The Third Wave - Super-Struggle

From the very beginning, I want to say that clearly, this book advises on reflection being far from imposing certain concepts, but illustrating different issues to be viewed with some skepticism and uncertainty, not notaken as a feasible fact. It specifically adresses to those who believe that history is far from its finish line, who may accept, despite many future storms and crises, that we have reasons to be optimistic.

We are facing a new civilization which involves new types of families, other styles of love, music, work, a new economy, other politics, principles and values. Millions already got used to the idea of tomorrow’s rhythms, but others, terrifed of what comes next, try to escape and go back to the past, to that dying world that gave them birth. 

Humanity had already faced two major waves of change, each one neutralizing the former cultures and civilizations and replacing them with unbelievable lifestyles for the precursors. The agriculture revolution – The First Wave of change – took thousands of years to quench. The Second Wave – the rise of industrial civilization – took just 300 years. Today, history is even more  accelerative, so, it is likely The Third Wave will sweep across history and fulfill itself in just a few decades. We, those who happen to live at that explosive moment, will therefore feel the full impact, because the Third Wave affects everyone. 

This new generation contradicts the traditional industrial civilization, because it is in fact highly technological and anti-industrial, based on renewable energy sources, on methods of production that make most factory assembly lines obsolete, on new, non-nuclear families, on a novel institution that might be called the “electronic cottage” or on radically changed schools and corporations of the future. This emerging civilization writes a new code of behaviour  and take us beyond the standardization, synchronization and centralization and beyond the concentration of energy, money and power. The new civilization will topple bureaucracies and will give rise to semi-automatic savings, because it makes the government forms more effective, simpler, yet more democratic than any we have seen so far, as a civilization with their own conceptions about the world, time, space, logic and causality.