Serge.V Lumber Barn

To create a fulfilling emotional life and a sane psycho-sphere for the emerging civilization of tomorrow, we must recognize three basic requirements of any individual: the needs for community, structure, and meaning. Understanding how the collapse of Second Wave society undermines all three suggests how we might begin designing a healthier psychological environment for ourselves and our children in the future.

To begin with, any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the techno-societies. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.

From Los Angeles to Leningrad, teen-agers, unhappy married couples, single parents, ordinary working people, and the elderly, all complain of social isolation. Parents confess that their children are too busy to see them or even to telephone. Lonely strangers in bars or launderettes offer what one sociologist calls “those infinitely sad confidences.” Singles' clubs and discos serve as flesh markets for desperate divorcees.

Loneliness is even a neglected factor in the economy. How many upper-middle-class housewives, driven to distraction fjy the clanging emptiness of their affluent suburban homes, have gone into the job market to preserve their sanity? Howmany pets (and carloads of pet food) are bought to break the silence of an empty home? Loneliness supports much of our travel and entertainment business. It contributes to drug use, depression, and declining productivity. And it creates a lucrative “lonely-hearts” industry that purports to help the lonely locate and lasso Mr. or Ms. “Right.”

The hurt of being alone is, of course, hardly new. But loneliness is now so wideZj read it has become, paradoxically, a shared experience.

Community demands more than emotionally satisfying bonds between individuals, however. It also requires strong ties of loyalty between individuals and their organizations. Just as they miss the companionship of other individuals, millions today feel equally cut off from the institutions of which they are a part. They hunger for institutions worthy of their respect, affection, and loyalty.

The corporation offers a case in point.

As companies have grown larger and more impersonal and have diversified into many disparate activities, employees have been left with little sense of shared mission. The feeling of community is absent. The very term “corporate loyalty” has an archaic ring to it. Indeed, loyalty to a company is considered by many a betrayal of self. In The Bottom Line, Fletcher Knebel's popidar novel about big business, the heroine snaps to her executive husband: “Company loyalty! It makes me want to vomit.”

Except in Japan, where the lifetime employment system and corporate paternalism still exist (though for a shrinking percentage of the labor force), work relationships are increasingly transient and emotionally imsatisfying. Even when companies make an effort to provide a social dimension to employment—an annual picnic, a company-sponsored bowling team, an office Christmas party—most on-the-job relationships are no more than skin-deep.

For such reasons, few today have any sense of belonging to something bigger and better than themselves. This warm participatory feeling emerges spontaneously from time to time during crisis, stress, disaster, or mass uprising. The great student strikes of the sixties, for example, produced a glow of communal feeling. The antinuclear demonstrations today do the same. But both the movements and the feelings they arouse are fleeting. Community is in short supply.

One clue to the plague of loneliness lies in our rising level of social diversity. By de-massifying society, by accentuating differences rather than similarities, we help people individualize themselves. W^e make it possible for each of us more nearly to fulfill his or her potential. But we also make human contact more difficult. For the more individualized we are, the more difficult it becomes to find a mate or a lover who has precisely matching interests, values, schedules, or tastes. Friends are also harder to come by. We become choosier in our social ties. But so do others. The result is a great many ill-matched relationships. Or no relationships at all. The breakup of mass society, therefore, while holding out the promise of much greater individual self-fulfillment, is at least for the present spreading the pain of isolation. If the emergent Third Wave society is not to be icily metallic, with a vacuum for a heart, it must attack this problem frontally. It must restore community.

How might we begin to do this?

Once we recognize that loneliness is no longer an individual matter but a public problem created by the disintegration of Second Wave institutions, there are plenty of things we can do about it. We can begin where community usually begins—in the family, by expanding its shrunken functions.

The family, since the industrial revolution, has been progressively relieved of the burden of its elderly. If we stripped this responsibility from the family, perliaps the time has come to restore it partially. Onlya nostalgic fool would favor dismantling public and private pension systems, or making old people completely dependent on their families as they once were. But why not offer tax and other incentives for families—including non-nuclear and unconventional families—who look after their own elderly instead of farming them out to impersonal old-age “homes.” Why not reward, rather than economically punish, those who maintain and solidify family bonds across generational lines?

The same principle can be extended to other functions of the family as well. Families should be encouraged to take a larger—not smaller—role in the education of the young. Parents willing to teach their own children at home should be aided by the schools, not regarded as freaks or lawbreakers. And parents should have more, not less, influence on the schools.

At the same time much could be done by the schools themselves to create a sense of belonging. Instead of grading students purely on individual performance, some part of each student's grade could be made dependent on the performance of the class as a whole or some team within it. This would give early and overt support to the idea that each of us has responsibility for others. With a bit of encouragement, imaginative educators could come up with many other, better ways to promote a sense of community.

Corporations, too, could do much to begin building human ties afresh. Third Wave production makes possible decentralization and smaller, more personal work units. Innovative companies might build morale and a sense of belonging by asking groups of workers to organize themselves into mini-companies or cooperatives and contracting directly with these group, to get specific jobs done.

This breakup of huge corporations into small, self-managed units could not merely unleash enormous new productive energies but build community at the same time.

Norman Macrae, deputy editor of The Economist, has suggested that “Semi-autonomous teams of perhaps six to 17 people, who choose to work together as friends, should be told by market forces what module of output will be paid for at what pay rates per unit of output, and then should increasingly be allowed to produce it in their own way.”

Indeed, continues Macrae, “those who devise successful group friendship cooperatives will do a lot of social good, and perhaps will deserve some subsidies or tax advantages.” (What is particularly interesting about such arrangements is that one could create cooperatives within a profit-making corporation or, for that matter, profit-making companies within the framework of a socialist production enterprise.)

Corporations could also look hard at their retirement practices. Ejecting an elderly worker all at once not only deprives the individual of a regular, full-size paycheck, and takes away what society regards as a productive role, but also truncates many social ties. Why not more partial retirement plans, and programs that assign semi-retired people to work for understaffed community services on a volunteer or part-pay basis?

Another community-building device might draw retired people into fresh contact with the young, and vice versa. Older people in every community could be appointed “adjunct teachers” or “mentors,” invited to teach some of their skills in local schools on a part-time or volunteer basis or to have one student, let's say, regularly visit them for instruction. Under school supervision, retired photographers could teach photography, car mechanics how to repair a recalcitrant engine, bookkeepers how to keep books, and so on. In many cases a healthy bond would gro^v up between mentor and “mentee' that would go beyond instruction.

It is not a sin to be lonely and, in a society whose structures are fast disintegrating, it should not be a disgrace. Thus a letter writer to the Jewish Chronicle in London asks: “Why does it seem not quite nice' to go to groups where it is perfectly obvious that the reason that everyone is there is to meet people of the opposite sex?” The same question would apply to singles' bars, discos, and holiday resorts.

The letter points out that in the shtetls of Eastern Europe the institution of shadchan or matchmaker served a useful purpose in bringing marriageable people together, and that dating bureaus, marriage services, and similar agencies are just as necessary today. “We should be able to admit openly that we need help, human contact and a social life.”

We need many new services—both traditional and innovative—to help bring lonely people together in a dignified way. Some people now rely on “lonely-hearts” ads in the magazines to help them locate a companion or mate. Before long we can be sure local or neighborhood cable television services w^ll be running video ads so prospective partners can actually see each other before dating. (Such programs, one suspects, will have enormously high ratings.)

But should dating services be limited to providing romantic contacts? Why not services—or places—where people might come simply to meet and make a friend, as distinct from a lover or potential mate? Society needs such services and, so long as they are honest and decent, we should not be embarrassed to invent and use them.

At the level of longer-term social policy we should also move rapidly toward “telecommunity.” Those who wish community restored should concentrate attention on the socially fragmenting impact of commuting and high mobility. Having written in detail about this in Future Shock, I will not retrace the argument. But one of the key steps that can be taken toward building a sense of community into the Third Wave is the selective substitution of communication for transportation.

The popular fear that computers and telecommunications will deprive us of face-to-face contact and make human relations more vicarious is naive and simplistic. In fact, the reverse might very well be the case. While some office or factory relationships might be attenuated, bonds in the home and the community could well be strengthened by these new technologies. Computers and communications can help us create community.

If nothing else, they can free large numbers of us to give up commuting—the centrifugal force that disperses us in the morning, throws us into superficial work relationships, while weakening our more important social ties in the home and community. By making it possible for large numbers of people to work at home (or in close-by neighborhood work centers), the new technologies could make for warmer, more bonded families and a closer, more finely grained community life. The electronic cottage may turn out to be the characteristic mom-and-pop business of the future. And it could lead, as we have seen, to a new work-together family unit involving children (and sometimes even expanded to take in outsiders as well).

It is not unlikely that couples who spend a lot of time working together in the home during the day will want to go out in the evening. (Today the more typical pattern is for the commuter to collapse on returning home and refuse to set foot outside.) As communications begin to replace commuting, we can expect to see a lively proliferation of neighborhood restaurants, theaters, pubs, and clubs, a revitalization of church and voluntary group activity—all or mostly on a face-to-face basis.

Nor, for that matter, are all vicarious relationships to be despised. The issue is not simply vicariousness, but passivity and powerlessness. For a shy person or an invalid, unable to leave home or fearful about meeting people face to face, the emerging info-sphere will make possible interactive electronic contact with others who share similar interests—chess players, stamp collectors, poetry lovers, or sports fans—dialed up instantly from anywhere in the country.

Vicarious though they may be, such relationships can provide a far better antidote to loneliness than television as we know it today, in w^hich the messages all flow one way and the passive receiver is powerless to interact with the flickering image on the screen.

Communications, selectively applied, can serve the goal of telecommunity.

In short, as we build a Third Wave civilization there are many things we can do to sustain and enrich, rather than destroy, community.

The reconstruction of community, however, must be seen as only a small part of a larger process. For the collapse of Second Wave institutions also breaks down structure and meaning in our lives.

Individuals need life structure. A life lacking in comprehensible structure is an aimless wreck. The absence of structure breeds breakdown.

Structure provides the relatively fixed points of reference we need. That is why, for many people, a job is crucial psychologically, over and above the paycheck. By making clear demands on their time and energy, it provides an element of structure around which the rest of their lives can be organized. The absolute demands imposed on a parent by an infant, the responsibility to care for an invalid, the tight discipline demanded by membership in a church or, in some countries, a political party—all these may also impose a simple structure on life.

Faced with an absence of visible structure, some young people use drugs to create it. “Heroin addiction,” writes psychologist Rollo May, “gives a way of life to the young person. Having suffered under perpetual purposelessness, his structure now consists of how to escape the cops, how to get the money he needs, where to get his next fix—all these give him a new w^eb of energy in place of his previous structureless world.”

The nuclear family, socially imposed schedules, well-defined roles, visible status distinctions, and comprehensible lines of authority—all these factors created adequate life structure for the majority of people during the Second Wave era.

Today the breakup of the Second Wave is dissolving the structure in many individual lives before the new structure-providing institutions of the Third Wave future are laid into place. This, not merely some personal failing, explains why for millions today daily life is experienced as lacking any semblance of recognizable order.

To this loss of order we must also add the loss of meaning. The feeling that our lives “count” comes from healthy relationships with the surrounding society—from family, corporation, church, or political movement. It also depends on being able to see ourselves as part of a larger, even cosmic, scheme of things.

The sudden shift of social ground rules today, the smudging of roles, status distinctions, and lines of authority, the immersion in blip culture and, above all, the breakup of the great thought-system, indust-reality, have shattered the world-image most of us carry around in our skulls. In consequence, most people surveying the world around them today see only chaos. They suffer a sense of personal powerlessness and pointlessness.

It is only when we put all this together—the loneliness, the loss of structure, and the collapse of meaning attendant on the decline of industrial civilization—that we can begin to make sense of some of the most puzzling social phenomena of our time, not the least of which is the astonishing rise of the cult.

Why do so many thousands of apparently intelligent, seemingly successful people allow themselves to be sucked into the myriad cults sprouting today in the widening cracks of the Second Wave system? What accounts for the total control that a Jim Jones was able to exercise over the lives of his followers?

It is loosely estimated today that some 3,000,000 Americans belong to about 1,000 religious cults, the largest of which bear names like the Unification Church, the Divine Light Mission, the Hare Krishna, and the ^Vay, each of which has temples or branches in most major cities. One of them alone, Sim Myung Moons Unification Church, claims 60,000 to 80,000 members, publishes a daily newspaper in New York, owns a fish-packing plant in Virginia, and has many other money-creating enterprises. Its mechanically cheerful fund raisers are a common sight.

Nor are such groups confined to the United States. A recent sensational lawsuit in Switzerland called international attention to the Divine Light Center in Winterthur. “The cults and sects and communities. . . are most numerous in the United States because America is, in this matter, too, 20 years ahead of the rest of the world,” says the London Economist. “But they are to be found in Europe, west and east, and in many other places.” Just why is it that such groups can command almost total dedication and obedience from their members? Their secret is simple. They understand the need for community, structure, and meaning. For these are what all cults peddle.

For lonely people, cults offer, in the beginning, indiscriminate friendship. Says an official of the Unification Church: “If someone's lonely, we talk to them. There are a lot of lonely people walking around.” The newcomer is surroimded by people offering friendship and beaming approval. Many of the cults require communal living. So powerfully rewarding is this sudden warmth and attention that cult members are often willing to give up contact with their families and former friends, to donate their life's earnings to the cult, to forego drugs and even sex in return.

But the cult sells more than community. It also offers much-needed structure. Cults impose tight constraints on behavior. They demand and create enormous discipline, some apparently going so far as to impose that discipline through beatings, forced labor, and their own forms of ostracism or imprisonment. Psychiatrist H. A. S. Sukhdeo of the New Jersey School of Medicine, after interviewing survivors of the Jonestown mass suicide and reading the writings of members of the Peoples Temple, concludes: “Our society is so free and permissive, and people have so many options to choose from that they cannot make their own decisions effectively. They want others to make the decision and they will follow.”

A man named Sherwin Harris, whose daughter and ex-wife were among the men and women who followed Jim Jones to death in Guyana, has summed it up in a sentence. “This is an example,” Harris said, “of what some Americans will subject themselves to in order to bring some structure into their lives.”

The last vital product marketed by the cults is “meaning.” Each has its own single-minded version of reality—religious, political, or cultural. The cult possesses the sole truth and those living in the outside world who fail to recognize the value of that truth are pictured as either misinformed or Satanic. The message of the cult is drummed into the new member at all-day, all-night sessions. It is preached incessantly, until he or she begins to use its terms of reference, its vocabulary, and—ultimately—its metaphor for existence. The “meaning” delivered by the cult may be absurd to the outsider. But that doesn't matter.

Indeed, the exact, pinned-down content of the cult message is almost incidental. Its power lies in providing synthesis, in offering an alternative to the fragmented blip culture around us. Once the framework is accepted by the cult recruit, it helps organize much of the chaotic information bombarding him or her from the outside. Whether or not that framework of ideas corresponds to outer reality, it provides a neat set of cubbyholes in which the member can store incoming data. It thereby relieves the stress of overload and confusion. It provides not truth, as such, but order, and thus meaning.

By giving the cult member a sense that reality is meaningful—and that he or she must carry that meaning to outsiders—the cult offers purpose and coherence in a seemingly incoherent world.

The cult, however, sells community, structure, and meaning at an extremely high price: the mindless surrender of self. For some, no doubt, this is the only alternative to personal disintegration. But for most of us the cult's way out is too costly.

To make Third Wave civilization both sane and democratic, we need to do more than create new energy supplies or plug in new technology. We need to do more than create community. We need to provide structure and meaningas well. And once again there are simple things we can do to get started.

At the very simplest and most immediate level, why not create a cadre of professional and paraprofessional “life-organizers”? For example, we probably need fewer psychotherapists burrowing mole-like into id and ego, and more people who can help us, even in little ways, to pull our daily lives together. Among the most widely heard don't-you-believe-it phrases in use today are: “Tomorrow I'll get myself organized” or “I'm getting my act together.”

Yet structuring one's life under today's conditions of high social and technological turmoil is harder and harder to do. The breakup of normal Second Wave structures, the overchoice of lifestyles, schedules, and educational opportunities—all, as we have seen, increase the difficulty. For the less affluent, economic pressures impose high structure. For the middle class, and especially their children, the reverse is true. Why not recognize this fact?

Some psychiatrists today perform a life-organizing function. Instead of years on the couch, they offer practical assistance in finding work, locating a girl or boyfriend, budgeting one's money, following a diet, and so forth. We need many more such consultants, structure-providers, and we need feel no shame about seeking their services.

In education, we need to begin paying attention to matters routinely ignored. We spend long hours trying to teach a variety of courses on, say, the structure of government or the structure of the amoeba. But how much effort goes into studying the structure of everyday life—the way time is allocated, the personal uses of money, the places to go for help in a society exploding with complexity? We take for granted that young people already know their way around our social structure. In fact, most have only the dimmest image of the way the world of work or business is organized. Most students have no conception of the architecture of their own city's economy, or the w^ay the local bureaucracy operates, or the place to go to lodge a complaint against a merchant. Most do not even understand how their own schools—even universities—are structured, let alone how such structures are changing under the impact of the Third Wave.

We also need to take a fresh look at structure-providing institutions—including cults. A sensible society should provide a spectrum of institutions, ranging from those that are free-form to those that are tightly structured. We need open classrooms as well as traditional schools. We need easy-come-easy-go organizations as well as rigid monastic orders (secular as well as religious).

Today the gap between the total structure offered by the cult and the seemingly total structurelessness of daily life may well be too wide.

If we find the complete subjugation demanded by many cults to be repellent, we should perhaps encourage the formation of what might be called “semi-cults” that lie somewhere between structureless freedom and tightly structured regimentation. Religious organizations, vegetarians, and other sects or groupings might actually be encouraged to form communities in which moderate to high structure is imposed on those who wish to live that way. These semi-cults might be licensed or monitored to assure that they do not engage in physical or mental violence, embezzlement, extortion, or other such practices, and could be set up so that people in need of external structure can join them for a six-month or one-year hitch —and then leave without pressure or recriminations.

Some people might find it helpful to live within a semi-cult for a time, then return to the outside world, then plug back into the organization for a time, and so forth, alternating between the demands of high, imposed structure and the freedom offered by the larger society. Should this not be possible for them?

Such semi-cults also suggest the need for secular organizations that lie somewhere between the freedom of civilian life and the discipline of the army. Why not a variety of civilian service corps, perhaps organized by cities, school systems, or even private companies to perform useful community services on a contract basis, employing young people who might live together under strict disciplinary rules and be paid army-scale wages. (To bring these paychecks up to the prevailing minimum wage, corps members might receive supplementary vouchers good for university tuition or training.) A “pollution corps,” a “public sanitation corps,” a “paramedic corps,” or a corps designed to assist the elderly—such organizations could yield high dividends for both community and individual.

In addition to providing useful services and a degree of life-structure, such organizations could also help bring much-needed meaning into the lives of their members—not some spurious mystical or political theology but the simple ideal of service to community.

Beyond all such measures, however, we shall need to integrate personal meaning with larger, more encompassing world views. It is not enough for people to understand (or think they understand) their own small contributions to society. They must also have some sense, even if inarticulate, of how they fit into the larger scheme of things. As the Third Wave arrives we will need to formulate sweeping new integrative world views—coherent syntheses, not merely blips—that tie things together.

No single world view can ever capture the whole truth. Only by applying multiple and temporary metaphors can we gain a rounded (if still incomplete) picture of the world. But to acknowledge this axiom is not the same as saying life is meaningless. Indeed, even if life is meaningless in some cosmic sense, we can and often do construct meaning, drawing it from decent social relations and picturing ourselves as part of a larger drama—the coherent unfolding of history.

In building Third Wave civilization, therefore, we must go beyond the attack on loneliness. We must also begin providing a framework of order and purpose in life. For meaning, structure, and community are interrelated preconditions for a livable future.

In working toward these ends, it will help to understand that the present agony of social isolation, the impersonality, structurelessness, and sense of meaninglessness from which so many people suffer are symptoms of the breakdown of the past rather than intimations of the future.

It will not be enough, however, for us to change society. For as we shape Third Wave civilization through our own daily decisions and actions. Third Wave civilization will in turn shape us. A new psycho-sphere is emerging that will fundamentally alter our character. And it is to this—the personality of the future—that we next turn.