The Big Transition: What Everybody Should Know But Very Few Do

In this clip we see America's premiere futurist, the late Alvin Toffler.  Since 1970, Alvin and his wife Heidi have been looking forward to where our society is headed, and advising business leaders, politicians, and others on the challenges that lie ahead.  I really wish more people would have listened to them.

 Every day, I hear people locally and people on TV talking about how crazy the world seems today.  Part of this is that we have multiple 24 hour news channels, so we hear about tragedies from around the world.  That makes the world seem more chaotic.

But the other thing is that the world really is more chaotic than it was a generation ago, and there were people predicting this decades ago.  Besides being reasonably creative and an old school BMX and skateboard industry guy, I'm also a geek.  But I'm not a computer geek or math geek.  I guess I could best describe myself as a economic and sociology geek.  I've always wondered why people do the things they do, especially when they do stuff that doesn't make much sense.  This started because I was a shy, dorky kid who got picked on for several different reasons and bullied throughout my school years.  But over the years, I became more interested in the big picture of where society is going, and the dynamics of the economy.  Obviously, most of my friends weren't into these topics, so I just watched events happen and read lots of books on a variety of subjects.  As far back as late 1989, I first heard that there were crazy times ahead for all of us.

I read a book called The Great Depression of 1990 by economist Ravi Batra.  Yes, I know we didn't end up having a great depression then, but we did have a six year long, "double dip" recession, which is actually pretty close.  What really caught my attention in that book was Batra explaining a theory called The Law of Social Cycles by a thinker from India named P.R. Sarkar.  You can read the basic explanation of it on Wikipedia here.  The bottom line was that Batra applied the concept to the U.S., and said that we were near the end of the Acquisitor Age.  That's a period, often hundreds of years long, when the business people dominate society.  Near the end of that period, the business culture becomes highly corrupt, the working class people are getting screwed, and eventually they rise up in mass to protest.  The Laborers, as they are called in Sarkar's theory, are sick of the status quo, and civilization goes through an extended, chaotic period as the Laborers rise to power.  But they don't have the skills necessary to actually run society.  So either society collapses (bad option), or a group called The Warriors takes over eventually.  In either case, things get really nutso for decades.

That's where we are now.  We're all in the crazy transition period between one dominant group running society and another taking over.  The Occupy Wall Street movement a couple of years ago was a sign of the Laborers rising up in protest.  The huge and surprising popularity of Donald Trump on the Right and Bernie Sanders on the Left in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign is an even larger Laborer protest.  The fed up working class is reaching critical mass.  Things are changing and will continue to change for many years to come.

Another take on this "Big Transition," as I'm calling it, comes from the futurist team of Alvin and Heidi Toffler, whose ideas you can see in the clip above.  A big part of their thinking is the Third Wave idea.  The title idea of their 1980 book,  The Third Wave, is that our society is in a long, turbulent transition between the Industrial Age (the Second Wave) and an information-based society, the Third Wave.  The first wave was the Agricultural Revolution, for those of you wondering.  In any case, the Tofflers also see the U.S. in a long, turbulent transition period where virtually every aspect of society is being re-invented.  Basically, every business, social idea, and institution will see a revolution in how they operate, if they haven't already.
The bad news is that the world is crazy for a reason, and the craziness will not end any time soon.  The good news is that this Big Transition offers all kinds of opportunities for people, courageous and creative people in particular.  Whether you like it or not, whether you believe it or not, this Big Transition is happening.  Unfortunately, most of our politicians and traditional business leaders are trying to fix things with Industrial Age thinking.  It's just not going to work.  That's where we come in.  Lots of news ideas and solutions are needed.

There are at least 20 million Americans who can't find a good paying job right now.  Personally, I'm creating my own job.  Check out the process in my new main blog, Create Your Own Dang Job.