women wear suits. That's true, but it's -- again, go around the planet and look at differences in levels and speed of adaptation. It's truer in America than it is in Europe. It's truer in western societies than it is in Asian. And then look at the enormous stress in a place like Iran and their view of women in the context of this emerging world and how non-competitive it is to isolate slightly over half your population from being productive.
So when you go to a truly fundamentalist Islamic society, they are literally ruling out of the game over half their population in terms of competitive skill, competitive ability.
And so you've got to look at this whole pattern. As you begin to think through the characteristics, and that's the scouting phase, just list them. Don't even try to make sense of them. When you start to get enough characteristics, you want to learn the principles. Why are these things there? One of the principles is electronic is going to replace paper. And you're just seeing it happen. So if your choice was to hire somebody who could use a manual typewriter or somebody who was used to software packages and you were trying to get clerical work done, which one is more likely to be responsive to where we're going?
You know, more and more things are freestanding with 800 numbers. 800 numbers are cheaper and cheaper, and if you combine that with fed ex and ups and other overnight delivery systems, you can now set up a very small business in your basement connected to the entire world by an 800 number using, again, the embedded system. I did an interview this week for fed ex which will be seen by 100,000 workers worldwide. So you have this huge, complex, sophisticated system that lets your single little business be successful, which might teach you to look around
and say, "what are the big systems that are available that I can use pretty cheaply? " I mean, your investment's $11. They've got to take your package from you, get it to where you want it to go, do it on time, and they get to make money if they can do it for $11. So you have an $11 system which is a worldwide system, and suddenly small businesses can be connected to the planet.
Now, consider that with the industrial-age vision of what a small business was, which was a local mom and pop operation that only had a local marketplace. So you get into more and more of these kind of things. Then as you see the characteristics -- and I describe them as putting dots on the wall. You know, like, remember the dot, connect the dots, when you were a little kid, and you'd go from 1 to 2 to 3 and it would turn out to be a rhinoceros or something? So you're putting dots up. That's the gathering of the characteristics. Then you're trying to figure out, what are the principles that tie the dots together? Is this an animal or is this a spaceship? Because you're trying to guess ahead, you're trying to get ahead of the dots. Okay? Then you say, okay, now that I'm beginning to get the principles, what are the new habits, institutions, and systems that matter?
I'll give you an example. In the high watermark of the industrial age, which included television, you could be a couch potato. As longas you could turn the TV on, you could lay there and the TV would amuse you. Can't be a couch potato and interact on a computer bulletin board, because you have to respond. And, in fact, reading will go up in the Third Wave, and so will typing, so will writing. Because you won't be able to get out of it. So you could make -- and when I got laughed at the other week for talking about laptops for poor kids, you could make an argument that getting people interactive systems which can only be communicated with by typing and can only be communicated with by reading would probably be the most powerful way to get people to be literate.
Now, how much are you willing to spend for each literacy? Well, if you're talking about the total number of teachers you'll hire, the total number of hours you'll spend on this child? And you said, what if I could find a freestanding device that that child could use that had the same effect; would it be okay? How do we get them to cross that bridge? Because the truth is in the information age, you have to be more literate, not less. And all of the high end of industrial age, we're all going to cease to be literate, we'll all sit around MCluhan's vision.
Now, that doesn't mean TV's going away. If there's an earthquake in Kobe, that's the fastest way to see the earthquake. And, in fact, if you watch stockbrokers now and money managers, they have a little screen up on the -- up on their computer, so they're typing away but they've got the TV on. And they can switch. Or they've got a screen where they're running the AP. Stories, and as soon as a big one breaks, they can turn on the TV in their own screen. You've seen the commercials now where you have the TV and the telephone and the fax and the e-mail and all of your records all on the same computer screen. And you're watching four windows simultaneously.
Which is why, by the way, if you go back and look at a Strauss Waltz and then you look at the speed of MTV, you look at a movie made in the '30s and the rhythm of the movie, and then you look at a movie made today. People are in the habit of looking on the surface at more things faster and getting absorbed in fewer of them. It's a very different pattern of relationship. As you start to invent the new habits, sometimes you're going to have to invent new words and new
meanings. Microwave. Cellular. Internet. Now, this is not new. Horseless carriage. Automobile, which is French. It means "self-moving." Electric guitar, which was, in fact, not a guitar at all. It's a totally -- it's an electronic instrument which resembles a guitar.
But notice how very often we'll use bridging words. So part of the bridge will be back here to the frozen so we still feel secure. But, in fact, we're beginning to move through to a different world. The lessons of history include parallel evolutions of the same kind of changes in other transitional waves. In other words, you can go back and say, all right, a very good way to experience what you're living through is to go to somebody who's going from agriculture to industry or from hunting-gathering to agriculture. James Michener's book "the Source" is a great novel for doing this, because it takes you through a spot in Israel for 4,000 years and it gives you a feeling for -- and starts with hunting-gathering, and it gives you a really good feeling. It's a pretty good novel. Look at the early to Old Testament as a fascinating record of the transition from a hunting-gathering nomadic society to an established agriculturally based society. Isn't that exactly what's happening? What is the meaning of the story of Abraham and his son laying on the rock, and the angel comes down?
>>sacrifice.
>>Yeah. It is the end of human sacrifice. This was a people describing to
>>themselves the moment at which they decided they would no longer
>>sacrifice their children, something which the Aztecs never got to,
>>although they didn't sacrifice their children. They sacrificed
>>prisoners. But notice this moment in the old testament, and you literally
>>see the nomadic agrarian Israelis becoming city people and becoming
>>farmers. And much of the fight in the old testament is between the
>>Israelis and the more urban and more commercial Mediterranean gods.
>>That's what the whole fight with Bayle is all about. It's a style of
>>life. And so they go and they take Jerusalem, which becomes their city.
>>And if you read the Old Testament in that sense as a historic document,
>>it is a fascinating study of the transition of a people from nomadic into
>>agricultural to having an urban high civilization with a temple and a
>>kingship.
And that's why -- and you see literally the transition to kingship, don't you? Saul's the first king. And so
you see these patternings, and it's well worth looking at in that sense literally as a study of the transition
into an agricultural society. What you've got to look at is, what are the characteristics of the Third Wave
information age? And you've got -- and literally, we need for people to be in a habit of looking around
and talking about this and saying, okay, what did I learn this week? Because I find in my case, every
week that goes by, I'm learning new things, I'm seeing new experiences, I'm having new data come forth
that I had never thought about. And you do it by looking at the newspapers, by listening to television, by
talking to people. And literally just sort of gathering. And not trying initially.
Don't try to force them into a pattern. Don't say, "oh, wow, now I see how we go back." Or equally bad, "boy, I see how it" -- you know, "my model's the circle. "now let me take all this new data and make it fit the circle." What you want to do is literally just let it be data. Let it tell you. Don't you tell it. Then you want to try to build the principles. What are the principles going to be? One is that it's going to be global. Another is it's going to be very personal simultaneously, so both you and the planet simultaneously. Now, how does that work? Well, we don't know yet.
Then you've got to look at, what are some of the new habits? One of the habits had better be learning. I mean, learning -- another habit, by the way, is exercise. And there's a very profound reason why exercise is suddenly emerging. Why do people think about exercise? In an agricultural age, what did you have to do?
>>work.
>>work. In an industrial age, what did you have to do?
>>work.
>>I mean, I had an uncle who was a steelworker. He thought the idea of
>>going to a gym was insanity. He wanted to go to a bar. I mean, he'd put
>>in eight hours in the gym. It was called the steel mill.
>>some things are never going to change.
>>Ah, but now you go to the gym first. Why do you go to gym first?
>>Because you don't do hunting-gathering. You don't pull a plow, and you
>>don't work in a steel mill, so literally as a biological organism, again,
>>at the risk of getting in trouble, you have a genetic need to exercise.
>>You don't stay healthy if you don't exercise, so suddenly in a Third Wave
>>society, you have a whole new habit, which will then lead to new
>>institutions. Which may well lead to whole new ways of thinking about
>>the tax code. I mean, you know, what if we encouraged you to stay in
>>good enough shape that you didn't get a heart attack?
Which is cheaper, to keep you in good shape or to give you a triple bypass? Just think about it. See, we don't even think that way over here. That's a stupid idea. Well, why? I mean, let's do a mathematical study. Why is it a dumb idea? Why isn't wellness a learnable, trainable, habitual, incentivized system? Because it can be if you work at it. And the companies that are doing it, by the way, have dramatic drops in costs. Why do they have a gym? Not because they're being nice and coddling people. Because it lowers the cost of their health insurance. Now, it takes three years, but in three years' time, they are making money by getting everybody to be well. Well, what if you did that as a society?
Now, as you look at the new habits and the new institutions -- and I would argue that gold's gym, in that sense, is an emerging Third Wave institution, and that you find others. I mean, I think Fed Ex is, frankly, a Third Wave institution. And the great power of Fed Ex and UPS is not the airplane or the truck. It's the computer that tracks the package. It is the human training. I once spent a day in a ups uniform in a truck, and I followed the package from picking it up to , sorting it and bringing it back, and it was amazing. And a ups or fed ex delivery person, man or woman, is a full-service, holistic small business standing right there. I mean, they deal with the customers, they take the material, they take the money, they do the recording. It is an astonishing system, and is, I think, very much a Third Wave.
And so you've got to look at some of the new systems of the Third Wave. And we've got to look at the -- and you've got to start -- and you can start looking around you and saying, what's going to work? Telemedicine, distance learning are emerging systems. The kind of ambulance or helicopter where you have -- all the diagnostics are in the vehicle. And you're literally doing the
diagnostics with the best brain surgeon in the world as you're going from the accident to the hospital. And so when you arrive at the hospital, you've done everything we used to do in the ER. You go straight to the operating room, because we've already done everything. You've done it with a technician who is not a doctor, but who is working electronically under the doctor's direction. Now, that's the Third Wave. And it's going to happen all over the place. And you've got to look at new words and meanings of the Third Wave information age. I mean, as I said earlier, microwave. Fax. Which, by the way, again, in the American tradition, was facsimile. It became fax. I don't know what cellular phone's going to become. Is there a word yet that -- "cellular's" too long.
>>personal communicator.
>>well, personal communication system, which was, by the way, PCs.
>>read-only memory, CD-ROM.
>>what about the French, who are trying to freeze their culture by making
>>non-French words crimes?
>>they'll lose. They'll just lose.
>>they're going to have trouble communicating.
>>sure, and they'll just lose. I mean, you can't in the long run keep an
>>entire supercivilization out of your society, so, you know, they can go
>>through a very elaborate -- and the German, I think, for telephone was
>>"far speaker." Huh?
>>is that what you are, the far speaker?
>>Yeah, I guess I'm the far speaker. It had different speaker. I'm the
>>far speaker from the far side. Right. That's a different meaning --
>>that's a different meaning. (laughter) that's a different meaning than
>>the German. But the point is to create, you know, to create that kind of
>>a -- and by the way, that is part of what the problem is. In terms of --
>>and I said it as a joke because it was too good not to say. The truth
>>is, because we're used to politicians who are here, what I'm trying to
>>do, which is understand and discuss this, does mean that by the standard
>>of this, I am outside. And so that -- in that sense, I mean, your
>>comment was, in a different way, true.
Now -- and you've got to look for dangers and opportunities that you can see as the Third Wave evolves. I mean, there is a real danger we'll leave the poor behind. There's a real danger that 45- or 50-year-olds who invested their whole life in their company are now going to find themselves temporarily obsolesced. Now the question is, can you rethink the system so it's temporary rather than permanent? Because I would argue you need to -- we need to focus as much on lifetime learning for 50-year-olds as we do on lifetime learning for 5-year-olds. Because if you grew up and were trained here and had a sense of stability, you feel really cheated here.
And so we really have to come to grips with, how are we going to make lifetime learning real? How do we help people start their own businesses? How do we help people make a new career? You can't --if you're going to live to be 90 or 100, you can't say to somebody, "you're obsolete at
50." You cannot have a society which says to an entire generation of people, "sorry that you were born a little bit too early. "you don't quite get it. "good luck." And instead what you've got to do is think, how are we going to reintegrate and reabsorb all the energy and talent, remembering people are going to live a lot longer? And that's going to have all sorts of implications on pension plans and retirement, and what does it mean and how much do you have to -- to save all your working life to live for five years after retirement is one thing. To save all your working life to live 40 years after retirement is a different thing, and probably unsustainable. Probably means that, like Drucker -- I mean, like Drucker and Deming, that there's some level of activity involved for most of your lifetime, because it's inconceivable that you can get people to save. I mean, the level of savings you'd have to engage in in order to be able to retire for 40 years is going to be a very small number of people.
And so as all these changes occur, we've got to be open and available to rethinking them. It also means that the same event can occur, and one person can see an opportunity while another sees danger at the exact same moment. So the software writer at Microsoft thought it was wonderful, and the centralized hardware computer at IBM thought it was terrible, and the same event's occurring and you're getting two very different descriptions at the same moment.
The rise of integration was wonderful if you were black, and if you were a white segregationist, it was terrifying. The sudden level of change -- I mean, here you had -- and it's something Drucker wrote about 30 years ago. You had blacks who were finally entering the industrial era and finally getting a good job in Detroit the week the factory closed. And was being replaced by white upper middle class software writers. And all the terms of engagement changed just as people began to succeed. So you've got to be very sensitive to the fact and you've got to listen carefully, because you can both be describing the same event, but your viewpoints are so different. That you've got to know -- you've got to walk -- I describe it as walking all the way around the tree. You've got to be willing to stop and walk all the way around the tree and see the event from their viewpoint.
Daryl Conner's term for it is "appreciative understanding." You don't have to agree, but you have to appreciate why they would feel that way and why you might feel that way if you were in their shoes. That doesn't mean they're right, but it means it's real. For them, this is true. And you've got to work at that if you want to hold your society together. And you've got to study the earlier transitions.
We can learn lessons from Britain between 1720 and 1850. We can learn lessons from America 1750 to 1915. From Japan, 1854 to 1930. Germany, 1830 to 1914. Russia, 1850 to 1917. All those were transition periods for those societies as they left the agricultural era and they went into the industrial era. Now, what did they do? How did they respond? What were the tensions in their periods? How did people respond in family structure, in politics, in entrepreneurship? And I think that there are also lessons to be learned about how countries, companies, and individuals change. Daryl Conner's work which I mentioned to you earlier, "Managing at the Speed of Change." What Daryl attempts to do here based on about 25 years of consulting is to show you the consistent patterns by which human beings tend to respond as human beings. How do people respond to the process of change, and how do they go through it?
Another book I've seen recently that's helpful, and that is Morris Schechtman's "Working Without a Net" in which Schechtman walks you through the scale of change we're living through. Dr. Barbara Lawton, who you met last week who helped us do the red bead experiment, wrote a note about this week's lesson. She had a bunch of specific ideas we'll share with you in detail, but for example, she says, "coming into the transition, it seems like all the structures, institutions, relationships, the pillars of our everyday existence are threatened. Pensions, lifelong employment, jobs and manufacturing, traditional teaching-learning relationships, things in life must be broken apart before it can be rearranged into more effective ways of living." In other words, you'll see the thawing at a rate faster than you'll see the refreezing.
So early on, the insecurity will increase and the threat of tension to old institutions will increase. From numerous early experiments, successful patterns will emerge. This is a very important part of this. One of the reasons you want to decentralize is so you have lots of parallel experiments, and then it's not like you can predict the winners, but you notice the winners as they occur, and you orient to the winners as they occur. Nobody in 1950 could have predicted McDonald's, but it's easy to find McDonald's at a later point. And you suddenly say, "wow, this must be working," because you see more and more of them. As you saw more golden arches, it became pretty obvious. "now," she says, "what it demands from all of us personally, it breaks our expectations about our future. We live within a framework of implied contracts," like if I do a good job and I'm loyal, my company is going to keep me forever. But what if your company can't? What if the whole world changes? What if the market replaces your product? "the change seems unfair." I've done my job. How come it's changing? But the objective fact, it's that big a world. There are that many things going on. She said, "we need the understanding to recognize that what we're experiencing is not someone else trying to cheat or deprive us, but is the result of our own collective actions."
That is, that the Third Wave is so huge, that it's not about somebody else conspiring to take away your stability. It's about the world changing and us going with the changes. Sort of like being in the middle of an earthquake and saying, boy, I'll bet, you know, the rich did this to us or the unions did this to us, or, you know -- no, it was an earthquake. I mean, the planet did it to us. And in a sense, the Third Wave is that big a change. It's a planetary change. She said, "we need the personal strength to put our energy into creating the new experiments and developing pathways into the future, rather than into denying the change and finding ways to patch a system whose time has past. We all need the understanding of profound knowledge," which is Deming's term, "to develop new methods of working, processes, and systems for the Third Wave world. We must be active learners looking for the new patterns underlying the themes."
And so I think this concept, one of the habits of the future will be that we have to all be active learners, that we have to take responsibility. And in the process of that learning, what I'm suggesting is that how we apply the five pillars of American Civilization help us think through the process of change from a second to Third Wave civilization. Remembering that the five pillars of American Civilization are, first, the historic lessons of American Civilization. Second, personal strength. Third, entrepreneurial free enterprise. Fourth, the spirit of invention and discovery. And, fifth, quality as defined by Edwards Deming. And what I'm suggesting is that we literally go back through and that you get a habit in your head when you bounce into a new
situation, a new problem, a new opportunity, of trying to apply all. Start with applying the historic lessons of American Civilization to the emerging Third Wave information age.
And here, what I would suggest is that you go back and you say, all right, how did we change the last time? Fulton's invention of the steamboat. The rise of the railroad. What was it like to go from the stagecoach through the pony express to the railroad? How did people adjust to those changes? What about towns that died because they weren't on the railroad? Towns that exploded, like Atlanta, because they were on the railroad. The importance of the rail heads in Chicago and buffalo. And you suddenly have a whole different pattern, okay? Second, personal strength in a Third Wave information age. It seems to me pretty clear that if you're going to make it through the freezing, I mean, the rethawing and the refreezing, it takes a lot of personal strength. And those people who have the personal strength to be active learners, those people who are able to go out and actively do the right kind of things, are going to face dramatically greater opportunities than people who get up in the morning and passively wait for somebody else to invent the future.
Daryl Conner, along that line, has a model of change which I found very helpful in which he says that resilience is the key factor. And what he means by "resilience" is -- and his whole point is this kind of change is never easy, so if you get in a habit of when you make a mistake, you get back up.
Think about learning how to ski. If you have the resilience to get back up after you fall down and get back up after you fall down and you have the sheer energy and the optimism and the drive to say, "okay, so I've fallen down nine times; I think I'll try a 10th time," you are much more likely to learn how to ski than if the third time you fall, you say, "that's it; I can't do it," and then you leave for two days or a week or a year and come back.
Well, the same thing's true of all kinds of active learning and all kinds of inventing of the future. Leading an organization. What we're doing in the house today. I mean, all these things, the more resilience you have, the greater your capacity to get things done. Which leads you, of course, to entrepreneurial free enterprise and the process of entering the information age. That the more rapidly you can invent and develop the future, the better off you are. Did you want to --
>>what is the fundamental -- what is the best way to explain what the
>>fundamental product in the information age is going to be? I hate to --
>>the fundamental product's going to be what people buy.
>>we're still going to need material production, we're still going to need
>>aircraft --
>>huge quantities, yeah, you'll have huge quantities of it.
>>are those things going to be produced more easily and with less human
>>resource so what the fundamental product will be --
>>what's the largest industry in central Florida?
>>entertainment.
>>huh?
>>entertainment.
>>tourism.
>>tourism.
>>the service is not good.
>>It may well be services, it may be the layer beyond services. It may be
>>developing virtual reality games. May be being a gamemaster. I can
>>teach you how to play virtual reality faster than anybody else. For
>>$5,000, you know, I'll be the equivalent of a ski instructor. You know,
>>come to me, because the game's get to be so sophisticated. It may well
>>be entertainment. I mean, look at Nashville. Look at Atlanta, which has
>>become a fairly big music center. Look at the amount of money for
>>"Jurassic park." It may be producing items of self-identity. You know,
>>you wear a certain kind of t-shirt. Why? Because you want to belong to
>>the group that wears those t-shirts. I mean, the truth is we don't
>>really know what's the other side of this, and that's part of why
>>entrepreneurship and the idea of a free market where the market defines
>>where you're going. I mean, who could have guessed that coca-cola would
>>be the most widely known single symbol of the industrial age? But it is.
>>I mean, more people across the planet recognize coca-cola than any other
>>trademark. You could never have predicted that in 1870.
>>when you look -- it's kind of interesting that when you look at these
>>various ages and changes, all of the things in hunter-gathering and
>>agriculture and industry have to be accomplished. These things don't go
>>away. They're just more easily accomplished kind of thing.
>>Oh, but if you had said -- but if you had said at the beginning of the
>>industrial era that only 3% or less of the country will grow food, the
>>answer would have been, gosh, we'll have 95% unemployment. And if you
>>had said at the beginning of the industrial era -- at the high point of
>>the industrial era that we'll be down to 17% of the population
>>manufacturing goods, matter of fact, I can show you all the static models
>>where people said -- where by looking backwards people said, my God,
>>we'll all be unemployed. It's turning out, by the way, the information
>>age doesn't mean what John Kenneth Galbraith said in "the Affluent
>>Society," more leisure time, people who are bored. Turns out you work
>>longer hours. You are more absorbed by your work. But you tend to find
>>a job you like. So you tend to self-select, so you end up -- you know,
>>you say, what's your hobby? For a lot of people, their hobby is their
>>work. They like what they're doing. It's the game they want to play.
>>And they'll play it for absurd lengths of time. You almost have to wean
>>them from it. You know, quit doing it. Go away for a week. It's not
>>necessarily because they're gaining -- you know, in the industrial era,
>>people did that to score high. They wanted to make more money. A lot of
>>people do it now because they love it. But I want to do my business.
>>You know, this is who I -- they identify themselves with what they do.
>>the whole big brother theory has become obsolete, as well, if this -- in
>>the information age because it's not so much --
>>you mean the state telling you, big brother in the sense of the state
>>telling you what to do?
>>well, not so much that. Big brother being able to track what you do. It
>>seems like now it's more little brother. We can access what you guys are
>>doing now. You see what I'm saying?
>>it may be. I mean, it may be that everybody can track everybody, in
>>which case you'll be tremendously bored. Because it turns out most
>>people don't do all that much stuff you want to know. But, but, it also
>>means that the government can track every credit card, every phone call.
>>
>>that's what I was saying about George Orwell.
>>You then have to discipline yourself with things like the privacy act and
>>say, yes, we could, but it will be illegal. We will not do it. And it
>>also turns out, by the way, that in the scale of an information society,
>>you have so many ways of communicating that a government capable of
>>tracking everything you do would itself be so confused by its information
>>that we don't know how to organize it. So that, in a sense, Gorbachev
>>found that he had less information over time, not more.
Look also at the notion, which is fairly self-evident, of the spirit of invention and discovery in creating a
Third Wave. I mean, obviously, Bill Gates is a good example, but so is Spielberg and George Lucas. So are
the people who are developing the biotechnology of the 21st century. So are -- so is the development of
the DNA and the double helix and Watson and crick's work on inventing modern biology. You know, and
so you've got a tremendous spirit of what's coming next. That is particularly important as you enter this
kind of an era. I mean, in a stable high civilization, in the roman world, there was remarkably little
invention and discovery by our standards. In our era, we are exploding the rate of research and the
number of things we're learning.
It also means -- and I think that Deming, in this sense, is a very transitional figure -- that Quality and Profound Knowledge are key parts of the transportation from an industrial era to an information age. That, in fact, what Deming was doing was creating the first systems insight into the most powerful patterns of the information age. The kind of teams that Deming is describing, the kind of human interaction, the notion of continuous improvement, is a very big part of where we're going. In this framework, what you need to ask yourself -- it goes through a series of questions.
First of all, individuals. You and your life. And you can literally sort of put a page in your notebook and start just making notes. How will this affect you? How will your life be different? Second is, how does it affect families? What's the structure of families? In a sense, we may be rebonding extended families, because the telephone and the fax and the e-mail allow a level of communications that rebonds us, and as the cost of transportation drops, we fly to see each other more often, or we drive on the interstate. So that, in a sense, we may be rebuilding an extended family in a different way. We're also inventing electronic families and electronic neighborhoods.
Most of you are not as close to the person who lives next door to you as you are to somebody on your telephone list. You live in an electronic neighborhood. If I asked you to tell me the 20
people you talk to most often, it will not include the person next door. That's true for almost everybody. And you can try that out as an experiment. I mean, start down the list of who do you -- you know, just keep track of who do you talk to in a week, and see how far down you have to get before you get to one of your physical neighbors. And you'll be very surprised.
But we live -- but it's not that we don't have a neighborhood, it's that our neighborhood's now electronic, which gets us to the whole notion of volunteerism in the Third Wave. We may have all sorts of new ways of coaching and helping and working with each other. You know, and it may well be that a lot more of it's by telephone. I mean, I don't know of how many places have tutoring by telephone. But it could be done very easily. I mean, you know, kids who talk on the telephone all the time could be tutored on the telephone. You could actually -- you could have senior citizens in Florida who when they get bored are tutoring kids in Detroit, and the cost is trivial compared to that kid not learning math. They might only meet once a year. But it's the whole notion of weaving together new patterns. Which also leads then to business and job creation in the Third Wave.
Had a woman come by last night who has invented an entire environmental recycling company out of boredom. She was tired -- she put -- her children were growing, she was tired of shopping, she believed in the environment, so she began -- she went out on her own, using the local library, found a particular recycling possibility, created a product, sold it to Disney and coke, and is now off and running and creating t-shirts out of coke bottles. Now, the two liter coke bottle has a plastic that can be reprocessed into fiber. The fiber can be used exactly like cotton, and she now has an entire company that she built out of her one room in her house.
And that's that process of creating new jobs. Which, by the way, then means you can start talking about local government. I mean, government is a lagging indicator of the Third Wave, because bureaucracies don't face the same pressures, and they have no incentives for change. You could revolutionize virtually every small -- every local government, every school board, every county government, every city government in this country could be revolutionized, and then you have state governments where we're beginning to get some impact. But state governments are a tremendously long way from being as efficient as American Express or as customer oriented as McDonald's, or as able to deliver per dollar as Federal Express, so think about state government in the Third Wave information age and what could it be like if you made the transition? Because you'll find governments rival the academic world and some parts of medicine as among the most trapped in a frozen environment and the most resistant to thawing.
And what you're looking for is, how do you get through this process of thawing and get people to start breaking down? And then, of course, the area where I'm most directly involved is, what is a Third Wave information age federal government like? You know, and what would you do to -- and that's where, frankly, Vice-President Gore is reinventing government. He's asking the right questions. Whether you agree or disagree with the details, he is beginning to put us in the right direction of saying, look, we've got to rethink this whole thing from the ground up.
But it's beyond the United States. There are implications of the emerging Third Wave information age for the world system and for national security. That's part of why I mentioned Toffler, Alvin and Heidi's book, "War and Anti-War," because you've got to think about, you
know, what would have happened if Saddam Hussein had hired 10 hackers at the beginning of "Desert Shield" and had decided to electronically try to break down American systems? Not killing people, not setting off bombs, but, for example, issuing 500,000 new American express cards. Or simply charging absurd fees. Breaking down telephone systems. Sending signals to turn off Georgia power company's electric plants. I mean, how much damage could you do on the information side?
And what does it mean that you now live in a worldwide system where when something happens somewhere, CNN is there live, and if CNN is not there live, that there's now such a ubiquitous flow of video cameras that somebody will be there. I mean, how does that change things? You know, what's a -- I tell military classes that I teach, you're going to be in a firefight, where it's going to be live on CNN, your cellular phone's going to go off. You're going to say, "mom, it's not as bad as it looks on TV. "I'm very busy. "I can't talk now. "can I call you when the fight's over? " Now, it sounds funny. It's not a joke. I mean, you're going to have people who go into the field carrying cellular phones. And since you have more and more married people and more and more husbands and wives in the military and they're sometimes drawing straws -- I mean, which one stays home with the kids? They both leave. You know, the kids are with grandma. Now they're both worried about the kids. They're about to go out on patrol. They call in, you know, "oh, Timmy has a fever." I mean, in the old days, there was a certain virtue of a wall between your civilian life and the war, because you could focus on the war. Now you're going to have real-time flow of information all day every day. You get in a fight with your boyfriend or girlfriend just before you go on patrol. What are you thinking about?
>>because if the Third Wave does go broke, wouldn't that almost in some
>>respects render warfare obsolete? I mean --
>>no.
>>what would be the -- what would be the advantage of going to war with a
>>trade partner or, you know, I mean --
>Ssame as it was in 1914. Germany's biggest trading partner was France.
>And the fact is -- and this is what makes me a conservative. The fact is,
>power in the end come from power, and somebody who has a gun at your head
>or a knife at your throat has an enormous advantage in winning the
>argument, and you have to have -- and you have to have a society capable
>of stopping that.
>>but isn't that a little humanistic? I mean, that --
>>no, and I think it's a fact. I mean, it is a -- just like you were
>>talking about earlier, don't you have to go through these changes?
>>yes.
>>It is a fact that if one society is prepared to annihilate the other, it
>>has an enormous advantage, and that what you've got to worry about is
>>that somebody out there who's really bad is going to get into the Third
>>Wave before you do. I mean, Nazi Germany had an atomic bomb in '41,
>>okay? The Soviet Union that made the information breakthrough before we
>>did. I mean, and the theory here is simple, there is evil. And evil has
>>to be dealt with, okay? Now, what you've got to look at is as you think
>>about from you personally up through family, business, government, to the
>>world, how can we learn more about the changes we're living through and
>>the changes to come? Okay.
And before we start talking about that, I'm proud of the team. Here is -- I assume I'm holding it up right,
okay? Here is the symbol for "crisis," which is made up on "danger" and "opportunities." It's Chinese.
This is the symbol.
>>I know, but which is danger and which is opportunity?
>>Beats me. There are limits to what I can -- and I won't fake it, because
>>somebody will call in next week and say, "boy, did you get that wrong."
>>But the point is that I think that it's very important to have this sense
>>of balance. I mean, you know, people who are self-described futurists,
>>innovators. I mean, when I was younger, a lot of people said, "oh, this
>>is all going to be wonderful." Maybe. There are dangers and
>>opportunities. Some of it will be good. Some of it will be
>>heart-breaking. Some of it will extend life. Some of it will destroy
>>life. Air conditioning, on balance, has made life easier in the south.
>>It's also increased pollution. There is a cost to air conditioning.
And so you've got to go through cycle after cycle. Vaccinations against various diseases have been wonderful for the human race. They've also led to an extraordinary population explosion, which has not been as wonderful for other species, and so you've got to go through these kind of thinking about what works, what doesn't work. And I think you've got to always have a sort of balanced sense that there's nothing that comes as a totally free gift. But there's also very few things that come totally bad. And so you're constantly trying to balance the dangers and the opportunities.
Now, what I want you to do -- if you think about going back to the core structure of thought that we talked about, you'd like to think through what are your vision, strategies, and projects for the transition. How are we going to go through the thawing and the refreezing? What's our vision of making the transition? What are our strategies for making the transition? What specific doable projects are out there that you could go and do that would help you make the transition? And then finally, what should you do every day? And, of course, as you're doing that, it's important to keep reminding people that the basic model for leadership is listen, learn, help, and lead. I mean, what's the best way to learn about the emerging Third Wave? Listen. And just constantly be probing. How do you find the characteristics? Let people tell you about them. And as you do that, you'll begin to learn things that begin to piece things together, and then you'll be able to say, gee, I wonder if that's a principle. I wonder if that really does give me -- remember, the value of a principle is that it allows you to predict.
Remember, Deming says every management action has to start with a theory, okay? I've noticed every time that when we put the water on the fire, the water eventually boils. That could lead to a principle. Water when heated will boil. Now, that sounds obvious because you've learned it, but it's not obvious. So you come over here and you start saying, all right, what are the characteristics I am discovering by learning, by listening and learning, and what do they start telling me about the principles that might emerge?
And by the way, it's possible to be all three. That is, you could end up in a Third Wave civilization which is a global civilization and which is so complex that you have multiple patterns interacting simultaneously. Now, you do some of that already, don't you? You can walk, you can roller skate, you can ride a bicycle, you can drive a car, you can ride in a bus, you can get in an airplane. And you're able to integrate all those into your personality. Yet they're very different, aren't they? But you don't even think about it, because you're used to it. See, the great power of being frozen is you get used to it. And so as we start emerging over here, we may have an extraordinarily complex system, but it may reflect itself in very simple habits. Again, go back to ups and fed ex. Ups and fed ex are unbelievable. I mean, you try to design the complexity by which they actually get it to work overnight on a worldwide basis, and it's immense. On the other hand, what's your experience of it? You pick up the phone. They show up. You give them the package and money. They leave. So for you, it's a very simple experience. Yet hidden behind that simple experience is a very powerful, complex system. Okay? Questions, comments.
>>okay, I can see that model some -- you know, in some way, but to me, it
>>seems like it's like the egg theory. You've got the egg over here and
>>you want it cooked. And so over here you've got to get a pan and a water
>>and everything, and so this is -- to me, this is the thawing portion,
>>where you bring all the elements together to make it --
>>right.
>>and then you come up with a product which would be this intangible.
>>but that implies you already know this game.
>>no.
>>see, you know you want a cooked egg.
>>but you don't know if the egg's going to come out cooked like you want
>>it. I mean, you're just --
>>No, but you already have a theory of a cook. No, I'm suggesting to you
>>that the truth is, this is so big, that we only have glimmerings, to use
>>Fred Franks, who was the commander of the seventh corps in "Desert
>>Storm," we only have glimmerings of the future. I mean, through the fog,
>>we sort of see a little of this and a little of that, and we think it's
>>going to be this way. But I'd carry you back a stage further.
How do we know it's an egg? How do we know it's food? I mean, what if, in fact, it's a Faberge Egg and
we now put it in a pot and we start cooking it, thereby ruining a very valuable art object. And that -- and
I'm not trying to disagree with you, except to say, this is -- I mean, I have certainties about the fact that
we are thawing, and I have certainties about the fact that this is going to be global and it's going to be
information. And I have concluded -- one of my conclusions after 20 years of thinking about it is that
American Civilization will turn out to be the highest way of organizing humans to liberate the maximum
amount of energy so you have the maximum creativity, so I'm now sort of convinced that at that level, I
know where we're going. I can't tell you many of the details. I can't tell you that we'll get to a -- not just
a hard or soft boiled egg. I can't tell you what it will be like. I'm still in the observation phase of, gee, the
water is boiling, isn't it? That is the fifth time we've learned that, and just seeing how it plays out.
>>but I think it's just as frustrating for the people that's here to keep
>>being in a society that's so frozen, because I have --
>>sure. Of course it is.
>>for example, I have a daughter, or my three children are Montessori
>>trained, and it's a very -- it's more of a dialogue learning-type
>>situation, and when they go to age -- I mean, grade 6, and all of a
>>sudden they're forced back into this.
>>sure.
>>and all of a sudden this system over here's telling them, I'm the
>>teacher, you're the child, don't interrupt my class.
>>right. Of course you're right.
>>I think they're more frustrated here than they are there.
>>And in a sense, this is one of the interesting things we're going through
>>right now. This is the first grade crisis. The first grade crisis is
>>not here. The first grade crisis is, for example, the power of obsolete
>>education systems to coerce taxpayer money to continue to fail. I mean,
>>it is astonishing the amount of money we spend on systems that are
>>totally failing. The dc. Schools spend $9,600 per child.
>>what's the national average?
>>much lower than that. About 4400, 4500. For $9600 per child, you can go
>>to an elite private school.
>>is that per year?
>>Per year, per year. A class of 20 is $192,000 in the room. I mean, one
>>of the studies I want to get done is to say, if we just said to a
>>teacher, "here is $192,000. "rent a room, buy the books, and feed them
>>lunch. "you get to keep the rest." Teacher's pay would change radically
>>overnight. I mean, just think about that. Literally it's -- I mean, I
>>had these numbers checked, because I knew it was going to be amazing.
>>$9600. And that's not the highest. The highest may well be in Newark,
>>which is, I think, like, 10,500. I mean -- and you're not getting --
>>you're getting about $1200 worth of learning, and yet we have been
>>convinced by this system that the only answer is, why aren't you spending
>>more? I mean, what you need to do is dissolve it.
Lawyers are the same way, as you're going to see next week. I mean, we accept levels of litigation that
are insane. Why do we do it? Because it -- because at the high water mark of the industrial era, it's what
the lawyers could get through, because guess who dominated the legislatures? Okay, so you go through
a whole series of these things. Now, I mean, on the other hand, you're going to threaten people. There's
no question in my mind that the idea of self-diagnosis will be bitterly resented and will absolutely
happen. Just as self-learning will happen.
I mean, you're seeing it with home learning. I mean, nobody's yet figured out home schooling is part of the Third Wave. I mean, if you can get the best computer software, the best textbooks, the best videotape, and your parents are willing to invest in your learning -- and it turns out, what
was the number, 15 out of the 17 top scorers on the sat. Were home schooled? Some number like that I saw the other day that I -- don't -- the media that normally takes this off, they should check it before they take it out of my class, but there is some number that's amazing about the number of home schoolers who are now doing, very, very well. Well, why is that? Part of it's because it's the emerging Third Wave environment.
I mean, the embedded base of learning is so enormous, you take your child to a great museum, then you take them over here to a great zoo. Then you take them down and they get to see a factory. Then they get to read about it. Then they get to watch the videotape. Then they get to use the PC at home and use the best software in the world, and you're personally nurturing and interacting with them. And I'm not arguing for home schooling. My children and my wife and I are all products of traditional, regular public schools, but I am saying that's a characteristic that is bubbling here that is telling us something. And for 9600 bucks, you can do a lot of home schooling.
>>have there been any returns on that? I believe it was Boston that opted,
>>you know, in a certain community to give the parents -- the students the
>>money that they were spending on the children.
>>I don't think it's in -- there is in Milwaukee where, again, Polly
>>Williams, a black welfare mother, who had been Jesse Jackson's
>>CO-chairman of state legislature, created vouchers for the inner city.
>>Tremendously bitter fight. And the republicans made her the chairman, or
>>chairwoman, of the education committee in the legislature. But what you
>>get right now is from public managed public schools to corporate managed
>>public schools. The Baltimore experiment, or the HartFord experiment. I
>>think that's only a very tiny step.
I mean, I think -- there's something happening here for doctors, lawyers, and educators that will dissolve
this system. You're going to see the same thing in the news media. I mean, every person is going to
become a reporter. And you'll just have -- you'll have an explosion of, you know, why don't you
contribute to your own newspaper? The newspaper will be electronic. And you see some of it -- you see
it with auto accidents, don't you? I mean, somebody calls in, they've got -- you know, they're -- at least
in Atlanta, they're on the Bellsouth mobile phone, they get to call, you know, wsb for free, and they go,
"wow, I'm right here, and there is a big tanker truck problem right here," and they're now the live, on-
the-spot volunteer reporter for the opening two minutes. Doesn't that sort of fit what you hear? You've
got traffic updates from the 37,000 people who call us.
You know, I'm now -- and it's interesting, because what you're getting is a total redefinition of what it means to be a reporter. You still have professional reporters, but now getting all sorts of people who are random. And when we shot down the airbus over the Persian gulf, there was, in fact, a video camera in a boat just held by an amateur, and they filmed the plane crashing. Well, they immediately sold it, probably to CNN. That person was, for that moment, a temporary reporter, weren't they? Similarly, you're going to have a lot of self-law, you're going to have a lot of self-health, you're going to have a -- you know, where you get up in the morning and you sit in an armchair or something and you -- it says to you, "your cardiovascular's not good enough. "go exercise a little bit more. "add -- you know, add a half mile to your run," or "add 10 laps to your swim," or, you know, "go do stairmaster longer."
>>we're talking about change, and I guess it could be argued that we're
>>change -- change is inevitable and change is constant, but why are we so
>>resistant to change?
>>Because you want certainty. Humans operate best when they're secure. So
>>you spend your lifetime trying to find out, what can I do? I feel this
>>way. I'm a very public figure, as you all know. I hate arriving late.
>>I got into some kind of a goof-up the other day -- well, the national
>>prayer breakfast. I arrived late because of something else we had to do,
>>and here's this huge crowd, and I was going to have to walk in late. I
>>literally for a half second thought about leaving just because I hate
>>walking in and being embarrassed. So people have a very high propensity
>>to be insecure, and, you know, you say, you know, what do you mean I have
>>to learn a new career? Or what do you mean we just changed power
>>companies and now they're billing differently? Or I'm going to change to
>>a new cable system and I can't find my favorite show? Or they no longer
>>do checkbooks the way they used to, and now -- I mean, anything which
>>makes us insecure goes at this core notion which is, we want to build
>>boundaries around us that are stable so that we know what we can do and
>>have a sense of certainty.
That's very human, and it goes back to chimpanzee politics and to Franz de Waal's work on primates. I mean, that people want orderly structured environments in which they have what Yankelovich called a giving and getting contract. I'll do my share, and now you owe me. That's why when you run into the steelworker who basically thought, if I was a good steelworker for 20 years, you're not allowed to close the factory. You can't make me learn a new career. And what we're describing here is a much, much more decentralized society.
I told Morris Schechtman that he ought to change the title of his book from "Working Without a Net" to "Building Your Own Net." So we will pick all of this up and go in to the Third Wave and the world market and creating next -- creating American jobs. And for that, we're going to ask you to look at "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt, chapters I, II, XI, and XII.
Last Updated 3/15/95 [HTML revised 2004-03-28 by Terrence Berres]
Renewing American Civilization Table of Contents